Death in the Garden Read online

  On Janine’s arm she prattled.

  ‘You’re talking your head off.’ Janine spoke without malice.

  ‘I know, but I’m enjoying it.’ Canon Linker was a quiet man; he did his best but he usually seemed abstracted and talked to her with the air of one anxious to get back to his book or the letter he was writing. Even his sermons were quiet affairs: his parishioners loved him for other reasons.

  On their walk they passed the site where the Cardboard-Cut-Out Theatre used to set itself up. Today there was nothing but rain on the cobbles.

  Bee knew at once. ‘ Where are they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ There was a notice stuck to a lamp post. Janine looked at it for a moment, then walked across to read. ‘ “Performances temporarily suspended”, it says.’

  ‘I knew they were short of money.’ All gossip filtered quickly around the community of the Garden.

  ‘I heard they were a bit pushed,’ agreed Janine reluctantly.

  ‘Does it cost much, I wonder, putting a show on here?’

  ‘Well, something, I suppose. More than they had.’

  ‘I should have made a contribution. One art should support another.… There’s another vacant space, isn’t there? Where Ginger and Pickles usually put their stall?’

  The rain had washed away at another patch of bare ground, cleaning it up, taking off some of the surface dirt and sediment left behind by the stall. Ginger and Pickles were tidy women, but still you cannot live and work in a place without leaving traces behind. They had left a stain where Ginger had broken a bottle of walnut oil, and a long mark caused by an accident with a sack of cardamom: Pickles had been responsible for that. The rain had partly dealt with it all.

  Bee knew, though. ‘ No. They aren’t here? Their space is empty. I wonder why?’

  Janine shifted her weight from one foot to another; Bee was leaning on her heavily, too heavily for her comfort. ‘How do you know? How can you tell?’

  Bee considered. ‘I suppose I smell it. And feel it, too. Emptiness vibrates.’

  Janine did not laugh. For all she knew, it might be true.

  They walked on. Emptiness is not peace and can sometimes be a worry.

  Two empty places must reflect two sets of people with problems. Bee meditated upon it.

  She heard a car start, then stop. ‘That’s a police car, isn’t it?’ The police car had been about enough lately for her to have no difficulty in recognising its engine. ‘ Calling on Cassie Ross again, I suspect?’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘It’s one way of pursuing an investigation. If that is what he is doing.’ He was pursuing something certainly, and probably not only Cassie Ross. ‘You know, I believe I should make a good detective. There have been precedents for a blind detective. Ernest Bramah invented one.’

  Janine kept silent, she found Bee Linker alarming sometimes.

  ‘He’s seeing a lot of Cassie Ross, but not much of our Edwina who has temporarily disappeared. At least, I have not heard her around lately.’

  Sergeant William Crail was an anxious man, too, but he was not worrying about Edwina. ‘Don’t waste time telling me about Miss Fortune,’ he had said to Cassie. ‘I know she’s gone and I know how to get hold of her if I want to. I’m a copper, remember, it’s my job. That’s not what’s on my mind at the moment.’

  Cassie was on his mind, in her own particular corner of it, but she was not his worry, either. Another woman was, and she was missing. Or if not missing, absent from her usual haunts. Not a woman much noticed, but one who interested him.

  The police were slowly putting together a picture of the killer of Luke Tory. Or, at least, they were placing his movements and some of his characteristics as discerned through his behaviour. One striking characteristic was his power to disappear: he was here, then nowhere. It was as if he had evacuated the district.

  Still, it was their belief, from forensic evidence, that the murderer had placed the poison which killed Luke in the decanter of whisky which only he drank. This suggested a good knowledge of Luke, and also access to the kitchen.

  From this, a list of names had suggested itself. Among these names, those of Cassie, Alice and Edwina had come first. Sergeant William Crail had submitted personality profiles of each girl (successfully filtering out his personal interest in one of them). Yes, they were capable of killing; yes, it was his belief that two of them, Cassie and Alice, had been blackmailed by Luke Tory: they had tacitly let him know it. Largely by not denying it to him with any energy.

