The Cipher Garden

by Martin Edwards

  The three of them drove home in silence and had little to say to each other before going to bed. Kirsty’s death had numbed them. All night, he kept waking up, unable to settle. At first light, he headed out into the garden and threw himself into decoding the cipher garden, but his brain wasn’t working and he’d resorted to physical graft. Nothing added up, certainly not this eccentric overgrown landscape in the shadow of the fell. What did an old cipher matter, when the young waitress was dead for no reason?

  Senseless, senseless, senseless.

  He thrust his fork into the hard dry earth and struck something solid buried a few inches under the ground. A large stone. The spikes of a monkey puzzle tree scratched his cheek as he stood up, but he took no notice. Levering with his fork, he brought to the surface a square grey tablet, a foot long and wide. As he brushed off the dirt, he uncovered chiselled indentations. Within a minute an inscription was revealed.

  WILL TAKE OUR LEAVE

  An anagram? He played around in his mind with the letters, but couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t fanciful or meaningless. Perhaps the message wasn’t meant to be read in isolation. He’d been clearing the undergrowth from a patch populated by ferns and foxgloves, divided from the rest of the garden by a picket fence and bounded by two monkey puzzle trees, a yew and a small weeping willow.

  He leaned on his fork, massaging his back with one hand, listening to the buzzing of the bees. His body was aching, and he’d tweaked the muscles in his ribs, but this wasn’t the moment to give up and retreat inside. A current of excitement was flowing through him, a sensation he’d experienced at Oxford. He was on the brink of discovery.

  Hannah closed her eyes and let the blast of water from the shower cleanse her. If only she could wash away what had happened. She must clear her mind, the doctor was right, think about the future. Looking back might destroy her.

  She stepped out of the cubicle and towelled herself dry. The house was as silent as a crypt. Strange to be here on a weekday. Her instinct was to ring the office, check out what was going on, but she’d promised Marc that she wouldn’t make the call, wouldn’t allow herself to be sucked straight back into the quicksand of endless meetings and filling in forms.

  But it was safer to think about work than the rest of her life. She needed to focus on solving the murder of Warren Howe, it would give her a goal to aim for. Even that was fraught with angst. She couldn’t rid herself of the suspicion that Tina Howe had murdered her husband. But she’d watched Tina running towards the dropzone seconds after Kirsty’s death. The woman’s ravaged face was a sight she would never forget. She might be a murderer, but that was a punishment too far. Nothing was crueller than watching your own child die.

  The tablet had lain beneath one of the monkey puzzle trees. Daniel used the fork to test the ground beneath the other. Soon the metal prongs struck another piece of stone. He levered it up and uncovered a second inscription.

  LEAVES FROM THE GARDEN

  Mosquitoes had stung his bare arms, leaving red tender marks. Sweat was pouring off him, and he’d forgotten to replenish his sun block. None of this mattered. He couldn’t stop now. He was on a roll, no question. The pain in his back and ribs meant nothing.

  He was driven on by the conviction that at last the cipher was within touching distance. No stopping now. Within ten minutes, he had dug out a third stone from under the drooping willow branches. He cradled it in his hands, as if it were a Ming vase.

  The tablet bore a carved question.

  WHY DID YOU LEAVE?

  The phone trilled. Hannah let it ring. Probably a recorded message that would try to sell her a timeshare in Spain. But the caller was persistent. In the end she surrendered.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hannah, is that you? You sound strange. Are you all right?’

  Terri. Faithful Terri. At least, faithful as a friend if not always as a wife. Hearing her brisk, confident tone was a therapy in itself. Hannah wondered whether to lie and pretend everything was all right. But Terri was no fool. She’d see through the subterfuge. And besides, even detective chief inspectors sometimes needed a shoulder to lean on.

  ‘Well, actually, I’ve been better…’

  There must be another stone. Must be. The message he’d uncovered made little sense. There were four trees and he’d convinced himself there must be four stones. But he couldn’t find the missing link.

