by Rebecca Tope
It was terrible that Kit was dead. This realisation hit her without warning. Not just dead, but murdered, only two or three weeks after his wife had died. Perhaps the tragedy of Frances’s dying had partly obliterated the horror of her husband’s. Perhaps two premature deaths were too many to process properly. By current standards, sixty and seventy were both too young to die.
‘Poor old Kit,’ she sighed.
‘Yeah,’ Bonnie agreed, though with less than total conviction. ‘Yeah,’ she said again, more firmly. ‘Nobody should be murdered. That’s a definite.’
The evening engagement with Christopher and Lynn absorbed all Simmy’s attention from five o’clock onwards. She went home and changed, finding it strange not to be preparing a meal for herself. Even stranger to be driving down to Bowness again barely an hour later. The Belsfield was the biggest hotel in town, facing the lake on a rising slope, solid and old-fashioned. Nobody could accuse it of being ‘boutique’ or ‘niche’. It was where the better-heeled stayed, enjoying the large rooms and handsome gardens. But it was not unduly expensive, and despite Russell Straw’s prejudices, it offered a perfectly good menu.
It also provided a big car park at the rear. As Simmy found a place under a tree, she saw Christopher and Lynn standing beside the entrance, evidently waiting for her. They appeared to be arguing, Lynn making jerky motions with one arm as if chopping hunks off a loaf of bread with the side of her hand.
Getting closer, Simmy could see clear signs of weeping. Lynn’s eyes were red and sunken, her cheeks rough under the yellow overhead light. ‘I am so sorry about Kit,’ Simmy offered. ‘It was such a dreadful shock.’
The young woman merely sniffed and nodded.
‘Come on, then,’ said Christopher. ‘I’ve booked the table. We’ve got time for a gin or something first.’
Simmy calculated the chances of a gin, plus a glass of wine, being enough to activate a breathalyser if she was stopped on the way home. The season of Christmas staff dinners had not yet started, which meant the police were unlikely to be unduly zealous for another few weeks. ‘Gin sounds just the thing,’ she said. Then she asked Lynn, ‘Have you driven here on your own?’
‘No. Christopher brought me. I’m staying at his place tonight. Barry can take a day off tomorrow and see to the kids.’
Simmy had to think hard before she recalled that Lynn had two small girls, the same as Eddie had. They had been the only children at Fran’s funeral, kept close by a man Simmy assumed to be their father, while Lynn did her duty in the kitchen. She had heard mutterings about the unsuitability of taking children to such an event.
Suddenly it struck her as odd that Lynn should impose herself on this dinner, to the extent of altering the venue to a much more upmarket occasion. Christopher’s explanation looked thinner on closer inspection. There was a subtext pushing itself forward – the abandonment of Barry and the children, the obvious argument that had been aborted abruptly when Simmy arrived – it felt potentially awkward, and even perhaps antagonistic.
Christopher was ushering them through to the bar, a hand on each woman’s back. He and Simmy were both tall, while Lynn was a mere five foot two. It made for a lopsided threesome. None of them spoke until they were settled at a low table with their drinks. Then Christopher raised his glass with a grimace and said, ‘To Dad, poor old chap.’
Neither Simmy nor Lynn responded. There was something almost crassly inadequate in the gesture. But he meant well, presumably. Then Simmy remembered that Ben Harkness had been summoned to a police interview, and Eddie Henderson could have had sinister reasons for suggesting Kit be visited, and nothing was as it seemed. Or might not be.
‘Chris said you were going to the Chinese, but I preferred to come here. I’ve been here before once or twice. It’s really good food.’
‘I’ve never eaten here,’ said Simmy. In fact, the last time she had been inside the hotel had been nearly a year ago, in circumstances of considerable danger and difficulty. Looking around now, she recognised details – carpet, curtains and big picture windows all came into focus at once. ‘But I have been in that room over there.’ She pointed.
‘I come here quite a lot,’ said Christopher. ‘They do antique fairs now and then.’
