Death in the Greenhouse

by JRL Anderson

  ‘He had an elaborate greenhouse, and was professionally, or semi-professionally, engaged in adapting various tropical or subtropical plants for English gardens. I believe that at least one of the big seed firms marketed his products.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but I should not have thought that adamantifera was sufficiently adaptable. It just shows what a genius the man was. But I should like very, very much to see adamantifera in an English habitat, and to take samples of the surrounding soil, if that would be permissible.’

  ‘Well, you ought really to get permission from Miss Sutherland, who is the present owner of Mr Quenenden’s property, but as she is away and the police are still responsible for keeping an eye on the place, I daresay it could be arranged quite easily. I’ll have a word with the inspector in charge, if you like.’

  ‘I should be most grateful.’

  ‘Can you find such a thing as a telephone in this medieval establishment?’

  Professor Huntingford smiled. ‘I can understand your feelings. As a matter of fact I do have a telephone of my own, if you care to step across the quad.’

  I walked with him to his rooms, and there was indeed a telephone on his desk. ‘How on earth did you achieve it?’ I asked.

  ‘Age and length of service – more particularly because I acted for a time as Warden of the college when the Warden himself was pro-Vice Chancellor of the university. You are welcome to use it should you wish to telephone at any time that I am here.’

  ‘That could be invaluable. I’ll use it now to ring the Newbury police.’

  *

  Inspector Rosyth saw no possible objection to my taking the professor to visit Mr Quenenden’s garden. There was no news of Miss Sutherland, but he did say that one small piece of information had come in which might or might not have a bearing on the case. I said I’d come on to Newbury after taking Professor Huntingford to the cottage and we could discuss it then.

  The professor had no car, and since I wanted to go on to Newbury instead of bringing him back to Oxford, Ruth said that she would come with us in her own car. So the three of us went in two cars, I piloting them through the country lanes beyond Oxford, the professor travelling with Ruth.

  The cottage looked extraordinarily peaceful. Ruth, as an American with an eye for the picture-postcard loveliness of traditional English villages, was enchanted. ‘It looks as if nothing had ever happened here for at least a thousand years,’ she said.

  ‘It may look like that, but a Chicago gangster would have felt quite at home here not long ago,’ I observed. ‘I’d better make sure that there is nobody in the cottage, and then we can have a look round.’

  I knocked formally on the door, waited for a decent interval, and then Ruth and the professor came into the drive. I remembered where I’d seen the little white-flowered plant growing, and took the professor straight to it. He looked at it, bent and sniffed the flowers and leaves, and fingered them gently. It was certainly a pretty little thing, more fully in flower than when I’d last seen it, and much more in flower than the plant in Miss Sutherland’s garden. ‘Yes, it is certainly adamantifera,’ the professor said, ‘and it would seem to be acclimatised – indeed, it must have become acclimatised to flower as well as this. May I take a cutting and some small samples of the soil round it?’

  ‘I don’t see why not – nobody is likely to miss them.’

  He had with him an attaché case, which opened to reveal a neat arrangement of small glass jars, a variety of instruments, and a small microscope. He cut a spray of the growing flowers, or florets, and then, using a miniature stainless steel trowel, he took a few scrapings of surface soil from around the base of the plant, put them in a glass jar, and labelled them. Then, using a measuring rod, he collected more soil from depths of five, ten and fifteen centimetres below the surface, bottling and labelling all these, too.

  ‘I must get some samples of the rest of the garden soil for comparison,’ he said. He walked round the garden, selecting half a dozen random spots from which he collected similar spoonfuls of soil. ‘There are some most interesting plants here,’ he said. ‘That lily, for instance – it isn’t in flower yet, but it will be in a month or so – is a Quenenden adaptation that was marketed three or four years ago. It is proving very popular, as it deserves to be. But adamantifera is the plant that really fascinates me.’

  The greenhouse was unlocked and he had a look inside it, but as I’d seen earlier Miss Sutherland had taken out all the special heating apparatus, and there was nothing out of the ordinary in the plants it now contained. As I was anxious to see Inspector Rosyth we didn’t stay any longer than we needed.