  His skin was burning, but he kept on going. The yew tree had thick, tangled roots that slowed him down, but he was certain there was something to find. Time passed. Twenty minutes, half an hour. What was that, wrapped around by the spreading roots?

  He’d found it. Soon he was brushing the dirt from the fourth stone and squinting at its inscription.

  TOGETHER AGAIN FOR ETERNITY

  Yew trees are often found in cemeteries, he remembered. Christ, did it mean that a corpse was buried here? The thought of it made him grind his teeth. But there was no body in the garden – who could it be? Not Jacob and Alice Quiller, for they had been interred in the churchyard at Brack. Not their son John, whose body had been brought back from South Africa and laid to rest in the same place.

  He looked around and saw the cottage grounds with new eyes. Paths leading nowhere, false turnings, dead ends. Belladonna, foxgloves, hellebore. Poisonous plants in a beautiful landscape. Even the loveliest blooms seemed sinister this morning. Weren’t lilies by tradition the flowers of funerals?

  ‘Daniel!’ Miranda had emerged from the cottage. ‘Phone for you. Marc Amos, from the bookshop.’

  ‘You talked about Jacob Quiller.’ Marc sounded pleased with himself. ‘He’s mentioned in a book I picked up in a job lot at a book fair. Riddles of South Lakeland. I spotted his name when I was flicking through a chapter on Brackdale. It talks about Quiller’s garden at the cottage in Tarn Fold.’

  ‘The cipher garden.’

  ‘So you know all about it?’

  ‘I wish.’

  ‘This book was published by a local firm, the print run must have been minuscule.’

  ‘Which company?’

  ‘RG Publications, they’re based near Hawkshead. A small press, a one-woman band. She’s been churning out a title a month for ten or twelve years now. Local interest stuff for tourists rather than the natives. A crowded market, but she keeps her head above water. This isn’t a book I recall. Must have been one of her earliest.’

  ‘What does RG stand for?’ Daniel asked, although he could guess.

  ‘Roz Gleave, that’s the publisher’s name. The author is called Eleanor Sawtell. Never heard of her. According to the blurb, she is – or was – a former primary school teacher. She also boasts that she’s a lifelong resident of Staveley and has three children and eleven grandchildren.’

  ‘What does she have to say about the garden?’

  ‘Not a lot, disappointingly. I’ll copy the paragraphs and put them in the post to you.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll call in and pick them up.’

  ‘In a hurry?’

  ‘Puzzling over the garden will take my mind off yesterday.’

  ‘Hannah said you were at the airfield.’ He sighed. ‘Frankly, she was in hell of a state last night. A horrific business, by the sound of it. That poor young girl. I suppose it couldn’t have been an accident?’

  ‘Hannah would know better than me, but the girl’s behaviour looked calculated enough from where we were standing. She just ripped off her helmet and parachute and dropped like a stone.’

  ‘My God, how could you hate life enough to want to do that to yourself?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. How is Hannah today?’

  A pause. ‘For once in a blue moon, she’s not fit enough to go into work. Though she took some persuading. Of course, she’s a workaholic, you must have noticed.’

  ‘She’s obviously very committed to the job.’

  A brief laugh. ‘That’s one way of putting it. Between you and me, she takes it all too much to heart. Naturally, she’s shocked by wh
at happened. She’s not as thick-skinned as most police officers. In fact, she’s not thick-skinned at all. God knows what she was doing at the airfield. I’ve never heard her express an interest in skydiving before.’

  ‘Something to do with work?’ Daniel had assumed it was no coincidence that Hannah and her sergeant had shown up at an event featuring Warren Howe’s daughter. But he didn’t want to say too much.

  ‘Suppose so.’ A pause. ‘She was on her own, I suppose?’

  Daniel hesitated. ‘We didn’t have time for conversation. But I didn’t see her interrogating spectators, if that’s what you mean. And of course the suicide jump stunned all of us. Nobody could have expected that.’

  If Marc Amos realised that Daniel had dodged his question, his voice didn’t betray it. ‘No, the girl must have had mental problems, it’s not a rational act. You’re coming over to the shop sometime?’