  So there was motive and, since it was their milieu, evidence of their passage – fingerprints and clothing traces – was everywhere. Otherwise, this was where the murderer first disappeared. He, or she, had been here, but so had half smart and theatrical London. If he came from that world he had gone back into it leaving no discernible trace. (There might be one: they were hopeful but secretive on this clue.)

  So at least they knew that if the murderer was not one of the three he could move in their world as a familiar figure. Although it was possible he changed his clothes. Was he a servant who could take off his apron and join his employers as their equal?

  The extra dimension, the frill on the cake – the telephone caller whom Edwina Fortune complained of – was dismissed by Sergeant Crail’s superiors as irrelevant.

  Bill Crail now thought differently and believed the telephone caller and the murderer had one thing in common: how to come and go.

  Edwina was central to it all, he thought; nothing that happened to her was irrelevant. Because, after all, it did look as though Luke had blackmailed Tim Croft over something. And Tim Croft, like Luke himself, led straight to Edwina.

  ‘See you this evening,’ Bill Crail had said to Cassie; they had already worked out an arrangement for meeting.

  He drove briskly past the empty spaces where the Cardboard-Cut-Out Theatre and the health food stall usually stood. Gone.

  Miss Drury looked down on their van which was parked beneath her sitting-room window. A group of local children were larking about it, as they often did when it was there. For some reason it amused them. Young devils, she thought, and banged on the window.

  The room was square with a wide bay window, identical to the one immediately above belonging to Miss Dover. The two ladies lived similar but different lives, and Miss Dover’s was the more way out. She had a wider, rougher circle of friends than her colleague, including some to whom Ginger closed her eyes, while there were one or two from whom even Pickles averted her gaze. But Pickles knew that from out of this circle of friends, and sometimes unhappy people, came profits.

  Not hard drugs, nothing illegal, but there were products that Pickles could provide that might or might not help with certain urges. You could always hope, and Pickles’ ragbag of clients were, whatever their sad lacks, hopeful people.

  Ginger hated these people, but knew that Pickles had to have them, needed them somehow, and profited from them. They both did. In fact, from people who wanted sexual stimulants, love potions or hate potions, their health food stall greatly prospered. Indeed, they needed it to.

  This awkward fact was not exactly a secret between Ginger and Pickles, but it was unexpressed between them. A lot of things were left unsaid by them; life was like that, they felt. It was one of the points they had in common. Ginger now paced up and down her sitting room using the narrow passageway between sofa and table as a marching ground. The worn patches on the carpet showed how often before she had taken this walk. Pickles had gone absent without leave many a time before: Ginger always worried; she felt so alone. Alone except for a horde of fears with faces like devils. Ginger was not a great believer in the Devil as such but from experience she had come to believe in evil.

  She thought she heard a noise in the room above; she went to the head of the stairs.

  ‘Pickles, old love, is that you?’

  Pickles had left the house yesterday evening on some unspecified errand of her own. She usually took the van on these occasions so Ginge
r presumed she had done so last night. She had not checked. The van was parked as a rule in the yard behind, where you could see it from the bathroom window if you leaned out and twisted your neck. Ginger had done this once and badly ricked her neck. The proprietor of a health food stall with her head at an angle was a bad advertisement.

  Yet the van had been outside the house when Ginger drank her early-morning tea. The old girl’s back, she had thought, but her friend had not appeared.

  The noise from the children below grew even louder. Vandals, she thought, I’d better go down and send them packing. She knew from experience that they only went if threatened with chastisement, so she took a walking stick with her.

  She sped down the stairs, stick in hand. I could murder a cup of tea, she thought.

  The word murder reminded her of Luke, then it produced her secret fear that someone would do in Pickles one day. She seemed so eminently murderable, somehow. Perhaps she was dead now, sitting propped up in their van. Or else bundled up, eyes staring, ready to roll out the back.

