by JRL Anderson
‘He wasn’t married?’
‘Not so far as I know. He lived on his own, and looked after himself.’
‘Any idea of relations? Of who’d be his next of kin?’
‘None at all, I’m afraid. The vicar might know – Mr Quenenden was a good churchman, and he’d go up to the vicarage sometimes. The vicarage is near the shop, and sometimes he’d go on there after calling at the shop for something.’
‘Well, Mr Jones, I don’t think we need keep you any longer. You did very well – everything you could have done. We’ll need a statement from your boy, but that can come later. It’ll be quite formal, so tell him not to worry.’
‘What about the customers? You can’t keep anything secret in a village – everyone will know about police cars and an ambulance at Vine Cottage.’
‘You can say there’s been an accident, and that Mr Quenenden is dead. I’d rather you didn’t go into details at the moment.’
‘I’ll do my best, but you’d be surprised how news gets around.’
The inspector smiled. ‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I know these villages,’ he said.
*
When Mr Jones had gone off in his van the inspector turned to Constable Rogers. ‘Short-staffed as usual,’ he said. ‘I know it’s time that you were going off duty, but I’m afraid I must ask you to stay until we can get some more men here. Detective-Sergeant Jackson is out on a breaking and entering job. I’ve left a message for him to come here as soon as he gets back to the station, and he ought to be along fairly soon. He’ll bring a uniformed man with him. Meanwhile, we ought to have a good look at that greenhouse. You’re a gardening man, Rogers, what do you think of it as a greenhouse?’
‘It’s a good one, sir, very different from my little eight by six at home. Cost a lot, too. It’ll have electric heating. I think, and you can see that there’s automatic ventilation in the roof. It’s got lighting as well, but I don’t see any switches. Looks as if the lot are controlled from the house.’
‘We’ll come to that when we search the house. But the body was found in the greenhouse, and we must try to work out what he was doing there before he was killed.’
The greenhouse was beautifully tidy, and stacked with plants. Near the door, on the left-hand staging, were rows of little pots of seedlings. ‘Tomatoes, these are,’ Rogers said, ‘and bedding plants to be put out later. All quite straightforward. He’s started them under glass, and they all seem to be doing well.’ He glanced at a thermometer on the greenhouse wall. ‘It’s 65 degrees now – if you can keep up that heat you can do pretty well anything. But I wouldn’t like his electricity bill.’
Beyond the shelf of ordinary garden seedlings were pots containing a variety of less usual plants. ‘Can’t say what most of these are, and that’s a fact. Way beyond my sort of gardening.’ Rogers said. ‘I do know these ferns – they’re Cyrtomiums, and I’ve tried to grow them indoors, as house plants. These are much better than anything I’ve ever managed, but then they’re in a greenhouse, and they’ve got heat. Lord, look at those orchids! Good enough for a flower-shop, and grown as a real professional job. Chap knew what he was doing, all right.’
‘He seems to have been holding a tray when he was shot. Can we find out what was on it?’
An empty space on the right-hand staging, near the end of the greenhouse, suggested where the tray had been, but there were no loose pots beside it. Inspector Rosyth and Constable Rogers searched the floor of the greenhouse, looking underneath the staging on both sides, but there was nothing to be seen, save the slight scattering of earth that they’d noticed before, and a few bits of broken plastic from the edges of the tray.
The tray itself was on a shelf above the staging near the door, where Inspector Rosyth had put it when they moved the body. Now he looked at it more closely. There were a number of faint rings, where, presumably, pots had stood – eight in all. Each taking one side of the staging, he and Constable Rogers searched the greenhouse systematically, looking for any little pots that might have stood on the tray. There were none. There were a few big flower pots for the larger plants, but all little pots for seedlings were neatly arranged on trays. The inspector studied the ring marks on the broken tray. ‘They’re not wet, but then in this heat they wouldn’t be,’ he said. ‘But one or two of them still seem slightly damp. He seems to have fallen on the tray, so it was covered by his body – that would delay evaporation, perhaps. It certainly looks as though there were pots on this tray not long ago. Where the hell can they have got to? And if there weren’t any pots, why pick up an empty tray?’
