The Windermere Witness (7 page)

Murkily, she wondered what the last words between father and son might have been. Had they been exactly the sort of thing you would never forgive yourself for? From what she had seen of Baxter, that felt all too likely. He would be haunted by them for the rest of his life, blocked by the impossibility of putting it right. She made a brief resolution never to say anything to anybody that would linger poisonously if that person died unexpectedly.

The man had his back to her, the shoulders sagging in the expensive wedding suit. He was pathetic and she was tempted to go to him and let him sob on her breast, if that was what he needed. She glimpsed the dissolution of a whole castle of plans and assumptions, projected far into the future.

And then a new thought hit her, bringing with it amazement that it had not occurred before. ‘His mother?’ she asked. ‘Where’s Markie’s mother?’ Shouldn’t George be huddled together with the one other person in the world with equal reason to be in emotional meltdown?

‘What?’ His voice was thick. ‘What did you say?’

She knew he had heard the first time, so did not repeat the question. It was not her business. If he wanted to ignore it, that was his right. She was occupied in trying to recall what Melanie had said about Markie’s parentage. Another woman, another household, running parallel to that containing Eleanor and Bridget, in the very house where Simmy now lived. So what had happened? Where was that other woman now?

He turned towards her, his face grey. ‘She married a man with a bigger yacht than mine.’ It was plainly an old joke, habitually told in bluff male company, with the
rueful laugh that would go with the acceptance of female gold-digging as a fact of life. ‘But it didn’t last. She’s in very reduced circumstances these days, working in a public school somewhere down south. Positioning herself to snap up one of the well-heeled dads, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Simmy nodded wordlessly, redrawing her image of a quiet little woman settled in a remote Lakeland cottage with her little boy, like something out of
The Forsyte Saga
. Instead it morphed into a mixture of James Bond and Evelyn Waugh. A jet-set couple, carelessly creating a child between other relationships, the mother virtually forgetting about him, or so the implication appeared to be.

Her sherry long since finished, she began to think about going home. Eleanor had blithely undertaken to drive her back, but that now felt like an unreliable promise. Baxter would have to babysit, and he might not be regarded as fit for that task. Neither was he likely to act as chauffeur in his current condition. Old associations of being stranded at children’s parties when her mother forgot to collect her at the appointed hour came back to her, along with a wholly irrational resentment. If it came to the crunch, she could probably walk home. Troutbeck was surely less than four miles from Eleanor’s house, even going back the way they had come. It would be shorter if there was a more direct route, but that was unlikely to be a proper road. And she did require an actual road; attempting a steep muddy footpath in the dark was not enticing, especially as she was still hazy about the precise geography.

Eleanor swept back into the room like a force of nature.
‘God, I’m sorry,’ she cried, as if late for a royal command. ‘I had to read
five pages
to her before she’d let me go. I’m too old for this game, let’s face it.’ She threw a smile at Simmy. ‘I was forty-five when I had her, you know. It seemed rather clever at the time, but don’t let anybody ever tell you it’s a good idea.’

Simmy endured the familiar stab with habitual stoicism. On average, somebody said something of this sort once a day. Today, though, was turning out to be unusually painful.

‘Here are the clothes your mother wants back,’ she remembered, proffering a plastic supermarket bag.

Simmy took it just as Eleanor belatedly noticed Baxter’s disintegration. ‘George? Are you all right?’

‘I think it finally hit him,’ Simmy explained awkwardly.

‘So it would seem. Well, old man, it had to happen sooner or later. You can’t avoid it for ever.’ The brisk tone had no discernible effect on him. He leant his brow on the windowpane, half hidden behind the long curtain. Less of an old man than an anguished little boy, desperate in his lonely suffering.

‘I should go home,’ said Simmy.

‘Right. Well … Um …’

‘I suppose I could phone for a taxi.’

‘No, no. Don’t be silly. I’ll take you. Where did you say you lived?’

‘Troutbeck. It’s not very far.’

‘Pity it’s dark – you could have gone on foot along Nanny Lane and been there in forty minutes. We’ll have to go back the way we came, as it is.’

