The Cipher Garden

by Martin Edwards

  It was half six and they’d bumped into each other in the car park behind the police station. Hannah fiddled with her keys, wondering how much to tell him, and then rebuked herself for having any reservations about candour. They’d known each other a long time and she trusted him as much as any man. Even Marc.

  ‘Who’s to say that they weren’t having it off at the time Warren was killed?’

  ‘They must have taken enormous care to cover their tracks, then. If Warren Howe had caught them in flagrante, it’d have been Peter Flint’s corpse that Roz stumbled over in her back garden.’

  ‘He was the jealous type?’

  ‘We never found any evidence of Tina giving him cause. She was the one who always had to turn a blind eye. Her line was that there’s more to a marriage than sexual fidelity.’

  Les Bryant, reversing out towards the exit, pipped his horn and she mouthed goodnight. ‘Perhaps she was thinking about her own behaviour, as well as his.’

  ‘Warren always came back to her, that was what she cared about. Or so she said.’

  ‘He might not have been bothered if she was playing away. Sauce for the goose and all that.’

  Nick made a sceptical noise. ‘Warren wouldn’t fret about inconsistency or double standards. And Peter shagging his missus wouldn’t have appealed to his sense of irony. No, he wouldn’t have rested until he’d taken revenge.’

  ‘Suppose Tina decided to kill him before he found out?’

  He considered her. ‘You think she’s guilty?’

  ‘Not on the strength of an anonymous tip-off. But Roz Gleave gave me the impression she didn’t have much time for Tina.’

  ‘They were never close. Whereas she became friendly with Gail.’

  ‘Linz is due to see Gail tomorrow. She lives near Coniston these days. Peter had to buy her a cottage as part of the divorce settlement.’

  ‘I interviewed her myself.’

  ‘Yes, I saw the statement. Did I read between the lines correctly? You didn’t take a shine to her.’

  ‘She’s an ice maiden. Very different from Tina Howe. She might have lacked a cast-iron alibi for the murder, but there was nothing to link her to the scene. And there was the question of motive. It was in her interest for her husband’s business to flourish and Warren was an integral part of that business.’

  ‘It seems to be flourishing now.’

  ‘Good line to be in, isn’t it? Everyone fancies having their own little Eden outside the scullery door.’

  ‘True, but Gail must be worth a second look.’

  ‘Hope Linz gets further with her than I did. Mind you, if Peter’s swopped Gail for Tina, Roz will be seriously unimpressed. She’ll blame Tina for breaking up the marriage. In her book, that’s as serious a crime as murder.’

  ‘She’s certainly stayed true to her own husband.’

  ‘Yes.’ Nick shuffled his feet on the tarmac. ‘What did you make of them, then?’

  Hannah chose her words. ‘I’d say they look after each other very well.’

  ‘Is that it?’

  ‘You know them better than me.’

  ‘Too well to regard them as suspects.’

  ‘And you assume I do?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Stop fencing, Nick. If you must know, I liked them, but I thought they were holding back on me. Why, God knows, but there’s something they don’t want me to find out They’re your friends, but I’m sorry, I can’t let that influence me. If they’re keeping a secret that’s relevant to this inquiry, you can bet I’ll find it out.’

  He didn’t answer. The only question in her mind was whether he knew what the Gleaves’ secret was, but if he did, he wasn’t telling. For a few moments they looked at each other before he gave a curt nod and walked away towards his car.

  As she watched his retreating back, an overwhelming sense of loss flooded over her. Whatever was going on in his mind, she was afraid that things between them would never be the same again.

  When Kirsty arrived home after work she found her brother asleep on the sofa. The stench of drink and uninhibited flatulence hit her as she walked into the living room. His snoring reminded her of his motorbike’s snarl. He was still wearing his muddy trainers and you could see dirt on the cotton throw covering the back of the sofa. Mum would kill him when she found out, but right now she was nowhere to be seen. She would be over at Peter’s. Unbidden, an image slid into her mind of Peter Flint’s white, stringy body stretched out on top of her mother’s fleshy curves.

  What’s wrong with this picture?