  The professor had brought with him the flowering sprig that I’d picked from Miss Sutherland’s garden. ‘Do you want this, or may I keep it?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course you can have it. I’m glad that you have found it interesting,’ I said, adding as an afterthought, ‘about how long would you say it had been growing in the garden where I picked it?’

  ‘Quite impossible to say with any certainty without looking at the plant. But the flowers are well-formed and healthy, which does not indicate a recent transplant. I’d guess at least one year, more probably two or three. But that’s only a guess, of course. I may be able to tell you more after I’ve compared flowers from the two plants under the microscope, and done some laboratory tests.’

  *

  As soon as Ruth had gone off with Professor Huntingford I went on to Newbury, and got there in nice time to take Inspector Rosyth out to lunch. I told him about the professor’s interest in the plant, and he said with a touch of exasperation, ‘Just another bit of this infernal jigsaw where nothing ever fits. I suppose you could make a case for saying that old Mr Quenenden was murdered for the value of some new plant that can be marketed but there’s no more real evidence for that than for any other confounded theory.’

  ‘All the same, I feel that we’ve neglected the horticultural side a bit. We know the firm he works for from the payments to his bank. I’ll get hold of their catalogues going back over the past few years, and perhaps have a word with their general manager, or whoever runs things.’

  ‘Well, it can’t do any harm, though on past form it won’t do any good. By the way, I told you I had a bit of news for you. Yet another van has turned up, though as far as I can see it gets us nowhere. It was simply a British Road Service delivery van that delivered a package to him at the cottage about a month before he died.’

  ‘Good work to discover it, anyway. How did you get on to it?’

  ‘Pure routine. You know we’ve been making inquiries about vans, and although we were looking for a plain van I thought it just worth asking the local BRS depot if they knew of any such vans that might have been around about the date of the Quenenden murder. They didn’t, but the manager did remember making a delivery to Newton Blaize round about what he thought was the right time. It turned out that he was wrong, for it was a good month earlier – just shows what human memory can do. But he went to a lot of trouble over it, found the driver who’d made the delivery, and the consignment note. It was in fact a delivery to Mr Quenenden at Vine Cottage, and the consignment note was signed by him. The driver remembers the visit clearly, and that what he delivered was a rather heavy wooden box, a small tea chest, he thinks it was.’

  ‘Do we know the sender?’

  ‘Yes, but it doesn’t help – it was simply a London firm of forwarding and shipping agents. All they could say was that the box, carriage paid to destination, had come by sea to Southampton consigned by their own agents at Port Kanto, the seaport of Mr Quenenden’s old colony, now Mpuga. The Southampton people had simply handed over the job to BRS, who duly delivered the box to Mr Quenenden.’

  ‘Do they know what was in it?’

  ‘No. It’s in their files as “One wooden box, weight 21 ½ kilos, contents unknown”.’

  ‘It must have gone through customs at Southampton. They must know what was in it. Did the shipping agents say anything about
paying duty?’

  ‘Not to British Road Services, anyway. You must understand that the information we have came to us through BRS – we haven’t made police inquiries about it yet, except that I sent a constable to the BRS depot in the first place. He reported that the BRS manager recalled a delivery to Newton Blaize, but he hadn’t looked up the exact date then, and in any case it didn’t seem particularly relevant because we were concerned with a plain van and all BRS vans are labelled unmistakably. All the details I told you about we only got this morning, from the BRS man’s own inquiries. I must say he went into things very thoroughly for us. How far the information is worth following up, I don’t know. It’s still hard to see how the delivery of a package a month or so before the murder can have any bearing on it.’

  ‘We still don’t know what, if anything, was taken from the cottage on the morning of the murder. A mysterious box – but that’s being fanciful, let’s stick to the official phrase of a box with unknown contents – arriving for Mr Quenenden from Mpuga might give us a line on something. But this is where we can help you, and the doubtlessly just as hard-pressed Southampton police. We have a special liaison with the Customs, and I can handle all that side of things. I’ll look after the seed merchants, too, for whatever they may be worth. Don’t look so crestfallen – after all, it was you who found out about the box.’

