The Windermere Witness (16 page)

Wilf had liked Melanie a lot – more than he had ever admitted out loud. Ben had heard him sniffing back tears in their shared bedroom, when she had dumped him after one uncomfortable date. It seemed that she had forgotten it had ever happened, now she had Joe Wheeler. Wilf would be unsettled by his brother’s sudden connection with her, just as he was over her, at last. Probably, Ben decided, it would be best not to say anything.

He had meant it when he said they should have a go at finding the Bowness Killer, as he was starting to think of the faceless gunman. The fact of Markie Baxter’s death kept sliding away, as being of lesser significance, but he knew this was a mistake. Two murders provided far more traction than one. Assuming the same person committed both, there had to be a whole stack of logical deductions to be drawn and a lot of people eliminated as suspects. But
had
it been the same person? You weren’t meant to make assumptions like that, with no evidence. The MOs had been completely different, which was always a strong signal that there were different killers. He felt the frustration of not knowing the individuals concerned. A bridegroom, his best man and two or three ushers, had all been on the spot for the first murder. So had about fifty other wedding guests and countless hotel staff. Markie had been killed at close quarters, according to the news report, and then pushed into the lake either to ensure he died, or to conceal the body. So the culprit must have been wet and muddy … He sighed at the surge of envy that flooded through him, picturing the forensic lab where clothes would be scrutinised, thread by
thread, and the faintest marks on the body’s skin magnified enormously to reveal a thumbprint or unexpected scratch. How could anybody expect to escape detection these days, when so much technological power could be used against them?

His Ace Attorney game – birthday present from Jack - had not yet been properly begun, given that real murders had happened under his nose. His accidental proximity to one killing, and his new friend Persimmon, gave him access to something both thrilling and terrifying, and he was not going to waste a minute of it, whatever the school might think.

As the evening went on, the whole idea of Simmy needing the protective presence of her employee felt more and more ridiculous. What could possibly happen? The house was in good repair, all the windows had proper latches, and there were no cellars through which a marauder might creep, only to materialise through a hatch in the scullery. Melodramatic scenes from Stephen King stories bore no resemblance to the mundane reality of a small stone house in Troutbeck.

To her credit, Melanie was no trouble. She disappeared into the spare room for nearly two hours, emerging triumphant, having finished her assignment. ‘Do you want to read it?’ she asked diffidently. ‘I’ve made a big deal of the part flowers can play.’

Simmy knew she should. The assignment had been going on for weeks, and she had heard a lot about it. The title was ‘Adding Value to Hotel Services’ with special reference
to so-called ‘boutique hotels’. Privately, she doubted that Melanie was temperamentally suited to hotel work in the first place. Her lack of patience would certainly disqualify her from working on reception, handling the impossible demands and complaints from guests with too much money and too few brains. But she might find a niche in administration or accounts or something, Simmy supposed.

‘Go on, then,’ she said, holding out both hands for the laptop. ‘You must be glad it’s finally finished.’

‘Careful! It’s hot underneath,’ Melanie warned. ‘Where shall I put it?’

They balanced it on the arm of a chair and Simmy scanned the screen. There were ten pages of it. She read quickly, increasingly impressed at the numerous ideas the girl had come up with, at the same time as being shocked at the poor grammar. It seemed that Melanie had yet to master the use of the full stop. One sentence went on for half a page. But she knew better than to criticise.

‘Brilliant!’ she enthused, at the end. ‘You’ve really put some thought into it, haven’t you?’

‘I’m an ideas person,’ boasted the girl. ‘That’s what I’m best at.’

‘I can see,’ Simmy agreed.

‘So now can we talk about the murders? What time do you usually go to bed?’

It was almost ten. ‘In another hour or so. But you can go when you like. You don’t have to wait for me.’

‘No, but I want to
talk
to you,’ she insisted.

Simmy had spent the evening trying to read a novel set in Elizabethan times, featuring Tradescant the gardener. It was engaging, enlightening and entertaining – but she
still wasn’t able to concentrate on it. The faces of Bridget and Lucy, Eleanor and George kept intruding. She heard again Lucy’s prattle and Markie’s brief disclosures outside Storrs Hall in the rain. She saw George crumple, and Bridget huddle miserably between Peter and Glenn. She admitted to herself that the horror and trauma of the two deaths could not be tidied away. Death didn’t work like that. You needed to go over it a hundred times, telling yourself the story of what had happened. It had been like that with her baby. You owed it to the dead person, for one thing, not to forget them. The baby had lived, inside her. She had wriggled and turned, flicking a tiny hand down near Simmy’s bladder, a special little trick that had gone on for months. They had known each other in that time. And then the baby had died, outrageously, just as poor young Markie had died. You couldn’t let it go at that. There had to be an accounting. Baby Edith had died because the umbilical cord had been defective and she was starved in those final hours. Markie had been killed by someone who had forfeited their right to a free and easy life by that vile act.