  Of course! When she realised, despite herself, she couldn’t contain a blast of laughter.

  Mum would insist on being on top, no question.

  * * *

  ‘You all right?’

  Marc had been sitting cross-legged on the carpet, checking a pile of dusty hardbacks for the tiny flaws that would diminish their value to serious collectors and sliding them into protective see-through jackets. Now that the task was completed, he was paying attention to her again. Not for the first time lately, Hannah felt she’d prefer him to remain buried in his own affairs.

  She mumbled something non-committal and kept leafing through the latest guidelines for the conduct of staff appraisals that she’d spread over the table. The yearly box-ticking ritual would need to be conducted soon and she was dreading it. Everyone had to pay lip service to the benefits of performance management, but in private everyone ridiculed the whole process. How could you guarantee a level playing field, consistency and an absence of favouritism and score-settling across the whole county? The whole exercise was a time-consuming waste of energy that everyone except the people who mattered thought would be better devoted to real police work. Yet it was becoming ever more important, with scores affecting competency payments and pension benefits for officers at the top end of their salary scale. People like Nick.

  ‘I said, are you all right? You’ve hardly said a word all evening.’

  Guilty, m’lud. She had a raging headache and had economised with effort over their meal, heating up a cheese and salami pizza and disinterring some fruit salad from the fridge. When it was made, she hadn’t felt like eating. The encounter with Nick in the car park kept nagging at her and she’d paid little attention as Marc recounted a triumph of Internet book dealing. Within hours of his advertising it, someone in Idaho had paid a small fortune for a book by Cecil Waye that he’d found in the job lot from Ravenglass.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Things on my mind.’

  ‘For a change.’ Bitterness frosted his voice. ‘Work’s all you ever think about these days.’

  She almost said: for God’s sake, stop whining like a caricature of a neglected housewife. Just in time, she bit back the words. For one thing, he was right.

  ‘I am sorry.’

  She picked up the appraisal documentation and slung it into her briefcase. It could keep. She walked across the room and bent to kiss him on top of the head. He reached out for her wrists and when he pulled her down on to the floor beside him, she shrieked in mock protest whilst making no attempt to resist.

  But even as he unfastened her blouse, even as he touched her nipples with his cool fingers, in the way that once had driven her to ecstasy, her thoughts began to stray. Marc wasn’t entirely right, it wasn’t just work that was bothering her. Filed away at the back of her brain was a suspicion so scary that she daren’t acknowledge it to herself, far less to Marc.

  Kirsty turned up the volume of the television until her brother spluttered and stirred from his torpor. As he came round, he swore repeatedly and with uncharacteristically inventive imagery. For Kirsty, it was water off a duck’s back. Their father had been as bad.

  ‘And what the fuck’s that?’

  On the screen, arrows were being fired at a young Chinese man wearing nothing but boxer shorts who was chained to a vast brick wall.

  ‘New programme. Brothers from Hell.’

  ‘You are so hilarious, move over Joan Rivers.’
>
  ‘Actually, it’s one of these endurance programmes. You know, how much can one human being be expected to cope with? Any day now they’ll start filming behind the scenes at The Heights.’

  Sam snorted in derision. ‘You don’t have any idea, do you? What it’s like in the real world. Your idea of a tough day is when the latest coachload of geriatrics doesn’t stump up a single tip.’

  She cringed at the smell of the beer fumes on him. ‘The real world? Getting pissed and riding motorbikes is your idea of the real world, is it?’

  ‘Why don’t you piss off, little waitress?’

  Ripping off the scarf, she said, ‘See what you did to me?’

  ‘I can hardly see anything.’

  ‘You haven’t even said sorry.’

  He uttered a long, low groan.

  ‘I suppose that’s as close as you’ll come to apologising.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have provoked me.’

  ‘I didn’t…oh God, what’s the use? Anyway, I’ve got news for you, if you’ll only break the habit of a lifetime and actually listen.’

  ‘News?’

  ‘The police are reopening the investigation into Dad’s murder.’

  ‘What?’ He sat up as though the sofa had been electrified.

