Suddenly While Gardening

by Elizabeth Lemarchand

  Pollard agreed that this was one of the rummest affairs that they had ever investigated, and that Stoneham’s theory of some brand of crackpot might very well be the answer.

  ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘it’s important not to be distracted by the skeleton from the little matter of when the poor bloke it belonged to departed this life, from natural causes or otherwise. The explanation of the whole business may lie there. However, one step at a time... We’re getting along a fair treat,’ he added, looking at his watch. ‘Crookshank said they’d expect us about eleven.’

  Twenty minutes later they drew up in the familiar car park of Stoneham police station, and shortly afterwards were shown into Superintendent Crookshank’s office, where Henry Landfear, Chief Constable of Glintshire, also awaited them. Pollard noted that he had lost a couple of stone since they last met, but that his habitual gloom had returned. Both men seemed harassed. He learnt that the news of the discovery of the skeleton had appeared in a special edition of the area’s morning paper on the previous day, having apparently been leaked to the press too late for the normal edition. The information given was much the same as that in the London evening papers, but the nearness of Starbarrow Farm to the kistvaen had featured more prominently

  ‘I suppose local people have got it in for this chap Ling who owns the farm, because of the row over the right of way?’ Pollard asked. ‘I heard all about it from my aunt over at Holston.’

  ‘His name’s mud round here,’ Henry Landfear replied. ‘I don’t suppose more than five per cent of the inhabitants of these parts will ever set foot on the Possel Way, but there’s nothing like obstruction of a right of way for getting people simply hopping mad. After the court hearing Ling had to be escorted to his car. And now we’re faced with the hell of a problem. Yesterday evening a gang of Stoneham youths — the usual trouble-makers — went out to Starbarrow Farm on their motor bikes and started a rough house. They came belting back here, saying they’d been fired on. The super sent a couple of his chaps out there, and Ling’s story was that they’d tried to break in and threatened to burn the place down, and he’d fired a few shots over their heads. He went on to say that if they turned up again he’d aim lower. He wouldn’t listen to reason or warnings, and flatly refused police protection, saying he was quite capable of looking after himself and his wife and property. Of course we’re sending a couple of men with dogs along this evening without letting him know they’re there, but God only knows how we can keep it up. We’re desperately short-staffed, like everybody else.’

  Pollard commiserated and agreed that if there were a viable case against Geoffrey Ling, the sooner he was pulled in the better for all concerned. He gave his opinion that the skeleton had been put into the kistvaen only shortly before it was discovered, and suggested that an appeal to recent walkers on the Starbarrow section of the Possel Way might narrow things down, and also provide a starting point for questioning Ling.

  ‘There’s also the question of whose skeleton it is,’ he said, ‘and whether the chap died down here or was brought here after his death. Has the pathologist been able to put together a rough description of what he looked like?’

  Superintendent Crookshank produced the pathologist’s report. Deceased had been between sixteen and twenty years of age, five feet six inches in height and of medium build, with bleached shoulder-length hair reverting to its natural dark brown colour at the roots. There were old fillings in three of his teeth, the latter having been neglected recently. There were no signs of bone injuries, but the fibula of the left leg and some of the metacarpals and metatarsals were missing. Death was estimated to have occurred between thirteen and sixteen months previously. Traces of various substances had been found on the skeleton. These included rust, glass, hemp fibre, sawdust and cement, and bacterial organisms associated with putrefaction. There were faint traces of blue-green algae characteristic of small areas of stagnant water containing an excess of decaying organic matter. The pathologist’s guarded conclusion was that during the process of decomposition the body of the deceased had not been buried in earth, but apparently kept in a dark, damp and confined space, possibly an old junk store of some sort.

  ‘Between thirteen and sixteen months ago,’ Pollard said thoughtfully. ‘That covers the spring and early summer of last year, and includes Easter. In an area like this it’s a time when visitors, welcome and unwelcome, start turning up. Let’s get another appeal out with the one about the kistvaen, asking if anyone remembers a youth of this age and description during that period. It’s a pretty long shot, but they do come off now and again.’

