The Grasmere Grudge

by Rebecca Tope

  Then everything got going again, and they were on Lot Number 260. That was about a third of the total, by the numbers, which suggested that the sale would be over around five, as predicted. Simmy found herself calculating times and logistics, and whether she could sustain an entire afternoon in the saleroom. Then her mobile began to jingle in her bag. Nervously, she looked round. Chris was taking bids, everyone focused on him. But there were also muted conversations going on around the room. Total silence was not demanded. She fished out the phone and answered softly, having seen the caller identified as Bonnie Lawson.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Simmy! Thank goodness you answered. Listen – can you come back? We’ve got trouble here.’

  ‘What trouble? It’ll take me an hour. It’s nearly time to close up, anyway. What’s the matter?’ Her voice had risen, and people were staring at her disapprovingly. Ben was looking at her in alarm.

  ‘Tanya cut herself. There’s blood everywhere. It’s clogged up the computer keyboard, so it doesn’t work.’

  ‘Good God, Bonnie! Is she all right?’

  ‘We used the first-aid kit. But there was a man here and he called 999, which was pretty stupid. I’d already phoned Helen and she came right away. So, we didn’t need an ambulance. Helen’s taken her to the new urgent treatment place in Kendal – they can do stitching.’

  ‘How long ago was this?’ The dark looks had become impossible to ignore, so she got up and went out to the reception area as she listened to Bonnie’s garbled story.

  ‘An hour, I suppose. I don’t know exactly. But I can’t close the computer down. And it needs mopping – the floor, I mean. And the table.’

  ‘What on earth was she doing?’

  ‘Cutting some ribbon with a knife. It slipped somehow. I didn’t see. But it sliced along her wrist, and it poured with blood.’ The young voice was shaky and getting worse. ‘I can’t really cope with blood, actually,’ she said faintly. ‘I had to force myself.’

  ‘Well done,’ said Simmy with an effort. ‘Poor Tanya.’

  ‘She was very brave. The man who called the ambulance was such an idiot, though. He made it all worse, talking about arteries and tourniquets. He came in about two minutes after it happened, while I was phoning Helen, and making Tanya press a clean pad on the place. That’s what you have to do, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simmy, who had been on a one-day first-aid course herself. The kit in the shop contained two big sterile pads for the very purpose. ‘That’s right.’ She remembered, belatedly, how Bonnie had difficulty with anything that could be described as dirty. Blood came under that heading. It all went back to damaging childhood experiences that had made the girl’s early teens severely dysfunctional. ‘Don’t worry, love. Just lock the shop and I’ll see to everything. You’ve been a hero, by the sound of it.’

  Ben had followed her out and was flapping and hopping in front of her, trying to get included in the conversation. ‘Ben’s here,’ said Simmy. ‘I think he wants to talk to you.’

  ‘In a minute. Are you saying I can go home and just leave everything? I’m not sure I should.’ She moaned. ‘It’s such an awful mess.’

  ‘Yes. It’s fine. It’s my fault for leaving you. Here – talk to Ben before he explodes.’

  The boy snatched the phone, bending over it as if protecting his beloved from further distress. ‘Hey, Bon. What happened? … Okay. That’s okay. I’m not hassling you … No, it’s fine … we’ll come back now. Go back to Helm Road, and we’ll find you when we get back. Shit, kid – you scared me.’ He forced a laugh. ‘From what Simmy was saying this end, I couldn’t even guess what had happened … yes, that’s fine. Just …’ His voice seemed to die away, consumed by emotion. ‘Bye, then,’ he choked. Then he looked at Simmy. ‘She says you’ll have to tell me. She doesn’t want to say it all again. Did something happen to Tanya?’

  ‘She cut herself. Your mother came and took her to be stitched. Bonnie can’t face all the blood in the shop. It’s all over the computer, apparently.’

  Ben pulled a face. ‘That won’t be easy to fix. The keys’ll be all clogged up.’

  ‘I know. I’ll have to borrow yours.’ She was teasing, knowing he would never let her use his precious Mac. ‘I won’t know who’s ordered flowers otherwise.’

  ‘Hasn’t your mother got one you can use? Or Christopher?’