  Halfway down the stairs, the stick dropped from her hand and rolled down the steps.

  Very shortly afterwards Pickles returned from her night out. Feeling somewhat repentant after her gallivanting and anxious to make amends, she had gone to the bakers to buy some iced buns which were Ginger’s favourite.

  There she had fallen into conversation with her friend the baker about the day’s big race. Pickles was a punter of great enthusiasm yet little skill. The chat went on longer than she had intended; Pickles was always a little jolly after one of her escapades. Eventually she picked up the buns and started for home. ‘Back Suzie’s Joy,’ she advised. ‘ Ten to one winner.’

  ‘Armourer’s Apprentice,’ came the countercry. ‘That’ll do for me.’

  Pickles rolled home. The first door was unlocked but they were casual about that, so she was unsurprised. At the bottom of the stairs she tripped.

  A walking stick. Ginger’s walking stick.

  ‘Silly cow,’ said Pickles. ‘Leaving it there. I might have hurt myself.’

  She moved forward, half wondering what that shadow was on the stairs.

  Blackness moved, a shadow flowed forward, darkness came to life.

  Canon Linker had seen darkness move, now Pickles saw it for herself.

  Chapter Seven

  Edwina had made what she considered satisfactory arrangements about her post, but the absent Lily had done nothing of the sort. There was already a pile of letters on the floor when Edwina arrived and then more were delivered every day. Lily appeared to have a whole horde of friends, all of whom delighted to write to her but none of whom seemed to know she was married. Neither close friends nor newspaper readers, then. Edwina, as she dealt with the letters, sorting them into neat piles and putting them on Lily’s desk wondered about them. Some must be circulars, of course, while others were certainly bills. The evidence suggested that Lily paid her bills once a year, and that time of year had not yet arrived.

  Edwina stacked the bills separately. Lily had a simplistic attitude to money; she squirrelled away large quantities of her earnings into what she called ‘ portable cash’ and parted with it for bills only when she had to. But her creditors appeared to accept this, and to be making no serious complaint.

  This morning the baby was beginning to make himself felt. Edwina did not mind. In a way she welcomed it as justifying her present hiding away from her usual world. Thus she was protecting the future. Her future and his.

  She had given the child an identity: he was a boy and would resemble a neat amalgam between her and his father. The features of her own father might be indicated somewhere. She had created the child she wanted to have. Not all first mothers personalise their child as highly. Edwina was unusual in this as in her other circumstances.

  Lily’s flat was a curiously calming haven, where Edwina felt rested and at home in a way she had not noticed when its lively mistress was in residence. But then she had only been there when that lovely and volatile creature was entertaining. Lily’s parties were not rowdy, but they were famous for their liveliness.

  Now what Edwina noticed was the comfort of the chairs and the bed, the blue and white china in the kitchen, the way the light through the windows fell upon the furniture, and the unpretentious ease with which Lily had invested everything. It said something peaceful about Lily that was unexpected but which Edwina was glad to hear.

  This flat was giving her something and she was taking it with open hands. I’ll be able to manage the child now, she thought. I am beginning to feel my way forward to a way of life for the two of us that will work. I can be alone with this creature and still survive as a person. How strange that the murder of Luke, coupled with the telephone calls, should bring about such an end. It would move her one step further away from her friends, and out of that tight triangle. You could compensate, of course. I’ll let Cassie and Alice help. Then, instantly: No, I won’t. This is me. Alone, I’ll do it. The step away was for ever then?

  The day was going to be truly hot. Edwina had all the windows open so that the noises from the street below floated up to her. She heard a woman shouting something about the price of lettuces and a man answering with a complaint about the late delivery of his newspaper. A third voice joined in with a message from someone called Eenie (so it sounded) who had gone off with someone called Scilla and who might never be coming back. This provoked an explosion from the first woman who seemed to be closely related to Scilla, if not to Eenie as well.

