The Rose Gardener

by Charlotte Link

  “I don’t think so. The news would have travelled around the island in a heartbeat. Guernsey is like a village. The gossip is monstrous. It’s a wonder that nothing got out of Kevin, but of course that’s because Kevin has kept quiet as the grave — he couldn’t do anything to risk poisoning the well. No,” Alan shook his head emphatically, “I’m sure that Kevin really was the only one who knew anything.”

  “But …”

  “Helene wasn’t dumb. She wouldn’t have risked confiding in Mae or any of the other old gossips. There are matters of law at play in all of this as well. The money was stolen from those poor people back then. Under no circumstances would Helene have been allowed to keep it. It was already extremely careless of her to tell Kevin, but I think she had to unload it on somebody, had to ease her conscience. And Kevin, with his chronic money troubles, was still the least dangerous mark — precisely because he would keep mum with an eye to his own interests. Helene could predict that, too.”

  “Why should Kevin kill Helene? He needed her again and again!”

  “But we don’t know,” said Alan, “what really happened in Torteval that night. We only know Kevin’s version. Maybe Helene refused. Maybe she told him enough was enough. That he’d get nothing more from her. A threat that would have been sure to plunge Kevin into despair. I don’t know what he’s caught up in, but whatever the case he’s in constant need of money, and besides that seems to be under the most serious pressure. You said my mother caught him when he was trying to sneak into Helene’s room to search for money on the day of the burial? Maybe that was his plan. To kill Helene and then take over her fortune.”

  “Kevin,” Franca was at a loss, “is the very last person I can imagine committing such a violent act. I mean, when it comes down to it, I really can’t imagine anybody doing something like that, but Kevin … he strikes me as so gentle, so completely harmless!”

  “You don’t know what sort of extreme pressure he might have been under. You’d be amazed how many gentle, harmless people turn into bona fide animals when they need money. Kevin might have had banks putting his feet to the fire. Either that or someone who’d be capable of coercing payment with rougher means than what a bank uses.”

  Franca furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”

  “I could imagine,” Alan said carefully, “that it’s possible Kevin has his hands in a few shady dealings. That is, let me be quick to say, a guess — I have no firm grounds for this suspicion. But these constant money woes … I’ve known Kevin for many years. I know about the way he lives, his lifestyle. Kevin lives a bit high on the hog, and I’d guess his bank account is overdrawn most of the time, but to my thinking the sums we’re talking about there can’t really be worth taking seriously. They aren’t the kind of sums that would make him do crazy things like this …”

  “What do you mean by crazy things? Right now we don’t well know if …”

  Alan leaned forward. “I find it crazy to sneak into a house in secret in order to steal money from a murdered woman’s room. He takes an enormous risk upon himself in doing so. Even if he has nothing to do with Helene’s death, he at least brings suspicion on himself that he took part in some way.”

  “As far as I know, he bought greenhouses and overextended himself.”

  “Greenhouses can’t ruin a man. I’m sure he had to take out a loan for them, and maybe he’s also gotten behind on a few of the payments, but he couldn’t get into such a fix on that account. He could get Helene to swallow that story, and maybe my mother too — but to me there are parts of his version of things that are rather suspect.”

  Franca poured herself another cup of coffee. She felt a bit chilly, wrapped her hands more tightly around the mug. The room wasn’t heated, and through the window, which was cracked open, cold and damp slowly crept inside. Alan, who had noticed her light shivering, stood up and closed the window. He paused there, looked out at the yard which was flooded with rain.

  “There’s also the taxi driver’s statement,” he said. “That another car was following his. The whole way from Torteval to Le Variouf. What if it was Kevin?”

  “He’d have to be crazy. It’s pure luck that the taxi driver didn’t pay attention to the license plates.”

  “If there’s a car behind you with its headlights blazing and it’s driving really close on top of that — and the driver said the other car was almost in his trunk — you can’t make out the number. Kevin could have counted on that.”

  “He wouldn’t have counted on it. Too risky …”

  Alan turned around and looked at Franca. It struck her how focused his gaze was, how wide-awake and attentive his features. She saw in him something of the man that he was, apart from the alcohol, late nights, ever-changing relationships. She saw the successful, intelligent lawyer; the man who acted deliberately, who was self-willed and had a grip on his life and on himself. She understood how strong this side of him was, but how quickly it could fall apart when the devil drink set his destructive machinery in motion.

  “Certain things about that night are highly strange,” he said, “if you consider how other evenings between Kevin and Helene went before. Helene had never come back in a taxi. Kevin always drove her, always. After all, it was an essential part of the whole production — that he picked her up and brought her back like a … a love-struck youth with his dancehall flame, to use Helene’s vocabulary. Because for her, it was about reconstructing a possible phase of her life that she hadn’t experienced.”

  “That night, though, the ritual was broken from the very beginning,” Franca reminded him. “Kevin didn’t pick her up. Beatrice brought her there.”

  “Yes, because this time it wasn’t Helene alone who was invited. It was just chance that she …” Alan broke off. “Why,” he asked, “was it, actually, that my mother didn’t stay? At Kevin’s. Why did she steal away the entire evening at Pleinmont Point?”

