Death in the Greenhouse

by JRL Anderson

  I cannot be sure if the group to which I have provisionally given the name adamantifera is properly a genus of its own, or a related variety of some other family. It is rare, and to be met with only in places of somewhat unusual soil content. I have seen it growing in strictly confined areas where a belt of some form of clay occurs in areas of soil of a different general nature. It will grow on the clay, but not outside it, even if the supporting belt of clay is narrow. The flowers are generally white, but can occur with gradations of other colours. Whether this is due to the particular soil content of the place in which the plant is growing, or to some cross-fertilisation with a related species, I have not yet been able to determine. In local folklore there is a good deal of superstition attached to the plant, though this appears to be highly complex, the flowers bringing good luck or bad luck according to a variety of circumstances in which they may be met. In some communities the wearing of a necklet of the flowers is held to enable barren women to conceive, although the flowers have to be of a special type, and gathered in accordance with a number of formalities. The plant, however, is so rare that it is impossible to generalise about it, and the beliefs to which I have referred occur only among a small number of isolated communities.

  It seemed an odd mixture of botanical and anthropological information. Adamantifera might be held to have brought Mr Quenenden himself bad luck, though whether its existence in his garden could possibly have had anything to do with his murder was another matter. And why was it growing in Miss Sutherland’s old garden? At her age it seemed scarcely likely that she could have been interested in the superstitious belief that it might encourage fecundity. Thinking of her, another thought came into my mind. As far as I could recall from my reading of the papers in the case she had told the police that she had scarcely seen Mr Quenenden since his retirement, save on isolated occasions when he had taken her to the Chelsea Flower Show. Professor Huntingford had estimated that adamantifera had been growing in her garden for at least a couple of years. She did not seem to have mentioned the dates of her visits to Chelsea with old Quenenden, and he might have given her a cutting or rootlet from the plant on one of those outings. But would he not have wanted to know how it flourished – would it not have been simple politeness on her part to tell him? Its existence in her garden implied a communication between them that was not implied in her statement to the police. I wished more than ever that we could find Miss Sutherland.

  A peculiarity in the entry about adamantifera in Quenenden’s Flora also struck me. I had browsed through the book during my meal, and although I could not pretend to have read it thoroughly – it was a considerable tome – I had gathered a fair sample of its style. In every entry that I’d read Quenenden had described the types of soil in which the plant he was concerned with flourished. Apart from the reference to ‘clay’, which by itself meant little, the soil content of the habitat of adamantifera was not mentioned. Deliberately? Or scientific caution, in that he did not then know enough about the plant to risk any firm conclusions? One could not know.

  *

  I took a cab to Meredith Boscombe’s house and got there a few minutes before ten. It had one of those speaker arrangements by which a visitor has to announce his name, after which the door can be opened electrically by someone inside the house. I said ‘Peter Blair’, and was somewhat startled to hear Boscombe’s voice emerge from some fitting in the door-jamb that I had not noticed, inviting me to come in. The door opened with the sense of magic that such electrical contrivances still produce in people of my age, but which I suppose are accepted as part of the natural world by anyone born into the era of electronic gadgetry. Boscombe met me in the hall, and the door closed and clicked shut behind me.

  He took me into his study, a pleasant room on the first floor of his elegant eighteenth-century house, the walls lined with books, mostly paperbacks, that looked as if they were actually read. Boscombe himself seemed drawn and tired. He offered me a whisky, which I accepted, and poured one for himself. ‘It is good of you to come – I’m sorry it had to be so late,’ he said, adding, ‘I suppose you have made no progress in this detestable affair?’

  I thought I could comfort him a little. ‘In the sense of discovering who is behind it, no,’ I said. ‘But in the sense of putting things a little more into perspective, I’m not sure. My own feeling is that you have no very immediate cause for alarm.’

  ‘How can you say that? The man is demanding the vast sum of a million pounds, with the alternative of raking up a past which, with the lying interpretation he intends to put on it, must damage me for the rest of my life. Even without the lying interpretation, it is still painful to me, and I have gone through hell in these past weeks.’

  ‘I’m afraid you were meant to – and the best weapon you can fight back with is to have courage to ignore the threats. Has it occurred to you that they are extremely curious threats?’

  ‘No. They are horribly real to me – and they reveal a knowledge of my past life, and a wish to hurt me, that are horrible to contemplate.’

  ‘Again, I think that is intended. As a demand for money, the threats so far have made no advance whatever – they remain vague, and you have been asked to do nothing specific in the way of producing the money. If the blackmailer is really trying to get money out of you, he is going about it in a strangely incompetent way. My feeling is that his prime concern is to fill your mind with such worry that you will not think of taking some action which might seriously damage him.’

  He poured both of us another drink. ‘It’s an extraordinary theory, and I don’t see how there can be anything in it,’ he said. ‘I know of no one whom I am in any special position to damage, even if I wished to cause such damage, which I don’t. I have political opponents, of course, and in my financial career there are doubtless some people with no great love for me, but I can honestly say that I hurt no one unfairly in getting the better of a deal. There are people who got the better of me for that matter, but I bear them no particular malice.’