  Both appeals were drafted and a constable summoned over the intercom to take them for immediate despatch to the broadcasting authorities and the press. Henry Landfear then reverted to the subject of Geoffrey Ling of Starbarrow Farm.

  ‘You’ll interview him, I take it?’ he asked.

  ‘I thought we might pay him a visit this afternoon,’ Pollard replied. ‘Can you fill in a bit? I understand he’s fairly new to these parts.’

  ‘I’ve never met him,’ the chief constable said, heaving his still considerable bulk into a more comfortable position on his chair. ‘My wife went to hear the right of way case — she’s a Friend of Cattesmoor — and came back quite intrigued. He struck her as a chap who made a pose of eccentricity but was anything but a fool underneath. There’s a rumour that he took a First in something or other, and makes up those crosswords with incomprehensible clues. I don’t know where his money comes from, but there must be quite a bit around. Starbarrow Farm was more or less derelict, and people say he’s done himself damn well. As you know, he’s got this thing about privacy. A rum-looking bloke, my wife says, with a face like a stage contortionist.’

  Pollard asked if Mr Ling had any family.

  ‘Yes, there’s a wife and a daughter. The wife goes in for pottery and weaving and whatever, but she seems as allergic to ordinary social life as he is. They’re reputed to have people to stay occasionally — old friends, I suppose — but never accept local invitations or entertain out there, although the girl’s boy friends are on visiting terms. She’s away most of the time in a job — a lectureship at a horticultural college near Wintlebury. A brainy girl and attractive, too, my wife says. Last Christmas she got engaged to a local lad, young Peter Grant, who’s a junior partner in a Stoneham firm of architects.’

  ‘Is he any relation to the Miss Davina Grant who was leading that guided walk when I got embroiled?’ Pollard asked.

  ‘He’s her brother.’

  ‘One more point, and we’ll clear off and get some lunch before going out to the farm and bearding Ling. What sort of a chap is this Bill Worth who says he discovered the skeleton in the kistvaen?’

  Henry Landfear looked enquiring. ‘Says? Any reason to suppose he knew it was there?’

  ‘Nothing you could call a reason. But he struck me as a bit anxious to brief me about this and that, and kept on ramming home how near the kistvaen is to Starbarrow Farm, in case I hadn’t taken it in. And I did think it odd that a chap of his type was on a guided walk at all. Anybody with half an ounce of gump could have got hold of the Friends’ pamphlet on the Possel Way, and gone on his own as I did myself. The rest of the party certainly weren’t his cup of tea, and he was decidedly snooty about Davina Grant.’

  ‘Any comment?’ Henry Landfear asked Superintendent Crookshank.

  ‘I reckon he went on the walk to get copy for his column in the Advertiser,’ Crookshank replied, referring to the weekly newspaper published in Stoneham. “He writes a piece each week on something that’s of local interest. Quite good, but a bit malicious, a lot of people think. If he can make anyone look silly, he’ll do it, like young Miss Grant trying to carry on everything her aunt did, and enjoying a change from second fiddle. Funny sort of bloke. Getting himself into print and his pictures into exhibitions makes him think he’s a cut above the rest of us, from the look of it. But I can’t see him getting mixed up in anything criminal. Certainly no
t a homicide.’

  ‘We’ve nothing against him, have we?’ Henry Landfear asked.

  ‘Nothing at all bar his nuisance value, sir. He’s one of these minor complaints chaps.’

  ‘Obviously I made the mistake of not taking him at his own valuation last Monday,’ Pollard said. ‘Hence the photograph and the jibe underneath, I suppose. Did you see it.’

  They both had, and agreed that it was typical Bill Worth.

  ‘Two birds with one stone,’ Crookshank added. ‘He got in a jab at Miss Grant as well, didn’t he?’

  ‘If you’re going out to see Ling,’ Henry Landfear said, “we’d better rustle up a Land Rover for you, don’t you think, Super? It’s hardly a run for that classy outfit down in the car park. You go out on the road to Biddle Bay for about eight miles to a village called Churstow. Then turn right up a narrow lane past the church — here it is on the map, see? It soon turns into a rough track which peters out on Cattesmoor, but you can’t miss your way. Follow the posts carrying the telephone cable. The ground’s like iron after the long drought, but a bit bumpy, of course.’