  ‘You heard.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘That would be telling. The point is, they are bound to want to interview us, aren’t they? His nearest and dearest.’

  ‘Oh, for Chrissake.’

  ‘They’ll poke around in our lives. They’ll find out about the anonymous letters.’

  ‘So what?’ He glanced back at the television screen. A medal was being put around the Chinese man’s neck.

  ‘So what if they discover that we lied about the Hardknott Pass?’

  ‘Who’s going to tell them?’ he demanded.

  ‘They have ways and means.’

  He reached towards her and gripped her arm so hard she squealed. ‘Listen to me, Kirsty. You’ll keep your mouth shut about that day, if you know what’s good for you.’

  Her arm stung and she could feel tears pricking her eyes. He’d never hurt her like that before. What if he became seriously angry, what if he lost it altogether? Maybe next time he tried to kill her, he’d make a proper job of it.

  Chapter Ten

  Peter Flint struck Daniel as an easy man to like. Intelligent, affable, articulate. He loved talking about his work, a quality which Daniel always found appealing. And he was honest enough to admit that, although he’d glanced at Daniel’s television series, he hadn’t watched the programmes all the way through. History was all very well, but he preferred to look forward, not back. What turned him on was creating something fresh for the future.

  ‘I did wonder if you were the BBC man when I heard about the appointment,’ he said. ‘It’s an uncommon name. But I had no idea you owned a second home up here.’

  They were sipping home-made elderflower wine beside the tarn. On the table in front of them were fanned out half a dozen pencil sketches by which Peter had illustrated ideas for redesigning the garden.

  ‘This is our one and only home. It’s not an investment property, it’s where Miranda and I live.’

  She’d taken Louise off to the gym in Kendal, leaving him free to see how much he could find out about the fate of Warren Howe without appearing to do so. He was playing a game, and he was sure Hannah would disapprove. Miranda and Louise too, for that matter. But he couldn’t resist.

  ‘You’ve settled here for good?’

  ‘Where better than the Lakes? You come from Beatrix Potter country, don’t you?’

  ‘A mile up the road from Near Sawrey, yes. Another lovely spot. Be warned, though, it takes a long time to become accepted by the natives. I’m still seen as an off-comer and I moved to the village from Penrith more years ago than I care to remember. But there’s more to the Lakes than the Blessed Beatrix and all those poets. The gardens, for a start. This area is so green – thanks to all our rain.’

  ‘I’ve almost forgotten what rain is like.’ Since the cloudburst greeting Louise’s arrival, each day had been hotter than the last. A hosepipe ban was in force and the lawns of Brackdale were starting to yellow.

  ‘You’ll remember soon enough,’ Peter promised.

  Ideas poured out of him like spray from a geyser. How about building a new glass gazebo, connected by a tunnel of hazelnut trees to the water’s edge? A garden was like a house, it needed to be split into a series of rooms. The key to success was retaining the element of surprise. You could only get so far with CDs that promised to turn you into a virtual Capability Brown. Even the most sophisticated software lacked creative imagination. You needed vision to see how a drab landscape might be set ablaze with colour. Or, with Tarn Cottage, to see how an unkempt jungle might become a secret paradise.

  Vision was Peter Flint’s speciality. He drew pictures in the air with his hands, his words tumbling over each other in his enthusiasm. Walkways conjured out of a medley of surfaces – grey slabs, white brick, crazy paving – twisting and turning to reveal new vistas round every bend. Drainpipes cut and stood on end to form containers of culinary herbs and fragrant jonquils. Logs forming stepping stones to lead towards the tarn through sanctuary planting: hawthorn, meadowsweet venusta and loosestrife. For the stretches up to the lower slopes of Tarn Fell, how about ox-eye daisy, meadow cranesbill, cowslip, and quaking grass?

  Yet the garden puzzled him as it did Daniel.

  ‘Doesn’t make sense,’ he said with a frown. ‘The choice of planting is odd in itself. Mandrake, hellebore, the monkey puzzle trees. And why lay a path that meanders so aimlessly? Failing to take advantage of a setting like this is almost criminal, frankly. An act of sabotage.’

