The Windermere Witness (12 page)

‘Don’t you love the lake?’ Simmy sighed without self-consciousness. ‘I never stop thinking it’s a special privilege to have a lake on my doorstep.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Eleanor, as if she really did.

Storrs Hall lay ahead, and Simmy’s chest began to feel tight. She had been entertaining increasingly dark thoughts about Peter, the bridegroom – and he was most likely to be in charge of the coming encounter. Her ambivalent role in the family catastrophe would make it impossible to establish a comfortable tone. Eleanor headed down the main drive with barely any change of speed, with no sign of nerves or hesitation.

‘The hotel must be very shaken up,’ said Simmy. ‘After yesterday.’

‘They’ll wish they’d never heard of the Baxters or the Harrison-Wests. They’ll be cursing the day they ever
thought of having weddings here. They’ll be counting the minutes until we all go away. But everybody’s staying on another night, I think. That was the plan.’

Simmy thought of the brother of Ben Harkness, her fellow witness of that morning. The hotel was connected in more ways than it realised.
Involved
, came the word again. It conjured a bigger tangle than ‘connected’ did, something sticky and persistent. And very slightly culpable.

‘They won’t think I did it, will they?’ she said, aiming for a jokey note.

‘What – murdered Markie
and
George? I don’t suppose so. Why – you didn’t, did you?’

Young Ben’s face floated before her eyes – asking whether the police might suspect him of shooting Baxter. ‘Everybody feels irrational guilt at a time like this, apparently. It’s such an enormous crime – such a dreadful thing to do – that we all feel we must have contributed to it somehow. Isn’t that it? As if it’s too much for one person to have done on his own.’

Eleanor pulled the handbrake violently, making the car lurch reproachfully. ‘I disagree,’ she snapped. ‘There’s only one guilty party in all this.’

Simmy stared at her. ‘You sound as if you know who it is.’

Eleanor rolled her eyes. ‘If I did, I’d have torn his arms off by now.’ It was an imaginative revenge, which Simmy could all too horribly visualise. ‘Come on, then. Let’s get on with it.’

Four men and one young woman were assembled in a room overlooking the lake, in which half a dozen tables were laid as if for dinner. The people mostly occupied two
dark-brown
leather sofas stood at right angles to each other at one end of the room. ‘Why have they put us in here?’ asked Eleanor.

‘Why not?’ said one of the men crossly.

‘It’s handy for Felix,’ said Bridget. The man in the wheelchair was positioned close to the end of one sofa. He was pale and ill-looking.

‘Well, we’re here now, anyway. This is Miss Brown. These are Peter, Glenn, Pablo and Felix,’ she pointed them out in turn to Simmy. ‘And Bridget, of course.’

The bride was also pale and solemn, sitting huddled between her husband and his best man. The wedding roles still clung to them, in Simmy’s mind, despite the casual clothes and cheerless faces.

‘Hello,’ said Simmy. ‘I’m so sorry for what’s happened. It’s absolutely terrible.’ She looked from one to the next, hoping for some manifestation of warmth. But instead there was a collective gaze of mistrustful enquiry. Polite, yes, but very far from friendly.

‘Gosh, this is worse than a job interview,’ she said, in an effort to lighten things. ‘I’m really not at all sure I’ll be able to give you the right answers, though.’

‘You witnessed Daddy’s murder today. Is that right?’ Bridget seemed even younger than her eighteen years, speaking up like a brave child.

For the first time, Simmy wondered how much the police had told the family about her. It struck her as rather questionable behaviour of them to mention her at all. She tried to think logically, to assemble all the information she had available to her. Hadn’t Moxon asked her something about being able to see the big picture?

‘I didn’t really witness anything,’ she corrected Bridget. ‘Is that what the police told you?’

Eleanor made a small sound, drawing attention from the whole assembly. ‘It wasn’t the police,’ she said. ‘They just sent a couple of women to tell me George was dead. They didn’t say how. They got his wife’s contact details from me. I went down to the Old England, where it happened, and the manager said you had been there. Apparently he knows you.’

Simmy frowned. ‘No, he doesn’t.’

Eleanor nodded emphatically. ‘He’s been to your shop. He recognised you right away. And of course I knew you were having lunch with George. It’s all quite straightforward.’

‘The police didn’t mention me?’ It seemed an important detail.

‘Of course not. They never tell anybody anything. Surely you know that?’

