Death in the Garden

by Jennie Melville

  Her eyes rested on the pile of letters also on the table. The letter in the brown envelope was on top, still unopened.

  Belatedly taking in the significance she stretched out a hand, her heart beginning to beat fast. No news in the medical sphere was good news; if the clinic was writing to her, then there had to be a reason, and it was probably not good.

  The letter opened itself, spreading out on the table in front of her.

  But the message was short and to the point: Dr Michaels wanted to make some more tests. An appointment had been set up for her. Would she confirm it?

  There was to be no running away; she had to stay.

  The silent traveller inside her was asserting his rights and would stop her running.

  Chapter Eight

  The scene was breaking up. As Edwina, all unaware of the new murder, travelled back across London to her own flat by bus and tube (Sid said it was safer with her in her present state, she could collect her own car later), the Cardboard-Cut-Out Theatre was packing itself up and trundling away. Perhaps for ever. The area where the health food stall usually stood had been empty all morning.

  Canon Linker was talking about death to his Aunt Bee, who in her turn was composing sentences in her head to be transmitted to Janine who sat, pad in hand, patiently waiting. Bee Linker was having a difficult time with composition. She had got her heroine to the bedchamber door but was undecided what to do with her. Events had got in the way of the bedding of her heroine. If only Jim would stop talking she might be able to get on with it. But she recognised his need to talk and reached out a hand to him. They were all wretched about Ginger and Pickles. Somehow those silly nicknames were still how you thought of them even in death.

  Jim was telling them how the two women had been discovered by the postman on the stairs of the house where they lived and the police had been called in. ‘ It was clearly murder, you see. Strangulation.’ She could tell by the black bass note in his voice that he was both sad and angry.

  Cassie Ross was talking to the policeman, Bill Crail. He had had a fractious scene with his colleague, Elsie Lewis, who thought Cassie too clever by half, which she was, and a snob, which she was not. Also a hindrance to the police investigation of Luke Tory’s death and a bloody nuisance, both of which she might have been. His relationship with Cassie had settled into a form they both recognised: they might not stay together for ever, nor perhaps even for long, but for the moment it was good. She had established that he had been lying when he claimed friendship with her old college chum, and he had established that she did not mind and had never believed it anyway. Honour was satisfied on both sides.

  He had just given Cassie his version of the finding of the bodies of Misses Drury and Dover, a version substantially the same as Jim Linker’s but containing a few details of his own. Such as that Ginger had been whacked on the head, while Pickles had been strangled. Ginger was not yet dead; she might pull through. But she could not yet talk. There was some doubt if she would ever talk again. She’d have the throat and the voice-box all right, but not the mind. Brain damage.

  ‘I know where your friend Edwina is, so you don’t need to worry over her.’ In which he was wrong; Cassie was quite right to be worried.

  ‘I could make a fairly good guess myself,’ said Cassie thoughtfully. ‘Eddie can be pretty transparent sometimes and so can Dougie.’ She had worked out where Edwina had gone and so had Dougie. They had both known that Edwina was looking after the key to Lily’s flat and both had seen that it was gone. It did not take much working out. Others might do it.

  ‘Perhaps her state of mind needs watching over.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with Eddie’s mind. She’s one of the sanest, cleverest people I know.’

  ‘Normally, no doubt.’ He gave Cassie a hard stare. ‘But she’s not in her normal state at the moment, is she?’

  ‘She has good reason.’

  ‘The man she claims is after her. And that’s a funny business.’

  ‘A typical male, police reaction,’ said Cassie angrily.

  They were drinking in the Duke of York in the hour before noon when it was less crowded. The Duke produced a reasonable cup of coffee as well as a good sherry; they were combining the two. ‘Oh, I believe it, in a way. And she’s pregnant.’

  ‘Oh, you know about that?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I don’t know about “of course”. I thought medical matters were confidential.’

