by Dick Francis
‘Two years,’ he said defensively. ‘I’ve worked here two years.’ He seemed to come quite suddenly to a decision to believe me, and almost apologetically lowered the gun. ‘This house is supposed to be locked up,’ he said. ‘Then I see you moving about upstairs.’
‘Upsetting,’ I agreed.
He gestured to Malcolm’s things. ‘You’d better pack them again.’
I began to do so under his still watchful eye.
‘It was brave of you to come in here,’ I said, ‘if you thought I was a burglar.’
He braced his shoulders in an old automatic movement. ‘I was in the army once.’ He relaxed and shrugged. ‘Tell you the truth, I was coming in quietly-like to phone the police, then you started down the stairs.’
‘And… the gun?’
‘Brought it with me just in case. I go after rabbits… I keep the gun handy.’
I nodded. It was the gardener’s own gun, I thought. Malcolm had never owned one, as far as I knew.
‘Has my father paid you for the week?’ I said.
His eyes at once brightened hopefully. ‘He paid me last Friday, same as usual. Then Saturday morning he phoned my house to tell me to come round here to see to the dogs. Take them home with me, same as I always do when he’s away. So I did. But he was gone off the line before I could ask him how long he’d be wanting me to have them.’
I pulled out my cheque-book and wrote him a cheque for the amount he specified. Arthur Bel I brook, he said his name was. I tore out the cheque and gave it to him and asked him if there was anyone else who needed wages.
He shook his head. ‘The cleaner left when Mrs Pembroke was done in… er… murdered. Said she didn’t fancy the place any more.’
‘Where exactly was Mrs Pembroke… er… murdered?’
‘I’ll show you if you like.’ He stored the cheque away in a pocket. ‘Outside in the greenhouse.’
He took me, however, not as I’d imagined to the rickety old familiar greenhouse sagging against a mellowed wall in the kitchen garden, but to a bright white octagonal wrought-iron construction like a fancy bird-cage set as a summer-house on a secluded patch of lawn. From far outside, one could clearly see the flourishing geraniums within.
‘Well, well,’ I said.
Arthur Bellbrook uttered ‘Huh’ as expressing his disapproval and opened the metal-and-glass door.
‘Cost a fortune to heat, will this place,’ he observed. ‘And it got too hot in the summer. The only thing as will survive in it is geraniums. Mrs Pembroke’s passion, geraniums.’
An almost full sack of potting compost lay along one of the work surfaces, the top side of it slit from end to end to make the soil mixture easy to reach. A box of small pots stood nearby, some of them occupied by cuttings.
I looked at the compost with revulsion. ‘Is that where…?’ I began.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Poor lady. There’s no one ought to die like that, however difficult they could be.’
‘No,’ I agreed. A thought struck me. ‘It was you who found her, wasn’t it?’
‘I went home like always at four o’clock, but I was out for a stroll about seven, and I thought I would just come in to see what state she’d left the place in. See, she played at gardening. Never cleaned the tools, things like that.’ He looked at the boarded floor as if still seeing her there. ‘She was lying face down, and I turned her over. She was dead all right. She was white like always but she had these little pink dots in her skin. They say you get those dots from asphyxiation. They found potting compost in her lungs, poor lady.’ He had undoubtedly been shocked and moved at the time, but there was an echo of countless repetitions in his voice now and precious little feeling.
‘Thank you for showing me,’ I said.
He nodded and we both went out, shutting the door behind us.
i don’t think Mr Pembroke liked this place much,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Last spring, when she chose it, he said she could have it only if he couldn’t see it from the house. Otherwise he wouldn’t pay the bill. I wasn’t supposed to hear, of course, but there you are, I did. They’d got to shouting, you see.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do see.’ Shouting, slammed doors, the lot.
‘They were all lovey-dovey when I first came here,’ he said, ‘but then I reckon her little ways got to him, like, and you could see it all going downhill like a runaway train. I’m here all day long, see, and in and out of the house, and you couldn’t miss it.’
‘What little ways?’ I asked casually.
He glanced at me sideways with reawakening suspicions, ‘I thought you were his son. You must have known her.’
