Nicola Upson - An Expert in Murder

‘So it was the Berwick authorities that handled the adoption?’

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The Simmonses looked at each other doubtfully. ‘It wasn’t exactly done through the proper channels, you see,’ said Frank after a pause. ‘Walter arranged it privately when he was in the army. Someone he served with had a child he couldn’t bring up himself – I don’t know why – but it seemed like the answer to all Walter’s prayers. He and Alice couldn’t have any of their own, you see, and being without kids was eating up Alice with grief; she made herself quite ill with it at one stage, and Walter was in despair. They were so in love when they first married; I’ve never seen a man so happy. He would have done anything for her, and a baby was what she wanted most in all the world. When Elspeth came along, it seemed too good to be true. She couldn’t have been more loved if she had been their own.’

‘It changed them, though,’ his wife added. ‘The end of the war and Elspeth’s arrival all happened at the same time, so somehow she seemed to get caught up in what the fighting had done to him.

He was never the same towards Alice when he came back; she said so herself. But the baby transformed her life. Elspeth was the making of Alice, but sometimes I think she destroyed Walter. They might have got through it if it had been just the two of them.’

‘Betty! You can’t say that about an innocent little baby.’

‘It’s true though, Frank, and it’s nobody’s fault. Don’t get me wrong,’ she continued, turning back to Josephine and Archie. ‘I don’t mean that Walter didn’t love Elspeth. Of course he did. It wasn’t that he resented her or that Alice neglected him. It was just that having a child gave Alice an excuse to put all her emotional energy into the little one. She looked after Walter, but she stopped trying to understand him.’

‘It’s hard to care for a man you love but don’t always recognise,’

said Josephine, who knew all too well what sort of psychological props long-term sickness demanded. When her own mother had died suddenly, she had given up her teaching career to return to Inverness and keep house for her father. Her sisters were married by then, and it had seemed the sensible thing to do. For the first few years, she had been happy back in her home town; her father continued to run the grocery store that he owned in the High 89

Street and she had enjoyed the peace and familiarity of Crown Cottage. Alone in the house during the day, she had time to write and was pleased when her early attempts to be published in various journals and magazines were moderately successful. In time, her poems and short stories led to full-length novels, but what began as pure pleasure soon became an essential facet of her own well-being: when her father’s health began to suffer, companionship turned to dependence and she found that she desperately needed another place to lay the emotions which she no longer dare attach to him for fear of how strongly she would feel his death when it eventually came. It took a rare amount of strength to care for someone who was lost to you without putting up those barriers of self-protection, and she refused to judge Alice Simmons harshly for failing to find it. ‘I’m sure Elspeth must have felt the weight of that responsibility, too, as she grew older,’ she said.

‘Yes, she did,’ Frank agreed, ‘although I think it hit her hardest when Walter died and she had to take care of her mother. She was aware of the change in Alice, you see, because she’d always been so capable; she never knew Walter when he was truly himself. It wasn’t all bad. There were times when he tried to pull himself together and be what he’d been before, but it never lasted long.’

Simmons paused, looking down at his hands. ‘Were you over there, Inspector?’ Archie nodded and let him continue. ‘After a while, you forget how senseless it all seemed at the time. The more the years went by, the more Walter looked back to the war as the time when he meant something, when people respected him. He thought it would be a new start, coming home to a wife he loved with a child of their own to bring up, but it never worked out that way for him. I kept telling him – it’s not the war years that were right, it’s the peace years that are wrong, but he never would accept that. None of us really found the land fit for heroes that we were promised but you adjust, don’t you? He couldn’t.’

‘Did he keep in touch with any of his army friends?’

‘Not that I know of. I remember him telling me once about a reunion they were having. He couldn’t afford to go but some of them clubbed together and paid for his ticket. Even then, he hated 90

every minute of it because he didn’t think his clothes were good enough. It’s no wonder he was bitter, is it? He went off with crowds throwing flowers at him, and when he came back he couldn’t even enjoy a drink with the men he’d fought alongside because he was ashamed of the coat on his back.’

Penrose listened, remembering some of the uncomfortable reunions he had been to himself. At times it had felt much easier to drink to the tragedy of the dead than to look the living in the eye, knowing that many of those men came back to the realisation that the world they had fought so hard for no longer wanted them.

‘Did anyone ever make contact with Elspeth’s real parents?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure Alice even knew who they were, and Elspeth certainly didn’t. It was almost as if keeping in touch with them would have been tempting fate: they might have changed their minds and wanted her back.’

‘But Alice did once mention something that she asked me not to tell anyone.’ All eyes turned to Betty Simmons, and her husband looked at her questioningly. ‘Every year, on Elspeth’s birthday, Walter got a letter with some money in it. The letter was never signed and Walter wouldn’t tell her who it was from, although he always denied it was from her parents. One year, when Walter was particularly ill, Alice got to the envelope first and opened it. There were ten five-pound notes inside, and a letter that just said, “You know where I am if you change your mind.” Walter was furious when he found out she’d opened it, but he refused to explain what it meant; he just told Alice not to worry, that if she wanted Elspeth to be happy she should forget all about it. That’s why she begged me not to say anything,’ she added by way of explanation to Frank. ‘She was terrified she might lose the child.’

Penrose was quiet for a moment as he considered the implications of Betty Simmons’s secret. The most obvious explanation for the money was that it had been sent by Elspeth’s real parents to help with the cost of bringing her up, but the message in the note made a nonsense of that: surely if they had wanted her back they could have just taken her, particularly as there was no legal agree-91

ment to protect Walter and Alice. ‘You’re sure the letter said “I”

and not “we”?’ he asked.

‘Yes, at least I’m sure that’s what she told me it said,’ Betty replied with certainty. ‘I remember wondering if one of her parents hadn’t really wanted to give her up and was trying to get her back, but I didn’t say that to Alice. It would have only worried her even more.’

The same thought had occurred to Penrose, who was developing a growing respect for Mrs Simmons’s intelligence. Josephine took advantage of the pause in his questioning. ‘When we were having lunch on the train,’ she began, ‘Elspeth seemed very excited about a young man she’d met quite recently. Do you know who he is?’

‘You must mean Hedley,’ said Frank. ‘Hedley White. He works backstage at Wyndham’s and the New. They met a couple of months ago when Elspeth and I were queuing for an autograph.