  Christopher! There he was, still ploughing through three or four hundred lots of antiques, with no idea of what was going on. So near and yet so far. She thought quickly. ‘I’ll leave him a message with Josephine,’ she said. Then she took a deep breath. ‘Actually, there’s not such a great hurry, is there? Nobody needs me right away. I can clean the shop tomorrow. It’s probably nothing like as bad as Bonnie thinks. I don’t know why she was so anxious for me to go back, really.’

  Ben gave her an impatient look. ‘She wants me,’ he said. ‘And you’re my only way of getting there quickly.’

  ‘That’s not what she said. She never mentioned you.’ The idea of her role being nothing more than a chauffeur was annoying.

  ‘Well I want to be there, and she knows that. Same difference.’

  ‘Are you two all right?’ came a voice from behind the reception counter. They turned to see the stout woman identified as Josephine leaning towards them. There was nobody waiting for attention – the whole area was deserted.

  ‘Oh! Yes, thanks. That is, we’ve got to leave early. I can’t interrupt Christopher, obviously, so perhaps you could tell him there’s a bit of a crisis in Windermere, so I’ve gone to see to it. I’ll phone him at five, okay?’

  ‘He might not be finished by five.’

  ‘Well, in that case he won’t answer his phone, will he?’ It was all starting to feel like too much. Guilt at leaving two young girls in charge of the shop; irritation with Ben who saw her simply as his driver; a sense of having wasted the morning in something that had actually been slightly tedious; uncertainty as to when she would have a chance to get Christopher to herself; it all made for jangled nerves.

  ‘Pity we never saw Nick. I forgot about him. We didn’t try to spot him from that woman’s description.’

  ‘We got the important stuff, though,’ Ben said, sounding pleased. ‘About the tax, and all that.’

  ‘Did we?’ She tried to remember exactly what they’d been told.

  ‘I’m getting a few theories,’ he said. ‘Plenty to work with. Once I run it all past Bonnie, it’ll be even clearer in my mind.’

  ‘Bully for you,’ muttered Simmy, getting into the car.

  Chapter Sixteen

  As she’d suspected, the bloodstains in the shop were much less gruesome than Bonnie had implied. Even the computer was only moderately spattered. The letters in the middle of the keyboard were somewhat gluey – from F to K were the worst affected. Experimenting with a piece of wire, Simmy found she could get most of it out. When it was dryer, it would flake off fairly easily, she hoped. The floor was similarly splashed, with a larger pool beside the computer table. Why had the wretched girl been cutting ribbon there anyway? And why not with scissors?

  The next task was to phone Helen Harkness and ask after Tanya. It was now almost half past two, and there was every reason to assume the patient was back at home, nicely bandaged and mollified. She tried to think which knife the girl must have been using and remembered with a jolt that there had been a Stanley knife in a drawer below the computer. Its blade was razor sharp and pointed. Would she be in trouble for leaving something so dangerous where a girl so young could find it? And how deep was the cut in her arm? Were any vital nerves affected? The surge of worry came all the more powerfully for having been suppressed for the past hour. Tanya was a nice girl, bright and cheerful. She had a twin sister who had embraced teenage culture and social media with all the usual enthusiasm. But Tanya had seen a different way, inspired by her brother Ben. Encouraged by the history teacher at school, and with Bonnie’s unconventional example, she was increasingly ambitious. ‘Law,
’ said Bonnie. ‘She wants to do law.’

  She made the phone call, using Helen’s mobile number. The woman was cool and calm, but not exactly friendly. ‘She lost a lot of blood. Bonnie’s very upset about it.’

  Bonnie! Simmy understood that she was expected to be every bit as worried about the older girl as she was about Tanya. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It must have been awful for both of them.’

  ‘I had to drop everything and rush her to that new place in Kendal. Lucky I knew about it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simmy again. ‘But she’s all right now, is she?’

  ‘There’ll be a scar. She just missed an artery. It’s really not nearly as bad as we first thought, but poor Bonnie had a right old meltdown. It made it all seem more of a drama than it need have been.’

  ‘Oh God. I’m so sorry, Helen.’

  ‘Well, it couldn’t have been predicted, I suppose. She was trying to be helpful, making up a bouquet for a customer.’

  ‘Not the man who called the ambulance?’