‘All right,’ she said.

Nothing remotely resembling a plan emerged from the next hour’s talk. Melanie’s talent for ideas threw up a number of propositions, nearly all of which Simmy rejected as either unrealistic or illegal. They compared observations of the people involved, despite Melanie’s frustratingly brief glimpses of them. She knew a surprising amount of background information, gleaned from years of gossip about the prominent local families. But Simmy treated it all
with scepticism. ‘You can’t believe the stuff they put in the papers,’ she said.

‘It’s not papers,’ Melanie argued. ‘It’s magazines. They do articles about their gardens and show photos of them in their best outfits.’

‘I saw Mr Baxter’s picture in the paper,’ Simmy remembered. ‘That’s how I recognised him. Didn’t he take over some local business a few months ago?’

Melanie brushed this aside. ‘It’s Peter Harrison-West we’re most interested in,’ she said. ‘And Bridget.’

‘And the Spanish chap. Pablo. He’s really rather lovely, you know. Amazing eyelashes. Don’t you know anything about him?’

They were going over old ground, and Simmy felt weary of it all. ‘We can’t possibly hope to understand it all,’ she groaned. ‘We’ll have to leave it to the police.’

‘Don’t be so defeatist. Hey – we’ve forgotten the most obvious thing of all.’ Melanie clapped her hands together like a small child, in her glee. ‘They’ll have to include us, after all.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Funerals, dummy. There’ll be two funerals in a couple of weeks, once the police have finished with the bodies. Masses of flowers. Television people. Everybody talking. We’ll be right in the thick of it.’

‘A couple of weeks? Are you sure?’

Melanie hesitated. ‘I think that’s the usual thing. They do post mortems and take samples and photos and all that, then the undertakers collect them and do the coffins and embalming and whatever else they do. I can ask Joe if that’s right.’

‘It’s a long time away. What do we do meanwhile?’

‘I don’t know,’ Melanie confessed. ‘Maybe something’ll turn up.’

‘And maybe it won’t. Now I’m going to bed. Don’t forget you’re supposed to be keeping me safe. If you hear any strange noises in the night, scream.’

‘Better than that.’ Melanie produced a metal whistle from her pocket. ‘I’ll blow this. It makes a tremendous noise. And I’ve got a torch as well. I wish I had a pepper spray, but nobody in Windermere sells them.’

‘Did you try to buy one?’

‘I did. Got a few funny looks, as well. I’ll get Joe to find one for me.’

‘I thought we weren’t telling Joe what we’re doing.’

‘Since we don’t seem to be doing anything, that doesn’t look like a problem. I can tell him I’m scared, with a murderer running around loose. He’ll go along with that.’

‘Thanks again, Mel. I do feel better with you here. It’s been a nice evening.’

‘If I hadn’t come, I’d never have finished the assignment. So we’re both happy, right?’

‘Right,’ laughed Simmy.

She was mostly on her own in the shop throughout Tuesday. There were no visitations from the police, and not a great many customers. One of the people who wanted a Halloween decoration called in to see if Simmy had any new ideas. They discussed it for a while, concluding with a design that had substantially mutated from the first suggestion.

She drew up a careful order for the wholesalers, to include
Chinese lanterns and mesembryanthemum, for use on the Halloween project. She tinkered with the window display, and the buckets of cut flowers on the pavement, bearing in mind Ben’s comments. And all the while, her thoughts remained stubbornly on the Baxters, her inclination to go and find someone from the family increasingly urgent. She wanted to see for herself how they were behaving, who was in control, how they dealt with the fact of their victimhood. Because it was obvious to her that there were more victims than Markie and George. Bridget primarily, but also perhaps Peter, who was now landed with a bride very different from the cheerful excited girl he expected. And if Peter was upset, his friends might well be too.

Except, she found it hard to summon much sympathy for the man. What was he doing marrying a virtual child in the first place? Her image of the couple as a mismatch between a hard unyielding block of wood on the one hand, and a pretty soft unworldly flower on the other had only strengthened since Sunday. It felt wrong, and she was inclined to accuse both Eleanor and George of irresponsibility in having allowed it to happen. Peter was an enigma she worried at repeatedly. On both occasions when she’d seen him, he had struck her as half of a pair with Glenn Adams, with Bridget sandwiched between them. Glenn had done much of the talking for them both, which had evidently suited Peter well enough. There was a nagging weakness about him, which she could not make sense of.

And then, at half past two, Bridget herself came into the shop. She pushed the door closed behind her and stood beside the display of lilies, apparently frozen. ‘Hi,’ Simmy greeted her. ‘I didn’t expect to see you.’

‘No. Well …’ Her cheeks, which had been pink with excitement and mirth on the morning of the wedding, were now white and waxy. There had been a wholesome roundness to her face, the full lips and shining eyes adding to an image of health and good fortune. Now she looked fifteen years older and infinitely sad. ‘Sorry. I was thinking about the last time I came here. Like ten million years ago.’

