The Windermere Witness (2 page)

‘Persimmon Petals’ was in the main street of Windermere. While Simmy was at the hotel, her teenaged assistant Melanie was holding the fort. Melanie lived on the eastern edge of Bowness and attended college at Troutbeck Bridge, taking Advanced Level Management for a year, aspiring eventually to become a hotel manager. The timetable contained enough gaps for students to find paid
employment around the town, and Melanie worked at the flower shop for fifteen hours a week. She talked a lot about ‘the hospitality industry’ and its innumerable ramifications. Simmy could often not understand her.

‘Everything okay?’ she asked, having located Melanie in the back of the shop. Her large figure was generally easy to spot. As tall as Simmy, she had a generous covering on her bones, and a big round head. She also had no sight in one eye, thanks to a fight with her brother when she was four.

‘Fine. How’s the bride doing?’

‘She’s disgustingly relaxed and cheerful. Doesn’t care about the weather. Loves the bouquets. Julie’s going to be in her element. I was a bit surprised that she hadn’t got there yet, but nobody seemed worried.’

‘You haven’t heard, then?’

‘What?’

‘Julie won’t be doing it. She’s broken two fingers.’

‘
What?
But none of the wedding people seemed to have heard – they’d have been in far more of a flap if they had. How do
you
know? What happened to her? I only saw her on Thursday.’

It was a daft question. Everybody knew everything in Windermere. Behind the throngs of tourists, there was a small core of residents, both dreading and yearning for the few quiet weeks after Christmas when they could breathe more easily and compare notes as to how the year’s business had been.

‘Graham Forrest came in for some roses, five minutes after you left. He’s lodging with Doreen Mills now, in case you didn’t know. And she’s Julie’s aunt. It happened yesterday. She trapped her hand in a hairdryer, somehow. It
“jackknifed backwards”, that’s what Graham said. Lucky it wasn’t a customer. She’d have been sued. You’d think—’

‘Yes,’ said Simmy hurriedly, hoping to avert a short lecture on health and safety. ‘Right. So who’s going to do the hair? Will they still
pay
her? My God! This is going to wipe the smile off young Bridget’s face.’

‘Yeah,’ said Melanie, her expression mirroring Simmy’s own mixture of concern and thrill at this unexpected setback in the life of the local golden girl. Except, even this might not seriously upset her. She could get married with her hair in a simple chignon, and the sky would not fall. ‘They’ve sorted out somebody else, I suppose. The hotel will have a list. They always have a contingency plan.’ She spoke proudly of her chosen profession. To Melanie, floristry was a poor lightweight line of work. She made no secret of the fact that she was only there because there’d been no other choice with the right number of hours.

‘But it won’t be the same. And the
photos
,’ Simmy said. ‘She’s got to have proper hair for the photos.’

‘They’re sure to find somebody else,’ Melanie insisted. ‘Julie’s not the only hairdresser in town.’

A fussy customer occupied the next ten minutes, but Simmy’s mind was not on the job. Poor Julie – she must be feeling wretched, not only because of the wedding, but because fingers were painful when broken, and extremely necessary for any sort of work. ‘Which hand was it?’ she asked.

‘Oh, the right. First two fingers on the right. She won’t be able to do anything for weeks.’

Outside it was still raining. The deep grey-brown of the local stone had turned black from the soaking. The
big building at the top of the street looked like a looming battleship. ‘Shirley C’s got a great big puddle outside,’ she observed. The biggest shop in town was another incongruity that Simmy still had to wrestle with. It sold lingerie, with the long street window full of plastic torsos modelling knickers and corsets for every passing visitor to admire. How it managed to survive, nobody knew.
Thriving mail order business
, some know-all suggested. The sheer brazen take-it-or-leave-it attitude was what struck Simmy most powerfully, seeming typical of the whole approach to life in the region. Nothing was done for ostentatious show – the stone walls were simply there to keep the sheep in; the houses were made of the same material as a matter of course, but if someone wished to add stucco nobody objected. It all worked out quite peaceably, because the fells and the lakes were of so much greater interest and significance than any human activity.