‘Not really. I’m not sure I’ve ever spoken to a police detective before.’ She remembered Moxon telling her how Markie had died, and wondered whether she had been favoured with special information.

‘You saw Markie yesterday,’ put in Peter, the bridegroom. ‘He spoke to you. Glenn and the others saw you.’ He looked at the other men, who nodded confirmation.

‘He did,’ Simmy agreed. ‘I was appalled when I heard what had happened to him.’

‘So were we all,’ said Peter Harrison-West brusquely. Simmy began to think she disliked him, which in turn made her fearful for his new bride.

Boldly she faced him. ‘Where were you today, anyway? I thought you wanted to talk to me, with Mr Baxter. That’s
what he told me. You were
both
going to have lunch with me.’

‘What?’ He blinked blankly at her. ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ He turned first to Glenn, then to Bridget. ‘What does she mean?’ he asked helplessly.

Bridget merely widened her eyes powerlessly, but Glenn reached out and patted his friend’s hand. ‘Must have been some idea the old man got hold of,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Maybe he couldn’t find you. You did go off, remember?’

Peter’s jaw tightened. ‘I didn’t go
off
. I’ve been here all bloody day, doing nothing.’

‘Let’s get back to Markie,’ pleaded Bridget, looking hard at Simmy. ‘How did he seem? I never saw him, you see. I hadn’t seen him for weeks. And there we were, getting married, while he was cold and dead in the lake.’ Her face crumpled into sudden sobs. ‘Poor Markie. How am I going to get on without him? How could anybody possibly kill
Markie?
’

‘Come on, Briddy. You’ve got Peter now.’ The consolation came from Glenn, who threw a complicated look at his best friend over Bridget’s head. The girl had leant her wet face into the best man’s shoulder, while he patted her.

‘It was gruesome timing, though. You have to admit that.’ Pablo, the black-eyed Spaniard, spoke perfect English, and appeared to have a saturnine outlook to rival Peter’s.

Simmy had begun an attempt to answer Bridget’s question, before realising that nobody actually expected her to say anything. The precise reasons for summoning her were no clearer than they had been at the start. Perhaps they wanted to look at her, as if she might come trailing fragments of the two dead men, messages from beyond. Or
did one of them have a nagging fear that she knew something that would incriminate him? Struggling to maintain a hold on the bigger picture, she entertained a theory that one of the people in this room, eyeing her with such severity, was a double murderer. There were other candidates, of course: Lucy’s father and other relatives; various shadowy business associates; hotel staff – there might be hidden reasons for any of them to eradicate the two Baxter men. There was even an obvious theory that Baxter had killed his son, and then been avenged by one of the others. But here was the group that she had seen around Markie, with the addition of Bridget and Eleanor. Here were the men who had means and opportunity to kill the boy and drop his body into the lake before going to change into their smart wedding clothes and behave quite normally for the next hour or so.

The
men
repeated in her head. Had they hatched a ghastly plan between them, for some appalling motive and slaughtered Markie collectively? Even Felix might have played a part. And then the same again that morning, gathering inside one of the buildings near the hotel and firing from a window … she saw it like a sort of western film, the men jostling each other, egging each other on, the long-barrelled gun pointing unnoticed out of the window.

But why call Persimmon Brown to stand before them, in that case? To demonstrate their innocent concern to Bridget perhaps?

She thought of DI Moxon and his likely reactions to this particular Star Chamber. He would want to observe the dynamics between all the players: any body language suggesting guilt or anxiety; revealing snippets of information. Like it or not, she was at least partly his
representative here. He would have no such opportunity, even if he arranged a similar gathering. People behaved very differently when a police detective was in the room. Or so she supposed.

She wasn’t standing, of course. Eleanor had positioned the two of them at a table facing the sofas. Pablo, next to Peter, rested languidly over the leather arm next to him, with Felix a few inches away. They made a pair, in some odd way she could not at first characterise. As Pablo spoke, Felix turned to him, watching his lips. He repeated, ‘You have to admit,’ softly, to nobody in particular. Then he said ‘admit’ again, as if tasting the word.

‘What?’ Glenn leant forward to peer past Pablo at the man in the wheelchair.

Felix snorted. ‘Language,’ he explained. ‘The words people use at such a time. It’s worth taking notice. Pablo said “admit”. It’s close to “confess”, you see. And “confession” is what’s needed. Somebody to admit they did these killings.’