  *

  When we got back to the inspector’s office after lunch his In tray was piled with papers about local cases. There was also a message asking me to ring Sir Edmund Pusey. I did this from the police station. ‘I think you will have to interrupt your tour of England for a bit because I want to see you,’ Sir Edmund said. ‘I won’t go into it on the phone, but there’s been another message to Meredith Boscombe. How soon can you get back to London?’

  ‘I’m about to start back now. As a result of what you call my tour there are a couple of things that I must set in motion in London, and I think I want to see you, too.’

  ‘Only “think”?’

  ‘Well, at the moment I’m a bit scared of your next demands on me – I must remind you sometime that I have a life of my own, and a good many things still to settle with Ruth. But let that pass. I should be with you in time for a cup of tea. By the way, can you ask your secretary to get hold of a copy of Quenenden’s Flora of Equatorial Africa? I’d like it to be there when I arrive, if possible.’

  ‘A modest request! Poor Rosemary! What does she do if the work, which is highly specialised and was published a good many years ago, isn’t immediately available in the bookshops?’

  ‘It’s nothing to the demands you make on her. There’s bound to be a copy in the library of the Royal Botanical Society. If they say that they can’t lend out valuable books, you must exert your well-known influence.’

  ‘All right, Peter. I daresay it will be here.’

  *

  Before leaving Newbury for London, I rang the number that Professor Huntingford had given me. He was in his room, having just returned from having lunch with Ruth. He was almost profusely grateful for our visit to Newton Blaize. ‘I shall get down to work on a laboratory examination of the plants later this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Even to the eye there are some interesting differences between the sprig you picked in Lancashire and the piece we cut this morning. I should very much like to take soil samples around the Lancashire plant. Would that be possible, do you think?’

  ‘It might be possible to arrange it, but it may take a little time.’

  ‘I shall hold myself ready to go to Lancashire whenever you say.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, then. Can I come and talk to you about the plants when you have made your examination?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And can you please give a message to Ruth for me? Give her my love, and say that I’ve had to go back to London and don’t know precisely when I can be in Oxford again. Tell her that I’ll do battle with the telephone system at your distinguished college to try to let her know.’

  ‘You need not battle all that hard. You have my number now, and I’ll give you the number of my laboratory, where I’m most likely to be if I’m not in my room here. In any case the lab staff will get a message to me, which you can rely on my passing on to Ruth.’

  He gave me the number, and I rang off.

  VII

  The Box

  ‘THE CALL TO Meredith Boscombe came just before one a.m. this morning,’ Sir Edmund said. ‘Here is a police transcribing of it.’ He handed me a sheet of paper with a few lines of typing. As before, the message began, ‘Brand speaking,’ and went on

  Wouldn’t you like to know who I am! Well

  you won’t. I am giving you a bit more time

  but I want you to realise that I have not

  got cold feet. You had better have the

  money ready when I ask for it.

  The police listener-in had recorded Boscombe as replying ‘I am not in the least frightened of your threats. I shall not . . .’ at which point the transcript ended with the note, ‘Caller rang off. Line dead.’

  ‘There is a tape-recording of the actual conversation,’ Sir Edmund said. ‘Having read the transcript you can listen to the voice.’ The recording was quite clear. Meredith Boscombe’s voice at the end was easily recognisable, but there was a curious, depersonalised quality about the voice of the caller Brand. I remembered a phrase from Boscombe’s report of the earlier call, that the man’s voice had seemed to go on ‘like a record’. It did sound rather like that, not exactly mechanical, but like a man dictating a letter to a machine instead of to his secretary. One could make too much of this, of course – the man was dictating to Meredith Boscombe, and perhaps he was reading from a prepared note.

  ‘Both the voice and the content of the message seem distinctly odd.’ I said.

