The Garden Plot

by Marty Wingate

  “No thanks, Malcolm.” She knew she’d get no further. “I’d better get home.”

  “Thanks for walking me back,” Pru said as they turned the corner near her house.

  “Not at all, it’s on my way,” Malcolm said. “There’s nothing like gardening to make you feel better, Pru …” His voice drifted off and Pru looked up from digging in her bag for the key to see Christopher standing at her front door. He turned and saw Pru first, then Malcolm. His face became a mask.

  “Ms. Parke. Mr. Crisp,” he said, clipping his words.

  “Inspector,” Pru said quietly.

  “Mr. Pearse,” Malcolm said, as if greeting a favorite uncle, “have you caught Jeremy’s murderer yet? Did you look into the matter of that argument between Harry and Jeremy?”

  Christopher ignored Malcolm. “Ms. Parke, I stopped by to ask you a few more questions about the day of the murder.” Christopher wore khaki trousers and a heather-blue sweater with a light tan jacket, more fancy-a-pint clothes than may-I-take-your-statement. Pru regretted her outburst at the country pub and wanted to explain herself, but she had nowhere to go with both of them in front of her. Be brave, Pru.

  “Malcolm, again, thanks so much. Would you mind, I do have something to … explain to Mr. Pearse.”

  “Not at all,” Malcolm said. “Now, Pru”—he placed a kind hand on her arm—“you mustn’t worry about people’s feelings when there’s a murder to sort out. You must tell the truth.” It seemed that Malcolm remained convinced that she knew something that she didn’t know.

  Pru stayed on the sidewalk, and Christopher came down to stand beside her as they watched Malcolm walk off. When she was sure he was out of earshot, Pru said, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you immediately about the conversation and the photos. And about looking over the wall. And I’m sorry I got angry; I sometimes think I can do everything myself.”

  “Really?” The corner of Christopher’s mouth twitched. “And I’m sorry if I sounded overbearing, but this is an open investigation.” He softened slightly. “I know I’m repeating myself, but it’s important. If you try to act on information you come across, it could put you in danger. I wouldn’t want that.”

  “Do you think Malcolm was involved?” She wondered if Christopher knew who Saxsby was.

  He watched Malcolm’s retreating figure. “Malcolm has an alibi,” he said, sounding as if he wasn’t sure he believed it. “He lives with his mother, and she said he didn’t go out at all the night before or the morning of the murder.”

  “What? He lives with his mother? He’s never said a word.”

  “She has limited mobility and spends her life on the ground floor of the house. During the day, she stays in the front sitting room, and at night, she sleeps in a bed at the back of the house. She’s hard of hearing but says she’s a light sleeper, and she swears that Malcolm did not go out.”

  “Oh, his ‘obligation.’ ” Pru remembered what Mr. Wilson had said. “Lives with his mother. Eww. Norman Bates. Are you sure she’s alive?”

  Christopher looked at her for a moment without answering and then asked, “Have you eaten? There’s an Italian place a couple of streets over. We could stop in for a bite.”

  “Gasparetti’s? That’s my favorite place.” They turned and walked up the street.

  “Did you stop by to ask me about my statement?” Pru asked.

  “No,” he said, “I did not,” and smiled at her.

  Pru readied herself to reveal the latest bits of information she had gathered, but decided to wait until after they ordered. Christopher glanced at the menu and began patting his pockets for his reading glasses, which were in the last pocket he searched. He looked slightly sheepish as he put them on. “No glasses for you, then?” he asked.

  She grinned. “Only because I have this menu memorized,” she said. “Otherwise, I’d be borrowing those from you.” She paused. “You never can seem to find them.”

  He half smiled. “It’s my own form of protest over needing them,” he said. “I never put them back in the same pocket, and so I never quite know where they are.”

  The café owner, Riccardo, had waved to Pru from across the restaurant when they arrived, but one of his waiters took their order and poured the first glasses from a bottle of the house Chianti.

  Once settled, she began. “I have more information for you, and I’m telling you immediately.”

  Christopher hesitated as he reached for his glass. “What is it?”