‘Heard something during the night or early morning, went to look, and found his pots gone,’ the constable suggested.
‘Well, it may be something like that. But they must have been extraordinarily valuable plants if he was killed by whoever took them.’
‘People who grow things for shows get up to some queer tricks. I remember old Charlie Simpson’s marrows last year. He’d won the marrow prize at our local show year after year, but a week before last year’s show somebody went into his garden during the night and slashed all his marrow plants. I’ve a pretty good idea who it was, too, but we could never prove anything.’
‘Charlie Simpson wasn’t murdered.’
‘No . . . but it shows what can happen.’
‘Did Mr Quenenden exhibit things from his garden or greenhouse?’
‘Not locally he didn’t, not so far as I know, anyway. And I think I would know, because I go to all the shows – won prizes for runner beans and chrysants, in my time. But there are big national shows he might go in for. I wouldn’t know about those.’
‘We’ll have to send the tray for scientific examination, and those bits of earth or compost that seem to have come from it. It may be they can give us an idea of what was growing in them, though it doesn’t seem too hopeful. I’ve got a small brush in my car – I’ll sweep them up now.’
By the time the inspector had done his sweeping, and put the sweepings in a big brown envelope, another car drew up at Vine Cottage. It brought Detective-Sergeant Jackson, and a constable to relieve Rogers. ‘I want the whole greenhouse gone over thoroughly for prints, particularly the door handle, and panes of glass round the door,’ the inspector said. ‘And we’ll need a photographer. Rogers, can you get on to Newbury for me and ask them to send out a team? Then you can go off duty. Meanwhile, I want the whole place guarded. Nobody is to go into the greenhouse, nobody at all, except the fingerprint man and the photographer. If anyone comes, find out who he is, and let me know at once. I’m going into the house with Sergeant Jackson.’
*
The inspector had been wondering how he was going to get into Vine Cottage. There was a window to what was probably a bedroom slightly open, but it would need a ladder to get up to it. As it turned out neither window nor ladder was required, for when he tried the door to the cottage he found that it was unlocked. That bore out the theory that Mr Quenenden, dressing hastily with clothes over his pyjamas, had gone out to investigate something during the night. He would not have locked the door behind him because he would have wanted to get back in. Equally, whoever killed him could also have got in by the simple process of opening the door.
It was at once apparent that someone had been in. The cottage was originally one of a pair of eighteenth-century farm labourers’ dwellings, with the door opening directly into a single kitchen-cum-living room, with a boxed-in set of stairs in one corner going up to two tiny bedrooms. At some stage the cottage and its neighbour had been knocked into one, the kitchen-living room of one dwelling now leading through a doorway to what had been the similar kitchen of its neighbour. Here, the old kitchen range had been taken out and the chimney space turned into a big stone fireplace. The old cottage window had been replaced by a big picture window looking onto the garden, making the whole room pleasantly light. The space to each side of the fireplace and the two windowless walls had bookshelves from floor to ceiling. There was a big desk to the right of the windo
w, and it was clear that the room had been used by Mr Quenenden as a combined sitting room and study. Now it was in a mess. The drawers of the desk, which had apparently been locked, had been roughly broken open, the woodwork round the locks splintered. The tool used for the job was lying on the floor – a hatchet that Mr Quenenden had presumably used for chopping firewood. The desk had been a beautiful piece of furniture, and the assault on it was brutal. Papers, a ball of string, pencils, a pathetic stick of sealing wax, everything that had once had a tidy home in the desk was scattered on the floor.
The books had been upset, too. Some of them had been taken from their shelves and added to the jumble on the floor, others had been roughly pulled out of place, leaving gaps in the once orderly rows. There were books in many languages, a number of them in Arabic, or at any rate in Arabic script.
‘Better look round the rest of the house before we tackle this lot,’ Inspector Rosyth said.
