by Rebecca Tope
Even Russell Straw, down in Windermere, had shown less interest in his guests in recent months. He had once taken great interest in discovering just who it was sleeping under his roof for two or three nights. He had rejoiced in collecting all their occupations. Solicitors and schoolteachers, social workers and software designers all gave him a thrill. Others, who withheld the information with politely tight smiles, were evidently spies or drug dealers, bankers or estate agents. Unpopular roles that were best kept undisclosed.
But the game became tedious eventually, and now Russell simply served them their breakfast with bland remarks about the weather.
Perhaps it was just because it was November, Simmy thought, as she drove slowly out of Troutbeck. Endings, challenges, a frisson of fear at what the winter might bring. Combined with the deaths of Fran and Kit, the decline of her father, the slow business in the shop, it was all decidedly depressing. And Chris was hardly going to manage to relieve it all by himself. It would be unreasonable to expect him to.
Bonnie was waiting for her on the threshold of the shop. ‘Hey, I didn’t expect you today,’ said Simmy. ‘It’s Monday.’
‘Yeah, but I had Saturday off, didn’t I?’
‘And here you are standing out in the cold. I am a bit late.’ They had discussed giving her a key, but it had never actually happened. ‘I expect I’d lose it,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been any good with keys.’
‘We could tie it to your phone,’ joked Simmy. ‘That would be the safest place.’ The notion of losing a phone was clearly ludicrous.
‘Corinne dropped me off on her way to Barrow. She’s visiting someone in the hospital.’
‘Oh? In the morning? Is that allowed?’
Bonnie’s face contracted. ‘Actually, it’s her mum. She’s been there since Friday. They don’t think she’s going to make it this time.’
Simmy wasn’t sure what to say. Was the mother of a foster mother a significant figure, an honorary grandmother? Very likely so. ‘Have you been to see her?’
‘Yeah. On Saturday. It was lucky you closed the shop, as it turned out. It’s sort of sad, but she’s not in pain or anything.’
‘How old is she?’
‘Not sure. Eighty or something. Corinne’s fifty, and she was the youngest.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Yeah, well. It’s what happens, right? Doesn’t make sense to complain about it.’
‘We all do, though,’ said Simmy ruefully. ‘I suppose we all think it’s some sort of massive mistake, when it comes to our own personal family.’
Bonnie gave a little shake, as if to throw off this line of thought. ‘What about you? Have a good weekend?’
‘Eventful. Friday seems a long time ago.’ And she gave her young assistant an edited account of the past two days, including the fact that she had seen Ben. ‘He stayed for ages at my place. Moxon brought him.’
‘I know. He called me when he got home. I heard all about it.’
‘He thinks Moxon’s got a theory about the murder.’
‘Right. He told me that, as well.’
They were setting up the shop as they chatted, ready for the new week. Poinsettias had arrived, along with some mistletoe. A week closer to Christmas brought a heightened acknowledgement of the upcoming festivities. ‘How many shopping days is it now?’ wondered Simmy.
‘Still more than thirty, if you count weekends. I don’t think they say that so much now, do they? People do online shopping in the middle of the night, so it doesn’t make much sense.’
It made Simmy feel old. She felt a flash of empathy with really old people, who were seeing incessant change to aspects of their lives they had taken for granted for decades. Where would it all end, she wondered glumly.
Not a single customer had disturbed them by lunchtime, and only one order had come through on the computer. ‘Another one for Staveley,’ noted Simmy. ‘I quite like going there. I’ll do it this time tomorrow.’
There was a growing sense of being in limbo. On all sides there were issues waiting to be resolved. Even Bonnie’s foster-granny, or whatever she was, was apparently waiting to die, fading painlessly into oblivion. Simmy wondered whether she should encourage the girl to talk about it, or leave it out entirely, so as to provide a sanctuary from the whole business. Best to take her lead from Bonnie herself, she decided.
And all the time she was more than half expecting somebody to come bursting through the door with news, demands, appeals – something that would shift the inertia and lead to a dramatic conclusion. It could be Moxon, Christopher, Eddie, George, Ben – even Angie or Hannah were possibilities. But not one of them appeared.
