by J M Gregson
He laughed nervously at this, but found the two men giving him only polite smiles in response. Hook, ball-pen poised over his notebook, said, ‘So you did you not leave this flat at all between six and twelve midnight, sir?’
‘No, I don’t think I did. I’d eaten well at around three, when the restaurant is closed to visitors and those of us who have been supplying the meals eat a late lunch. I made myself a snack here at about eight, watched a little television, and enjoyed a couple of whiskies. I’m not a big drinker, but I like to finish off a heavy working weekend with a malt whisky, unless I’m going out.’
He wondered if they would ask him to name the programmes he had watched, perhaps even to give them some account of what they had contained. But Hook merely nodded as he wrote. When he had finished, he said unexpectedly, ‘Was Mr Cooper the sort of man who made enemies easily?’
It was a chance to implicate others, to divert attention away from himself. But he hadn’t had time to think about it. It wouldn’t do to seem too eager. ‘I don’t think so. Why do you ask that?’
‘For the obvious reason that someone has chosen to kill him. And because I’ve always found that the man in charge of things makes more enemies than most. He often has to take unpopular decisions which affect the lives and careers of those who work for him. Unless he’s very good at his job, some of these decisions will be unfair or ill-advised. Even when they’re not, they may be perceived as that by those who suffer from them; not many people are as objective as you claim to have been about being reprimanded.’
Hugo noted that ‘claim to have been’. This man he had taken as Sergeant Plod was an opponent to be reckoned with, despite his appearance. ‘Yes, I can see that. There were the usual rumblings you get about any boss. You’re right when you say that people get very subjective when decisions don’t suit them. But I wasn’t aware of anything beyond that. It seems a big step from grumbling about your lot to killing a man.’
‘Indeed it does. Is there anyone who can confirm that you were here for the whole of yesterday evening?’
‘No. If I’d killed Dennis Cooper, I dare say I’d have made sure there was.’
His little barb drew no response beyond a single word in Hook’s notebook. The DS looked at his half-page of notes for a second or two, then said, ‘We’d like you to continue to think about this very serious crime. If anything occurs to you which might have a connection with it, please get in touch with this number immediately. Anything you have to say will be strictly in confidence.’
They left then, without pressing him any further. He reviewed what had happened and couldn’t be certain whether this had been merely a routine gathering of information, as they’d implied when they asked to see him, or whether they regarded him as a serious candidate for murder. At least they hadn’t asked him about his computer, which had stood like an accusation on the table a yard or two to the right of them throughout.
Indeed, they hadn’t pressed him at all about his private life or about how he came to be working here. What he thought of as his hobby was against the law; the group wouldn’t need to be so secretive about it otherwise. But he couldn’t see how Lambert or Hook could possibly know about that. Probably they wouldn’t even be interested.
They were only interested in murder, so he’d better give his full attention to that.
TEN
Lorna Green was not working at Westbourne Park on the Monday when the body was discovered. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday were her days for voluntary work.
She had arranged to take her mother to see some old friends in Monmouth. They’d been neighbours of the Greens for many years. Lorna remembered lying in bed as a child and listening to raucous laughter from downstairs after one of her parents’ dinner parties. They’d been younger then than she was now; she could imagine her dad and Mr Williams being quite risqué in their prime, and the ladies being guiltily amused in a foursome when they might have felt the need to be disapproving in a wider public setting.
She was shocked to see how much older the Williamses looked. Harry was walking with a stick and Enid had the beginnings of a humped back. Her hands shook quite violently as she handed round cups of coffee. Because she had known them since she’d been a small girl, Lorna found it difficult to call the old couple Harry and Enid rather than Mr and Mrs Williams. When she forced herself to do so, she heard echoes of old people’s homes and hospitals, where people were now addressed by their forenames whether it pleased them or not.
Things became easier as she chatted about her work at Westbourne. She now knew as much as anyone alive about the history of the place. And she found she was better with an audience of two than the large groups she often addressed at the gardens. She felt free here to stimulate questions and to feed in amusing anecdotes about the man who had founded the garden. It seemed to her that the owner had been rather a dull man, redeemed by his passion for plants and his vision of what Westbourne might become. She told them about his mother’s frustration with the ways he was using the considerable fortune he had inherited and the rather comical spats between the two.
The Williamses were genuinely amused and plied her with questions, which kept her going for some time and relaxed all of them. Her hosts had been to the garden years ago; Harry unearthed an old brochure from the depths of his bureau and Lorna was able to tell them how the National Trust had developed the gardens in the last twenty years. She had some interesting tales of the first head gardener under the Trust, who had been a benevolent despot with his own ideas of what were the best horticultural practices. The ways in which he had been supported and occasionally outwitted by the Trust’s representatives had seen some hilarious moments.
‘I wouldn’t vouch for the absolute accuracy of that!’ she said, concluding a tale which involved water butts and sheep droppings. ‘I dare say people have added to it in the telling, as happens with most of these stories.’ Her audience agreed. Then Harry went off on an account of the eccentricities of their own gardener, who was a great help and a good worker, but also a law unto himself.
