The Windermere Witness (4 page)

Her father was at the table, doing a crossword. He looked up, patently ready for anything. ‘Well, hello!’ he twinkled. ‘It’s a little girl. I like little girls.’

Lucy gave a little huff of acknowledgment, apparently assuming that everybody liked little girls.

‘This is Lucy,’ said Simmy. ‘She hasn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.’

‘Or you,’ said Lucy, in a proud show of generosity. ‘I had sausages.’

‘And thirsty,’ added Simmy. ‘We both need a drink.’

There was a shelf full of cartons of fruit juice in the fridge. ‘Apple, orange or pineapple?’ Simmy asked the child.

‘Pineapple,’ said Lucy.

‘Pineapple,
please
,’ said Simmy’s father automatically. ‘Politeness costs nothing, but works wonders for oiling the cogs of social exchange.’

‘Sorry,’ said Lucy, easily. ‘I forgot.’

Angie had not followed them into the kitchen. Simmy brushed away a suspicion that she had transgressed in her mother’s eyes. To accept the commission of minding a small scion of the wedding party ought to have struck her as a pleasing piece of spontaneity, a sign that her daughter was less unlike her than she often believed. Instead, coming on a busy Saturday it was an annoying imposition. Angie was not so much maternal as businesslike in her approach to children. She thought she knew what they liked, and what their basic requirements were, and left the rest to the experts. It had been obvious from the start that Lucy liked and trusted her.

‘People due at three,’ said her father, cocking his head at the clock on the wall. ‘Bad timing, petal.’

Simmy was stunned to discover that it was already ten minutes to three. Her inner clock had stopped around half past one. ‘No wonder we’re hungry,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it’s gone so fast.’

‘Funny old day.’

‘To say the least.’

She made sandwiches, which Lucy ate without fuss or mess. Given a chance to examine her more closely, Simmy diagnosed a robust individual, both mentally and physically. There were no vapourings about butter or onion or having the crusts cut off. There was ample flesh on the little skeleton, too. Lucy enjoyed her food, it seemed. She would probably have made short work of the wedding breakfast, given the chance.

Her total ignorance as to Lucy’s home situation was a gnawing frustration. It made conversation almost impossible. Plainly it was taboo to mention the deceased
Markie, for a start. But perhaps there were other relatives it was safer to introduce. ‘This is my daddy,’ she explained, belatedly. ‘His name is Russell. Did you say your daddy was in Ireland?’

Lucy nodded and swigged more juice. ‘County Wicklow,’ she said. ‘Where the fairies and leprechauns play.’

This revealed a wealth of information to Simmy’s eager ear. Lucy’s father was an Irish poet, a romantic soul with a rich sense of humour. A man not so different from her own father, in fact. Who now proved it, by singing the line back to the child, to the tune of ‘Home on the Range’. Both females laughed delightedly.

Simmy broke her own rule by asking, ‘Does Daddy live with you and Mummy?’

Lucy’s eyes sparkled scornfully. ‘Of course he does. Sometimes, anyway. When he isn’t at his house.’

‘Not in County Wicklow, by any chance?’ Simmy’s father put in.

‘Cockermouth,’ Lucy corrected. ‘He had a flood and his chairs floated like boats. There was a fire engine.’ She frowned.

‘Should have been a flood engine, eh?’

‘Yes.’ Uttered with emphasis.

‘That was years ago, petal. You must have been a baby.’

‘I was five. That’s not a baby.’

‘Ah! Not the Great Flood, then. A special one, just for Daddy. Nasty.’

‘There was mud on the walls and the garden was a wreck.’ The quotes were vivid, the trauma plainly still very much in evidence. ‘And …’ the child’s eyes widened with mimicked alarm, ‘… he
wasn’t
insured
.’ This came in a
horrified whisper, that was also an obvious quote, probably from her mother.

‘Dreadful,’ sympathised the man who cared little for such mundane aspects of modern life. ‘Very bad luck.’