  ‘I’ll be with you in half an hour.’

  Far below the Sacrifice Stone, the tranquil and secluded corner known as Tarn Fold is associated with a story about the garden created in the late nineteenth century by Jacob Quiller. Quiller’s mother was the younger sister of Richard Skelding, whose father had bought Brack Hall fifty years before. The Skeldings and the Quillers were God-fearing folk, much-respected pillars of the Brackdale community and Jacob himself was a churchwarden and staunch supporter of the church at Brack. His wife Alice was a local girl of humble stock who worked at the Hall as a housemaid before catching Jacob’s eye. Originally the Fold, like most of the rest of the valley, formed part of the sprawling Brack Estate. Richard, well known for his generosity, transferred ownership of the Fold to Jacob as a wedding gift, and Jacob built a pretty little cottage in a clearing close to the lower slopes of Tarn Fell. Alice’s life revolved around their only child, John, to whom she was utterly devoted.

  It was said that the Quillers struggled to keep their faith after John’s tragic death. He was a soldier who fought in the Boer War and died one day short of his twenty-first birthday. Neither Jacob nor Alice seems ever to have recovered from that dreadful blow. Indeed, the story goes that after John’s funeral, Alice became a recluse who refused to leave the cottage and would not speak to a single soul other than her distraught husband. Before long they were both dead – departing this mortal coil on the very same day. One suspects that in truth their lives ended the moment they received the tragic news from South Africa. The simple epitaph on their gravestone close to the lych gate at their beloved church records poignantly that the couple died of broken hearts.

  Jacob Quiller was reputed to have laboured unceasingly in his garden in the months leading up to his demise and it may be that he overtaxed himself. Village wisdom had it that there is a secret about their deaths to be discovered by unravelling a cipher that Jacob hid in the garden, yet little seems to be known about it. The Quillers had no family other than the Skeldings, to whom the cottage passed back on their deaths. Richard paid for a memorial to John that can be seen in the church to this day. He sold the cottage and it remains in private hands, although the present owner does not encourage sightseers. The cipher has presumably disappeared, if it ever existed. Possibly it was no more than a tantalising rural legend. In any event, it seems to this author to be crass to intrude upon personal grief. How much more romantic to take at face value the words that the Quillers chose for their headstone. Let us pause and reflect that, whatever learned medical men tell us, folk may indeed die from broken hearts.

  Daniel handed the book back to Marc Amos. It was a battered trade paperback. On the back cover was a black and white photograph of Eleanor Sawtell. Seventy-five at a guess, she had white hair, a kindly expression and a cardigan with a missing button. An obese and complacent tabby sat on her lap, smirking as though it had solved the cipher but wasn’t telling.

  ‘An unsatisfactory story, really,’ Marc said.

  ‘A puzzle without an obvious solution, that’s the challenge. I’ve been mugging up about gardens and things that grow in them. Odd, I always thought of gardens as life-enhancing. Plants, too. Surprising how many of them have macabre connotations.’

  Marc shook his head. ‘Not my subject, I’m afraid.’

  ‘The monkey puzzle tree, for instance. Originates from Chile, and guess what? The climate in Cumbria suits it perfectly.’

  ‘It’s chilly enough here most of the time. Sorry, terrible joke. I looked Eleanor Sawtell up in the phone book, but couldn’t find her in Staveley. She might be ex-directory, but…’

  ‘I’ll have a word with Roz Gleave, see if she can help.’

  A chance too good for someone so obsessively curious to miss, a chance to kill two birds. To find out more about the cipher – and the murder of Warren Howe.

  Marc grinned. ‘Detective work, is it? You’ll be competing with Hannah next.’

  On his way to Keepsake Cottage, Daniel decided that he couldn’t help liking Marc Amos. How stupid to feel a pang of jealousy because Marc had Hannah all to himself. But was Marc jealous too, did he suspect that something was going on between her and the Sergeant? And if so, was he right? Daniel hadn’t had time to study Nick Lowther. He seemed amiable and wore a wedding ring, but colleagues at work often had affairs. Hannah Scarlett didn’t seem the type to play around, but was there really a type? It was all down to individual chemistry; you never knew what might happen when circumstances thrust two people together.