  ‘No – I don’t think so. Didn’t he show up a few minutes later? Bonnie really took against him.’

  ‘So I gathered. Do we know who he is?’

  ‘Bonnie probably does. He must have given his name when he made the call.’

  Simmy looked round the shop and saw a half-finished bunch of flowers on the floor, under the table, splashed with dark-red blood. Roses, lilies, white daisies – where was the customer who had been trying to buy them, she wondered. Had he or she left the order, saying they’d be back when the bouquet was complete? That would be the usual practice. ‘Well, I’m terribly sorry. I’ll have to give her her pay sometime.’ I hope it won’t put her off coming again, she thought. Clearly, it was too soon to say anything of that sort. Helen was very likely to veto such a suggestion, the way she was feeling.

  ‘I expect he’ll be in touch, then,’ said Simmy. ‘I’ve got to go now.’

  She gathered up the laptop, checked that everything was turned off, the doors locked, the plants provided with water and then left the shop. She’d parked her car in the main street, trusting it would escape the attentions of officials for the ten minutes she intended to leave it. The only orthodox spaces were too far away, in small streets on the northern side of the town. She got in and then she just sat there, unsure of what to do next. Christopher would still be juggling bids, and she’d had enough of watching him do that. She wondered whether he had noticed her and Ben talking to the Pruitts, and if so, whether it bothered him.

  The prospect of another hour’s drive along the busy winding road on a Saturday afternoon made her feel weary. She reviewed her options and discovered that every one of them involved doing something for someone else. She could visit her parents and help with ironing or bedmaking. She could visit Tanya and see the damage for herself or call Bonnie and offer reassurance and congratulation on a crisis well handled. She could even drop in on Flo and her baby, on the reasonable chance that they had once more been abandoned by the neglectful Scott. All quite easy and more or less pleasant activities – but none of them what she, Simmy Brown, actually wanted to do.

  So, what did she want? Something lazy and relaxed, she decided. Something with no agendas or motives that had anything to do with murder enquiries. She had little enough time off from the shop, and what she did have should be spent in peaceful self-indulgence.

  But she didn’t want to go home, either. That would make too much of a statement. Hiding, escaping, sulking – various negative interpretations of that sort might well be drawn. She could almost hear Bonnie saying But why did you do that? Shutting yourself away when there’s so much going on.

  That was the trouble, of course. There was simply too much going on. There had been all week, and it made her breathless. She was going to get married, move house, try for a baby – all thrilling and positive. So why did she feel besieged by other people’s expectations? Even Christopher didn’t seem to understand the upheaval involved. He was taking it all much too lightly. And yet, she didn’t want to bring him down or make everything seem difficult. He wasn’t in his usual frame of mind, after the traumatic events of Monday. He hated being the object of police interest. He had to concentrate fiercely to do a good job as an auctioneer, with only a brief break in a seven-hour day. He had glanced at her now and then, but only as a potential bidder. Would he have worried at her sudden departure with Ben? Or did he quickly forget all about it? Had the whole exercise of going to Keswick been foolish, with disastrous consequences for Tanya and Helen being annoyed with her?

  She suddenly knew what she wanted to do. It was a summer weekend, the sunshine filtering pleasantly through the high cloud. Her favourite town at times like this was Ambleside. Calmer than Bowness, but more colourful and interesting than Windermere, it offered a good variety of attractions. The evening she’d spent there with Corinne had only enhanced its appeal. It was on the way to Keswick, after all. She could spend an hour strolling around with an ice cream, and then head off northwards to meet her fiancé and tell him what a brilliant auctioneer he was.

  It worked out much as planned. Meandering along the busy streets, she found somewhere to buy an ice cream not far from the statue where she’d met Corinne and leant against a stone wall to eat it, thinking about nothing. People smiled vaguely in her direction, and two separate dogs approached for a brief salutation, dragging their uncomplaining owners after them. Nobody seemed to be in a rush; the holiday mood dominated everything. When the last tip of the cone was finished, she looked around and noticed the CaniCare charity shop a little way down the street. A woman was coming out with a bulky carrier bag, so it was evidently open. Simmy drifted down for a look.