Lucy shook her shoulders as if discarding the whole episode. ‘Is there any pudding?’ she asked. ‘Please?’

‘An apple,’ suggested Simmy.

A repressed grimace greeted this idea. ‘No, thank you.’

‘Heavens, Sim, we’ve got ice cream, haven’t we?’ her father expostulated.

‘I don’t know, Dad. I don’t live here, remember. Mum said apples, so that’s what I thought we were meant to have.’

The doorbell pealed loudly before the matter could be decided. ‘People,’ said Russell. ‘I seem to recall mention of small boys. Might be someone to play with,’ he told Lucy.

Something about this puzzled the child. ‘Are they visitors?’ she asked.

‘Not exactly. They’ve come here for bed and breakfast. That’s what this house is – a B&B.’

‘B&B,’ repeated Lucy. ‘Oh. But it isn’t bedtime,’ she objected. ‘And not time for breakfast.’

He laughed ruefully. ‘Perfectly true. Usually people don’t come until after they’ve had dinner somewhere. These are outrageously early. I don’t know why. There’s probably a very good reason.’

Ten minutes later, Angie arrived with an explanation. ‘The little child has to have a nap at precisely three-thirty,’ she told them, with an exaggerated sigh. ‘They’re following some inflexible schedule that seems insane to me. They’re putting it in the cot now. The other one is allowed to come and play with Lucy, in the sitting room.’

Lucy looked wary. ‘Is it a boy?’

‘William. He’s three and a half.’

‘Oh.’

Simmy felt weary and resentful. How had all this happened, anyway? She had been exploited, seized as a convenient solution to a problem that had nothing to do with her. She had been flagged down by a youth who was shortly to be murdered, spoken to in a wholly inconsequential fashion, and thereby embroiled in the biggest local scandal for many a year. Lucy was easy enough, but that was beside the point. Detective Inspector Moxon had been the brightest spot in the day, surprisingly. A human being amongst the peacocks and prattlers that were the local gentry. One of them had killed their bright young hope, and the house of cards had deservedly collapsed about their ears.

‘She doesn’t want to play with a three-year-old boy,’ she said, with unwarranted force. ‘Do you?’

Lucy considered. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘After I’ve had pudding.’

‘Ange – do we have ice cream?’ asked Russell. ‘Under the circumstances …’

‘In the freezer. Some of that honeycomb stuff you like,’ said Angie automatically.

‘Honeycomb?’ Lucy’s eyes sparkled. ‘Like Markie has? That’s my favourite.’

Simmy’s parents had not registered the identity of the murdered boy; they did not react to the mention of his name. But Simmy was unprepared for it, and it sent a shard of ice through her guts.

‘Markie?’ she repeated. ‘Is that what you call him?’

Lucy gave her a withering look. ‘Yes,’ she said shortly. ‘He’s called Markie.’

So Lucy knew the murdered boy, shared his ice cream, counted him amongst her intimates. The tragedy of his loss could not leave her unaffected. Whoever had killed him had damaged an innocent child, and who knew how many others, in the process.

She took Lucy out for a walk when the three-year-old B&B guest turned out to be an impossible playmate. The prospect of a holiday in the Lake District appalled and enraged him. The car journey had made him feel sick; his small brother had received unfair quantities of attention. His very natural response was to pull Lucy’s hair and scratch her cheek. In reply, she had pushed him hard, sending him reeling into the bookshelves, where a sharp edge had caught his brow and raised a spectacular bruise.

Simmy had grabbed her charge and removed her from the house entirely.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Lucy repeated, as they walked blindly down the hill towards Bowness.

‘No it wasn’t. He’s a little beast.’

This surprised Lucy into silence for a moment. ‘A little beast,’ she murmured in wonder. ‘Yes.’

‘That’s the trouble with B&B – you never know what
the people might be like. Nearly all of them are very nice, but sometimes there’s trouble.’

‘Sometimes there’s a little beast.’