The original cottage stairs had been left in both living room and kitchen, so that there were two ways of getting to the bedrooms. One of the rooms over what was now the kitchen of the combined cottages had been turned into a bathroom, the other was apparently a spare bedroom. Mr Quenenden’s bedroom, with the bedclothes pulled back just as he had left them, was over the sitting room. The small room next to it seemed to be an overflow study, for it, too, was lined with books. In contrast to the mess downstairs the upstairs room did not seem to have been disturbed. ‘Found what he was looking for, maybe,’ the inspector said.
On one wall of Mr Quenenden’s bedroom was a big electric bell, and underneath it a collection of switches, and what looked like thermostat controls, neatly arranged on a board. There were also two dials, one registering temperature, the other calibrated to indicate humidity. ‘Shouldn’t be surprised if these control the greenhouse. We can check quite easily. Slip out to the greenhouse, sergeant, and see what the thermometer in there reads. I’ll open the window a bit more, and you can call out the reading to me,’ the inspector requested.
The sergeant did this. The temperature inside the greenhouse was precisely that indicated on the dial. The inspector called from the window, ‘Don’t come back yet – I want to try an experiment.’
The switch directly below the alarm bell was in the Off position. The inspector turned it on, and at once the bell started ringing. ‘Shut the greenhouse door,’ he called to Sergeant Jackson. As soon as the door was shut the bell stopped. ‘That explains why he got up and went out,’ he said to himself. He turned off the switch and called through the window, ‘OK – you can open the door again now.’
A quick further experiment at the switchboard showed that three different sets of lights in the greenhouse could be controlled from the bedroom. ‘Wonder why he didn’t turn on a light before he went out,’ the inspector mused. ‘Could be because it was getting light, and he reckoned he could see well enough – that would put the time of whatever happened around six. Or maybe he did turn on a light, and whoever killed him came up and turned it off. I can understand his turning off the bell – he wouldn’t want that to go on ringing. But it’s a bit of a puzzle about the light.’
He called the sergeant back to the house, and the two policemen began to go through the mess on the sitting-room floor. Among the piles of papers were two five-pound notes, four one-pound notes, and Mr Quenenden’s cheque book. ‘Seems like he didn’t want money,’ Sergeant Jackson observed.
‘No, this wasn’t any straightforward robbery. There are plenty of things around that look quite valuable, and none of them seems to have been touched,’ Inspector Rosyth said. ‘He knew what he was after, some document, perhaps, or maybe a book. God knows how we’re going to find out if he got what he wanted. But first we’ve got to do some work on Mr Quenenden. There’s next of kin to be informed, and when we learn something of his background maybe we can get a line on the motive for whatever happened here during the night. And there’s a hell of a lot of work to be done in the village. There’ll have to be house to house inquiries, to ask if anyone heard a shot, noticed a strange car, or anything else. The cottage is a bit isolated, so we may not get much, but it will have to be done all the same. Can you get on with that now, sergeant? You’ll need another man from Newbury. I don’t want to withdraw the constable on duty here. When you go round, find out anything you can about Mr Quenenden himself – from what the shopkeeper says, he seems to have been a bit of a mystery. His cheque book shows that he had a bank in Oxford. While you’re dealing with things here I’ll see if I can get hold of the bank manager. Why do these things always have to happen at weekends? Just put in to make it harder, I suppose. Still, Oxford police will know who the manager of the branch is, and he’s bound to live locally. Unless he’s playing golf, or away for the weekend, or something, he may be able to tell me of a will, or a solicitor, so that we can find out about the next of kin. We can’t leave that until Monday.’
*
Inspector Rosyth struck lucky with the bank. The manager was at home, and when telephoned was shocked by the sad news of his customer and ready to do all he could to help. It turned out that he could do a good deal. Mr Quenenden had kept his account at the same branch since his undergraduate days in Oxford, and the bank held not only his will but a record of the financial dealings of a lifetime. The bank, of course, was shut, but the manager had the keys of the safe, and he went with the inspector to extract Mr Quenenden’s will. That was of the most immediate importance.