  ‘I didn’t have to go to a doctor to find out she was pregnant. I’m a detective, remember?’ He was not prepared to admit how he had found out, but the means had been somewhat unethical, involving a policewoman and a medical student. ‘I guessed.’ That was partly, true, anyway, he had guessed before finding out. She was beginning to show.

  ‘It hasn’t touched her mind.’

  ‘But what about her emotions? These telephone calls …’ He shrugged.

  ‘We all had them,’ Cassie said sharply.

  ‘But she took them to heart; she responded. That’s where she went wrong. She should have taken a tough line. Instead she runs away. Not far but far enough to be a nuisance.’ He drank his coffee which was too strong and bitter for his taste; he had recently given up sugar and not managed to achieve a relationship with a substitute. He pulled a face. ‘We will be out of your place soon.’

  The police investigation team had kept control of Cassie’s Garden premises since Luke Tory’s death. Cassie had been locked out of her offices, but not her living rooms.

  ‘Sorry if it’s been an inconvenience to you.’

  ‘Oh well, I hadn’t really moved into the office and drawing room; my staff have been operating from the Baker Street office. I hadn’t planned to make a total move till the autumn so it hasn’t mattered.’

  ‘You’ve been living there, though.’

  Cassie grinned. ‘And well you know it.’ He had spent two out of the last seven nights there, departing discreetly with the dawn. Elsie Lewis knew, of course, and this partly explained her fractious moods. Bill Crail decided that although he loved women he did not always like them. ‘But I don’t mind living in a muddle.’

  ‘I had noticed.’ He was an orderly man himself and would have tidied Cassie up if he had thought of a long-term relationship, but that was not how he saw it and he doubted Cassie did either, and he was too wise to probe. If you probed in that area you frequently dug up things better left hidden. He had done it once, when younger, and been rapidly married then unmarried as a consequence. ‘ How well do you know Edwina Fortune? And I don’t mean that bit about all being born on the same day and sharing horoscopes, I mean how well?’

  ‘I love her,’ said Cassie. ‘And that’s well enough.’

  ‘In a way.’ He had picked up the story about the three of them being a unit, friends indissoluble, examined it carefully and found that it held true, but it wasn’t the answer he wanted. ‘But you loved other people too.’

  ‘Well, we had relationships, yes. Alice got married.’

  ‘And Edwina Fortune loved a man called Tim who got killed. So did Luke Tory. And now another death. There’s a lot of death around you three.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about Miss Drury. I’m shattered. But there’s no connection, is there?’

  Bill Crail started his sherry, which was sour to his taste too. ‘ I don’t know. Not my case. Not even in my patch.’ He sipped his sherry. ‘We agreed when we started that you wouldn’t ask questions and I wouldn’t answer them.’ This was what stuck in Elsie Lewis’s throat: she couldn’t believe it.

  They stared at each other.

  ‘I can’t help thinking, and you can’t help telling,’ said Cassie. ‘Yes, tell.’

  He stared at her indignantly.

  Cassie began to laugh. ‘Oh yes, you do. All the time, and more than you know.’

  Bill Crail opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. Sometimes she made him speechless.

  ‘For instance, I know you still hold the belief that one
of us three killed Luke. Poisoned him with agaric powder. One of us.’

  ‘Cass—’

  ‘And you’ll choose your time to tell me which it is. In bed, probably. A bit like a detective story. A Raymond Chandler? “ Baby, I hate to tell you – it’s you. You’re a murderer.” ’

  ‘I still have feelings, Cass.’

  ‘But you’re the detective.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I am: I am like a small electronic eye moving over the ground, seeing, reporting what I see. Or think of me as a little insect grubbing up facts. There’s a lot of other people at work, forensic scientists, other policemen, a lot senior to me. It doesn’t matter too much what I think, Cass.’

  He did not usually take such a low view of himself; previously he had felt that he had given colour to an investigation, materially aided its turnout, even if as a junior detective, but the company of Cassie seemed to demand honesty. Beside her he felt a nothing. For the first time he asked himself if there might be something enduring in this relationship. After all, marriage might be right some time; he was a man with unconsciously conventional moral standards.