  ‘I have brought a tape-recorder with the voice of the man who calls himself Brand. I want you to listen to the recording several times, and to try to recall any impression it may give you of the personality of the caller.’

  We went over the record till I was sick of it. He listened intently to each playback, but in the end shook his head. ‘If I have any impression of personality it is of a kind of no-personality,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but I fear that your efforts to help me are no good.’

  ‘I can understand your impatience, but try to think a little more deeply. If your blackmailer is somebody who is afraid of you rather than anyone who has given you cause to be afraid of him, would he not go out of his way to disguise his personality? You may not know why you are dangerous to him, but his whole approach suggests that you are, or that he thinks you are. Cast your mind back to your period in Africa. Did you have many visitors to your farm?’

  ‘No, it was far too remote.’

  ‘People must have turned up sometimes.’

  ‘Well, only the sort of people you’d expect. Some of the staff of the Christian Mission would come over occasionally, and there was a young agricultural officer – the agricultural man for Quenenden’s district – who came once or twice. I suppose there may have been a few other people, but I can’t recall them.’

  ‘Can you remember the agricultural officer’s name?’

  ‘No. I saw him only a couple of times, and it was a long time ago.’

  ‘He would have been English?’

  ‘Oh, yes. In the old days there was a Colonial Agricultural Service that was part of the Government, at least, it came under the Government. It would send round people to advise on improvements to native systems of farming and stock-raising, to encourage forest industries, and so on. I remember the chap who came to me advising me to try a new variety of coffee bean. I might have done it if I hadn’t given up the place after Gita’s death.’

  ‘What happened to the farm after you lef
t?’

  ‘Nothing. I had all the problems of Gita’s inheritance on my hands, and as soon as those were settled all I wanted to do was to clear out of the country for ever. There wasn’t much of a market for farms as remote as mine. I suppose I could have sold it for something if I’d tried hard enough, but I didn’t even try. Mine wasn’t the first abandoned hope in Africa.’

  ‘How big was the farm?’

  ‘Well, there was quite a lot of land, nine or ten square miles, I suppose. But most of it wasn’t any good, though I’d plans for clearing more of it if I’d stayed. There were a few hundred acres of fair coffee land near the river, but the rest of the river land was bush, and then it rose steeply from the Ga plain to the Kandini Heights – that’s a kind of outlying ridge to the central massif of equatorial Africa, the highlands drained by the Ga river. I didn’t grow anything on the higher land. It was used a bit for grazing cattle. I didn’t have any herd myself, but I let the local people use the land as they liked.’

  ‘Since it wasn’t sold, the area would still be yours?’

  ‘In theory, I suppose it would. In practice I don’t know. The Mpugan Government has taken over and redistributed a lot of the more important estates, but mine was remote and unprofitable, and as far as I know it’s been left to go back to bush. They haven’t nationalised it – at least, if they have, they haven’t bothered to tell me. Whether I could reclaim it I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, because I’ve not the slightest intention of going back there. I liked the local people, they were pretty good to me, and they’re welcome to whatever used to be mine.’

  ‘That agricultural officer you spoke of – would he have been on Mr Quenenden’s staff?’

  ‘Quenenden was District Commissioner – that is, he was the Colonial Government’s chief representative for the whole district. As such, all local Government services came under him, but the specialised services, like the agricultural service, were also responsible to their own authorities and the D.C. wouldn’t necessarily have had much to do with the running of their day to day affairs.’

  ‘The agricultural officer would have known Mr Quenenden?’

  ‘Lord, yes. It was a small place, and everybody knew everybody. Besides, Quenenden was in a way his boss.’

  ‘What happened to the officers of all these various services on independence?’

  ‘More or less anything. The older ones like Quenenden took pensions, some of the others stayed on to work for the new Government, or were transferred to some branch of the home civil service, or got jobs for themselves somewhere else. What happened to the young man who came to see me I haven’t any idea. Does it matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably not, but he is a link of a sort with Quenenden, and as such I’d like to know where he is, and what he’s doing. By the way, I haven’t had a chance to tell you yet, but I called on one of your brothers-in-law, the one running a travel agency, and he bears out your own view entirely. He seems genuinely grateful to you, and certainly has no ill-feelings about your wife’s inheritance.’

  ‘You seem to have been inquiring into me fairly thoroughly.’

  ‘How else could we help? I thought you might be pleased to know that your own observation to me had been confirmed.’

  ‘Sorry. I feel smirched by the whole vile business. Forgive me if I seem exasperated.’

  ‘Of course. And try to be a little comforted by the possibility that somebody is more afraid of you than you have any need to be of him.’