  A dog began to bark, while from another open window pop music suddenly burst into sad sound with the beat banging away underneath like a cross voice with only one thing to say.

  I’ll buy some flowers, she decided. Roses, if I can get them, but anyway something sweet-smelling, then some salad stuff. The woman’s voice shouting about lettuce had made her hungry for something crisp and green; food fancies were plentiful with her at the moment. And I will see if Dougie has sent on any post.

  She did her shopping first, rather delaying going for her letters, reluctant that anything should break this happy mood she found herself in.

  At a street stall she chose her flowers, not roses after all but white lilac, heavy and sweet. In the end she did not fancy lettuce, the smell seemed to choke her, but bought asparagus instead.

  Then she strolled on to Sid’s shop, where Sid was behind the counter smoking a herbal cigarette; the smell reminded her of Ginger and Pickles.

  ‘Morning, miss. Come for your post?’ He opened a drawer and handed over a packet of letters. ‘Nice little pile for you today.’ He looked curious but did not ask any questions, as Edwina had guessed he would not when she set up her arrangements. He was well paid for his service; silence was built into the bargain.

  ‘Thank you.’ She put the letters in her shopping basket, one borrowed from Lily’s kitchen. ‘Any news?’

  ‘Nothing local except our dentist has eloped with his nurse; knowing his wife I don’t blame him. In the world outside, the usual couple of wars.’ He pushed a newspaper across for her to read the headlines. ‘Have it on the house.… Had someone in here just now asking after you.’ He watched her face, eyes interested, mouth half smiling.

  ‘What?’ Instantly she was alert. ‘Who?’

  He relented at once. ‘ Don’t worry. Only Mrs Waters who lives next door to us. “Who’s that lovely lady?” she asked. She loves to know who her neighbours are. She thinks you’re an American.’

  Edwina relaxed; he was aware of it. So she did mind enquiries after her. He had been testing her out. ‘Oh yes, so she’s Mrs Waters, the one with the hats? Why does she think I am an American?’ Mrs Waters was the proprietor now of a small cafe, from whose window she watched the world, always wearing a brightly coloured hat.

  ‘Because of your clothes.… They’re not the sort we usually see around here.’

  Edwina took note of that; in future she would watch what she wore. It was her first intimation that out of your own habitat
you stood out like a banana on an apple tree; you did not notice the other inhabitants but they recognised you for a stranger. London was made up of lots of villages and now she was in a new one.

  ‘Thanks.’ In his way Sid had been helpful, had perhaps meant to be, perhaps not. ‘Well, what did you tell her?’

  ‘Nothing. Don’t talk about customers too much. Rule number one in my business. Any business.’ Then he added tolerantly, ‘But she’s not a bad old thing. Used to be a milliner up west and that’s where the hats come from. She’s using up old stock.’

  Impossible to know if he was telling the truth or just building up a story.

  His wife came from the room behind and gave him an alert, affectionate look. ‘ I heard that. But why was she asking? A nosy old thing she may be but old Mother Waters never does anything unless she’s got a reason for it.’ She gave a brisk nod towards Edwina. ‘I’m only just saying. I mean, she sits over there at her window watching us all but I wouldn’t call her a detached observer. If she asked questions, then someone asked her. Money might even have passed hands.’

  ‘Take no notice of my dear wife,’ said Sid. ‘She fancies herself as a spinner of yarns.’

  ‘Thanks anyway,’ said Edwina. She took her letters and went out into the street. She had a quick look at the letters, identifying most of them easily enough as business of one sort or another. There was a picture postcard from Alice, nothing from Cassie. There was a small manilla envelope of which she could make nothing, while somehow feeling she should. She would have to take it back to the flat and open it.

  As she walked back she glanced towards Mrs Waters sitting at her cash desk by the window; her gaily turbaned head was bent over the accounts but she seemed to be keeping a weather eye on the street because her head moved slightly as Edwina paused across the road.