‘I didn’t come here. I didn’t like her.’
He seemed to find that easily believable.
‘She could be as sweet as sugar…’ He paused, remembering. ‘I don’t know what you’d call it, really, what she was. But for instance last year, as well as the ordinary vegetables for the house, I grew a special little patch separately… fed them, and so on… to enter in the local show. Just runner beans, carrots and onions, for one of the produce classes. I’m good at that, see? Well, Mrs Pembroke happened to spot them a day or two before I was ready to harvest. On the Thursday, with the show on the Saturday. “What huge vegetables,” she says, and I tell her I’m going to exhibit them on Saturday. And she looks at me sweet as syrup and says, “Oh no, Arthur. Mr Pembroke and I both like vegetables, as you know. We’ll have some of these for dinner tomorrow and I’ll freeze the rest. They are our vegetables, aren’t they, Arthur? If you want to grow vegetables to show, you must do it in your own garden in your own time.” And blow me, when I came to work the next morning, the whole little patch had been picked over, beans, carrots, onions, the lot. She’d taken them, right enough. Pounds and pounds of them, all the best ones. Maybe they ate some, but she never did bother with the freezing. On the Monday, I found a load of the beans in the dustbin.’
‘Charming,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘That was her sort of way. Mean, but within her rights.’
‘I wonder you stayed,’ I said.
‘It’s a nice garden, and I get on all right with Mr Pembroke.’
‘But after he left?’
‘He asked me to stay on to keep the place decent. He paid me extra, so I did.’
Walking slowly, we arrived back at the kitchen door. He smelled faintly of compost and old leaves and the warm fertility of loam, like the gardener who’d reigned in this place in my childhood.
‘I grew up here,’ I said, feeling nostalgia.
He gave me a considering stare. ‘Are you the one who built the secret room?’
Startled, I said, ‘It’s not really a room. Just a sort of triangular-shaped space.’
‘How do you open it?’
‘You don’t.’
‘I could use it,’ he said obstinately, ‘for an apple store.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s too small. It’s not ventilated. It’s useless, really. How do you know of it?’
He pursed his lips and looked knowing. ‘I could see the kitchen garden wall looked far too thick from the back down at the bottom corner and I asked old Fred about it, who used to be gardener here before he retired. He said Mr Pembroke’s son once built a sort of shed there. But there’s no door, I told him. He said it was the son’s business, he didn’t know anything about it himself, except that he thought it had been bricked up years ago. So if it was you who built it, how do you get in?’
‘You can’t now,’ I said. ‘I did brick it up soon after I built it to stop one of my half-brothers going in there and leaving dead rats for me to find.’
‘Oh.’ He looked disappointed. ‘I’ve often wondered what was in there.’
‘Dead rats, dead spiders, a lot of muck.’
He shrugged. ‘Oh well, then.’
‘You’ve been very helpful,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell my father.’
His lined face showed satisfaction. ‘You tell him I’ll keep the dogs and everything in goo
d nick until he comes back.’
‘He’ll be grateful.’
I picked up the suitcase from inside the kitchen door, gave a last look at Moira’s brilliant geraniums, vibrantly alive, shook the grubby hand of Arthur Bellbrook, and (in the car hired that morning in London) drove away towards Epsom.
Collecting my own things from my impersonal suburban flat took half the time. Unlike Malcolm, I liked things bare and orderly and, meaning always to move to somewhere better but somehow never going out to search, I hadn’t decked the sitting-room or the two small bedrooms with anything brighter than new patterned curtains and a Snaffles print of Sergeant Murphy winning the 1923 Grand National.
I changed from Malcolm’s trousers into some of my own, packed a suitcase and picked up my passport. I had no animals to arrange for, nor any bills pressing. Nothing anywhere to detain me.
The telephone answering machine’s button glowed red, announcing messages taken. I rewound the tape and listened to the disembodied voices while I picked out of the fridge anything that would go furry and disgusting before my return.
Something, since I’d left the day before, had galvanised the family into feverish activity, like stirring an anthill with a stick.
