by JRL Anderson
‘I must say, though, it’s not a bad idea! We might consider doing it ourselves. But I don’t know any van-hiring firms. Do you know where she got the van from?’
‘I don’t, and I don’t think she herself had anything to do with it, because it was all fixed up by her friend. And I don’t remember seeing any name on the van – in fact, I don’t think it had one. It was just an ordinary plain van, smallish for a furniture van, though we got everything in it all right. It looked fairly new, or at any rate in good condition, and it must have been, because I had a card from Hilda after the move and she said that everything had gone smoothly.’
‘Do you know the name of her friend by any chance? I really would like to get in touch with him and ask his advice.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t. I knew Hilda well as a colleague, and sometimes she’d ask me to a meal and to play bridge. But naturally there was a lot of her life that I didn’t know about at all – she wasn’t exactly secretive, but she was a good deal senior to me, and she didn’t invite questioning about personal affairs. But I’m just gossiping. If you want to find out about the van, why don’t you ask Hilda herself – I’m sure she’d want to help. I can give you her address, if you haven’t got it already from the estate agents.’
‘They told me that the house belonged to a former headmistress of this school called Miss Sutherland, and they said she’d moved south. But they didn’t volunteer an address for her – there was no reason why they should, and I rather think that estate agents don’t like to disclose the addresses of clients too readily, in case people start trying to make private deals between each other. I daresay I could get the address from them, though. But if you’ve got it handy it would certainly be a help to have it.’
‘I can tell you offhand – it’s Vine Cottage, Newton Blaize, near Newbury, Berkshire.’
I wrote it down. ‘You really have been wonderfully kind, and you’ve made me feel much happier about Joyce and Rachel,’ I said. ‘I hope they can come to you – and although I say it, you’ll find them both quite able.’
She looked at her watch. ‘I haven’t time to take you round myself, but I can find someone to show you over the school. It would be better, though, if you could come back this afternoon, because it’s the dinner break now.’
‘I’m afraid I must get back to London. And, as I tried to explain, I wanted to meet you rather than to look at classrooms. I haven’t the slightest doubt about classrooms, and am quite happy to take them on trust. And I hope that I may have the pleasure of meeting you again when Joyce and Rachel come.’
‘I hope so, too – I wish all parents were as concerned about their children’s schooling as you obviously are. But I suppose I shouldn’t say that!’ She gave me what I’m sure was meant to be her nicest smile, we shook hands, and, feeling rather ashamed of my duplicity, I left.
VI
Some Little White Flowers
IT WAS INTERESTING, though hardly a striking coincidence, that a plain van had turned up again in the case. What it meant – if anything – was another matter. In one instance we had only a tired veterinary surgeon’s visual recollection to go by, and this new one was an entirely reasonable occurrence of a van’s being taken to a house to move furniture. Still, if we could find out where the Bolton van had come from it would be a help, if only in a negative sense. Tracing the van was a matter for the local police, who knew the district and could make all sorts of inquiries that I couldn’t. Before coming to Lancashire I’d got Sir Edmund Pusey’s office to notify the Bolton force of my possible intrusion into their territory, and since it was important to our department to keep on good terms with all police forces I should have called on the Bolton men anyway. Now I had a practical reason for doing so. After a drink and some food at a pub I went along to their headquarters. I was received somewhat warily by the superintendent, who offered me a cup of tea. I accepted the tea, outlined developments in the Quenenden case, and explained my visit to Lancashire as an effort to give myself some personal background to Miss Sutherland, whom we now had to find. ‘Now that it needs some real police work, naturally I’ve come to you,’ I added.
The superintendent laughed, less warily. ‘Come off it, Colonel Blair,’ he said. ‘I know a little of the work of your department, and I don’t doubt you’d come to Bolton with good reason. At the same time I appreciate your looking in to tell us about it. What, exactly, can we do?’
‘Until a few days ago we’d no reason to suppose that Miss Sutherland had anything whatever to do with the Quenenden case, except as a somewhat unexpected beneficiary under his will. She may still be wholly incidental – but her apparent disappearance is worrying, as much for her own safety as for anything it may have to do with the Quenenden murder. So we must find out everything we can about her. But we don’t want official inquiries to be made yet – her disappearance hasn’t been reported, and we don’t want to alert anybody who may be concerned in it. You and your people will have your own ways of picking up bits and pieces of information about her – whether she had any particularly regular visitors to her house, whether she was normally there in the school holidays, or whether she often went away, her general reputation in the school, and so on. We are directly interested in a man friend who seems to have hired a van to help with her move from here to the cottage at Newton Blaize. She must have known him fairly well, one would think, or he wouldn’t be concerned with her move. Is he local? Where did he get the van? This is all work that you can do and we can’t – or at least that you can do far better than we could hope to.’
‘Fair enough. I’ll get one of our lads on to it straightaway. Have you a photograph of the lady, and any sort of description of her boyfriend?’
‘I’m afraid neither, but the photograph should be easy enough – there must be photographs of a local headmistress in the local newspaper offices, and when you get hold of one we’d be glad of a copy at Newbury. The friend is more difficult.’