  One more thing he’d rather not think about, like Kirsty’s death. He dragged his mind back to the stone tablets. All four were meant to be found, no question. They were so close to the surface that any serious attempt to clear the ground would uncover them. The carved words might be part of an elaborate code – shades of Beatrix Potter’s diaries – but he doubted it. His bet was on a simple if cryptic message. He’d start by juggling with the phrases he’d discovered.

  Perhaps there was a pattern. Assume that the four stones he’d found – the willow, the two monkey puzzles, and the yew – were connected by the circumference of a rough circle. Start at the willow and move clockwise.

  Why did you leave? Leaves from the garden. Will take our leave. Together again for eternity.

  * * *

  Outside the sun was high, but Hannah stayed indoors. Her skin burned too easily in heat this fierce. She gulped down a can of Coke for the sugar boost. Talking to Terri had made her feel half human again, but she was still tired. She plucked a musty hardback at random from Marc’s Ravenglass haul. She reached as far as page twenty before deciding she wasn’t in the mood for murder by Italian dagger in a locked room surrounded by snow with not a footprint to be seen. The choice of daytime TV shows was unspeakable and soon she was stretched out on the sofa with eyes shut, forcing herself to focus on whatever had made it necessary for Warren Howe to die.

  When you know Howe, you know who – but what else was there to know about Warren Howe? The picture in her mind was of a man to whom plants meant more than people. With Gail, Bel and Roz among conquests, he was capable of turning on the charm to lure a pretty woman into his bed. He was single-minded and seemed to have mastered the art of getting what he wanted. Every scrap of evidence suggested he didn’t have an unselfish bone in his body.

  Gail, Bel and Roz. Three old friends. Women could be so close with each other. Closer even than Terri and her. Suppose the trio had nourished a grudge over Warren’s treatment of them? Maybe she’d been too hasty in dismissing Les Bryant’s suggestion of a conspiracy to kill. But the youthful flings with Bel and Roz were ancient history. There was so much that theory left unexplained. Not least the anonymous accusation of Tina. If one or more of the women had sent it, why resurrect the old case if they had something to hide?

  No, Tina was still her suspect of choice. Warren had betrayed her with Gail and it was one betrayal too many. The stumbling block was the Hardknott Pass alibi. But just as locked rooms were meant to be breached, so murderers’ alibis were meant to be broken.

  The moment Daniel pulled up outside Keepsake Cottage
and got out of the car, the heat hit him. It was like walking into a wall. He was about to ring the doorbell when voices came drifting through the air. People must be outside, at the back of the house. He made out the words of a man who sounded frantic.

  ‘Suppose the police find out? That woman, Hannah Scarlett. Roz, this is serious, how can we keep quiet?’

  ‘We must!’ A woman’s voice, full of anguish.

  ‘But…’

  ‘Oh God, how I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.’

  This was fall-out from Kirsty Howe’s death, had to be. He waited, but nothing more was said. He pressed the bell. After a minute he rang again and at length he heard footsteps coming round the side of the house. A brisk woman with a helmet of grey hair, wearing a sleeveless top and shorts. When she took off her dark glasses to inspect him, it was obvious that she’d been weeping.

  ‘Mrs Gleave?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  He extended a hand. ‘My name’s Daniel Kind.’

  ‘I recognise you, don’t I? You were on the television.’

  ‘A while back, yes.’

  She raised her eyebrows and Daniel sensed that, for all her distress, this was a woman of considerable strength of mind. ‘What on earth brings you to my house?’

  ‘I live in Brackdale and I’ve been reading your book about the riddles of South Lakeland.’

  ‘Not my book, really,’ she said. ‘I’m only a humble publisher.’

  He grinned. ‘A humble publisher? Some people would say that’s a contradiction in terms.’