A girlish voice came first, breathless, a shade anxious. ‘Ian, this is Serena. Why are you always out? Don’t you sleep at home? Mummy wants. to know where Daddy is. She knows you and he aren’t speaking, she’s utterly thick to expect you to know, but anyway she insisted I ask you. So if you know, give me a ring back, OK?’
Serena, my half-sister, daughter of Alicia, the one child born to Alicia in wedlock. Serena, seven years my junior, lay in my distant memory chiefly as a small fair-haired charmer who’d followed me about like a shadow, which had flattered my twelve-year-old ego disgracefully. She liked best to sit on Malcolm’s lap, his arms protectively around her, and from him, it had seemed to me, she could conjure a smile when he was angry and pretty dresses when she had a cupboardful.
Alicia, in sweeping out of the house when Serena was six, taking with her not only Serena but her two older boys, had left me alone in the suddenly quiet house, alone in the frilly kitchen, alone and untormented in the garden. There had been a time then when I would positively have welcomed back Gervase, the older boy, despite his dead rats and other rotten tricks; and it had actually been in the vacuum after his departure that I contrived the bricking up of my kitchen-wall room, not while he was there to jeer at it.
Grown up, Gervase still displayed the insignia of a natural bully: mean tightening of the mouth, jabbing forefinger, cold patronising stare down the nose, visible enjoyment of others’ discomfiture. Serena, now tall and slim, taught aerobic dancing for a living, bought clothes still by the cartload and spoke to me only when she wanted something done.
‘Mummy wants to know where Daddy is …’ The childish terms sat oddly in the ear, somehow, coming from someone now twenty-six; and she alone of all his children had resisted calling Malcolm, Malcolm.
The next caller was Gervase himself. He started crossly, ‘I don’t like these message contraptions. I tried to get you all evening yesterday and I hear nothing but your priggish voice telling me to leave my name and telephone number, so this time I’m doing it, but under protest. This is your brother Gervase, as no doubt you realise, and it is imperative we find Malcolm at once. He has gone completely off his rocker. It’s in your own interest to find him, Ian. We must all bury our differences and stop him spending the family money in this reckless way.’ He paused briefly. ‘I suppose you do know he has given half a million… half a million… to a busload of retarded children? I got a phone call from some stupid gushing female who said, “Oh Mr Pembroke, however can we thank you?” and when I asked her what for, she said wasn’t I the Mr Pembroke who had solved all their problems, Mr Malcolm Pembroke? Madam, I said, what are you talking about? So she told me. Half a million pounds. Are you listening, Ian? He’s irresponsible. It’s out of proportion. He’s got to be prevented from giving way to such ridiculous impulses. If you ask me, it’s the beginning of senility. You must find him and tell us where he’s got to, because so far as I can discover he hasn’t answered his telephone since last Friday morning when I rang him to say Alicia’s alimony had not been increased by the rate of inflation in this last quarter. I expect to hear from you without delay.’
His voice stopped abruptly on the peremptory order and I pictured him as he was now, not the muscular thick-set black-haired boy but the flabbier, overweight thirty-five-year-old stockbroker, overbearingly pompous beyond his years. In a world increasingly awash with illegitimate children, he increasingly resented his own illegitimacy, referring to it ill-temperedly on inappropriate occasions and denigrating the father who, for all his haste into bed with Alicia, had accepted Gervase publicly always as his son, and given him his surname with legal adoption.
Gervase had nonetheless been taunted early on by cruel schoolmates, developing an amorphous hatred then which later focused itself on me, Ian, the half-brother who scarcely valued or understood the distinction between his birth and mine. One could understand why he’d lashed out in those raw adolescent days, but a matter of regret, I thought, that he’d never outgrown his bitterness. It remained with him, festering, colouring his whole personality, causing people often to wriggle away from his company, erupting in didactic outbursts and wretched unjustified jealousies.
Yet his wife appeared to love him forgivingly, and had produced two children, both girls, the first of them appearing a good three years after the well-attended marriage. Gervase had said a little too often that he himself would never in any circumstances have burdened a child with what he had suffered. Gervase, to my mind, would spend his last-ever moments worrying that the word ‘illegitimate’ would appear on his death certificate.