‘Shut up,’ said Glenn in disgust. ‘You’re talking gibberish.’

‘Oh, Glenn!’ Bridget reproached. ‘Don’t be so nasty.’

‘I can take it,’ said Felix robustly. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

‘Nobody was,’ said Peter. ‘We all know better than that.’

‘Boys!’ urged Eleanor, rather belatedly. ‘Don’t start arguing over nothing.’

They weren’t boys, though, Simmy noted. Felix was probably the youngest, in his mid thirties. Glenn and Peter were both some years older than that, with Pablo apparently somewhere in between. Bridget was like a freshly cut lily
amongst a clump of drying twigs. Or bullrushes, as Simmy had visualised them the day before. Bridget was the baby Moses in the thicket of brown reeds, given up by her terrified mother … Shaking herself, Simmy returned to her observations of what was there before her. Bridget was not conventionally pretty, except in the way that all
eighteen-year
-old girls were. Clear skin, glossy hair, crisp jawline and flawless neck. All the attributes that a woman almost forty ceased to take for granted.

How
brave
she must be, though, to enter into such a marriage. The two men either side of her were solid, powerful, settled. They might crush her slim body between them, without ever intending any harm. They would surely crush her spiritually, simply by forgetting how it was to be so young. Or perhaps they would form an impregnable wall of protection around her. Perhaps now she had no father or brother to fight for her, she could simply replace them with Peter and his friends.

Pablo, apparently irrepressible, stuck to his original point. ‘Markie was out there with us waiting for his dad to turn up. He was in a perfectly good mood, joking about the rain. Then the old man drove right past us, ignoring us, and Markie just stood there staring after him. Later on, when we discovered what had happened, Baxter was beside himself, full of self-reproach, because the boy had died before he could speak to him. Am I right?’

‘As far as it goes,’ nodded Glenn. ‘What’s your point?’

‘Poor Daddy!’ mourned Bridget. ‘He never meant to be nasty to Markie. He was late and wanted to come and talk to me before everything got going. He didn’t want to get his clothes wet, that’s all. He had no idea that Markie was

waiting out there for him. He just saw a gaggle of men under big umbrellas and thought nothing of it.’

‘That’s what he told me,’ confirmed Eleanor. ‘It was silly of Markie to wait out in the rain like that.’

‘But he wasn’t there alone,’ contributed Simmy, on the grounds that she could be back at Beck View eating cake with her mother, if they weren’t going to ask her any proper questions. ‘Why were you all standing out there like that?’

‘Pablo wanted a smoke,’ said Glenn. ‘That’s why we went out in the first place. And we got chatting, and watching the light on the lake, and arguing about some daft thing Felix said. Then we went in again,’ he finished simply.

‘Without Markie.’ Bridget’s tone held a flat fatalistic accusation. ‘You left him out there to die.’

‘We left him, and he died,’ Glenn corrected her. ‘None of us
knew
that was going to happen, did we? We’d have stayed and watched out for him, otherwise.’

There was pain somewhere in his eyes and his voice, Simmy thought. Glenn-the-best-man was suffering, and Bridget, his friend’s new wife, was not slow to detect it.

‘It’s okay, Glenn,’ she said gently. ‘Nobody’s blaming you.’

‘
Blame
him? Glenn? Of course they bloody don’t.’ Peter’s anger flared without warning.

‘Sounded to me as if Bridget was reproaching all of us, just now,’ said Felix. ‘Even me. And it’s true, we did leave him. We must have done, since none of us can remember him coming back inside with us. We all just assumed he was there somewhere.’

‘And we went ahead with the wedding without him,’ wailed Bridget. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for that. I knew he
wasn’t there. Everybody did, by then. And none of us had the decency to go and look for him.’

‘Except George,’ said Eleanor. ‘George went out, before you’d got your rings exchanged.’

‘Did he?’ Peter frowned at her. ‘I never knew that.’

‘He didn’t find him, though. It never occurred to him to look in … in the … you know.’ Her voice faltered. ‘Poor Markie. He was such a sweet boy.’

‘Can we maybe try to stop saying that?’ said Pablo, with a sigh. ‘It’s no more true of him than of any boy, after all. He was
young
. That’s the terrible thing here. We don’t have to beatify him to make the loss any greater than it already is. And the waste.’ He pushed himself back into the comfort of the sofa, where Glenn could hardly see him.