  ‘Someone, sometime, must have meant it to be like this.’

  ‘Agreed. And a long time ago, I’d guess.’

  ‘The cottage is over a century old.’

  ‘Who knows, the same might be true of this garden? Looks like there have been attempts to keep it up in the past thirty or forty years, but not to much effect. Of course, there are plenty of eccentric English gardens. Think of China and Switzerland captured in miniature at Biddulph Grange, think of the erotic symbolism at West Wycombe Park. Mellor’s Garden in Cheshire tells the story of Christian’s trials in The Pilgrim’s Progress and reflects the philosophy of Swedenborg for good measure. But each of those gardens has a meaning. No offence, Daniel, but this is just a tangled mess.’

  ‘Intriguing, though.’

  Peter Flint’s brow wrinkled. ‘Trust me, Daniel, it isn’t a recreation of the past you need here. It’s a new beginning.’

  When Daniel asked about Flint Howe’s business, Peter was happy to talk. His partner, Tina, organised the admin; she was the computer wizard, every firm should have one. Her son Sam, the young fellow who had dropped him off in Tarn Fold before taking the van to size up another job, undertook the heavy labouring along with a couple of contract workers. A taciturn lad, Sam, happier astride a motorbike than a sit-down mower, but possessed of a flair for discovering the perfect place for every plant, and that was a gift that couldn’t be taught. It was in the genes. Lucky Sam, he’d inherited it from his late father.

  ‘His dad was a gardener, too?’

  ‘We were partners. He was a true plantsman.’

  Peter finished his drink and didn’t object when Daniel filled the large glass again to the brim. The elderflower wine was an experiment. Miranda had never made it before and it was rather strong. So much the better for loosening tongues, Daniel reckoned, and he was spared qualms of conscience, given that Peter wasn’t driving.

  ‘You were in partnership for how long?’

  ‘Ten years. People said we were chalk and cheese, Warren and me. Quite right, but neither of us cared. We didn’t socialise, we led separate lives, but we made a damn good team.’

  ‘You must miss him.’

  Of course Warren was a sad loss, Peter said. Tina had taken an age
to get over his death, perhaps you never get over that sort of thing altogether. But everyone has to move on. While Warren was alive, she worked on the purchase ledger in a Dickensian office in Ulverston, but she’d inherited his stake in the business. Peter had persuaded her that, rather than sell out her interest, or sit back and enjoy the fruits of others’ work as a sleeping partner, the best way of capitalising on her investment was to help him grow the firm. As for Sam, if he lacked Warren’s work ethic, never mind. He was young, there was time yet.

  Savouring the wine, Daniel asked, ‘Was it a long illness?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Your partner, Warren. Cancer, was it? Or heart?’

  Peter wiped his mouth. When he spoke again, his voice was pitched lower, as though out of respect for the dead. ‘To tell you the truth, Daniel, he didn’t die of natural causes. He was murdered.’

  Daniel deployed the shocked yet intrigued expression he’d once reserved for financial negotiations with his publisher. Within five minutes he’d gleaned as much as he’d learned from Hannah and his researches in the old newspapers and online.

  ‘So the killer is still walking the streets?’

  ‘Well.’ Peter ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I suppose you could look at it like that. Unless the person is dead or in prison for some other crime.’

  ‘It sounds premeditated. Which argues that the culprit knew Warren personally, had a particular motive for murder. Random killings are different. Homicidal maniacs don’t explore back gardens in search of their victims.’

  ‘True.’ Peter’s grin revealed crooked teeth. ‘Stupid of me. I forgot that you have a professional interest in detective techniques.’

  ‘Presumably Tina lives in hope that one day the police will catch up with the man who killed her husband. Perhaps if they come across a fresh lead…’

  Peter coughed. ‘I honestly believe that all she wants is to put the whole dreadful experience behind her. She never likes to be reminded of – what happened. Can’t find it in my heart to blame her. She went through so much and then she raised Sam and Kirsty on her own. It’s taken her a long time to come to terms with her husband’s death. We never speak about it. God knows, the last thing she needs is for the police to start raking over old bones.’