Dimly it occurred to Simmy that in the current era of universal approval and respect, such pejorative descriptions were taboo. Everybody was intrinsically virtuous. It had all been taking root during her own schooldays, she supposed – clumsy efforts to remove all tendencies towards exclusion of the thick or the malignant. Since then it had been perfected to the point where such care had to be taken over language that it might as well have been Soviet Russia in the 1950s.

‘That’s right,’ she affirmed. ‘Although we must admit that he’s probably had a difficult day.’

‘Like me,’ suggested Lucy diffidently. ‘Mummy says a wedding is always very stressful.’

And this one more than most
, thought Simmy, with a pang. That poor young Markie – how could it be possible? What in the world could he have ever done to deserve the ultimate violence?

‘Your day has been
much
more difficult,’ Simmy said. ‘And you’re being very brave and good. I must say I’m very impressed.’

‘Oh – it’s the Baddeley clock!’ came the unexpected response. ‘Daddy and I
love
the Baddeley clock.’

Simmy experienced for a second time a sense that her and Lucy’s fathers had much in common. The clock tower stood on the point where the old Lake Road joined the more recent New Road, and was generally agreed to mark the border between Windermere and Bowness. Russell Straw had been enchanted by it on his first day in Windermere and
had researched the man it memorialised. It was a fairy-tale construction with four little turrets guarding a spire topped with a weathervane. A tiny wooden door stood on the north side, with the clock and inscription to the south. It had windows to the east and west, the whole edifice decorated with crenellations on the corners and around the windows. It was easy to imagine a family of elves or trolls living inside it. ‘Baddeley conducted campaigns against stone quarries,’ Russell discovered. ‘And here’s this crazy folly made of the very stone he disliked so much.’

‘But it’s lovely!’ Simmy had protested. ‘It’s been made so carefully, as a pure act of love.’

‘I know,’ Russell had chuckled. ‘That’s what’s so delightful about it.’

‘We have to walk round it three times and make a wish,’ said Lucy. ‘That’s what they do in Mongolia, and it always works.’

‘So what are we going to wish?’

‘I’m going to wish for Bridget, not me,’ said the child, suddenly serious. ‘Bridget’s going to need all the luck she can get.’ Once again, it was obvious that she was quoting from an adult, even before she added, ‘That’s what Daddy says,’ in confirmation.

Trying not to think about probable watchers from the Victorian villas on either side of the road, not to mention passing traffic, Simmy allowed Lucy to lead her three times around the tower, pausing to bow at the completion of each circuit. By the end of the second, she had lost much of her self-consciousness and was aware of following an ancient ritual that had a certain power, even now. The October leaves on nearby trees held a magic of their own, with the
intimations of endings and hardships to come. When the killing of a princely young man was factored in, there was certainly some additional dimension to be acknowledged.
Good luck, Bridget
, she whispered, as the third circuit ended.

They walked as far as Rayrigg Wood, scuffing leaves and watching two frantic squirrels chasing through the branches. Conversation was sporadic, but Simmy learnt that Lucy and her mother lived in Ambleside, with her father an inconstant presence. Lucy went to school at an establishment known as ‘St Clare’s’ where her teacher was Miss Hamble. She had been assessed as ‘gifted and talented’ because she had a reading age of ten. ‘And I’m not even seven yet,’ she boasted.

Bridget lived in the same house, but she had been going to college in Carlisle for a long time, and didn’t come home so much any more. Peter was nice. Mr Baxter smelt funny, but not exactly in a nice way. Markie was sad because his girlfriend dumped him.

‘Oh?’

‘Bridget said it broke his heart. She said it was Mr Baxter’s fault. They shouted a lot.’

‘So Bridget and Markie …’ She didn’t know how to frame the question. They were half-brother and -sister – very possibly they would be close friends, sharing emotional confidences and watching out for each other. She changed tack. ‘Where does Markie live?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘You haven’t been to his house?’

Lucy shook her head. ‘He comes to us. He stays sometimes. There’s a room. There’s lots of rooms.’