I explained how I had paid a tactful call on the Acting Headmistress of Miss Sutherland’s old school, and that all my information about Miss Sutherland’s move came from her. I had asked if she knew the name of the friend, saying that I’d like his advice on where to hire furniture vans, but she didn’t know it, and suggested reasonably enough that I could ask Miss Sutherland herself. I added, ‘She had no idea, of course, that we don’t know where Miss Sutherland is. In the circumstances I could scarcely pursue the matter.’
‘No . . . well, we’ll just have to see what we can do. It helps that she was a schoolmistress, there’s often a lot of bitchy gossip to be picked up about schoolmistresses, though it may be totally unreliable. Do you want all reports sent to Newbury?’
‘I think so, yes. Inspector Rosyth there is formally in charge of the case, he knows all about me and my department’s interest in things, and he’ll keep closely in touch.’
*
There was news of a sort when I got back to Newbury. Inspector Rosyth and his men had put in a lot of work in trying to trace the movements of the missing Mrs Brown. Lacking a photograph of Miss Sutherland they had only a verbal description to go by, but they’d found a motorist who had given a woman of roughly her age and description a lift towards Reading about nine o’clock on the night before my call at Vine Cottage. He had picked her up on the Hungerford-Newbury road about half a mile from the turning where the minor road from Newton Blaize met it. She was carrying a small suitcase – he remembered it because he had put it on the back seat of his car when she got into the front seat beside him. ‘I don’t usually give lifts, but I stopped for her because I thought she looked particularly tired,’ he had explained. ‘I wasn’t actually going quite as far as Reading – I live just outside Theale – but she said that would do very well, because she could easily go on from there by bus. So I dropped her off at Theale – it’s only a few miles out of Reading.’ The woman had not talked much on the trip, but she had explained why she had to get to Reading that night. She had no telephone of her own, but
a neighbour had brought a message from her sister, who lived in Reading, saying that she had to go into hospital early next morning. Her husband was away, and there’d be no one to look after the children. The woman was polite and well-spoken, and when she got out at Theale offered to contribute towards the cost of petrol for the journey. ‘I just said that it hadn’t cost me anything extra and that I was glad to help,’ the man added.
*
‘Can’t say that it gets us very far,’ the inspector said after telling me of the woman and the lift. ‘It might be possible to confirm her story by finding the sister who had been admitted to hospital, but Reading is a big area, there are scores of women admitted to hospital every day, and we’ve no idea which hospital, where the woman lived, or of her name. We can’t even be sure that it’s a hospital in Reading – conceivably it might be one of the London hospitals. So inquiries on those lines seem just a waste of time. All we can say is that a woman who may have been Miss Sutherland got a lift towards Reading on the night when Miss Sutherland may have disappeared.’
‘If the woman was Miss Sutherland she would seem to have gone off voluntarily,’ I said.
‘Yes, but that doesn’t get us out of the wood. She may have gone off voluntarily and be held somewhere against her will, or even done away with. It doesn’t make it any less urgent to find her.’
I was doing mental arithmetic. ‘She was picked up around nine o’clock, you say – that would be about two and a half hours after I’d rung her to make an appointment for next day. Time enough for more telephoning on her part, or even a visit somewhere by car. How long would it take to walk from Vine Cottage to the point where she was picked up?’
‘The cottage is about a mile from the main road, and she was picked up about half a mile beyond the junction. Say a mile and a half, and she was carrying a suitcase. It might be half an hour or thereabouts.’
‘That puts her time of departure at about half-past eight. I wonder if anyone saw her on the Newton Blaize road between then and nine o’clock.’
‘We’re working on that, of course. No luck so far.’
We discussed where the woman might have gone from Reading, but it seemed futile even to speculate, for it might have been anywhere – Reading is a major railway centre, and has regular bus services to London Airport.
I told the inspector that he could expect a photograph of Miss Sutherland from the Bolton police. That could be shown to the motorist, and would help to determine whether the woman he had picked up was Miss Sutherland or not. It wouldn’t be conclusive evidence because identifying chance-met people from photographs is an uncertain business, but it would be better than any evidence we had so far.
The inspector went on rather apologetically, ‘I’ve got another bit of news, though I’m afraid you won’t like it much.’
‘There’s more than enough I don’t like about this case already. What’s the new trouble?’
‘It isn’t exactly trouble, but it suggests that some of your thinking has been wrong, my thinking too, come to that. You’ll remember saying that the plain van the vet saw on the morning of Mr Quenenden’s death suggested a hired van. Well, we’ve made a lot of inquiries about hired vans and it turns out that most of them aren’t plain – they’ve nearly always got advertising signs painted on them, saying “Rent This Van”, or “So-and-So’s Van Hire”, or something. Of course that doesn’t rule out the possibility of hiring a plain van, but it does suggest that vans without any lettering at all are likely not to have been hired. Pity, because it was a nice theory, and I certainly went along with you.’