Simmy refrained from reminding the woman that this
entire exercise had been at her insistence. ‘Nanny Lane?’ she repeated.

‘Right. It’s a footpath, the other side of Wansfell. Impossible at night, obviously. We’d never see you again.’ She laughed. ‘Curses – another boy has fallen into the abyss.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Oh, sorry. It’s a family thing. We had an old phrasebook – German, I think. That was one of the phrases. My sister and I say it to each other rather a lot, even now. It’s surprising how often it seems to crop up.’

The joke was in alarmingly bad taste, given the events of the day, and Simmy forced the tightest of smiles.

‘George,’ said Eleanor in the loud clear tones of a nurse addressing a distracted elderly patient. ‘I’m taking Persimmon home now. You’re in charge of Lucy. I’ll be half an hour. All right?’

‘Persimmon?’ He stared at them. ‘Is that what you said?’

‘Come on, George. It’s her
name
. Get a grip of yourself. I want you to stay here and listen out for Lucy. She’s very tired, so you shouldn’t have any trouble. But stay in the house, all right?’

‘Persimmon,’ he repeated. ‘Lovely orange things. Make your mouth dry, though. There was a tree in that garden – remember? In France, where we stayed that summer. Goudargues.’ He sighed. ‘You were a bitch because I was pining for Pasquale.’

‘You make it sound like a thousand years ago.’

‘It was.’

‘Bridget was eight. Ten years, that’s all.’

Simmy listened reluctantly to this piece of intimacy. She
could detect no bitterness or animosity in either of them, and could not prevent herself from making a comparison with her own abiding rage against Tony. These two seemed relaxed to the point of nonchalance about past betrayals. They had both moved on to other people, with little discernible harm done. Would they be equally nonchalant about the disappearance of these partners in a few years’ time? Was it routinely expected that no relationships endured for long in the circles they inhabited?

It was an alien mindset that she found confusing and irritating. Other people’s morality was often disturbing, of course. They committed acts that you’d been taught to regard as entirely wrong, and received no retribution for it. Except that in this instance, retribution had fallen catastrophically onto the Baxter man, and if Simmy was not mistaken, there was a large dose of guilt mixed in with his grief and anger.

In the car it turned out that Eleanor was less carefree than she might have seemed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she repeated, driving too fast down the winding lane. ‘We were going to have a proper talk with you about this morning, weren’t we? I should have realised it would be too much for George. He’s never had anything like this happen before.’

‘No,’ said Simmy. ‘Not many people have.’

‘Of course not. Listen to me! What a stupid thing to say. I meant, hardly anything has ever gone wrong for him. Money just sticks to him, women chase after him, he’s never been ill.’

‘He thinks Peter’s friend, Pablo, killed Mark. Something to do with insurance.’

Eleanor gave a little cry, half horrified laugh, half protest. ‘No! Does he? Oh dear.’

‘He told the inspector, apparently.’

‘Poor Pablo. Peter’s very fond of him. They’ve known each other for ever. They were at Repton together.’

Simmy guessed this must be a school, but had never heard of it. ‘He was outside with Markie and Peter and that best man chap. They were waiting for Mr Baxter.’

‘Right.’

‘I thought that was what you wanted to talk to me about?’ She felt some faint obligation to unburden herself, as if that might be a way to shake free of these people. In those final minutes in the house, she had understood that she had no wish to involve herself with them any further.

‘Yes, it was. Sort of. I hoped you might be able to reassure George somehow. Tell him that Markie was in good spirits, looking forward to seeing him again, happy about the wedding. They parted under a cloud you see, last time they met.’

‘Oh. How long ago was that?’

‘A month or so. Markie and Bridget had been reminiscing about their childhood, and laughing about the freedom they’d had, and George heard it as critical of him, for some reason. They were pure
Swallows and Amazons
, for years, growing up here.’

‘So I gather. You were rather famous in the area, apparently. My assistant has told me about it. You sounded like a cross between the Bloomsbury Group and
Dynasty
. All that money!’