Ferdinand, his brother, was quite different, taking illegitimacy as of little importance, a matter of paperwork, no more.
Three years younger than Gervase, a year younger than myself, Ferdinand looked more like Malcolm than any of us, a living testimony to his parentage. Along with the features, he’d inherited the financial agility but lacking Malcolm’s essential panache had carved himself a niche in an insurance company, not a multi-million fortune.
Ferdinand and I had been friends while we both lived in the house as children, but Alicia had thoroughly soured all that when she’d taken him away, dripping into all her children’s ears the relentless spite of her dispossession. Ferdinand now looked at me with puzzlement as if he couldn’t quite remember why he disliked me, and then Alicia would remind him sharply that if he wasn’t careful I would get my clutches on his, Gervase’s and Serena’s rightful shares of Malcolm’s money, and his face would darken again into unfriendliness.
It was a real pity about Ferdinand, I thought, but I never did much about it.
After Gervase on my answering machine came my mother, Joyce, very nearly incoherent with rage. Someone, it appeared, had already brought the Sporting Life to her notice. She couldn’t believe it, she said. Words failed her. (They obviously didn’t.) How could I have done anything as stupid as taking Malcolm to Newmarket Sales, because obviously I would have been there with him, it wasn’t his scene otherwise, and why had I been so deceitful that morning when I’d talked to her, and would I without fail ring her immediately, this was a crisis, Malcolm had got to be stopped.
The fourth and last message, calmer after Joyce’s hysteria, was from my half-brother Thomas, the third of Malcolm’s children, born to his first wife, Vivien.
Thomas, rising forty, prematurely bald, pale skinned, sporting a gingerish moustache, had married a weman who acidly belittled him every time she opened her mouth. (‘Of course, Thomas is absolutely useless when it comes to …’ [practically anything] and ‘if only poor Thomas was capable of commanding a suitable salary’ and ‘Dear Thomas is one of life’s failures, aren’t you, darling?’) Thomas bore it all with hardly a wince, though after years of it I observed him grow less effective and less dec
isive, not more, almost as if he had come to believe in and to act out his Berenice’s opinion of him.
‘Ian,’ Thomas said in a depressed voice, ‘this is Thomas. I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday lunchtime but you seem to be away. When you’ve read my letter, please will you ring me up.’
I’d picked up his letter from my front doormat but hadn’t yet opened it. I slit the envelope then and found that he too had a problem. I read:
Dear Ian,
Berenice is seriously concerned about Malcolm’s wicked selfishness. She, well, to be honest, she keeps on and on about the amounts he’s throwing away these days, and to be honest the only thing which has pacified her for a long time now is the thought of my eventual share of Malcolm’s money, and if he goes on spending at this rate, well my life is going to be pretty intolerable, and I wouldn’t be telling you this if you weren’t my brother and the best of the bunch, which I suppose I’ve never said until now, but sometimes I think you’re the only sane one in the family even if you do ride in those dangerous races, and, well, can you do anything to reason with Malcolm, as you’re the only one he’s likely to listen to, even though you haven’t been talking for ages, which is unbelievable considering how you used to be with each other, and I blame that money-grubbing Moira, I really do, though Berenice used to think that anything or anyone who came between you and Malcolm could only be to my benefit, because Malcolm might with luck cut you out of his will. Well, I didn’t mean to say that, old chap, but it’s what Berenice thought, to be honest, until Moira was going to take half of everything in the divorce settlement, and I really thought Berenice would have a seizure when she heard that, she was so furious. It really would save my sanity, Ian, if you could make Malcolm see that we all NEED that money. I don’t know what will happen if he goes on spending it at this rate. I do BEG you, old chap, to stop him.
Your brother Thomas.
I looked at the letter’s general incoherence and at the depth of the plea in the last few sentences with their heavily underlined words and thought of the non-stop barrage of Berenice’s disgruntlement, and felt more brotherly towards Thomas than ever before. True, I still thought he should tell his wife to swallow her bile, not spill it all out on him, corroding his self-confidence and undermining his prestige with everyone within earshot; but I did at least and perhaps at last see how he could put up with it, by soothing her with the syrup of prosperity ahead.