  The shop was much more densely stocked than any she’d seen before. It reminded her irresistibly of Christopher’s auction room. There were shelves on two sides, rows of clothes on hangers on a third, and the window itself was full of knick-knacks. Down the middle was a table holding boxes and trays of further small items. Plates, old postcards, numerous china ornaments, toys and a lot more that could only be termed ‘miscellanea’. The atmosphere was of an Aladdin’s cave, heightened by a faint smell of joss sticks and lower-than-usual lighting. Music was playing. Somebody here had a powerful imagination; Bonnie would approve heartily.

  Simmy fingered the contents of the first tray she came to. Costume jewellery, silk scarves and ties, old watches and lengths of ribbon were all jumbled together, as if just tipped out of the drawer of an old lady’s dressing table. Which it probably had been, she supposed. People donated their deceased relative’s house contents to charity, almost as often as they paid someone to clear it all away. They’d pick through it for the best things, and then turn their back on the rest. If a shop like this was willing to take it, then good luck to them.

  A man was standing behind the small counter, watching her and another woman who was scanning the shelves of books. Simmy met his eye. He was of middle height and middle age, with a bald patch surrounded by mid-brown hair. He wore spectacles with thin metal frames. ‘Wow!’ she said. ‘What a lot of stuff!’

  ‘Pile it high, sell it cheap,’ he said, without a smile. ‘That’s the motto here.’

  ‘I’m sure it works very well.’ She held up a brightly coloured scarf with a Tiffany design. ‘This is top quality – and you only want two pounds for it.’ That was another quirk she’d already noticed: the prices were all in round figures. Most charity shops inexplicably priced almost everything at a figure ending in nine.

  ‘The thrill of the chase,’ said the man, still not smiling. ‘And the back room’s full – literally full – of a great deal more. It comes in faster than we can process it, and the boss insists we never refuse a donation.’

  ‘You need to hire a hall one day a month and have a big rummage sale,’ she suggested.

  ‘Good idea,’ said the man with a sigh.

  She bought the scarf, and then found a long-sleeved shirt that was exactly what she had been looking for. The total came to fi
ve pounds, and she went away very contented.

  It was half past three, and she was forty minutes at most from Keswick. She could easily catch the closing lots of the sale and be there when Christopher stumbled exhaustedly off his podium. They would go to his flat, eat, drink, canoodle … a long day would have a perfect ending, with a good helping of luck. It could all go badly wrong, of course, but she clung to her optimistic scenario. They could make the most of the time together, whatever happened, refusing to be victims of circumstance, ignoring other people’s troubles at least for a few hours.

  The drive was impeded by tourist traffic, especially in the Grasmere area. Walkers and dogs ambled across the road in some places, and cars were parked where they shouldn’t be, making it difficult to squeeze past oncoming vehicles. There were also sheep liable to jump out without warning. But none of this bothered Simmy. She enjoyed the sense of having regressed a century or so, where traffic did not dominate every aspect of life and rules were there to be broken. The landscape on both sides of the road was high and rugged – the classic Lakeland scenery that was so beloved by the English. Its very timelessness was the main appeal, so that attempts to erect wind turbines or zipwire rides were rejected almost automatically. There were limits, everyone agreed, and if you didn’t preserve at least a few wild areas, what was the point of it all? Or so Simmy’s father would argue. Ben would point out that the zipwire, at least, came close to fruition. And quite a few of the lakes that everybody loved were in fact man-made reservoirs, supplying water to big cities further south. Nothing was quite as natural or simple as it seemed.

  The car park was barely half-full when she finally arrived at the saleroom. Two men were loading a large pile of objects into a blue van, and another was packing his purchases into a trailer behind his four-wheel drive. If she remembered correctly from her previous day at the sale, the rules permitted buyers to remove their acquisitions from one o’clock onwards. A small team of men and boys located the lots, checked they’d been paid for and assisted with loading them up, even while the auction was still going on. She and Ben had missed that part of the proceedings. Then she noticed, in her wing mirror, a large tin trunk being pushed into the van and realised she was looking at the mysterious Nick at last. He was tall and thin, wearing colourless clothes, sporting a week’s worth of stubble and looking exhausted. The man helping him was one of the saleroom staff – a wiry little chap in his sixties who restlessly roamed around looking for people needing assistance, pausing every minute or two to chat to people he clearly regarded as friends.