‘Never as much as people think, of course. But we were peculiar for the times, I admit. There’s nowhere as good as
the Lakes for being peculiar. It’s easy to transport yourself back to the thirties, or even further. William Morris, Ruskin, that Bolton man at Storrs, all leaving their traces behind. You can just
feel
their ghosts, especially at this time of year. Another month, and it’ll be day-long mists, with everything dripping wet, and sheep looming at you without warning. I can’t tell you how much I love it,’ she finished with a contented sigh. ‘And now there’s Lucy to start it all over again. I have to say I’m amazingly lucky. I know I am.’

It was a very odd speech for the member of a family violently bereaved that very day.

‘But—’ Simmy started, wanting to suggest that if Markie could be murdered, then was there not cause for concern about Lucy, or Bridget?

‘You’ll have to navigate me from here,’ Eleanor interrupted. ‘Which end of Troutbeck are you?’

The potential awkwardness in the fact that she was now inhabiting the house in which Baxter’s other woman and child once lived made her deliberately vague. ‘The other end. Between the hotel and the pub. You can drop me outside the hotel, if you like.’

‘Right. Sorry, again. We must seem outrageous to you, dumping Lucy on you, and then spiriting you away for no good reason. I don’t expect we’ve been very rational, at least in the eyes of a normal person.’

‘No problem,’ Simmy assured her, heartily. Did anybody relish being called ‘normal’, she wondered. The word came packed with patronage and a disingenuous hint that the speaker really quite valued being abnormal herself. ‘Thank you for the lift.’

Eleanor gave a brief chirp of farewell, and turned the car
around with a flourish. Simmy walked the few yards to her little house, and let herself in. Her car, she remembered with a jolt, was still down in Windermere, three miles away. Why hadn’t she asked Eleanor to take her there, instead? She’d have to walk down in the morning, and it was sure to be raining.

It was still not quite eight o’clock, but it felt a lot later. The chilly little house held no welcoming cat or dog; no flicker of life at all. She was used to it by this time; all the fears of intruders or evil spirits long since despatched by routine and custom. Although the past week had seen no fewer than four large spiders invading her home, as they detected the onset of winter and sought out a cosy spot for hibernation, and these she did fear. Hypersensitive to them, Simmy saw them the moment they ventured into the open, crossing the floor with a terrifying purpose. Her irrational self beat them to death, even as she felt guilty at doing so. Spiders didn’t hurt you – she knew that. But there was no way she could sleep, once she had seen one in the house with her. One day, she promised herself, she would grow out of it, and be a properly sensible person.

In Worcester, she and Tony had lived in a flat, with other people both above and below, and on one side too. It had been like a hive, the cells nestled neatly together, and everyone in their own allotted space. Shops, pubs, cinema had all been within an easy walk. She had never consciously assessed the relative merits of town and country, adapting readily to each in turn. The market garden job she had mentioned to DI Moxon had turned up by accident, never intended to be permanent. It had been a speculative venture on the part of a friend of Tony’s – ten acres of ordinary
field transformed within weeks to a riot of soft fruit and vegetables, which had to be tended, picked, packed and transported. It had suited her almost miraculously, for reasons she still had not troubled to analyse. From there to establishing her own floristry business had seemed a small step. Everybody liked flowers, after all. To be the source of fragrance and beauty and a symbolism redolent of love and attention seemed to her the best of all possible jobs.

The house opposite was the holiday home of a London couple. They made the long drive perhaps eight times a year, bringing huge quantities of possessions, which they unloaded noisily right outside Simmy’s front gate on arrival and reloaded again on departure. However hard she tried, she could not avoid disliking them. They could see into her front rooms, through windows she seldom bothered to cover with curtains. They made comments on her garden and treated her like a close friend. They had not been since late August and she was sure they would be back again at any moment.

She went to bed early, weary from the long day, which had begun at six-thirty that morning. The news of Mark Baxter’s death would be everywhere by this time, the story highly likely to make national headlines, with its high-society background and the compelling mix of romance and murder. It was a classic, a
Lorna Doone
or
Wuthering Heights
, forcing violent horror onto the peachy-pink happiness of a wedding.

She thought about Bridget and what the girl might be feeling, on this wedding night. Julie the hairdresser had insisted that it was a love match, with nothing beneath the surface to spoil the joy. Obviously, Julie had been wrong.