The will was a short document, drawn up some years ago by a firm of solicitors in Oxford, leaving everything Mr Quenenden possessed to a Miss Hilda Sutherland, with an address in Lancashire, and making her his sole executor. Using the bank’s telephone, the inspector got on to the Lancashire police, explained the situation, and asked them to get in touch with Miss Sutherland, with a request that if at all possible she should call at Newbury police station without delay. The bank manager was also able to provide the name of the senior partner in the firm of solicitors concerned, an elderly man called Mr Predell, who lived in Oxford. Again the inspector was lucky. Mr Predell answered the phone himself, and agreed to see the inspector at his home as soon as he cared to call.
Mr Predell was as shocked as the bank manager had been at the news of Mr Quenenden’s death, but more personally affected, for the dead man had been a friend as well as a client of long standing.
‘We were at Oxford together – at Pembroke,’ he said. ‘But I wasn’t in Eustace Quenenden’s class. I got a modest second in law, while he took a brilliant first in Oriental languages. He went into the old Colonial Service, and had history turned out differently I have no doubt that he would have been Sir Eustace, and a distinguished Colonial Governor. He spent most of his career in British Equatorial Africa, in the territory that later became independent as Mpuga. He was the senior District Commissioner and certainly in line for a Governorship, but with the winding up of the old Colonial Empire his career inevitably came to an end. I was out of touch with him during most of his African service, though we met once or twice when he was on leave in England, and we corresponded regularly at Christmas. He took his premature retirement some seventeen years ago, and we acted for him when he bought the property at Newton Blaize. We also acted for him when he wanted to make a will. The actual document is in safe custody at his bank, but I have a copy at my office, and I can get it if you feel that it may be of concern to you.’
‘Thank you, but I have already seen the will – the bank manager was most helpful, and I needed to see the will as soon as possible because it is necessary to get in touch with his executor. Do you know anything about the Miss Sutherland, who is apparently the sole beneficiary, as well as his executor?’
‘I have never met her. I understand that she is a schoolmistress, whom Eustace met when she taught at a Mission School in Africa many years ago. Eustace was unmarried and had no close relatives. His instructions were clear and concise – he wished everything to go to Miss Sutherland.’
‘Did he have mu
ch to leave?’
The lawyer considered the question before replying. ‘By today’s standards Eustace was scarcely a rich man, but he was comfortably off,’ he said. ‘He was an only child, and he inherited a substantial sum from his parents. In addition, he had a Colonial Service pension. When he retired he turned to the botanical studies which were his other great interest in life. He could have had a notable career as a botanist, and would have made a fine Professor of Botany, but as I explained his academic qualifications were linguistic and he felt it was too late to begin again. Nevertheless, his Flora of Equatorial Africa is a standard work. He discovered several species new to science during his African career, and he spent much of his time at Newton Blaize in selective breeding of tropical plants to try to adapt some of them for English gardens. I don’t know much about his work here but I believe he had some success and sold some of his adaptations to commercial growers.’
‘I think you were going to give me an estimate of the size of his estate.’
‘Forgive me, I got a little led astray. I was going to try, but it is exceedingly difficult. After his purchase of the property at Newton Blaize he sought my advice on the matter of his investments. As far as I recall he possessed then capital of around £100,000, but that was a good many years ago. He was a careful man, and with his pension to live on I should think that his capital is at least intact, if it has not grown considerably. Also, I do not know how profitable his plant-growing may have been. You would do better to consult his bank – doubtless they hold his securities for him.’
‘Yes, the manager told me that they held a number of his investments, but I have not gone into them. I wanted to consult you first. Will you be acting for Miss Sutherland in obtaining probate?’
‘If she wishes us to act, certainly. But she may have her own solicitor.’
‘I have asked the Lancashire police to try to get in touch with her, and I hope that she will be able to come to Newbury. It is important that she should be interviewed as soon as possible. There will have to be an inquest, of course, but as Mr Quenenden’s executor there are many things that she will have to see to. May I call on you again if I feel in need of your help?’