‘I know.’ Simmy waited.

‘The thing is, I never got an answer, did I? On Sunday Peter and the others wouldn’t really let you talk. So I’ve come to try again, that’s all. I want your impressions. My mother says you’ve got insight, whatever that means. She likes you. So does Lucy. You were a friend. You
are
a friend.’

‘I didn’t do anything, really. I was just handy, that’s all.’

‘That’s what Peter said. He’s cross with Mummy for bringing you to Storrs. Well, he’s cross, full stop, actually. They won’t let us go on the honeymoon, you see, and he’s lost thousands of pounds. The insurance won’t cover murder, apparently.’

It should have raised a laugh, but Simmy could see there was no prospect of any merriment. ‘Victims get compensation, don’t they? There must be a fund or something.’

‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. He can afford it. His bonus last year was half a million pounds. Can you believe it?’

‘So – are you still staying at Storrs?’

‘Oh no. We’re at the house now. Last night was the first proper night as a married couple. It didn’t seem to count while we were still at the hotel. I thought it would all be okay, but it’s horrible.’ She shuddered. ‘Cold, and
miserable, and Peter all cross and silent. If Glenn hadn’t come round, we’d have been a total disaster.’

‘Where is the house? Here in Windermere?’

‘Ambleside. Peter bought it six months ago. We’ve been doing it up since then. It’s nice.’

They were still avoiding the subject of Markie and her father, Simmy realised. ‘Shall I make some tea?’ she suggested. ‘I would offer to close the shop, but I can’t really …’

‘God, no. Don’t do that. If anybody comes I’ll just sit quietly out of the way. Tea would be nice though. Thanks.’

They sat at the back of the shop, squashed into the area beside the till and the computer. ‘Markie was the same age as you – is that right?’ Simmy began, unsure of how to broach the subject without being too upsetting.

‘Five months younger. It was a great scandal – which you probably know. Daddy shouldn’t have been allowed to get away with it, but somehow he did. Mummy found out before I was a year old, and insisted we grow up as brother and sister as much as possible. She always liked Markie – everybody did. His mother was sensible enough to stay in the background. Poor woman – I’ve had her on the phone this morning. She’s been talking to the police, of course, like all of us. She wants to come and see me and Peter. That’ll be fun, won’t it?’ She grimaced. ‘I can’t imagine what I’ll say to her.’

‘Did he live with her, right up to … up to now?’

‘No, no. After she sold the house in Troutbeck, he went to live with Daddy. Penny’s got a live-in job at a boarding school, which is a bit weird, really. Daddy says she’s on the lookout for a rich man, father of one of the boys.’

‘They lived in my house,’ Simmy said absently.

‘Pardon?’

‘That’s what Markie said. He knew it was me. I think that’s why he stopped me – to make the connection. On Saturday. Isn’t that funny?’

‘Is it?’

‘One of those little coincidences that lead to much bigger things.’

Bridget eyed her doubtfully. ‘What did it lead to?’

Simmy paused. ‘Nothing important, I suppose. Just my involvement. If he hadn’t waved me down, I’d have had no reason at all to ever see any of you again. The police wouldn’t have bothered to question me, and I’d never have even met your parents.’

‘Oh,’ said Bridget carelessly. ‘Well, I’m glad you did. You’re so nice and sensible. It’s refreshing.’

‘Thanks,’ said Simmy ruefully.

‘Anyway, we were talking about our childhood,’ Bridget pressed on, as if needing to get the story told before any further sidetracking could happen. ‘I can’t pretend it was a very normal family life. My mother never forgave Daddy, in her heart. She just pretended. The truth is, she was punishing him in the cleverest way imaginable. Never letting him forget what he’d done. She used Markie. I only came to understand that a little while ago. She insisted he got the same education and holidays and gadgets as I did. It looked like generosity to most people, but it was really a never-ending rubbing of his nose in what he’d done. Awful, really.’

‘Gosh,’ said Simmy faintly.

‘I can’t say I suffered at all. I gained a brother, after all.
Then they divorced, when I was ten, and I didn’t see Daddy much after that. Neither did Markie until he went to live with him.’

‘But you still saw each other?’ There was a discrepancy lurking somewhere, that kept slipping out of reach. Bridget’s recital was obscuring a more recent detail.

‘Not so much. There wasn’t the same point to it after Daddy had gone. But we emailed and phoned all the time, and insisted on being together in the summer. We stayed at Peter’s every year from when we were twelve.’

‘Really?’ Could it actually be as innocent and ordinary as Bridget seemed to be implying? Had Peter Harrison-West spent all those years grooming the little girl, biding his time until he could marry her? It was close enough to the stereotype of a paedophile to raise alarm, but far enough from it to subside into mere puzzlement.