Lorna glanced at her mother, who was sitting very still on the sofa and staring unseeingly out of the window. It was an expression that had become familiar to her over the last year or so. It was the means by which Barbara Green extracted herself from surroundings she found bewildering and retreated into that strange half-world which only she understood. Her daughter sought desperately for forgotten fragments from the time when the Greens and the Williamses had been neighbours and Enid, realizing what was going on, joined in and helped her.
For a time, Barbara came alive, even contributing her own fragments of reminiscence, recalling the day when a gale had broken a clothesline and Enid’s and Harry’s smalls had ended up festooned round Barbara in her garden. Lorna had heard the tale many times before, but Enid and Harry seemed to have forgotten it, so she joined in the laughter when the story was concluded. She wondered how far the couple recognized her situation; they were undoubtedly helping things along as much as they could.
Enid Williams had planned a pleasant lunch for them, but it was a little ambitious for her diminished energy levels. Lorna cast aside the restrictions of her childhood and helped all she could in the kitchen. She was frightened that Enid would scald herself as she tried to drain heavy pans of boiling water containing new potatoes and other vegetables – she had prepared and cooked far too much for the four reduced appetites who were to sit round her table today.
Presently they were able to take the food on the trolley into the dining room, where Enid and Harry had set the table out beautifully with gleaming cutlery and cut glass before their visitors arrived. Harry emerged from the sitting room as he heard the trolley, looking thoroughly distressed. ‘Your mum’s using the bathroom, Lorna. I showed her to our downstairs cloakroom, but she insisted on going upstairs.’ He was plainly very glad to have Lorna back to take over.
Lorna heard the Williamses conferring in muted voices in the dining room as she climbed the stairs. Her mo
ther emerged not from the bathroom but one of the bedrooms beyond it. She had taken off her shoes and the lightly patterned cotton dress which had looked so well on her; she stood on the landing clad only in bra and pants. ‘I can’t find my nightdress anywhere!’ she said accusingly to Lorna. ‘And it’s high time you told me which bed I’m to sleep in!’
Lorna fought down a sense of rising panic. ‘You’re not going to bed, Mum. It’s the middle of the day and you’re not at home. Put your dress back on and we’ll go downstairs. Enid’s got a nice lunch ready for you.’
‘Enid? Who’s Enid? I don’t know any Enid.’
‘Yes you do, Mum. Come on, I’ll help you get dressed and we’ll make your hair look nice, shall we?’
Barbara looked for a moment as if she would resist, but eventually she let her daughter take her into the bathroom and slide her dress over her thin shoulders. She sat on the edge of the bath, silent as a child, whilst her thinning grey hair was combed for her. Lorna took her hand and led her carefully downstairs to where Enid and Harry Williams stood anxiously in the hall.
The meal was a muted affair, with three people making stilted conversation and trying to disguise their glances at the fourth. Barbara seemed to have recognized her hosts, but no one was sure of that. She said little but ate steadily, downing the token helping of wine which had been poured into her glass at one swallow. The others pretended not to notice that the food had gone cold whilst it waited on the table.
They went into the lounge and Barbara sat in an armchair and closed her eyes. Lorna terminated the visit as swiftly as possible. It wasn’t necessary to be polite. Everyone would now be relieved to have this over. She would phone the Williamses this evening, once she had Barbara safely in bed, and make her apologies. And the Williamses would say that there was nothing to apologize for and it wasn’t her fault and how sad life became as you grew older.
Lorna was growing used to conversations like that.
She fastened the seat belt carefully across her mother and drove carefully, as Harry Williams had reminded her she must do under stress. She put Classic FM on for her mother, so that there was no need for either of them to struggle with words. When the Radetzky March was played, she sang her way wordlessly through the tune and tapped the steering wheel to the vigorous rhythm, but Barbara did not join in as she would once have done. Lorna thought that her mother must be asleep, but when she reached the M50 she stole a glance at her. Barbara was staring vacantly at the greenery flashing past.
In the hourly Classic FM news summary, Lorna Green heard that there had been a suspicious death at Westbourne Park.
Jim Hartley was determined to play this very straight. He knew he mustn’t be obstructive, but he wouldn’t give them anything he didn’t need to.
He’d been in the boss’s office often enough before – probably more than anyone else who lived at Westbourne, he reckoned. Dennis Cooper had always emphasized that none of them would be here without the gardens and said firmly that that made the head gardener the most important employee of all. As curator, he had the widest brief and the biggest responsibility, but without the gardeners no one would be employed. Jim knew that it was Cooper who oversaw the finances of the place, who decided whether the increased success and the greater number of visitors each year warranted an extra apprentice gardener, and he was happy that it should be so. Like most dedicated gardeners, he didn’t want any involvement whatsoever in financial matters.
He conveyed all this to the chief superintendent and the detective sergeant when they’d asked him about his work here. They let him go on for longer than he’d expected, though he was a little disconcerted by the way they studied him intently whilst he spoke, as if his words carried greater weight than he thought they did. He felt like a racehorse in the paddock, being studied intently by the punters for any strengths or weaknesses which might prove significant in the race to come.
