The Windermere Witness Read Online Free

rain stopped. Markie said it would, and it did.’ Simmy was still wondering how that had happened so predictably. ‘Amazing.’
    ‘Markie?’
    ‘Bridget’s half-brother,’ Simmy told her, with her newfound knowledge. ‘Only a year younger than her. All rather scandalous.’
    Angie tossed her head impatiently. ‘Not interested,’ she asserted. ‘Not my kind of people.’
    It was true that Simmy’s mother tended to focus on higher matters than the local gentry. She read literary biographies and watched old French films and never gave up trying to persuade everyone else to do the same. Unusually for a B&B she provided a sitting room for the guests containing a TV and DVD player, with a stack of discs that only the most dedicated film buffs could be expected to watch. There were also games and jigsaws and about five hundred more books, additional to those on the landing. The surprise was that these eccentricities were received with acclaim. ‘Beck View’ was suspected to be the most popular and successful establishment in the whole of Lake Road.
    ‘Can I have lunch?’ Simmy asked. ‘Is Daddy going to be in?’
    ‘He is. We’re having sausage bake with spaghetti,’ her mother informed her. ‘I’ve got a new lot of people due at three, the pests. It clearly says on the website that we don’twant anybody before four, but they always think I’ll make a special exception for them.’
    ‘They’re right. Couldn’t you say you’d be out? Can’t they find something else to do for an hour?’
    Angie shrugged. ‘We’ve been recommended by some friends of theirs, apparently. I didn’t recognise the name of the friends, but they sound all right.’
    ‘Not really pests, then?’
    ‘It depends. You can never be sure. They’ll go out for an evening meal, anyway.’
    ‘No wonder you can’t remember their friends. There must be hundreds who’ve stayed here over the years.’
    ‘Thousands, actually. And I do usually remember them if I see them again. Although there are some who make no impression whatever.’
    At thirty-seven, Simmy conducted her own life well out of sight of her parents. She had bought a small stone house halfway between Windermere and Ambleside and made sure she didn’t visit Beck View more than once a week – often less than that. Catching up with news was generally done over lunch, as it would be today.
    Except that the comfortable family meal never took place. Five minutes before the three of them were due to sit down together someone rang the doorbell. Angie asked Simmy to get it, and she found Melanie on the step. ‘Something’s happened down at Storrs,’ she gasped. ‘Somebody died.’
    Simmy visualised an overindulging uncle succumbing to a coronary and knocking trays of champagne flying. Melanie’s excitement, always quick to flare, struck her as excessive. ‘Oh?’ she said. ‘And that warrants leaving the shop, does it? Couldn’t you have phoned me?’
    ‘It’s the boy – Mark. He drowned in the lake.’
    ‘No!’ Simmy’s insides cramped with a sudden involuntary horror. ‘Was he boating? Surely not. He was an usher …’
    ‘I think we ought to go down there and see,’ Melanie insisted. ‘You spoke to him today. They’ll want to know what he said to you. They want you to be a
witness
.’
    ‘Don’t be stupid. Of course they don’t. Why me, when there must be hundreds of people who’ve seen more of him than I did?’
    Melanie’s dimples appeared as she manifested extreme exasperation and her sightless eye stared insistently. ‘Sim, listen,’ she urged. ‘There’s more to it. Joe called me just now. It’s terribly serious. The Baxter man has gone berserk, accusing everybody in sight of killing his boy. Joe says Markie never showed up for the wedding at all. He must have been in the lake all morning. So when I said you’d seen him, Joe said you had to go and make a statement. He said I should fetch you and take you down to the Hall.’
    ‘Joe,’ Simmy