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

newspaper reports about Hilda in the 1960s. It looks as if things have moved on since you knew him.’

‘Made more progress than you did with your booklet, then,’ said Angie rather unkindly.

Simmy briefly told them the main points concerning Ben’s discovery of a mysterious baby and the apparent links to Josephine, which were tantalisingly difficult to pin down in any detail. ‘We still think one of them must have killed her. When we tell Ben that you knew Petrock, he’ll be thrilled. I have a feeling he thinks that he’s the most likely suspect.’

‘No, no,’ said Russell firmly. ‘That man could never kill anyone. He’s much too dithery for that.’

‘He’s young and strong and didn’t seem a bit dithery to me. His brother’s more so. And as for Uncle Ambrose …’ she giggled. ‘He’s the very epitome of ditheriness. He’s an archivist and spends all his time with musty old books.’

Russell gave her a severe look. ‘That’s a very inaccurate stereotype, if I may say so. Archivists are the sharpest people of all. They never miss a detail or fail to spot a connection. They can read handwriting from the sixteenth century that’s totally illegible to anybody else. I often wish I’d been one,’ he finished wistfully.

‘I stand corrected,’ smiled Simmy. ‘He should be working for Oliver, by the sound of it. I never realised that his speciality is authenticating old bits of ivory and documents – and Josephine seems to have been doing something interesting with old documents as well. Her neighbour told us today that she used to sit up half the night poring over papers or letters or suchlike. She collected that sort of stuff, apparently.’

‘What sort of stuff?’

Simmy didn’t answer for a moment, as she shifted Robin to the other side, and asked her mother if there was any more tea on offer. ‘There’s some sort of thread running through all this,’ she said slowly, more to herself than to Russell. ‘Something about letters from the 1940s. It’s all gradually coming clearer. I wish I could go to Ben’s now and talk it through with him.’

‘But you’ve got responsibilities,’ said Russell, eyeing the baby.

By a quirk of mental association Simmy suddenly remembered another dependent creature. ‘The squirrel!’ she yelped. ‘I forgot all about the squirrel! It will have died of hunger by now. I’ve been out all day.’

‘Have you changed that baby’s nappy lately?’ Angie asked, coming back with the second mug of tea. ‘There’s a bit of a whiff.’

‘I haven’t got any left. I put the last one on when we were in Keswick. He seems to be a right little poo machine today. I didn’t think I’d be out this long when I left home this morning. Have you got any here?’ She did not expect an affirmative answer, but Angie Straw was nothing if not resourceful. As the owner of a busy B&B, it was, Simmy supposed, hardly surprising that such emergency items should be kept available for feckless guests.

‘Of course I have,’ she said. ‘But mostly in larger sizes than you need.’ She went off to rummage in the appropriate drawer.

‘Squirrel?’ Russell prompted. Simmy explained. ‘A grey squirrel?’ He was delighted, to the point of gently clapping his hands. ‘You devil. Although, did I tell you I heard on QI this week that the reds are in fact more recently introduced than the greys? Can you believe that? It’s a bit of a semantic game, but all the reds were totally wiped out centuries ago – presumably by human beings – and quite a while later they imported replacements from Scandinavia, much more recently than the greys got here from America. And now they’re exterminating them. Doesn’t that create some sort of moral quagmire, don’t you think?’

‘I thought so already,’ said Simmy, feeling idiotically distressed about her neglected little pet. ‘Will it have died, do you think?’

‘Not from hunger. Did it have water?’

‘A bit. I’ll have to go. Christopher’s going to be there before me as it is. What a bad wife I’m going to make.’ She paused. ‘And that’s another thing. The wedding. I can’t imagine how we’re going to get everything ready in time. Even keeping it simple, there’s a horribly long list of things to do. I haven’t thought about it at all today.’

‘Wedding schmedding,’ said Russell, apparently thinking he was being hilarious.

Driving home, Simmy felt painfully torn in a number of directions. Only hours ago she had been congratulating herself on managing to be a fully functioning person, engaged in another unofficial murder investigation with Ben, while at the same time being a more than adequate mother to Robin. It struck her now that Christopher had not featured at all in this self-congratulatory thinking. How was it that she so often found herself secondary to someone else’s needs, stressing about who came first and what she might best do for them? It had to be, she supposed, that this was how she liked it. If pressed, she could not have identified any other course than this. There was nothing she actively wanted to do differently. She loved the shop and the autonomy it brought her. There at least she was only answerable to herself. But she was loving the new house and the new baby just as much.

And, to her horror, she realised she very much loved the intellectual games with Ben, solving the mysteries of the criminal mind, plunging into the labyrinth of brutal murder with Ben and Bonnie and earning the approval of DI Moxon. She wanted it all, she concluded – and that probably made her a very greedy person.

She had texted Christopher with an update, apologising for failing to be at home to greet him and asking him if he would please feed the squirrel. ‘I just got carried away,’ she said at the end.

Kirkstone Pass was cluttered with tourist traffic, some of it evidently eager to watch the sunset from such a good vantage point. Mindful of the baby in the back, Simmy