  Franca had been waiting for this question that entire time. She felt uncomfortable. “She … she wasn’t feeling very well …,” she said evasively.

  Alan looked at her sharply. “Why wasn’t she feeling well? I’m certain she told you.”

  Franca hesitated, but then she pulled herself together. “She’d spoken with you that afternoon. You had just broken it off with Maya and …”

  She didn’t say anything further, but Alan had already understood what was going on. “I was fall down drunk,” he said. “I remember. It upset her terribly, didn’t it?”

  “She was completely beside herself. Shocked, hopeless, at a loss for what to do. I’ve never seen her like that. She said she couldn’t endure an entire evening of Helene’s chatter, and … well, she opted for being alone among the cliffs.”

  Alan leaned against the windowsill. He looked worried and thoughtful. “I’ve asked a lot of Mum,” he said quietly. “It must be terrible for a mother to keep having to see her son intoxicated.”

  “She sees different sides of you as well,” Franca said warmly. “And in her heart she’s very proud of you.”

  He smiled. “You’re a sweet person, Franca. Why weren’t you at Kevin’s? Or had he not actually invited you?”

  “That day my husband showed up on Guernsey unexpectedly. He wanted to get me to come back, and I wanted to ask him for a divorce. So we needed that evening in order to have a rather prickly conversation.”

  “And?” Alan asked.

  She looked at him. “And what?”

  “Are you going back to him? Or are you getting divorced?”

  “I’m getting divorced,” Franca answered shortly.

  Alan nodded, but made no further comment.

  “Your theory is off, somehow,” said Franca. “Kevin can’t have planned to ask Helene for money that evening, because otherwise he wouldn’t have invited Beatrice and me.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t planning to. He thou
ght he couldn’t always invite just Helene; at some point he had to bring the rest of the family over for once. But when he was unexpectedly alone with Helene, he took advantage of the opportunity and asked Helene for a certain sum. Helene refused.”

  “Why should she have? She’d kept on helping him for a long time by then.”

  “At some point enough is enough. Helene might have had a lot of money, but maybe it was slowly dawning on her that she could be a bit more careful with it. After all, she couldn’t know if eventually she’d not be able to take care of herself on her own and would need expensive care. She pulled the plug.”

  “Hmm,” said Franca and poured herself her third cup of coffee. Her heart would be racing all the rest of that day, but at the moment she didn’t want to abstain.

  “Do you remember the taxi driver’s statement?” Alan asked. “Helene called him — from Kevin’s house. Normally it’s the host who performs this task, wouldn’t you agree? Supposedly Kevin was too drunk, but my mother says he’d seemed wide awake and lucid to her when she called him later that night. She didn’t have the impression that an excessive amount of alcohol was at play. The taxi driver reported that Helene had spoken unusually quietly and had been upset. She was standing in the middle of the street when he picked her up. We both know Helene. She wouldn’t stand around alone in the middle of the street somewhere late at night. She would wait until the taxi driver rang the bell. Unless …”

  “What?”

  “Unless she was threatened. She was threatened so brutally that she had to flee Kevin’s house. Maybe she had to make the call in secret — and that’s why she was whispering. Somehow she managed to reach the telephone and then to secretly slip out to the street.”

  “Setting aside the fact,” said Franca, “that try as I might, I can’t imagine Kevin brutally threatening another person. I also find it illogical that he would then — assuming that really was what happened — wait calmly until Helene had called a taxi. And that then she can stand around waiting for another long while on the street, without Kevin coming and finding her. And besides that, don’t you consider it strange that in the scenario you’ve just described, Helene didn’t immediately call the police?”

  Alan walked a few steps from the window towards the table and back, then again remained by the window. The rain was slowly letting up, but already there were new clouds pressing in from over the ocean, and the wind shook the wet trees.

  “I think it was rather typical of Helene that in such a situation the first thing she wanted was to just go home. If Kevin threatened her, then she must have been completely out-of-sorts. She would never have expected something like that from him. I don’t think she would immediately have thought of the police. Kevin was her friend, her confidant, a kind of son. The only person that she’d told about the money that Erich had left her. You’re not so quick to send the police after your best friend. You want to have time to think first. You want to try and understand what’s happened.”

  Franca shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “And now? What should we do?”

  “Go to the police. Tell them what we suspect.”

  “Or,” said Franca, “we speak with Kevin first.”

  Alan was going to say something in reply, but he was interrupted by Mae, who walked into the room. No one had heard her car drive up. “Hello,” she said shyly. “I knocked on the front door but apparently nobody heard me. I’ve got plans with Beatrice.”

  Mae looked rather inappropriately attired in her bright yellow linen dress, with the summery short sleeves, and her light white shoes. Obviously she had decided to wear this outfit the day before and couldn’t now be convinced otherwise just because it was raining and several degrees colder. The whole length of her thin, wrinkled arms was covered in goosebumps.

  Typical Mae, Franca thought affectionately. She’d rather catch her death than rein in her vanity even a little.

  “Beatrice and I were going to go to St. Peter Port,” Mae went on. “To walk around and then have lunch somewhere.”