Instead, she received a phone call.
It was Helen Harkness. ‘Two things,’ she began briskly. ‘First – Kit’s funeral. I suppose I’ll have to send the bloody man some flowers, if only because it was my son who found him. Can you put me in a pending tray or something? A spray of neutral colours, thirty quid or so?’
‘Neutral colours?’ It was the first time Simmy had heard the phrase in relation to flowers. She envisaged dried and dead blooms in sepia, beige and grey. ‘Like white?’
‘Whatever you think. Pale, anyway. As far as you can get from flamboyant and intrusive.’
‘All right.’ That made two orders in the imaginary pending tray. She wondered whether her software had a heading for such situations. Probably not, she decided, and wrote it down on a notepad with a pen.
‘And second,’ said Helen, relentlessly, ‘thanks for having Ben yesterday. He was gone much longer than I expected. I hope you had a good talk?’
‘Did he tell you any of it?’
‘You’re joking. He won’t even give me a clue or two to help me guess.’
‘Did he at least mention that we had George Henderson with us for a lot of the time?’
‘He did not. You mean one of Kit’s sons, do you?’
‘The third one, yes.’
‘What did he want? Where does he live?’
‘I’m not entirely sure what he wanted, other than to stop feeling left out. And he lives miles away, practically in Penrith.’
‘Is he married?’
‘There’s a girlfriend, called Leonora.’ Simmy waited in vain for a comment on the name, as would undoubtedly have come from her mother. The fact that it didn’t come brought a very slight sense of relief.
‘Oh, well,’ said Helen, sounding as if she wanted no more information about the Hendersons. ‘That’s all I wanted to say.’
Simmy was listening for the buzz of a disconnected line, when the woman added, ‘That Hannah’s a piece of work, isn’t she?’
‘Pardon?’
‘She’s put a whole lot of stuff on Facebook. Wilf showed it to me this morning. Talking about finding the birth mother who gave her and her sister up, wanting to make up for lost time. She must be mad. Doesn’t she realise that all sorts of people are going to pop out of the compost heap and claim her as theirs? I mean – Facebook, of all things!’
Wilf was Ben’s older brother, who occasionally involved himself peripherally in Ben’s obsessions, but mostly got on with his much more ordinary and contented life. ‘I never knew they were adopted until a few days ago,’ said Simmy. ‘I’m still trying to get to grips with it.’
‘Oh, I keep forgetting how well you used to know them.’ A short pause, then, ‘How could you not know? Did they keep it such a secret?’
‘My mother says not. She thinks I was just incredibly unobservant.’
Helen laughed, and with a brief farewell, the expected buzzing sound filled Simmy’s ear.
‘Was that Ben’s mum?’ asked Bonnie, two seconds later.
‘It was. She’s ordered flowers for Kit’s funeral, when it happens. I imagine the body will be released any day now.’ Another unanticipated aspect of floristry was a rapid acquisition of the arcane details surrounding unexpected deaths. At least half a dozen customers had explained the role of the coroner to her, and how frustrating the delays
and obfuscations could be. The most recent – four or five months earlier – had been a long rant from a man whose ninety-five-year-old mother, having died slowly in hospital, was referred to the coroner without the family being told. This last was the sore point. Simmy had glimpsed a world riddled with suspicion, where the son had perhaps poisoned his aged parent with a slow-acting substance, and no way was the hospital doctor going to let him escape retribution.
‘It could happen, though,’ Melanie had said when hearing the story.
‘So could a lot of things. Surely you agree that it’s based on a kind of insanity, which does no good at all? All it does is impede a process that’s already impossibly slow and inefficient?’
‘Maybe,’ said Melanie.
Bonnie would be more inclined to agree with Simmy, surely? Much of her life so far had been spent working round officialdom with its mistakes and failures to understand. But Bonnie was as yet ignorant of matters involving a coroner. ‘Released?’ she echoed.