  ‘What I want to know,’ said Cassie, ‘this other murder, poor Pickles’, is it connected with Luke?’

  Bill Crail was careful: with women like Elsie Lewis and Cassie Ross around in his life, he had to be. ‘As I said, it’s not in my patch.… I am not privy to anything,’ – Cassie started to giggle, she found his turns of speech endearingly formal – ‘but there does not, as yet, seem to be a connection.’ Then he added carefully, ‘Other than that they sited their stall in the Garden and that they knew both you three and Luke Tory.’

  There might be another connection; he had been holding it back, but he could afford to let it out now. It was hardly a secret, being well passed around in police circles. He himself had caught a smell of the truth the very first day of the investigation into Luke Tory’s death, when he had picked up the newspaper that Tory had been reading in the taxi. You could call it coincidence if you liked, but he did not believe in that sort of a coincidence; when you were working and thinking at a certain level, things stood out so that you saw them large and clear. He did not know how Luke Tory had reacted when he read the name of the corrupt constable Edward Miller, but Crail knew how he had felt himself. Poor bloody fool, he had thought.

  ‘I don’t want to go into details,’ he said. ‘ But we think that Luke Tory used the special insight he got into people’s lives to blackmail them, small sums, but enough. One of his victims, a young policeman, has confessed.… His name plus notes of money received was in the notebook that Tory kept in his desk. Tim Croft’s name was there, sums of money mentioned, again. Likewise Miss Drury’s name … no sum mentioned there.’ Was he blackmailing her? He could have been, they knew she had peddled strange odds and ends of drugs. Perhaps they were blackmailing each other.

  ‘Tim!’ Cassie seized on the name at once. ‘Edwina’s not going to like that much.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I suppose she has to know?’

  ‘She may know already.’

  Cassie digested what he had said; when she spoke her voice was cold. ‘Edwina is not a murderer.’

  If anything she was a victim, but Cassie did not say this aloud either. She had only just seen it as part of Edwina’s character and she did not like it.

  ‘Nor is there any direct connection between Tim’s accident, Luke’s death and the murder of Pickles Drury.’

  ‘Nothing clear,’ agreed Bill Crail. ‘All circumstantial. But wouldn’t it be interesting if there was?’ He was hoping; he had heard there was one interesting possible forensic link. A strange, and biting one.

  Cassie finished her drink and stood up. I covered up well there, she told herself. I think, I hope … but Tim. Well, that explains a lot. The toad beneath the harrow knows. I wonder? And she thought about another name that might be added to Luke’s blackmail list. The trouble with blackmail was that it was like a crawling disease that never stayed still. ‘I’m off.’ She hitched her bag over one shoulder so that it hung like a school satchel and marched out. He stayed where he was.

  Things were breaking up in the Garden and good might come out of it.

  For the police, anyway.

  Edwina was almost home when Alice finished trying on the winter clothes of her most distinguished customer. The child had been easy, mother and nanny difficult. Across the room her eyes met those of the child, a boy of about six, small for his age, and a cool measured glance passed between them. They had come to an arrangement, tacit but negotiated: he would behave with quiet dignity when fitted and she would do what was expected of her. Children of his age, he especially, were supposed not to need money. But whether he needed it or not, he liked it, and the small secret golden coin was a sweetener. She wondered what he did with them, possibly stock-piling them against the deluge. They had always been a far-sighted family and not foolish about money.

  Alice looked at her assistant who was holding the pins and suppressed a yawn. Her most important engagement of the day and the last. She was tired. They were going now. Moving out of her showroom in a dignified procession.

  When they had gone Alice retired into her small office and closed the door on the world outside. The elation and sense of triumph that would once have followed such an encounter no longer bubbled up. She’d done it, succeeded in her own particular way in her own special world, but was it worth it?