  ‘The voice, yes – but if he knows as much as he seems to know about Meredith Boscombe’s past he may be someone once known to him, and might be expected to disguise his voice in some way. But what strikes you as odd about the message – apart from the outrageousness of the whole thing?’

  ‘It doesn’t get anywhere. If the man is out for money why doesn’t he take some more active steps to get it? He’s made a huge demand, which, I suppose, Meredith Boscombe could probably raise the cash to meet, but he hasn’t done anything more than issue somewhat obscure threats. This latest message is just another threat – it doesn’t require Boscombe to do anything specific, just keeps him on tenterhooks. I’m beginning to wonder if that isn’t the purpose of the whole exercise – to keep Boscombe on edge while something we know nothing whatever about either happens, or doesn’t happen.’

  ‘Possible, perhaps. If Boscombe were Foreign Secretary it would make more sense – there might be some deep political plot – national or international – to keep the Foreign Secretary’s mind occupied with personal affairs. But he’s not Foreign Secretary – as Minister of State, grand title though it sounds, he is only a junior Minister, he hasn’t been in office long, and I should say that his influence on any important aspect of foreign policy is negligible. Obviously we can’t rule out politics, and certainly there are enough political madmen around to make anything possible, but I can’t really see this attempted blackmail as anything other than related to Meredith Boscombe personally. Anyway, you will have to see him again after this latest message, and I’ve already made an appointment for you at his house at ten o’clock tonight. He apologises for making it so late, but he’s got to make a speech somewhere or other this evening, and he can’t be home before ten. I thought that you might take the tape-recorder and see if you can get any sort of recognition of the voice. You have a way of asking questions that seem to prompt people’s memories.’

  ‘Bosh. If you have made the appointment I suppose I shall have to keep it, though there are other things that I wanted to do this evening.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘It’s not too late to dig out our Customs chap, though I shall have to get on to him at his home. It is too late to deal
with the seed merchants. Did you get that copy of the Flora of Equatorial Africa for me?’

  ‘Customs and seed merchants?’

  ‘They may or may not mean anything. I’ll explain about them later. What about the book?’

  ‘You know something of Rosemary’s abilities. Yes, she has got a copy for you, though it interfered sadly with a lot of work I wanted her to do for me.’

  ‘I’d like to take her out to dinner, but you haven’t left me any time. I’ve got to get on to the Customs, and I’ve got to do some hard reading about what grows on Quenenden’s old territory. I can get on with that while waiting to call on Meredith Boscombe at ten o’clock.’

  *

  I collected the copy of Quenenden’s Flora and rang our Customs man from my own room. Fortunately he was at home, and I asked if he could find out from his people at Southampton what was in the box that British Road Services delivered to Newton Blaize.

  ‘Can you give me the date it arrived in Southampton?’ he asked.

  ‘I can give you the date it was dispatched from Southampton by British Road Services, but I’m afraid I don’t know the date of arrival, or the name of the ship it came on, except that she was a vessel calling at Port Kanto.’

  ‘That ought to be enough. How urgently do you want to know about it?’

  ‘I don’t think you need to get anybody out of bed, but I’d like to know sometime tomorrow, if possible.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll ring you at the department.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather ring you, because I don’t know where I’m going to be most of tomorrow. Would midday be too early?’

  ‘No – unless there were any special problems, it’s mainly a case of checking records at Southampton. That shouldn’t take long. Ring me at noon by all means, and I’ll hope to have all the news you want by then.’

  *

  I gave myself a solitary supper in a small Greek restaurant, and studied Quenenden’s Flora over the meal. It was not a convenient book for reading at table because it was bulky, but it kept me sufficiently interested to ignore the inconvenience. I am no botanist, and much of the technical description of plants was beyond me, but Quenenden was an interesting writer, and his account of each variety of plant included a description of the countryside it grew in, and of its economic, medicinal or even ritual importance to the people who lived there. His reference to the genus adamantifera was confined to an appendix. He provided a drawing, unhappily not in colour, of a plant much like those we’d been dealing with, and had written (this was nearly a quarter of a century ago):