  “You know who Saxsby is, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Alf Saxsby, Vernona Wilson’s brother,” Christopher said.

  “Did you ask Malcolm about Saxsby? Did you tell him I was the one who overheard?”

  “I would not reveal you as the source,” Christopher said.

  “He knows it was me—he saw me,” Pru said, wondering what kind of lecture might follow this revelation.

  Christopher watched her for a moment, his face unreadable. “Malcolm said he thought it was your assistant who might have overheard something, but he said it was a misunderstanding, and that they were talking in general terms about the Wilsons. He apologized for the remarks made about you. And now, how did you”—he paused for emphasis, she knew—“find out who Saxsby is?”

  Pru wanted to hurry and explain, lest Christopher jump to what Pru knew to be the wrong conclusion. “I only found this out today when I talked with the Wilsons. Mrs. Wilson showed me a photo album so that I could see the garden they had in Hampshire. It was lovely, Christopher, a flagstone path with sun roses coming up in the cracks. A shallow fountain at the axis of two paths, with that little Mexican fleabane growing at its base. Just enough neatly trimmed yew to anchor the whole design. It wasn’t a large garden, and the borders weren’t too deep. They were just the right proportion. Mrs. Wilson said Simon included lots of late color, so it wasn’t the typical spring-bash display. They had a wonderful stone wall, and he had several tender vines growing on—”

  “Pru.”

  “Yes?” Pru said, still seeing visions of hardy fuchsias in bloom.

  “Alf Saxsby.”

  “Oh, sorry.” She paused as the server set her plate of pasta down. “I didn’t see him the other day—only Sammy did. But an old photo fell out of the front of the album I was looking at today. I picked it up, and it was of a boy in a school uniform. When I turned it over, I saw the name: Alf Saxsby.”

  “Did you question Mrs. Wilson?” Christopher asked.

  “She had already mentioned Alf,” Pru said, “when I first met her. Alf, her brother, owned their house in Hampshire, and they had to move because he sold it out from under them with no warning. Apparently he’s been in trouble off and on most of his adult life.”

  “And were you talking with Malcolm about Alf Saxsby?” Christopher asked.

  “Well …” Tread lightly here, Pru thought, you are not a police officer. “I ran into Malcolm this afternoon, and we decided to have a drink …”

  Christopher’s eyes began to narrow.

  Pru hurried on. “And we were talking about roses and other garden topics. I thought if I could just turn the conversation in the direction of the Wilsons, then it wouldn’t look as if I was interrogating him, but he might say something useful.” Pru looked at Christopher. “Do I get a lecture?”

  “I don’t dare—we haven’t finished our meal. And did you find out anything?”

  “No,” Pru said, acknowledging her failure. “Not even when I said that I knew he saw me in the garden. I didn’t want to admit to knowing that Saxsby and Alf were the same person. I did mention Mrs. Wilson’s brother, Alf, and something about the house in Hampshire, and he admitted that they had met, but then he clammed up.”

  “Was Malcolm asking you questions? About the Wilsons or the shed or what you had seen?”

  “Trying to get information out of me the way I was out of him? Yes, I believe he was. He keeps harping on what I saw that I might not remember. I don’t know what that would be.”

  She looked
up to see him studying her face. “Pru”—he reached across the table and took her hand—“an investigation may turn dangerous at any time …” He spoke with quiet concern, and she responded in kind.

  “Christopher, I don’t need protecting. I can take care of myself,” she said as she held on to his hand. He took a breath, but she kept going. “All right, here’s one more thing I found out today. A couple of years ago, Alf was hanging around one of Mr. Wilson’s digs down in Hampshire.” She couldn’t help being a bit proud of all the information she could hand over, but at the same time … “I didn’t ask about that. It just came out in conversation.”

  “Right,” Christopher said. “As long as you weren’t using any harsh interrogation tactics.”

  She smiled. “I thought it would be helpful for you to know,” she said in an offhanded manner. “I am not a police officer—I remember that.”

