‘You’re really not going back to Newcastle, then?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s all up in the air. Mum and Dad aren’t too chuffed about me doing history at all, for some reason – they think I’ve let myself in for a whole lot of complication.’
‘They’re probably right. But better to do it now than later, I suppose.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Gosh – it’s quarter past eleven already. I should rescue your mother from Robin, pop back to the shop and then get to Beck View for lunch. We’ve probably only got another fifteen minutes. Less, actually.’
Ben shrugged. ‘I can carry on without you, now. I’ll email anything interesting and print it out as well. I’ll start a file.’
‘A dossier,’ said Simmy, remembering earlier episodes, where the schoolboy Ben had assembled impressive quantities of information and insight concerning local killings.
‘Bonnie says I shouldn’t call it that any more,’ he said. ‘For some reason she thinks it’s a nasty word.’
‘Does she?’ Simmy repeated it to herself, thinking of the way her father would analyse individual words, unpicking them and tracing their origins. ‘I suppose it sounds like “doss” or “dosser”.’
‘Right. Something like that,’ he said absently, his attention back on his screen. ‘This is going to be a lot of fun,’ he went on enthusiastically. ‘So many hidden connections. I can’t find a single thing about Fabian Crick, though. I’ve just done a search for him.’
Simmy had got up to leave but remained standing near the door for several more minutes. ‘I’m not surprised. I doubt if he’s computer literate, or even that he’s got a job worth mentioning. Come to think of it, he never said a word about any kind of work. Christopher might remember what he was doing before he went to Africa, I suppose.’
‘The police are going to be all over him, of course. Once they find out about his aunt leaving the house to Josephine, they’ll want to check up on the whole family.’
‘You think?’ The idea made her wince. ‘Surely only if Christopher tells them about him.’
‘Which he will – obviously. How could he not?’
‘He won’t want to. He’s already got a bit of a reputation for dropping people in it after the Grasmere thing. And we both think it’s completely impossible that Fabian attacked Josephine.’
‘Yes, you said. Even so, he’s the key to it. Got to be. There’s a clear chain, connecting you to him, and him to her.’
‘You make it sound far too simple. It doesn’t feel simple at all to me.’
‘No, well, you’re right, I suppose. But it’s somewhere to start. The police are going to think so, too.’ He tapped his front teeth thoughtfully. ‘It would help to know more about the victim. How well did Christopher know her?’
‘Less well than he thought, probably. He’d only been to her house once and doesn’t seem to have much idea of what she did outside work.’
‘So we’ve got two dead women, from different generations, then. And Uncle Richmond, who suddenly feels like a bright scarlet herring to me. Or perhaps I mean he’s a smokescreen. Did you not get a feeling that Fabian was throwing him at Christopher as some sort of punishment?’
Simmy struggled to keep up. ‘Say that again.’
‘There’s no hint of a credible reason why he was brought in, unless we’re missing some big piece of the story.’
‘I expect we are. Obviously we are, given what happened to poor Josephine.’
‘What if there’s no connection? What if we’re looking at two quite different matters?’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in coincidences.’
‘Sometimes I do,’ he said, to her irritation. ‘So let’s get back to Aunt Hilda. Ninety-one years old. That’s wild. Just think – if she knew her grandparents, they’d go back to about 1860 or so. They’d remember times that seem impossibly distant to us now.’ He sighed happily. ‘Just confirms what I’ve been thinking about history. It’s all so fabulously rich.’
It made Simmy’s head hurt to scan back through the centuries like that. The past had never held very much interest for her, other than the enjoyment of her father’s tales of local celebrities like John Ruskin and Fletcher Christian. And they tended to feel more like fairy tales than actual historical reports. ‘If you say so,’ she said. ‘Josephine must have had a feeling for history, I suppose, with all her collecting.’
‘You mean she and Aunt Hilda were both collectors?’
‘I told you that already. But I’m a bit vague as to exactly what they collected. Hilda liked stuff they call “memorabilia”. I’m never too sure what that means.’
‘Old letters and diaries, basically. Photos. Postcards. Personal writings, you might say. Notebooks. You remember Chris talking about that lot at Saturday’s auction. A box of papers from a family, all chucked in together. You can get a lot of information into one big cardboard box.’
Simmy thought of her own very small packet of documents. Passport, birth certificate, car insurance. Three or four letters she’d kept from her father, and a few of the nicest cards people had sent for various birthdays. In total they would easily fit into a shoebox. ‘Right,’ she said uncertainly. ‘All very old-fashioned. That stuff all exists on people’s phones now, I guess.’
‘For our sins,’ muttered Ben. ‘So what did Josephine collect?’
‘China, apparently. Lots of little Limoges boxes, Christopher said. I can’t remember what else. No mention of memorabilia.’
‘Hm. So why in the world did Hilda leave her the house? That’s got to be crucially important.’
‘No idea.’
Again, the youth tapped his teeth. ‘I can think of several theories that would connect all this up together. Might be these collections did overlap somehow. Could the two women have been fighting over something? Or’ – he looked up excitedly – ‘what if someone else, a third party, wanted this thing, whatever it might be, and assumed