‘That’s right. They have to be sure there’s no more evidence to be found on – or in, I suppose – the body, before they let it be buried or cremated.’
‘Mm,’ said Bonnie, showing no sign of wanting further information. Simmy looked at her, trying to assess the degree of squeamishness behind the single syllable. Any girlfriend of Ben Harkness was unlikely to get away with much in the way of female vapourings, but Bonnie did have genuine issues around the more visceral aspects of life. She washed her hands a lot, and never wore the same clothes twice without cleaning them. She had suffered from severe anorexia and missed a lot of school as a result. She had needed to be protected from the sight of Kit Henderson’s bleeding body.
‘Right, then,’ Simmy sighed. ‘There must be some work we can do.’ But when she looked around the shop for inspiration, she could see nothing that was not already in perfect order.
‘It feels weird, doesn’t it?’ said Bonnie. ‘Just standing around like this, waiting for something to happen. It’s not exactly productive, is it?’
‘I’m not sure I ever feel particularly productive,’ Simmy admitted. ‘I’d say we were more of a service industry than a manufacturing one, wouldn’t you?’
Bonnie looked blank. ‘Is that what “productive” means, then? I thought it was just … making good use of the time.’ She frowned. ‘Product – right. Now I see.’
‘My father would be proud of you,’ laughed Simmy.
‘So would Ben.’ Her eyes grew glittery with the ecstasy of her adoration. ‘There was so much I had never even thought about. Words. History. Poems. Science. It just goes on and on – and he knows all of it. How does he? He must have started when he was two, to have learnt such a lot.’
‘He’s a prodigy,’ said Simmy carelessly. ‘Some would say he’s a freak of nature, with a brain three times as big as most people’s.’
‘No, it’s not. He’s just …’ As she sought for the words, the choked sound of the doorbell announced a customer at last, along with a belated realisation on Simmy’s part that there was something she could usefully have filled the past ten minutes doing. She could have climbed on a chair and examined the problem with the silly thing.
Two men came in. They were both quickly recognised by Simmy, and neither was especially welcome.
‘Mr Wetherton,’ she nodded to the older one. ‘And Jack – that’s right, isn’t it? Hannah’s husband.’ They must be bringing news of Kit’s funeral, she supposed, and more orders for flowers. She had no idea at all what Jack’s surname might be. She still thought of Hannah and Lynn as Hendersons, having failed to attend their weddings or note the gender or date of their offspring.
‘Right first time,’ said the younger man. He was mid thirties, with dark colouring and a lean outline. Not entirely unlike Kit in his prime, Simmy noted. She had only met him once, at Fran’s funeral, holding a child in each hand, in an attempt to keep them quiet. They were the only children present, and Simmy had caught a number of disapproving glances. Only after an hour or so did Simmy learn that the children belonged to Lynn, not Hannah, and their father was a man named Barry, who was being obsessively attentive to Kit, while neglecting his daughters.
‘She’s good with names and faces, I see,’ remarked Malcolm Wetherton. ‘Once seen, never forgotten, obviously.’
‘Not really,’ she demurred. ‘After all, I am a very old friend of the family, so anybody connected with the Hendersons is bound to make an impression on me.’ Just how this man was connected remained obscure. He kept popping up, as a husband of a friend, and then a friend in his own right. If he was pally with Hannah’s husband, that at least probably removed any lurking doubts as to how he’d come to be with her at Saturday’s auction. This association prompted her to ask, ‘Did you buy anything on Saturday? My dad got a lovely dish. He was terribly pleased with himself.’
Jack blinked and looked from face to face. ‘What’s all that about?’
Uh-oh, thought Simmy. Maybe things were not so innocent after all. But Wetherton smiled easily, and said, ‘We were both at Christopher’s saleroom in Keswick. Didn’t Hannah tell you?’
‘Not that I recall,’ said the husband, finding himself in a classic situation, universally recognised. ‘Did you buy anything?’
‘Not much. I was selling mostly. Got a nice price for a painting I picked up at a car boot. Probably worth three or four times as much again, but I’m not complaining.’