  Christopher laughed, let go of her hand, and went back to eating. But Pru couldn’t quite leave the subject yet. She thought again about the easy access Malcolm had to the Wilsons’ garden. “Do you consider Malcolm a suspect?”

  “No. At least not a likely suspect.”

  “Why not?”

  Christopher took a breath. “Do you really want to hear this?”

  “Yes.”

  “From the angle of the blows to the head, we can tell that the person who struck had to be taller than Malcolm.” Pru remembered the sight of Jeremy’s bloodied corpse. She put her fork down and wished she hadn’t ordered the pomodoro sauce.

  “But if Jeremy had been kneeling, then he would be shorter than Malcolm,” she said.

  “If Jeremy had been kneeling, most likely it would have been on the far side of the mosaic, where the hole was dug—that’s where the blood was on the soil—and that is almost against the back wall. There was too little room for anyone to get behind him and …”

  Pru had taken a sip of her wine and found she needed to use both hands to put the glass back on the table. How does anyone get used to dealing with violent death? she thought.

  “Right,” Christopher said, “that’s enough on that subject.”

  “Yes, yes, let’s talk about something else.”

  He studied her for a moment, and she held his gaze.

  “Do you really get around London to all your jobs on the Tube and bus?” he asked. She accepted the lob and launched into a description of a typical day in her gardening life.

  Although they arrived earlyish for dinner, they stayed well past the rush and into the late-arrivals time, and after the plates had been cleared, they continued to explore each other’s lives.

  Pru told Christopher about the time, early in her career at the Dallas Arboretum, when she had been assigned the task of turning the water in all the fountains green for St. Patrick’s Day. She had used the wrong kind of dye, and the fountains had to be not only drained, but also the sides and bottoms scrubbed hard to get the color off—a task that was left to her alone.

  Christopher told Pru of his first investigation as a uniformed officer—tracking down the culprit who stole a highly prized and quite expensive African gray parrot owned by the local magistrate in Lower Upham. As it happened, the magistrate’s hunting dog had nicked the bird, but that was learned only after an unpleasant discovery on the kitchen floor.

  She compared English weather with the Texas climate. “It’s really hot in the summer, in the nineties—thirty-five degrees Celsius—for three months at least.”

  “Well, it sounds fine for holiday temperatures, but difficult day to day.”

  “It’s dreadful,” Pru said. “Funny, I never thought of it that way when I lived there. It was just the way things were. But I wouldn’t want to go back to it.” She caught herself off guard as, unbidden, the thought came to her that she may have to. “Were you born near Stow?” she asked to change the subject.

  “No, I grew up in Kent, near Edenbridge. But I went to Oxford, and that’s where Phyl and I met. We lived near Cheltenham when we were married.” He reached for the wine bottle and poured them each a last glass. “But that was a long time ago. We’ve been divorced for fifteen years.”

  “When did you move to London?” Pru asked.

  “About that time,” he said. “I started at the Met and climbed my way up to DCI over the years. I spent all my days and many evenings working and gave up most everything else in my life.” He gave a small shrug. “I’ve been quite successful at that.”

  There, Pru thought. A glimpse behind that polished police exterior.

  “Getting lost in work is an easy excuse, isn’t it?” she said. He regarded her with a smile.

  “You have a son?” Pru asked, remembering Phyl’s visit to the Badger Care booth. Christopher nodded. “Where does he go to school?”

  “Graham’s at Sheffield, studying environmental science.”

  “Does he want to work in restoration? Policy? Engineering?”

  “Soil science, although beyond that I’ll have to let the two of you discuss it.”

  Pru played with the last few strands of pasta on her plate and thought about meeting his family. “Edenbridge—that’s near Hever Castle, Anne Boleyn’s family home. When William Waldorf Astor built the gardens there, beginning in 1904—well, had them built—he diverted the river to make the big lake at the end of the Italian walk. Eight hundred men stomped down the clay soil to form the bottom of the lake.” She shook her head. “No head gardener has that kind of manpower at her fingertips these days.”

  “I find it not too difficult to imagine you could handle that,” Christopher said.