Lynn was looking from face to face with an intensity that Simmy found irritating. Finally, she met the look square on, and held the other woman’s gaze long enough to alter the tone of the conversation. ‘You haven’t changed at all since you were about ten,’ she said. ‘I would still have recognised you.’ It was true – the frizzy light-brown hair and the deep-set eyes were just as they’d always been. ‘I remember you were always up to mischief.’
‘Was I? What sort of mischief?’
‘Oh – teasing the boys. Telling tales to Frances. Making a lot of fuss about every little thing.’
‘That wasn’t mischief,’ said Christopher. ‘That was bloody-mindedness. She was a horrible little beast. So was Hannah, of course, only more so.’
It occurred to Simmy for the first time that the family patterns of the Hendersons and the Harknesses were almost identical. Older boys, followed by little sisters, five children in each case. It made her wonder if that had provided a point of contact between Kit and Helen Harkness. Had they discussed the trials and pleasures of a large family? Surely they must have done. You couldn’t talk about carpets without referring to the rigours they would endure at the hands and feet of several children.
A waiter came to tell them their table was ready and they spent a few minutes ordering food and drink. There was a briskness to it that suggested the purpose of the evening was considerably more serious than simply eating a good meal. They were close to a window, looking out on to the dark waters of Windermere below them, bordered only patchily by lights.
‘So,’ began Lynn portentously. ‘Are we going to talk about who killed our father?’
Chapter Eleven
Only then did Simmy grasp that she was the interloper, and not Lynn at all. Christopher must have insisted that he could not break his engagement with her, and that if Lynn wanted to spend the evening with him, she’d have to agree to Simmy being there as well. They had an obvious need to talk about their father’s death; a need which was liable to be frustrated by the presence of a somewhat distant friend. Simmy could have nothing to contribute. She almost stood up there and then and made her excuses.
But Christopher seemed to feel differently. ‘Good question,’ he told his sister. ‘And something I’m sure Simmy can help us with.’
‘Me?’ She blinked at him.
‘An objective eye. With some experience of criminal behaviour, I gather.’
She flushed. ‘That sounds bad. But yes, I have got unpleasantly close to some nasty people.’
‘And so has your young friend Ben. Isn’t that right?’
She looked into his brown eyes, trying to understand the purpose of his questions. The eyes were disturbingly familiar, taking her back twenty years and more, to when she and he had been soulmates, on that final family holiday. She had loved him then, and wanted to spend every moment with him. They had mutated almost overnight from friends to lovers. Or rather, not quite lovers in the usual sense. They had not had sex or even kissed. But they had lain on the sandy beach, gazing into each other’s eyes and talking sporadically. Her body had throbbed with a frightening will of its own that lay entirely outside her control.
And then they had gone separate ways, with exams and jobs and grown-up lives, and she had actually forgotten how intense it had been, until now.
‘Um,’ she said. ‘Sorry. What are you asking me?’
‘Ignore him,’ said Lynn, with a little laugh. ‘He didn’t mean to sound so accusing. He’s been the same with all of us – trying to make us confess.’
‘That’s rubbish, and you know it,’ Christopher shot back at her. ‘I know it wasn’t Simmy.’
‘And it wasn’t me or Hannah or Eddie or George, either. It’s just as likely to have been you as any of us.
We all resented him in our various ways.’
‘Did you?’ said Simmy in bewilderment. ‘Why?’
‘Have you got all night?’ Lynn flashed back. ‘Because that’s what it would take to tell you.’
‘Come on,’ begged Christopher. ‘That’s going much too far.’
‘It’s not, though, is it? You can say what you like, the truth is going to come out now he’s dead. It always does. All those horrible secrets he kept the lid on – they’ll be common knowledge in no time flat.’
Her brother gulped, and cast an alarmed look around the huge dining room. Nobody was close enough to be listening, for which he looked very relieved. ‘I don’t know any horrible secrets,’ he hissed. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He looked at Simmy. ‘Do you?’