  “I think my mother’s upstairs still,” said Alan. “I’ll go see what’s keeping her. Have a seat with Franca and have yourself a cup of coffee.”

  Mae sat down and gratefully warmed her hands on the hot drink. “What dreadful weather this is,” she said with a look outside and shivered. “You wouldn’t believe that yesterday people were running around in their bathing suits.”

  “If only it weren’t so cold,” Franca agreed. “It was a real hassle having to put on a thick sweater this morning.”

  “I drove through St. Peter Port on the way here,” Mae reported. “And I saw Maya and Kevin in the harbor. Maya was dressed ridiculously, as always, much too thin.”

  Franca was grinning inside. Mae seemed not to realize that the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

  “She and Kevin were standing in the rain, no umbrellas, no rain jackets, and they were talking and moving their arms around … I honked and waved at them but I don’t think they even noticed me. They were too far in it.” Mae shook her head weightily. “These young people are hard to understand sometimes. But now how is it, actually,” she lowered her voice conspiratorially, “are Maya and Alan staying together? Is it finally working out between them?”

  “They’re broken up,” said Franca. “And I don’t think one should force anything there either. The age difference is too big, their ways of looking at life are too different. I think it would be better if each of them finds someone else.”

  “Alan will have a hard time of it,” said Mae, who once again had to let her granddaughter off the hook. “I mean, what woman wants a man who’s always drinking too much anyway? And it doesn’t seem to be getting any better with him. A person with no character at all.”

  The way Franca saw it, the same thing could be said about Maya, and in that selfsame tone of utter conviction — but she was silent. Having a discussion with Mae about it would have been pointless anyway.

  Alan and Beatrice came down, and Beatrice asked in amazement whether Mae, in light of the abysmal weather, really wanted to stick with her plan and drive into St. Peter Port. Mae made a face that made it clear to everyone how deeply offended she would be if Beatrice was to cancel their plans.

  “Ok then,” Beatrice said, resigned. “But are you really going to go like that? You must be freezing to death!”

  “I’m not the least bit cold,” Mae claimed, “I’m all set for us to head out.”

  Alan turned to Franca. “What do you think, do you want to go too? We can break off on our own once we get there. But either way I’ve got no interest in sitting here in the house and staring at the rain all day.”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” Beatrice said quickly. “Come on, Franca, go with him. If he sits here by himself until evening …”

  “… then he’s guaranteed to get completely plastered,” Alan finished the sentence. His voice sounded bitter. “Not to worry, Mum. I’ll keep myself occupied in such a way that I can’t make the teensiest reach towards the liquor bottle.”

  “Last night Alan wasn’t the least bit drunk,” Franca quickly offered. “Everything was fine with him.”

  Alan smiled. “Thanks, Franca. But this report will hardly impress my mother. She is deeply convinced of my lack of character. A single night of restraint can scarcely cause her to form a new image of me.”

  A brief, embarrassed silence prevailed between them. Then Mae said, with exaggerated good cheer, “So then, lets get going! We’re just going to have ourselves a nice day!”

  “You two go ahead,” said Alan. “Franca and I will come later. We don’t have to be lapping at your heels the whole time.”

  It was clear that he had no interest in spending all too much time with his mother — not after she’d spoken to him, yet again, about his drinking.

  “Just say that you’ll …” Beatr
ice began angrily, but Franca quickly said, to diffuse the situation, “Maybe we could all meet for lunch somewhere in St. Peter Port.”

  They agreed to all be at Bruno at one o’clock, an Italian place on the harbor road. It was ten o’clock, and it was still raining.

  The rain stopped almost instantaneously at half past twelve; a strong wind tore the clouds apart, and ever larger stretches of glorious blue sky peered out from behind the shreds. The grass and the leaves were glistening wet. All at once the sun brought so much heat that steam rose up from the earth and the humid air quivered. Alan and Franca came back from a hike along the cliff path to Moulin Huet Bay, both completely soaked through, with dripping hair and raincoats shiny with moisture.

  “As soon as we get home, it stops raining,” said Alan. “Our timing was exceedingly poor.”

  “We’ve got to get to St. Peter Port,” urged Franca with a look at her watch. “Your mother and Mae are waiting.”

  “Oh, let’s just leave it,” said Alan. “I haven’t the least bit of interest in sitting with my mother and listening to her lecture me for two hours.”

  “It was originally your suggestion that we accompany the two of them.”

  “That was stupid of me. Somehow I always think when I’m home that I should look after Mum a bit, especially now that she’s only got me left … but then I forget how insufferable she can be, and that she probably won’t ever stop treating me like a child.”

  “Yes, but we can’t leave the two of them sitting in Bruno now,” said Franca. “Come on, there’s no helping it, you’ve got to see it through.”

  Alan sighed in resignation and pulled his car keys out of his pants pocket. “What do you think — are you dry enough under your rain jacket, or do you have to change?”

  “It’s okay. We can go.”

  The car was parked down at the bottom of the driveway. While they went down the path between flowers beaded with moisture, and droplets from the trees kept falling on their heads, Franca realized something. “Oh, crap!” she said in German and stopped.