It was only when they sensed he was faltering that Lambert said rather abruptly, ‘So how would you summarize your relationship with the murder victim, Mr Hartley?’
‘Good.’ His words had been running easily whilst he spoke of the gardens and his plans, but they threatened to desert him now, when he needed to speak freely and convince these shrewd men that he was innocent. ‘He discussed all the developments quite frankly with me. We have a five-year rolling plan; we add a few new things each year, but they have to wait their turns.’
‘Did you have many disagreements?’
‘No. I can’t remember us having a real argument.’ Jim wondered if they would think that was too trite. He went back to his job details; he had studied them for so long before his interview that he still knew them almost by heart. ‘I was involved in all the thinking and planning from the outset, you see. For instance, I said a few months ago that the rose garden was looking rather tired and suggested some of the modern disease-resistant shrub roses which might replace older ones that are failing. A lot of the planning comes directly from my suggestions. It was made clear to me when I was appointed that I was to suggest and plan the developments here, rather than be just a working gardener who implemented other people’s ideas.’ He knew he’d mentioned thinking and planning too much, but it had seemed important to him to make his point.
‘What kind of man was Mr Cooper?’
Jim hadn’t expected anything so vague. He felt as though they were studying him rather than Cooper when they asked things like that. Perhaps they wanted to know if he’d been harbouring some grievance against the dead man. He said stubbornly, ‘We got on well, as I’ve just told you. I liked him.’
‘Fine. But that doesn’t tell me a lot about Mr Cooper.’
Jim endured a moment of panic. It seemed that everything he could say about Cooper’s character would rebound on him and place him at the centre of this business, when he desired more than anything to present himself as merely a spectator watching events. ‘I’d say he was rather a private man. It wasn’t easy to get close to him.’
‘Fair enough. But from what you’ve told us, you were closer to him than anyone outside his family.’ Lambert saw a protest coming and pressed on. ‘You met him more often, both for long-term planning and for day-to-day decisions, than anyone else who works here. You must have some ideas about his strengths and his weaknesses – was he a womanizer, for instance?’
‘No. Well, not that I’m aware of. But I’m usually the last to know about things like that.’
There was a flash of bitterness here, which they noted for future attention. But at the moment they were concerned with what he could tell them about Cooper. ‘By definition, a murder victim has at least one serious enemy. Usually we find a man who excites that sort of rage has more than one. We need all the help that people like you can give us.’
‘Yes. I can see that.’ Jim forced himself to stop and think. He’d been quite a bright boy at school and he’d passed all his horticultural exams without much trouble. He’d been pleased to find he could still write quite well when he made his reports about the gardens. But the spoken word was different; gardening wasn’t a trade where you had to express complicated thoughts in words. He said carefully, ‘Dennis Cooper didn’t give away much about himself. But he liked to know everything he could about others. He certainly seemed to know what was in everyone’s file.’
‘Which was probably partly why he was efficient as a leader. You need to know the strengths as well as the weaknesses of your staff.’
‘Yes. Dennis seemed to be more interested in the weaknesses.’
There, he’d said it. Blurted it out in a few words. It showed his resentment against the man, when he’d meant to keep everything bland and unrevealing. He’d no idea at this moment whether this was a good or a bad thing. Lambert seemed to be trying to reassure him as he said, ‘It’s much better that we find this out now from you than later from someone else. That way, we might have thought you were trying to conceal something.’ He gave Hartley a grim smile. ‘You need to enlarge a little on what you�
��ve just told us, I’m afraid.’
‘He wanted to know everything about the private lives of the apprentices we took on. He said I was to inform him of anything irregular which went on. “Irregular” was one of his favourite words, I think.’
‘Perhaps he felt a responsibility towards these young people who are still feeling their way into a dangerous working world. Perhaps with the ones living on site he thought he had a responsibility to supervise their development.’
‘Perhaps. And when only one or two of them can be taken on to the permanent staff at the end of their training, you could say that he had a right to know everything to help his decisions. But more often than not he takes my recommendations anyway. When lads are on drugs or binge drinking, it shows up very quickly in their work, when that work involves hard physical labour. We’re lucky here: we can pick and choose our apprentices. We don’t get many bad ’uns.’
‘Are you saying the curator had an unhealthy interest in the young men working here?’
‘No, nothing like that! It was all perfectly proper. He just seemed a bit of an old woman when it came to storing away bits of gossip. Am I allowed to say that?’
Lambert grinned wearily. ‘Probably not. But please carry on.’
‘Well, it wasn’t just the apprentices. Dennis Cooper wanted all the information he could get on the senior staff here, as well. He wanted to know where the chef went when he went off the site.’
‘And did you tell him?’ The grey eyebrows arched above the grey eyes in innocent enquiry.
‘No. I couldn’t if I’d wanted to, because I don’t know. My family’s enough for me to worry about. I keep myself to myself.’
‘But you think the curator liked to pry into people’s private lives?’