  ‘The Land Rover’s made Inspector Toye’s day,’ Pollard told him. ‘Can you get a car up on to the moor from the other villages on the Biddle road? If the skeleton didn’t come from Starbarrow Farm, it must have been brought along somehow. A bit conspicuous just to sling it over your shoulder.’

  After some discussion the two local men agreed that you could get a car up from any of the villages, but that it would be impossible to do it without being noticed. Superintendent Crookshank undertook to have enquiries made, and that these should cover strangers on horseback as well.’

  Over their lunch Pollard and Toye discussed tactics for the interview with Geoffrey Ling.

  ‘We’ve nothing to go on at the moment,’ Pollard said. ‘It’s simply to give us a chance to vet the chap himself and spy out the land. Keep it short, and Ling guessing, I think.’ They easily located Churstow and the turning up to Cattesmoor, and noted that about half a dozen people materialised in doorways to watch their progress up the steep narrow lane. Toye, who was enjoying himself in spite of his critical attitude to the Land Rover’s standard of maintenance, carefully negotiated the deeply rutted surface beyond the cottages and the gateway giving on to the moor. Pollard shut the gate behind them and stood looking around him. Their route ahead climbed steadily through a great sweep of heather, in which the deep purple of the bell variety was giving place to the soft rose-pink of ling. The only sign of life was a kestrel poised almost motionless in the cloudless sky above them, and some distant white blobs of sheep moving slowly on a patch of greenness. He got into the car again and they started off along the faint wheel tracks following the telephone cable. Toye remarked that it must have cost a packet to get the G.P.O. to run a line out that far. Pollard agreed, studying the map closely as they progressed. After about a mile and a half he forecast that they would see the farm from the top of the next rise. A couple of minutes later they looked down on a cluster of grey buildings backed by a windbreak of trees, diminutive in the great stretches of the moor.

  ‘Blimey!’ Toye exclaimed. ‘Talk about the world’s end!’ Through binoculars Pollard could see a walled garden gay with flowers in front of the farm house, and what appeared to be a number of large notices. After a time these became legible, ‘STRICTLY PRIVATE’, ‘KEEP OUT’, ‘BEWARE OF THE DOGS’, ‘YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED’, he read out. ‘And unless I’m much mistaken, Ling’s watching us coming along from over the top of the garden gate. Duck when you hear the whistle of bullets, won’t you?’

  Suddenly a loud booming filled the air, and a huge hollow voice informed them that if they were reporters they came at their own risk.

  ‘Step on it,’ Pollard ordered. A smart acceleration carried them over the intervening ground to a standstill, with the car’s nose and the POLICE notice on the windscreen confronting the face looking over the gate. It was a red-brown weathered face under wisps of grizzled hair. As Pollard stared at it in fascinated recognition its underlip shot out truculently.

  ‘Hooligans with threats of arson. A brace of police. The local police boss-man. High-ups from the Great Wen. Without a warrant you shall not set foot across my threshold.’

  While these statements were being declaimed in an unexpectedly high and pedantic voice Pollard extricated himself from the car.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Ling,’ he said. ‘We haven’t time to cross your threshold this afternoon, so the matter doesn’t arise. I am Detective-Superintendent Pollard of New Scotland Yard, and this is my assistant, Detective-Inspector Toye. We are conducting the official enquiry into the discovery of human remains in the kistvaen on Starbarrow.’

  ‘Go ahead and prove that I put it there, then,’ Geoffrey Ling invited. ‘You’ll have your work cut out.’

  ‘Even Euclid needed data before proving a proposition,’ Pollard replied. ‘When was this house last unoccupied overnight?’

  Geoffrey Ling cast up his eyes to heaven in mute appeal. Finally, as Pollard remained impassive, he stated that the last occasion had been for a few weeks at the end of March in the previous year.

  ‘The police,’ Pollard said, watching him, ‘are interested in last Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. Were you yourself in residence then?’

  Just for a split second, before Geoffrey Ling’s features were distorted into an expression of ironic gravity, there was the blankness of indecision.