Jack met Simmy’s eye, and gave a conspiratorial wink. ‘Crazy business, if you ask me,’ he said. ‘The same things going round and round, everyone trying to make a profit. When will anybody just buy the picture because they want to hang it on their wall?’
Malcolm Wetherton shrugged. ‘Who knows?’
‘Chris is a good auctioneer, don’t you think?’ Simmy asked, with a craven desire to speak his name and hear him praised by these men.
‘The ladies like him,’ agreed Wetherton. ‘Just like his old dad, in that respect.’
‘Which brings us to the reason we’re here,’ said Jack deftly. ‘Flowers for the funeral. We’re thinking it’ll be the end of next week, paperwork permitting.’
‘Okay,’ said Simmy. ‘Tell me what you’d like.’ She glanced at Wetherton, wondering whether he had suggested the advance flower order, since he had already done the same thing himself, several days ago. The suspicion popped up that he was using it as a regular pretext for coming into the shop; if so, he was singularly unimaginative.
‘I told Jack I’d already ordered mine,’ he explained. ‘We met in the street just now and I thought I’d come with him. We’ve got some matters to discuss after this.’
‘Have we?’ Jack blinked. ‘What’re they, then?’
Wetherton looked at Simmy and said nothing. A moment’s awkwardness was dispelled by Jack pointing to random flowers standing on the floor in buckets, and suggesting the general shape and colour of his funeral flowers. ‘There won’t be a joint one from all the children, then?’ she queried. ‘That’s the most usual thing. Like you did for your mother.’
‘That would make more sense,’ he agreed. ‘But when Hannah suggested it last night, George said he’d already decided to go in with Eddie, and the rest of us could do what we liked. She told me to get on with it while I had the chance.’
‘Seems rather a shame,’ Simmy began before catching Bonnie’s eyes on her. Standing by the table holding the till and the computer, the girl evidently had something she would have liked to say.
‘What?’ muttered Simmy.
‘Two new orders just popped up.’
It was obvious that this had not been the main thing that Bonnie had wanted to convey, but Simmy played along. ‘Oh good. About time, too.’ She briskly took all the necessary details from Jack, including his surname, which turned out to be Latimer. ‘So she’s Hannah Latimer,’ she said. ‘I never knew that.’
‘Sounds rather nice, don’t you think?’ said the man, as if he could take any credit for it.
‘And you’ve
got one child – is that right?’
‘Right. Kieron. He’s five. Lynn’s got Christa and Ginnie. We see a lot of them.’
‘Christa? Was that after Kit?’ She could scarcely believe that her mother had failed to trumpet this piece of blatantly unimaginative repetition on the part of the Hendersons.
‘What? Oh – no. At least – it never occurred to me that it might be. She’s Christabel, officially.’
‘Still quite similar,’ said Simmy.
He didn’t look as if he was following her fixation on nomenclature, especially as his companion was showing signs of impatience. ‘Okay, mate,’ said Jack, genially. ‘Just because you’ve got no kids shouldn’t make you so antsy when someone else talks about them.’
Simmy repressed a shudder. Reference to childlessness was a perpetual minefield. Who could say what disasters and disappointments lay behind the Wetherton story, just as they did with her own?
‘Time enough yet,’ said the man. Simmy remembered, with a slight effort, that he was married to the woman called Cheryl, who looked to be over forty, and he was well into his fifties. Good luck to them, then, she thought, with a surprising little pang of excitement.
Wetherton led the way to the street at a pace beyond the advisable in a crowded flower shop. Simmy and Bonnie both watched with in-held breath. They only exhaled when the door closed behind both men.
‘So what was that look for?’ Simmy demanded.
Bonnie made no attempt to play dumb. ‘You were talking yourself out of business, telling them they should just send one lot of flowers. You’ll get twice the money if they do five separate ones. At least. Nobody’s going to spend less than forty of fifty quid, are they? And even the most fabulous joint effort wouldn’t come to more than a hundred and fifty. Likely to be a lot less. I worked it out while they were talking,’ she added, modestly.