The wedding remained at the front of her mind for the rest of the morning. At eleven-fifteen, she gave up all attempts to concentrate on the work in front of her, and went back to the street door to examine the sky. Markie Baxter’s predictions came back to her – that it would stop raining at exactly this time, which would be more or less exactly the moment when Bridget and Peter became man and wife. Assuming everybody presented themselves punctually, of course. That, in Simmy’s experience, seldom happened.

The puddles and rivulets in the street were deterring most would-be shoppers. The beck alongside her mother’s house would be frothing and scrambling in full spate after so many hours of downpour. The lake would be lapping
at the jetties and piers along its shores, and creeping closer to the hotel that had been built so hazardously close to the water. Had it ever flooded, she wondered? It was hard to see how it could have avoided it, in the two centuries since it had been built, and yet she had heard no local stories of inundation.

As she watched the little town centre, she realised that there were faint shadows being thrown by the few shoppers as they walked along the shining wet pavements. Umbrellas were being closed, and chins released from enveloping collars. ‘Mel – it’s stopped!’ she called back into the shop. It was like a tap being turned off, and she marvelled at it.

‘What did you expect?’ came Mel’s voice behind her. ‘The Baxters and the Harrison-Wests between them are more than a match for the weather gods. Nobody would dare rain on their special day.’

‘The boy, Mark, said it would stop at eleven-fifteen. It’s like magic.’ Simmy still couldn’t credit it.

‘What boy would that be?’

‘Mark. Markie – whatever they call him. Her brother, isn’t he? He stopped me for a chat as I was leaving.’

‘Half-brother, Sim. He’s her half-brother. Don’t you know the story?’

It was a question she must have heard a hundred times since relocating from Worcestershire. Everywhere there was a story, a piece of local history that she was expected to have absorbed within weeks of arriving. ‘Different mothers?’ she ventured. ‘But they can’t be more than a year or two different in age.’

‘Less than a year, actually,’ grinned Melanie. ‘There was
never any secret about it. Poor old Eleanor just had to put up with it.’

‘But I thought she divorced him?’

‘Not until the children – that’s Markie as well as Bridget – were old enough to cope with it.’

‘Why would it affect Markie? What difference did it make to him?’

‘I’m not sure, exactly, but everyone says there were major changes to both their lives. Once George had gone, both Eleanor and Markie’s mother would have been on the same footing. The balance of power would shift.’

Simmy did her best to imagine how it would have been. ‘So how old were they, then?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know exactly, but they weren’t babies. And then it was
George
who divorced
Eleanor
. He’d fallen for the Plumpton woman by then, and wanted to marry her.’

‘Lordy, Mel – it’s like something out of Noel Coward.’ Except it wasn’t really, she acknowledged. It was all quite commonplace in the present day. Mixed-up families, with no two children sharing the same two parents, and everybody more or less amicable about it. It was she, Persimmon Brown, who was out of step. She was the one who could not find it in herself to forgive or forget or cease to wish every sort of hell onto her one-time husband, Tony.

‘P’simmon!’ warbled her mother. ‘What are you doing here? I’m knee-deep in sheets, look.’

Her mother was the only person who used her full name, and even she omitted a couple of letters, pronouncing it in her own unique way that made it sound oddly Irish. When asked repeatedly to give a rational account of her choice of such an outlandish name for her baby, she always said, ‘You were bright orange when you were born. You looked just like a persimmon. How could I resist?’ But nobody in England knew what a persimmon looked like, Simmy argued feebly. The name was ridiculous. ‘So change it,’ challenged her mother. ‘Maybe you’d have preferred to be Apricot?’

Simmy would have preferred Liz or Jane or Emily, when she was eleven, but gradually she came to appreciate some aspects of her name’s uniqueness.

