The Windermere Witness by Rebecca Tope Page A

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 thisentire 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. Shecould 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