‘No idea,’ she said, with perfect honesty. ‘But I can’t believe there’s anything bad enough to kill him for. Although, as I said, I barely knew him. I don’t think I should even be here.’ Again, she was inclined to simply get up and leave. But the waiter was bringing their starters, and had opened a bottle of expensive red wine, and it would be an act of considerable courage to interrupt the proceedings at that point. Courage or aggression? Disapproval, or plain cowardice? The motives were opaque, and therefore wide open to interpretation. Besides, she was enjoying the proximity of her one-time beloved. Again, she looked into his eyes, trying to read the extent of his own recollections, as well as understanding what it was he wanted of her now.
‘Isn’t it strange,’ he said softly. ‘Here we are, almost forty, and it feels as if we were sixteen again.’
‘Oh – you two!’ Lynn burst out. ‘Haven’t you grown out of all that long since? No wonder you never noticed what my father was up to, Simmy. You only had eyes for Chris, and here you go again.’
‘Do you all call him “Chris” now?’ Simmy asked, choosing obtuseness as the least difficult response. She could simply ignore the implications of what Lynn had said, or so she hoped. ‘Nobody ever did when we were young.’
‘I don’t know.’ Lynn frowned. ‘It might just be me.’
‘Never mind that,’ said Christopher, with a sympathetic glance at Simmy. ‘You’ve got to stop making these vague slurs on Dad’s character. I know he had a few girlfriends, over the years, and that was hard on Mum – but it was never anything serious. No more than most men get up to, I’m sorry to say.’
‘Not my dad,’ said Simmy, with some force. The idea of universal male misbehaviour was one she had never accepted as true. It might have been common in a bygone generation, when men felt they could get away with it because their wives were hopelessly dependent on them financially, but since then they’d learnt that the risks associated with adultery were seldom worth the effort. A scorned wife was not just furious these days, but capable of very painful revenge. ‘He’s got more sense.’
‘Your mum would probably castrate him,’ smiled Christopher. ‘Mine wasn’t half so ferocious. And she didn’t really care that much what he did, as far as I could tell.’
‘She told me she wished he would just go off with some floozy and leave her in peace,’ said Lynn. ‘But she could never get up the nerve to throw him out.’
‘He wouldn’t have gone. He liked the bungalow too much.’
‘She could have gone herself, of course. That never seemed to cross her mind.’
Again, Simmy felt uncomfortably intrusive. She ate her mackerel pâté and said nothing. The others were getting into deeper waters, reminiscing about their parents and correcting each other’s assumptions. It was all part of grieving, Simmy supposed. A compulsion to talk through what had happened and what had been lost. It was also increasingly apparent that Christopher and Lynn, the eldest and youngest of the family, knew each other less well than Simmy had expected. Their memories did not match, as they began to recount events from the past. Lynn’s vague accusations against her father were overlaid by softer stories of his amusing ways. ‘He would always stop and talk to dogs in the street, but never let us have one of our own. Said he couldn’t stand the smell of them indoors.’
Christopher raised his eyebrows. ‘I never heard him say that.’
‘Well, he did. It was all to do with the smelly carpets he had to deal with in people’s houses.’
The main course was almost finished, with Simmy ahead by a wide margin, due to her near silence. She had drunk more than a glass of wine, as well, with Christopher topping her up two or three times. The drive home would be semi-automatic, the car almost knowing the way by itself – but the twists and turns in the narrow lanes could be treacherous on a winter’s night, and she resisted the urge to take another mouthful.
‘We can’t possibly work out who might have killed him, all the same,’ said Christopher flatly. ‘We could go through every detail of his life and find a hundred people he’d annoyed, and get nowhere. Everybody makes enemies, after all. It’s human nature.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Lynn, which was exactly what Simmy was thinking. ‘I never made an enemy – did you?’ Lynn asked Simmy.
‘Not that I can think of. Even Tony isn’t my enemy.’ She sighed. Her ex-husband was becoming a remote and slightly embarrassing figure from her past; a failure in so many ways. She never heard from him, and was not even sure where he was living.
‘I thought George was your enemy,’ said Christopher to his sister.