‘Like too many theories it wasn’t based on sufficiently accurate observation,’ I said. ‘Of course you’re right – you do meet quite a number of “Rent This Van” vehicles on the road. But it’s a queer thing – another plain van, and one that was certainly said to have been hired, has turned up in the case.’ The inspector had been so keen to tell me of the tracing to Reading of the woman who might have been Miss Sutherland that I hadn’t yet told him of my doings in Lancashire. When I gave him my account of the plain van hired to move Miss Sutherland’s furniture he was naturally interested. ‘If it was hired locally the Lancashire police should be able to trace it – they’ve got the date, and the address it went to,’ he said. ‘But then it may not have been hired locally – it may have come from London, or anywhere. Like everything else in this damned case it’s a bit of a jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t fit – or rather, worse, it’s like a bit of a jigsaw that could fit into a hundred different places. But at least you’ve found something else for us to go on, even if like all the rest of the evidence it gets us nowhere.’
‘Try not to be depressed. Most of the case is outside your area, anyway, and it’s sheer bad luck that you’re mixed up in it,’ I said.
‘Sorry . . . I don’t think we can raid the Chief Constable’s locker, but the pubs will be open, and I’d like to buy you a drink.’
The Scotch did us both good. It was all very well for me to urge Inspector Rosyth not to be depressed, but I was depressed enough myself over our apparent total lack of progress. The whisky at least made me feel that there were worse places to be in than a pub in a pleasant old market town, and that if I didn’t waste too much time drinking in Newbury I could get to Oxford in time to have dinner with Ruth.
*
It was through Ruth that we identified the flower that I’d picked in the garden of Miss Sutherland’s old home. I still had it in my pocket, and I showed it to her at dinner. ‘It’s a pretty little thing,’ I said. ‘Have you any idea what it is?’
‘I’m an American – you can’t expect me to know all your English plants,’ she said. ‘But I can easily find out for you. The Professor of Botany is a Fellow of our college. He’s a nice old boy –he was particularly good to me when I felt very lost and lonely at being about the first female ever to be allowed to eat at the High Table. He’s a widower, and lives in college – he has rooms just across the court from mine. I’ll go to see him in the morning, and ask him about your plant.’
I left it with her, and arranged to call for her at midday to take her to lunch.
*
When I got to Ruth’s room she had somebody else with her, an elderly man with eyes that seemed exceptionally bright and sharp behind his gold-rimmed glasses. ‘This is Professor Huntingford,’ she said. ‘He is very much interested in your plant, and wants to talk to you about it.’
The sprig that I’d picked from Miss Sutherland’s garden was laid out carefully on a piece of tissue paper on Ruth’s desk. ‘Ruth tells me that you picked this in a garden in Lancashire,’ the professor said. ‘I should not have believed it possible, and I shall be more than grateful for a detailed account of how you came by it.’
‘I’m afraid there really isn’t any more detail,’ I said. ‘I was looking over an empty house on the outskirts of Bolton, for a possible purchaser who wants a house in that neighbourhood, when I noticed this little flower growing, thought it exceptionally pretty, and picked it. Later I remembered that I’d seen a plant just like it before, in the garden of a cottage in Berkshire.’
‘You astonish me. Would there be any chance of seeing the plant in its Berkshire habitat?’
‘I should think so. I ought to discuss it with the police – I don’t know whether Ruth explained that I am a sort of policeman, and that my introduction to the Berkshire cottage was because it was the scene of the still unsolved murder of an old man called Eustace Quenenden.’
‘Quenenden! That may explain things – it also makes them more exciting still. You are aware that Eustace Quenenden was a botanist of outstanding ability?’
‘I know that his work on the flora of Equatorial Africa, carried out when he was serving there as an official of the old Colonial Service, is regarded as important, and that he maintained his horticultural interests after his retirement. What is so special about this particular flower?’
‘It looks like a variety of the genus adamantifera, new to science un
til described by Eustace Quenenden in a paper in the Journal of the Royal Botanical Society not long ago. He does not classify it as a distinct genus in his Flora of Equatorial Africa although he includes a drawing of a plant much like it and suggests that if it is not a hybrid or sport in the genetic sense it may represent a new genus. His article in the RBS Journal goes much farther. I have it here. You will see that he includes both photographs and drawings, with a detailed technical description of the leaf structure, flower formation and other vital characteristics which make it distinct from hitherto known plant families. Beyond saying that he first met the plant in Africa and has spent several years working on its propagation here, he does not discuss its habitat. I am surprised that he found it possible to propagate an African plant in England, but from what you have shown me, clearly he succeeded. You will understand why I am so interested in actually seeing the plant in growth.’
‘What is the significance of the name adamantifera?’
‘As the first describer of the plant he was entitled to give it whatever name he chose. It is not yet fully recognised, of course, but I have no doubt it will be, and it will enter science as adamantifera Quenendensis – a just acknowledgement of Eustace Quenenden’s work and observation.’
‘Why adamantifera?’
‘Observe the diamond-shaped florets in the specimen you picked. Adamas is Latin for a diamond – the genitive is adamantis, and Quenenden could properly derive his name from the genitive form. What astonishes me is that it should grow in England.’