Under the trees, the light was fading, the chill of evening starting to make itself felt. ‘It’s nearly five o’clock,’ Simmy said. ‘We’d better go back and wait for your mother to collect you.’

‘Am I staying at the hotel again tonight? They said it would be two nights.’

‘I don’t know.’

The chaotic consequences for the wedding would be reverberating still. It seemed obvious that there could be no carefree disco, as planned. After what had happened, guests would have the discretion to stay in their rooms, or to quietly leave again, if they had arrived for the dance unaware of events. Bridget and Peter were married – that was the main thing. But rooms remained booked, the hotel kitchen would be devoted to supplying provisions throughout the evening to the remaining company, who hung on for whatever reason. Some had probably flown over from foreign parts and could not readily make alternative arrangements.

How, she wondered, could poor Inspector Moxon ever hope to untangle it all? How could he make sense of such a ghastly crime? The cast of suspects must run into the dozens, with all the dogged sifting of means and motives and alibis and witnesses ahead of him. Simmy marvelled at her own urgent wish to help him. She wanted vengeance for Markie, who had, she slowly admitted to herself, singled her out for some opaque sort of appeal. She had failed him, as it turned out. He had been trying to tell her something, perhaps somehow hoping she would gather him into her van and drive him off to a place of safety. And yet their exchange had concluded with a piece of optimism about
the weather; a prediction that had proved miraculously accurate. She hoped, foolishly, that he had lived long enough to see the cessation of the rain, while knowing that he almost certainly had not.

She thought over the timing, while walking back towards Lake Road, hand-in-hand with young Lucy – half-sister of Markie’s half-sister; a relationship that only the aborigines of Australia were likely to have a word for. If the killer had been among the wedding party, then he would have been in the hotel, witnessing the couple’s vows, at the moment when the rain stopped. And that meant that the deed had been done at an earlier point. Sometime between nine-thirty and eleven, then, and more likely at the earlier end of that period, to leave time for changing into topcoat and tails; to insert the buttonhole and square the shoulders. What monster could behave like that? And why?

‘I need a wee,’ said Lucy, apologetically. Simmy remembered the two large glasses of pineapple juice and was not surprised.

‘Can you wait till we get back to the house? It’ll be ten minutes or so.’

‘I don’t know.’

Simmy looked around. There were shady trees and shrubs that would conceal a squatting child. ‘You could go behind a bush,’ she suggested, totally ignorant of the protocols of such an idea.

‘A bush?’

‘Yes. Pull your trousers and pants down and wee on the ground. I’ll stand guard and make sure nobody sees you.’

‘I can’t,’ said Lucy flatly.

‘Okay. We’d better get back to the house quick, then.’

Probably a narrow escape, Simmy decided, as they marched briskly back up the hill. She’d be accused of abuse if anyone saw her handling the naked nether regions of a strange child. What did people do these days, anyway? She remembered that peeing behind a bush had been an integral part of most family walks, thirty years ago.

They reached Beck View without accident, and Simmy rushed Lucy through the house to the downstairs toilet without pausing to announce their presence. The side door was never locked during daylight hours, so access was easily gained. Only as she stood outside the loo did she become aware of an unusual silence: no radio or TV, no voices, no footsteps overhead. Had the B&B people all gone to bed for some peculiar afternoon nap? Had her parents remained quietly in the kitchen, drinking tea and thinking their own thoughts? Before she could go to investigate, her mother appeared from the dining room, her face pale and drawn.

‘Mum? What’s the matter? You look awful.’

‘They’ve gone. They said they’ll be suing us for the damage to their kid. They called an ambulance for him, because he seemed drowsy.’

‘What? But that’s ridiculous. It was just a bruise.’

‘Yes, I know. But they wouldn’t listen. They’re completely paranoid, both of them. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘But they can’t sue
you
. It was Lucy who did it.’