  “I applied for a post at a private garden,” she said, “just outside Tunbridge Wells. I had an interview last week.”

  “Tunbridge Wells,” he said, almost to himself. “Tunbridge Wells is close.”

  “Yes, it is close,” Pru replied, and wondered, close to what—Edenbridge or London? After that she remembered the short conversation with Ned. “But I don’t think I got it.”

  Riccardo stopped by their table after Christopher had excused himself when his phone rang. Pru had become a frequent enough customer that she and Riccardo were on speaking terms. “Pru, he looks very nice. I’m happy for you.” She loved listening to Riccardo speak, as he had that Italian way of adding a vowel to the end of every word, whether one existed or not.

  Again, Pru felt the need to correct this misconception. “Oh, no, Riccardo, we’re only friends.”

  “I know what friends look like, Pru.” He dropped his smile. “I hope you won’t be leaving us now that the Clarkes are back in London.”

  “What? No, Riccardo, they aren’t … Did you see them? Did you talk with them?” Why do people keep seeing the Clarkes? she thought. First Wilf at the pub, now Riccardo. They couldn’t be back—Jo never said a word.

  Riccardo looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Pru, I didn’t mean to upset you. Maybe it wasn’t them. It could’ve been someone else I mistook for them, only because they were walking along Grovehill Square on Sunday.”

  Sunday—she wasn’t home Sunday. If they were back in London, why didn’t they tell her? Why didn’t Jo tell her?

  Christopher came back to the table, and held Pru’s chair for her as she stood up. Riccardo said, “Sir, I hope you and Pru enjoyed your meal.”

  As they headed for the door, Christopher said, “You’ve become well-known in the neighborhood.”

  “It’s better than eating alone every night,” Pru said, and then cringed at such a pitiful statement.

  “I believe I know what you mean.”

  When they stepped out, it was raining—more than a drizzle, less than a downpour. Definitely more than she was prepared for. “Oh, dear.”

  Christopher reached inside his jacket pocket and brought out a collapsible umbrella. “An Englishman is always prepared,” he said. He popped it open, put his arm around her, drew her close, and held the umbrella above them. “Shall we?”

  Pru supposed she would’ve stayed drier if they had walked faster
, but she didn’t really care, and apparently neither did he. The rain made enough noise drumming on the umbrella to make conversation difficult, so they walked together in silence, his hand slipping from her arm up onto her shoulder, his fingers lightly touching her bare skin, which made her shiver unintentionally. When Christopher stopped walking, Pru was surprised to see that they stood on her front step.

  Out of practice with this portion of the evening, she immediately looked down and started digging in her bag for the key. Christopher dropped his arm, and when she’d found the key, she turned to open the door.

  Safely on her own side of the threshold, she said to him, “Thanks so much for dinner, Christopher. I enjoyed the evening.”

  “So did I. Good night, Pru.” He placed one hand on her arm, kissed her on the cheek, and left. She had a small frown on her face as she closed the door. Too late she realized she should’ve asked him in for coffee. She decided she needed a review of the rule book.

  Trispin Hall

  Bampper, Truro

  Cornwall

  TR4 8AG

  11 October

  72 Grovehill Square

  Chelsea

  London SW3

  Dear Ms. Parke,

  This is to inform you that you have not been selected for the post of first under gardener of Trispin Hall. We appreciate your interest in the post and your knowledge concerning the history and development of ravine gardens in Cornwall. We know that your knowledge will stand you in good stead in your future employment.

  We wish you well in your future endeavours.

  Yours sincerely,

  James G. Russell-Davies, director

  Trispin Hall Public Trust

  JGRD/wgs

  Chapter 8

  She had precious little to distract her from the latest bad news. Her client list had dropped noticeably. The Nethercotts discovered they could wield hedge clippers as well as anyone—although Pru feared for the fate of the nascent crown and lyres, to say nothing of the peacocks—and she had encouraged the Hightowers to hire a lawn service, explaining to them that she might be leaving soon. She barely acknowledged that to herself; it took great effort to say it aloud to someone else.