The Ullswater Undertaking by Rebecca Tope (read dune .TXT) 📕

soon. It’s been a very weird day, from his point of view. Lots of driving, which he didn’t seem to mind, luckily. But rather snatched feeds at random times. And now he’s fast asleep, look.’

‘Go now,’ Bonnie urged. ‘You’ll only be forty minutes or so – unless the traffic gets really bad. There’s Newby Bridge, then Blackwell, then someone just round the corner from Ben’s house. I’ve got all the postcodes for you – shall I put them in the phone?’

‘All the way to Newby Bridge?’ Simmy sighed.

‘’Fraid so. It sounds quite easy – you’ve been there before, I think. The flowers are all done, anyway. I’ll go and put them in the van.’

Despite her earlier relief at still being needed at the shop, it caused her a certain degree of distress to abandon Robin and return to her old routine of flower delivery. ‘It’s not even a month yet,’ she whined to herself. ‘And here I am back at work, just as I vowed not to be. I’m a mess of contradictions, let’s face it.’ She could hear, in her mind’s ear, the baby’s howls of hunger and abandonment. How could she – and not even leave him a dummy for comfort? Angie had threatened to disown her if she ever used a dummy.

The traffic was mercifully co-operative, until the final few minutes, when trying to get back onto the main road after the last delivery proved almost impossible. In the end, she simply pushed out in front of an elderly woman driving an elderly car, waving a thanks that would have gone unseen through the solid sides of the van. She threaded it through the narrow alley that led to the back of the shop and rushed to her baby’s rescue, terrified of the implications of what she’d done.

‘He hasn’t moved a muscle,’ said Bonnie complacently. ‘I parked him in the back room and forgot all about him.’

Simmy’s next horrified thought was that he must therefore be dead. She almost shook him in her efforts to check for a breath. ‘Calm down,’ said Bonnie. ‘He’s absolutely fine.’

Which he was. ‘I’d better get off to Beck View, then,’ said Simmy. ‘I can feed him there, if he ever wakes up.’

Bonnie’s forlorn expression gave her pause. ‘Oh Lord, you poor thing,’ said Simmy. ‘I’m really sorry you got landed with it all. When’s Verity likely to be back?’

‘She didn’t say. It’ll be all right for a few days now, anyway. If Tanya comes in tomorrow, and if Monday’s as quiet as it usually is, we needn’t worry till Tuesday. Maybe you could call her and make her say what she’s doing.’

‘Ben and I need to talk to you about things. It’s been a very productive day. He’s gone home to do an algorithm and work out who’s the chief suspect. We had to go to Keswick.’

‘Yes, I know. He’s been texting me about it.’

‘Has he? That’s good.’

‘I don’t really understand it, though. There’s no way he can tell me everything until I see him. I’m going down there this evening, to see if I can catch up.’

‘I’m supposed to be phoning Moxon. He asked me to talk to a neighbour of Josephine’s and we met her in the street. Christopher knows her. What she told us was interesting. In fact, the whole day has been extremely interesting, one way and another. I think we sort of know the whole thing, if we can just put it all together.’

‘It’s half past four, Sim. You’d better get going. Maybe we can get together on Sunday, like last week, and sort it all out then.’

Sunday still felt quite a long way off to Simmy, as she walked her somnolent infant back to Beck View, where she had left her car. Her main concern was a sudden raging thirst, due to having nothing to drink since the pub lunch. She began to walk faster, which had the useful effect of lulling Robin into yet more sleep.

Her parents were in receptive mode, settling her on the sofa, bringing a large mug of tea and inviting her to talk to them. ‘We heard about the woman at Christopher’s workplace,’ said Angie. ‘You never told us.’

‘Didn’t I? I can tell you now, if you like. Dad met her last year – the woman in the office, sitting at the computer.’

‘Don’t remember,’ said Russell.

‘Ben and I have been doing detective work all day. It’s been fun, mostly. Robin was incredibly co-operative. He doesn’t mind the car any more. Christopher’s in a tizzy, obviously. Not just because they’ve lost Josephine so horribly, but because there’s this man called Fabian Crick, who knew Josephine and has a whole lot of relations called Armitage.’

Russell’s eyes went wide and his head jerked forward. ‘Is one of them called Petrock?’ he asked.

‘Actually, yes. He’s a cousin. The person at the centre of it all is their Aunt Hilda. She died not long ago, and Petrock’s writing her biography. She did a lot of remarkable things, apparently.’

Russell laughed. ‘He’s been saying he’d write it for years. I doubt if he ever will. Though it’ll help that she’s dead. You can’t libel the dead.’

‘You know him?’ It was his wife who spoke. ‘How?’

‘He was in that little writing group I used to go to in Ambleside. When I was trying to collect local anecdotes for a booklet – remember? We were all decades older than him, and I suspect we patronised him rather. He didn’t stay very long. I remember him mainly for his wonderful name. We all thought he was rather a fantasist, I’m afraid, dreaming of revealing some shocking incident from his aunt’s early life. We warned him about libel and so forth, I remember, but he said it would all be true and he was determined to prove it. Some documents he said would confirm the whole thing.’

‘He’s written most of it,’ Simmy said. ‘I saw the manuscript. He even read some of it to me and Christopher. And Ben found some