‘No, you didn’t. That’s Hannah, not me. He never bothered much with me. It was those two who fought all the time.’
And they were off again on their anecdotes and disagreements as to just what happened when Lynn was a mulish teenager and her brothers were taking off on their various careers. Simmy listened, aware that Ben Harkness was going to want a detailed report of all that was said, as soon as he could get to her. ‘What do they all want?’ he would ask. And ‘Who had the most to gain from the old man’s death?’
Answers were impossible to glean from the conversation between the siblings. She tried to catch Christopher’s eye again, almost unconsciously. The realisation that there was still some connecting thread between them was bubbling somewhere inside her, warm and auspicious. She was content to sit there across the table from him, recapturing the past, which had seldom been sunny, but had definitely been enjoyable. He looked at her every few seconds, making an obvious effort to include her, and draw her out of her silence. He made apologetic faces, smiling and widening his eyes. He interrupted his sister to say, ‘Simmy – are you having a pudding? What about coffee?’
The meal was nearly done. It was nine o’clock. ‘Coffee, yes,’ she said. ‘I should be going soon.’
‘Good God, look at the time!’ shrilled Lynn, having glanced at her watch. ‘I said I’d phone to see if the girls went to bed properly.’
‘Properly?’ Christopher echoed.
Lynn flapped a tipsy hand at him. ‘You haven’t got kids – you don’t understand about the rituals. Barry’s pretty good, but he sometimes forgets something. Christa isn’t talking yet – she’s really behind, actually. She just squawls if one of her toys isn’t right. And Ginnie won’t always explain, if she’s in a bolshy mood.’
The world of motherhood and bedtimes and favourite toys was as alien to Simmy as it evidently was to Christopher. ‘Sounds like a nightmare,’ he said. ‘When I was in the Pacific, people just let their kids fall asleep when they were tired, with none of all that routine baloney.’
‘And I know an American woman who records every single second of her child’s day – sleep, food, nappies – the whole thing documented on an app.’
‘She’s mad,’ said Christopher shortly. ‘They should have the kid adopted by normal people.’
‘Like Mum and Dad did with me and Hannah? Right,’ said Lynn, with an expression close to pain.
‘Yes, actually. Do you doubt it?’
‘I certainly don’t subscribe to the idea that we should feel everlasting gratitude, or loyalty. They did it because they wanted to. They wanted two girls, and that
’s what they got. They were perfectly ordinary parents, nothing special. You boys weren’t done any favours by it, and we were never totally integrated with you. Maybe natural-born girls wouldn’t have been, either. I’m not saying it was a disaster, but I’m not starry-eyed about it. I just get sick of all the mushy stuff about the whole business.’
Well, thought Simmy. That’s telling it how it is, sure enough.
‘Does Hannah feel like that, as well?’ Christopher asked.
‘Probably. We don’t discuss it. Once we’d agreed there’s no point in trying to track down our original parents, there wasn’t much more to be said. She had the worst of it, of course.’
Before they could get back to how George had persecuted his new sister from the outset, Simmy raised a hand. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I think I should go. Won’t you let me pay at least something towards the meal?’
Christopher shook his head. ‘Definitely not. Look – why don’t you come to the auction on Saturday? It goes on all day – come for the afternoon, at least. It’s quieter then, and easier to park.’
‘No, I can’t. I said I’d go and see my parents. Another time, okay?’ Again their eyes met, and she found herself in a panic at the thought of not seeing him again.
‘The next one’s not for three weeks.’ She thought she could detect a matching panic in his voice. ‘They’re always on a Saturday in Keswick. You’d be hooked in no time,’ he promised her. ‘We always have plenty of quality china – vases for your shop. Mostly they go very cheap.’
‘I’ll definitely come along one day. It sounds great.’
‘Load of old junk,’ said Lynn sourly. ‘You would not believe the rubbish people put in for sale.’
‘And somebody always buys it,’ Christopher flashed back. ‘Every item has somebody looking for it. My job is to bring them together.’