Teachers had been crass about it, baulking at this
unknown name when Kezias and Chloes and Zaras went unremarked.
Per
simmon, they would cry, making it sound awkward and unbalanced. Even Per
sim
mon was clunky. Nobody ever got the hang of P’simmon.

‘I did the wedding flowers at Storrs Hall,’ she said. ‘Julie’s broken her fingers. She can’t do the hair. It stopped raining at exactly eleven-fifteen, like magic. Did you have a lot in last week?’

‘Full to bursting. Daddy had to go foraging for eggs at ten last night and I had him waiting table this morning. You know how he hates that.’

Simmy knew better. Her father made a complex private game out of serving breakfast to their guests. He had a mental list of a dozen or more snippets of local information, which he issued on a strict rota basis. He would subtly steer any conversation around until he could deftly slip in the fact that Mountford John Byrde Baddeley would be for ever turning in his grave at the memorial they’d built for him. Or that Lake Road had once been the main highway through Windermere, choked with traffic for centuries. Now it was silent and still and very much improved.

‘He doesn’t mind, really,’ she argued mildly.

‘He likes the money.’

The house had five guestrooms. When it was full, earnings reached three hundred pounds a night. In the summer peak, they might all be full every night for weeks on end. By any standards, the money was significant. The fact that Angie Straw was an unreconstructed hippy who found the normal rules of B&B-hood completely impossible to adhere to, seemed to matter little. She had a dog and two cats which might all appear without warning
anywhere in the house. She allowed guests to bring their own dogs, and kept a constant stack of patchwork cotton bedspreads for them to lie on. ‘People always say it’ll sleep on the floor, but of course that never happens,’ she laughed. The useless extra cushions that so many landladies heaped onto the beds were absent from her establishment. She gave people real milk in little jugs that she collected from small potteries across the country. There were no televisions in the rooms. Instead she had erected a substantial bookcase on the landing and invited people to help themselves. She let people smoke in two of the rooms, and smoked unashamedly herself. This last got her into the most serious trouble, but her website made a feature of it, and earned her a steady stream of relieved customers as a result.

‘You wouldn’t believe how many people like their dogs and fags so much they never go away unless they can take them along,’ she said. ‘They think I’m wonderful.’

The legal implications of allowing people to smoke simmered ominously in the background. Simmy was fairly sure that it would only take one complaint to bring the authorities down onto her mother’s head in an avalanche of litigation. But she had no hesitation in supporting the right to allow anything in your own home. The smoking ban had gone ludicrously beyond what was reasonable and the sight of sad little groups of smokers standing outdoors in all weathers always gave her a pang.

‘Bridget Baxter’s married by now, then,’ said Angie. ‘Peculiar business. Who’s Julie?’

‘The hairdresser. I suppose they knew about it when I was there, but nobody said anything. All the girls had rollers in and Bridget seemed amazingly relaxed.’

‘Probably stuffed to the eyeballs with Valium. Nobody uses rollers any more, do they?’

‘I think she’s going for a retro look. All bouffant.’

‘Dangerous in the rain.’

‘The rain stopped. Markie said it would, and it did.’ Simmy was still wondering how that had happened so predictably. ‘Amazing.’

‘Markie?’

‘Bridget’s half-brother,’ Simmy told her, with her newfound knowledge. ‘Only a year younger than her. All rather scandalous.’

Angie tossed her head impatiently. ‘Not interested,’ she asserted. ‘Not my kind of people.’

It was true that Simmy’s mother tended to focus on higher matters than the local gentry. She read literary biographies and watched old French films and never gave up trying to persuade everyone else to do the same. Unusually for a B&B she provided a sitting room for the guests containing a TV and DVD player, with a stack of discs that only the most dedicated film buffs could be expected to watch. There were also games and jigsaws and about five hundred more books, additional to those on the landing. The surprise was that these eccentricities were received with acclaim. ‘Beck View’ was suspected to be the most popular and successful establishment in the whole of Lake Road.