  She would like to have talked it over with Edwina and Cassie. Part of her present trouble was that she was missing their old closeness. She had a shrewd idea where Edwina was hiding away, but she wasn’t going to do anything about it. Alice guessed that Edwina would soon be back; she wasn’t a girl to hide away for long. And anyway, life forced you back as a rule. Nature did not seem to favour evasion.

  The news about Ginger and Pickles had reached her that morning from two sources, first Dougie and then Canon Linker who was on his way to talk to the Cardboard-Cut-Out Theatre.

  She was miserable and unhappy. Not frightened exactly, for Alice had the deep feeling that nothing could touch her, but coming close to it.

  She felt very much alone. Cassie had struck up a relationship with the detective and Edwina had fled, only Alice was left on her own. She had tried telephoning Kit Langley, but there was no reply from his flat and his chambers in the Temple would not answer questions about where he was to be found. Perhaps they did not know, either. But of course they did and were only protecting him from Alice. She sighed; she really loved Kit, wherever he was.

  He might be with Edwina.

  Alice was, in the end, a cynic about human behaviour, and thought anything was possible.

  There had always been something about those telephone calls (of which she had had, initially, her share) which had aroused her scepticism. Something not quite right, she told herself. How did a man behave who was, obscenely, pursuing a woman? Not so, she thought.

  Even to question the truth of what her friend was undergoing seemed a heresy, one did not think of Edwina like that, but the natural sceptic inside Alice stirred and would ask questions. What was behind it all, and wasn’t Edwina’s reaction too extreme, too hysterical? She was pregnant, that had to be true, the hospital said so. Otherwise … No, Alice, repress the thought, she told herself.

  Oh Edwina, Edwina, she thought, we were all so close once. What has gone wrong at the heart of us that we have fallen into this trouble? No answer there, either.

  They were three separate entities now, drifting apart like continents, pulled by subterranean forces beyond their control.

  As Edwina travelled back to the news of the death of Pickles Dover, carrying with her in her baggage, together with letters and memories, that photograph she passionately studied while desiring not to recognise, things were breaking up in the Garden. Cassie, Alice, Bee and Jim Linker, even Janine Grandy, were drawing into themselves and apart from each other.

  And the Cardboard-Cut-Out Theatre, worst hit of all as they t
rundled back to base in Woolwich, had mislaid a patron and a fellow performer. ‘ Nina’s away,’ was their sad refrain. She’d be back, of course, she always was, but meanwhile they were in need of a paymaster and a friend.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Whatever happened to us?’ said Alice sadly. It was a rhetorical question, not demanding an answer. They were ill together again, the three, fallen without thought into their old positions in Edwina’s flat with Alice on the floor, Edwina elegantly on the sofa, and Cassie upright in an armchair, spectacles on her nose, looking formidable. But it felt different, no disguising it. They knew now that Edwina had been at Lily’s place in Deptford, and even in the short space away they could see how she had changed. Or perhaps the change had been coming on slowly all this time and the absence made it show. Her very shape was different.

  ‘Apart from murder and sudden death?’ Cassie took off her spectacles, revealing eyes that looked as though she might have been crying.

  ‘I know what happened to me,’ said Edwina with feeling. She was no longer wearing the clothes that Mignon Waters had admired, but had put on a loose dark cotton house-gown made by a famous Japanese designer in a low mood. It was very chic, high-fashion, lost-person clothing, as if a refugee had managed to get to a good couturier to have her rags made up. Only someone with a lot of money to spend and a lot of self-confidence could afford to dress like that. The effect was both vulnerable and highly sexed, and ought to have had a danger label on it. Cassie, looking at Edwina, wondered if she knew what the effect was and decided she did not, but that it explained a lot about Edwina that she had chosen to wear it. Asking for trouble. Open to violence.

  As if reading this thought, Edwina drew her bare feet in under her frayed hem. A curve of breast white against the dark curtain could just be seen beneath a well-placed tear in the fabric. Cassie turned her eyes away.

  Alice reached out a hand and patted Edwina’s. ‘Sorry, love, we do forget. Was it lousy at the pre-mums clinic?’