  ‘I was,’ he replied.

  ‘Did you at any time during these nights hear any sound such as a distant car or someone on horseback, or anyone moving about outside?’

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘What dogs have you got here?’

  At the abrupt change of subject and tone Geoffrey Ling flung open the gate. A black and white cocker spaniel tumbled out and squirmed excitedly over Pollard’s feet.

  ‘The plural is a little touch of poetic licence, Superintendent, to discourage — er, callers.’

  ‘How do you keep your rats down?’ Pollard was surprised to hear himself asking.

  For the first time Geoffrey Ling forbore to grimace and looked at him with interest.

  ‘Can it be that a top cop from the Great Wen is — or once was — a countryman?’ he enquired. ‘Meet Attila, the Scourge of God, and Tamburlaine the Great.’ With a wave of his hand he indicated two huge battle-scarred toms sunning themselves on the wall, one orange, and one white with a sinister black patch over its left eye. ‘Cattesmoor, aptly named by its aboriginals the home of wild cats. We found these two here when we came.’

  ‘This is Inspector Toye’s line,’ Pollard told him. ‘He’s hooked on cats. Go along and take a look, Toye. Well, Mr Ling, I don’t think we need trouble you any further, at present, that is. If I could just put the question about those particular nights to your wife?’

  ‘She heard nothing.’

  ‘You must know, I’m sure, that we can only accept statements at first hand.’

  An oddly gratified gleam appeared in Geoffrey Ling’s light blue eyes. He raised his hand in a gesture enjoining silence. Muffled thuds were audible.

  ‘Penelope! Leave your loom! An importunate suitor is without!’ he carolled in a high-pitched cracked voice.

  Mrs Ling was plump and placid, with straight light brown hair screwed into a bun. Not surprisingly, she was also sparing of speech.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, eyeing Pollard with casual interest.

  He stated his credentials and business, and repeated his question about the previous Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.

  ‘I heard nothing,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t here.’

  As Toye, who had unobtrusively rejoined the group, took down the address at which she had been staying from Thursday evening to Monday morning, Geoffrey Ling gave a short bark of laughter.

  ‘Just a moment,’ Pollard said. ‘Was your daughter at home on those nights, Mrs Ling?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He who laughs last, laughs longest,
I think, Mr Ling?’ Pollard queried as Toye took down a second address. ‘We shall, of course, be interviewing Miss Ling.’

  ‘No, you can’t see the kistvaen from the back windows of the house,’ Toye reported, as they jolted gently over the moor. ‘Not at this time of year, anyway. The trees are much too close. They pretty well block out any view on that side, and there are quite a few outbuildings, too. I hadn’t time to look inside more than a couple. One had an electric pump in it, for the water, I take it, and the other was a wood store, full of logs. There’s a back door, and I don’t suppose they bother to lock it at night. Easy enough to slip out and disappear into the trees.’

  ‘As far as the daughter goes,’ Pollard said, ‘I just can’t believe that she wasn’t out with young Grant at any rate on one night last weekend, and that would leave the field clear for Ling, of course.’

  Toye agreed that it was a point.

  ‘Ling knows something,’ Pollard went on. ‘I’m certain he does. If only somebody comes forward and swears that the skeleton wasn’t in the kistvaen on Friday afternoon, we might consider bringing him in for questioning if nothing more turns up in the meantime. Anyway, it hasn’t been a wasted trip. And I bet I know who’s had the biggest kick out of it, too... Through Darkest Glintshire at the Wheel of a Land Rover?’

  Toye declined to rise, merely remarking sedately that it made a nice change after the motorways. As they approached the gate leading to the lane down to Churstow a woman with grey hair accompanied by a wirehaired terrier came through it. On catching sight of the car she waited, holding the gate open. Pollard leant out of the window to thank her.

  ‘Local custom,’ she told him, with a speculative look. ‘Not that there’s much occasion for it as a rule. It’s only these last few days that the track’s become a highway. Scotland Yard, isn’t it? You’re not our police, and obviously not the Press. I’m Elsa Fordham, a retired Churstow incomer, as we’re called by the genuine villagers.’