‘Can I have lunch?’ Simmy asked. ‘Is Daddy going to be in?’

‘He is. We’re having sausage bake with spaghetti,’ her mother informed her. ‘I’ve got a new lot of people due at three, the pests. It clearly says on the website that we don’t
want anybody before four, but they always think I’ll make a special exception for them.’

‘They’re right. Couldn’t you say you’d be out? Can’t they find something else to do for an hour?’

Angie shrugged. ‘We’ve been recommended by some friends of theirs, apparently. I didn’t recognise the name of the friends, but they sound all right.’

‘Not really pests, then?’

‘It depends. You can never be sure. They’ll go out for an evening meal, anyway.’

‘No wonder you can’t remember their friends. There must be hundreds who’ve stayed here over the years.’

‘Thousands, actually. And I do usually remember them if I see them again. Although there are some who make no impression whatever.’

At thirty-seven, Simmy conducted her own life well out of sight of her parents. She had bought a small stone house halfway between Windermere and Ambleside and made sure she didn’t visit Beck View more than once a week – often less than that. Catching up with news was generally done over lunch, as it would be today.

Except that the comfortable family meal never took place. Five minutes before the three of them were due to sit down together someone rang the doorbell. Angie asked Simmy to get it, and she found Melanie on the step. ‘Something’s happened down at Storrs,’ she gasped. ‘Somebody died.’

Simmy visualised an overindulging uncle succumbing to a coronary and knocking trays of champagne flying. Melanie’s excitement, always quick to flare, struck her as excessive. ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘And that warrants leaving the shop, does it? Couldn’t you have phoned me?’

‘It’s the boy – Mark. He drowned in the lake.’

‘No!’ Simmy’s insides cramped with a sudden involuntary horror. ‘Was he boating? Surely not. He was an usher …’

‘I think we ought to go down there and see,’ Melanie insisted. ‘You spoke to him today. They’ll want to know what he said to you. They want you to be a
witness
.’

‘Don’t be stupid. Of course they don’t. Why me, when there must be hundreds of people who’ve seen more of him than I did?’

Melanie’s dimples appeared as she manifested extreme exasperation and her sightless eye stared insistently. ‘Sim, listen,’ she urged. ‘There’s more to it. Joe called me just now. It’s terribly serious. The Baxter man has gone berserk, accusing everybody in sight of killing his boy. Joe says Markie never showed up for the wedding at all. He must have been in the lake all morning. So when I said you’d seen him, Joe said you had to go and make a statement. He said I should fetch you and take you down to the Hall.’

‘Joe,’ Simmy repeated, dazedly. ‘The policeman, you mean?’

‘
Yes
. He’s my boyfriend, in case you’ve forgotten.’

‘He shouldn’t have told you about it, should he? Is he allowed to do that?’

‘He knew we did the flowers. We’re
involved
, Sim. This is a
huge
thing to happen. The Baxters and the Harrison-Wests, for God’s sake.’

Simmy began to imagine the headlines and the gossip, and felt icy rivulets flowing through her body. But still she was far from grasping the central import of Melanie’s news. Standing there on her mother’s doorstep, her jaw working erratically as she attempted to speak coherently,
she wanted nothing more than to close the door in her assistant’s innocent face.

But she could not do that. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and tell my mother. Give me half a minute.’

‘Bring a coat,’ said Melanie, with a maternal touch that would never have occurred to Angie. ‘It’s turning colder.’

The van was still parked behind the shop, so they walked briskly back to collect it. ‘Why didn’t you drive here?’ Simmy grumbled. ‘If there’s such a great hurry?’

‘I told you, I haven’t got the motor today. I came on the bike. And you won’t let me drive the van, remember?’ This was a sore point with Melanie, who was unmoved by arguments involving the price of insurance.