  *

  It was too late to do anything more that night, but as soon after nine o’clock next morning as I thought a managing director might decently have got to his office I rang Sharpe and Wilberforce Ltd, the big firm of seed merchants for whom Eustace Quenenden had apparently worked in some capacity from time to time. Their headquarters were in Kent, and although I got through to the offices without difficulty it was much harder to persuade Mr James Wilberforce’s secretary to let me speak to the man himself. Eventually, a discreet mention of police inquiries into ‘a certain matter’ which Mr Wilberforce would doubtless want to deal with personally overcame her protective screen, and I asked him if I could come down to see him. He was reluctant to agree without knowing more precisely what I wanted to see him about, and as I had no wish to say anything about Quenenden over an office telephone we were rather at an impasse. I then pulled out the Home Office, saying that a matter of great delicacy had arisen which could not be discussed on the phone, but on which his views might be important, and he agreed to see me at two thirty that afternoon. This suited me quite well, for it allowed time for getting hold of whatever information the Customs people at Southampton might have for me before talking to the seed merchant.

  *

  I don’t know what I expected from Southampton, and whatever it was our Customs man did not tell me when I telephoned him at noon. He said instead. ‘I’ve found out about that consignment at Southampton, but it seems so extraordinary that I should like to talk to you about it. Will you be in the department if I come along now?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘because I’ve got to go down to Kent for early this afternoon, and I’m not at the department – I’m ringing from my place in the Temple. But I can easily get to you – if I’m lucky in picking up a cab in Fleet Street I should be with you at the City in fifteen minutes or so.’

  ‘Good. I’ll be expecting you. Will you have time for some lunch?’

  ‘Doubtfully. But it’s nice of you to offer.’

  *

  HM Customs is among the most ancient of English institutions, and its senior officers have a slight air about them of being Lord High Chancellors (or perhaps Lord High Executioners). Actually, although they sometimes have to deal with some thoroughly nasty characters, those whom I have met have always been personally among the kindliest (and most intelligent) of men. Our man was no exception – he wore a rose in his buttonhole, and would have been delighted to discuss his roses if I had let him. But we had to discuss the wooden box that had turned up at Southampton.

  ‘You may find it hard to believe,’ he said, ‘but your box contained nothing but earth.’

  ‘As I grow older I am surprised by less and less. Were your people puzzled by it?’

  ‘Yes, and that is why I wanted to see you – to explain all that was done. Preventive men – alas, with some cause – tend to be suspicious by nature, and a box apparently packed with earth could conceal a number of highly dutiable, or undesirable, constituents – jewels, or drugs, for example. This consignment was, therefore, delayed for some days while the earth was sifted, and subjected to fairly detailed analysis.’

  ‘Were you able to discover the consignor – where the box came from?’

  ‘Yes, it had the usual customs declaration form attached to it. It was sent by the Rev. Father Jacob Simpson, of the Christian Mission, Otaro, in Mpuga, and the contents were declared as “Soil samples for agricultural research”.’

  ‘And what did you discover?’

  ‘More puzzling still – nothing! The earth was of a clayey consistency, but the most careful sifting revealed nothing secreted in it. There were a few gravel-like small stones that presumably were normal constituents of the soil, but they were of no value. A chemical analysis was carried out and a copy is in the post. The analysis may mean something to you, but all it meant to us was that the contents of the box were innocuous, and precisely as stated on the customs declaration. We have another responsibility that also had to be met. Our own Ministry of Agriculture is rightly concerned about the possible introduction to Britain of plant pests or diseases, and there are various regulations about the import of plants and related products. So a bacterial examination of this consignment of earth was also carried out. Again, the results were negative – I mean, they showed nothing that could be harmful. Once all this had been done the box was released to the forwarding agents for dispatch to its final destination.’

  ‘You’ve done marvellously in a very short time. You may or may not know t
hat the recipient of the box of earth was murdered a few weeks later, and so far there has been no progress in finding either the murderer, or, indeed, a motive for the murder. Whether the box has any relevance to this I can’t yet say. I’d like to see a copy of the chemical analysis when you get it.’

  ‘Of course. I’ve already arranged for a separate copy to be posted to you directly at the department.’

  I declined his offer of lunch, and had a drink and a sandwich on the way to Charing Cross and my train into Kent.

  *

  As those who receive its sumptuously illustrated catalogues will know, Sharpe and Wilberforce is a substantial business. There was an original Sharpe, who traded as a herbalist in the early nineteenth century, purveying cures for everything from toothache to short-sightedness – there were no restrictions on advertising medicines then, and for all I know he did no more harm, and perhaps less, than many doctors since. His partner, the first James Wilberforce – going back four generations now – was an adventurous traveller in China and the Himalayas, bringing back many plants that are today familiar in English gardens. When Sharpe died Wilberforce acquired the business and continued trading under the old name, but he gradually dropped the medicinal side and developed the firm as general seedsmen and suppliers of garden sundries, a development carried on with great success by his descendants. The firm’s offices, a neat block of modern buildings set in acres of garden, reflected its prosperity. The commissionaire to whom I reported was impressed by the ‘Colonel’ on my visiting card; he looked like an ex-Guardsman, was pleased when I told him so, and said that he had been a sergeant in the Coldstreams. He conducted me into the presence of the reigning Wilberforce with something of the proprietorial air of an orderly sergeant taking a visiting officer to see his CO.