‘And it was
you
who brought her here. And the law still hasn’t fully decided whether a B&B is a public place or a private home. In this case, they were paying me for accommodation, with the implication that I would protect
their children from attack. I keep telling myself not to worry, but I have to say it was extremely unpleasant.’

‘It’ll be fine, Mum. The hospital will tell them they’re over-reacting, and they’ll drop the whole thing.’

‘Including their holiday. They might want compensation for that.’

‘And you might want compensation for loss of earnings for no good reason.’

Angie sighed. ‘Why is life always so unpredictable? Just one thing after another, and I never see it coming. I’m too old for this sort of thing.’

‘You’re sixty-one, Mother. That’s not old, by about twenty years. Even Dad isn’t really old, and he’s seventy.’

‘I
want
to be old. I want to put my feet up and go on cruises and let the young people do the worrying.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Simmy laughed. The notion of her mother on a cruise was almost surreal. ‘You haven’t got the right clothes, and you’d probably murder three or four of the other passengers.’

The word
murder
hovered uncomfortably in the air, dissipated only by the front doorbell ringing.

‘Oh, God – they’ve come back,’ Angie shuddered. ‘Save me!’

But the people at the door were not outraged parents, but traumatised wedding guests. At least, Eleanor and George Baxter should have been traumatised, but both looked disconcertingly normal. Simmy recognised him from pictures in the local paper and had to straighten her thoughts before she remembered that these two people were no longer a couple. They had been divorced at least eight years ago, when Bridget was ten, and George had
remarried before Lucy was born. And yet there was plainly an amicable connection between them. If not, George should not have been there at all. Where was his current wife? And, more urgently, where was Markie’s mother?

‘Lucy!’ she called, wondering where the child had wandered off to. ‘Your mother’s here.’

‘Has she been all right?’ asked Eleanor, without visible concern.

‘Fine. She’s good company.’

‘She is, isn’t she? We’re not sure quite how it happened, but she seems to be turning out rather well. Bridget was monstrous by comparison.’

‘Come in. I’ll go and find her.’

Angie was in the back room with Lucy, the discarded bridesmaid’s dress in her hands. ‘I suppose you’ll have to change back into this,’ she said dubiously.

‘You don’t need what she’s wearing, surely?’ Simmy objected. ‘They’ll give it back in a day or two.’

‘How do you know?’

It was a good question. There could be no guarantee that Eleanor would follow any of the known rules about such things. Lucy saw her doubt. ‘Yes, we will,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to wear
that
again.’ She eyed the pink-peach satin with disgust.

‘It is horrible, isn’t it,’ said Simmy reflectively. ‘Amazingly nasty.’

‘A kindred spirit,’ came Eleanor’s voice from the doorway. ‘Don’t you think there’s a sort of wicked conspiracy that prevents us from saying how vile the whole wedding business is? I never realised quite how awful they are until now.’

‘Well …’ Simmy ventured, thinking today’s wedding had hardly been representative.

‘Oh, I know what you’re going to say. They’ve cancelled the whole evening business. Sent everybody away. Bridget and Peter are up in their suite, with Glenn and the others. I think they’re playing cards. George is all in pieces, of course, so I said he could come with me. He likes Lucy.’

‘I thought Markie might come for me,’ said Lucy, her voice ringing clear in the room. She looked hard at her mother, with a challenge to disclose the truth.

Eleanor scooped the child to her, in a rush of protective emotion that struck Simmy as oddly unpractised. Lucy accepted the demonstration with equanimity, but did not hug or cling. ‘Oh, baby,’ moaned the mother, ‘you’ll have to understand that Markie’s gone. We won’t see him any more.’

It had been a long day. Nerves were strained by the awareness of a lurking malice and suspicion, and the uncertainty of what might happen next. George Baxter hovered behind the women, in his fabulously expensive suit and glowing silk tie, his face blotched with red patches. Of everyone in the room, his loss was by far the deepest, and the awareness of this gave him an aura that went beyond the charisma he was said to display as a matter of course. Simmy recalled that Markie had seemed to be apprehensive about his arrival at the wedding.