The convolutions of Melanie’s transport arrangements had never properly registered with Simmy. She shared an elderly Fiesta with an older brother, a liability in Simmy’s view, which regularly refused to start. For backup, Melanie used an expensive bicycle that she resisted as much as possible. Melanie was not really built for cycling. ‘Did you?’ Simmy puffed. ‘In all that rain?’

‘I did. It was horrible.’

‘Must have been. Gosh, you never realise how steep this hill is until you try to walk up it quickly, do you?’

‘Nearly there,’ Melanie panted.

The van, with its cheery floral logo, seemed an incongruous vehicle in which to arrive at a police investigation, but there was no choice. They were through Bowness and on the final stretch down to Storrs within a few minutes. The whole scene was completely transformed from that of a few hours earlier. None of the festive
merriment of a wedding was to be seen. The lapping waters of the lake struck Simmy as almost voracious, gobbling up poor young Markie for no reason at all. What in the world could have happened to him, she wondered, when he had been so happy and relaxed, apparently moments before meeting his death? Except, she corrected herself, he
hadn’t
been all that relaxed. He’d been worried about meeting his father, impatiently waiting out in the rain.

The last of the rain clouds had slipped away to the east, leaving a pale-blue haze overhead. Simmy glanced at her watch, in an attempt to calculate how much time had elapsed since she was last there. It was a quarter to two – four and a bit hours, in which the lives of a dozen people or more must have been permanently changed. The memory of the little bridesmaid twiddling her fingers on the sofa came unbidden to her mind. Was she a cousin, perhaps, or somebody’s stepdaughter? Had she known and loved the charismatic Markie? Would anyone manage to explain to her that she was never going to see him again?

They had to park on the roadside and walk down the hotel’s drive, having explained themselves to a policeman at the main gate. There were people everywhere, some with obvious TV cameras, and vehicles almost blocking the road that continued down to Newby Bridge. The hotel’s lawn was suffering badly from the heavy traffic across it, so soon after the rain.

Inside the hotel, the staff were plainly pulling out all the stops to maintain a calm front, while cooperating fully with the police. The magnificence of the rooms made their task a lot easier. The building seemed to be saying it had seen every sort of upset before, many a time, and
this latest episode was not going to change anything. People might shout and bustle and throw accusations, but the Hall would drift serenely on, its gaze on the forested slopes across the lake, and keep the whole business in perspective. Simmy took a moment, as she was escorted towards a room somewhere to the left of the main entrance hall, to appreciate the fabulous rotunda with the gallery running around it, like a replica of St Paul’s Cathedral. Would whispers run around it, like its more famous forebear, and reveal the secrets behind the death of Mark Baxter?

Her strongest feeling was one of being an interloper, an unjustified intruder, there under false pretences. She was, after all, a humble florist, with no claims at all to special insight of any description. At some point, outside the Hall, she had been parted from Melanie, who had said, ‘See you later,’ before melting away. Simmy could not help feeling that Melanie would make a far better witness; that she had a firmer grasp of what had been going on.

She was shown into a room which contained seven or eight people sitting at tables. As she focused more carefully, she saw they were in twos, and that notes were being taken. The room was more than large enough for the pairs to speak privately without being overheard. A man with a long head and small eyes behind spectacles appeared to be waiting for her. Her escort was a young constable, who said, ‘Mrs Brown, sir. The florist.’

‘Ah! Yes. Thank you very much for coming, Mrs Brown. It’s a big help for us if people can come and see us quickly, while everything’s fresh in their minds, as it were.’

She raised an eyebrow at him, and waited to be invited
to sit. ‘Sorry,’ he realised. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Moxon. Do sit down.’

She glanced around the room, wondering whether all the other interviewers were of such senior rank as hers. It seemed highly unlikely. She recognised none of the interviewees.

‘I still don’t know what happened,’ she complained.

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out. But first I need to make a note of your full name and address, and phone number, if that’s all right.’