‘I suppose in view of what’s happened we’d better pull out all the stops for him.’ Jack Haines scrutinised the paper she had given him.
Mandy said, ‘He’s still got that hacking cough. He doesn’t look all that well. I hope he’s looking after himself.’
‘I think we can do most of these,’ said Jack, still looking at the list.
‘If not,’ she said mischievously, ‘we could always ask Bob Steele if he could send us some of them.’
‘Over my dead body,’ he growled, his face turning an apoplectic shade of crimson. ‘I’m not going down on my bended knee to that man for anything. Anything at all. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, Jack,’ she said sedulously, turning back to her own desk. ‘But according to Russ the man’s happy enough to come to you for almost anything.’
‘That’s as maybe,’ he said enigmatically. ‘And mind what you say about Bob Steele in front of Russ. I’m not happy about him either.’
They were interrupted by the arrival of Anthony Berra. ‘I hear the admiral’s ordered just what he wants as usual,’ he said ruefully.
‘He has,’ said Haines, adding peaceably, ‘He’s old, of course.’
‘And difficult,’ sighed Berra.
‘Handling him must be good practice for your dealing with the Bishop, Anthony,’ said Mandy Lamb briskly. ‘I hear your future father-in-law is no pushover.’
‘That’s nothing – you haven’t met his wife,’ groaned Berra. ‘I call her Mrs Proudie behind her back. Terror of the diocese from all accounts. By the way, Jack, I’ve just come from the Berebury Garden Centre and Bob Steele said again he was sorry to hear about your troubles and if there was anything he could do, to let him know.’
‘That’ll be the day,’ muttered Haines, half to himself, his complexion again turning an unhappy shade of red.
‘Upset you, has he?’ concluded Berra. ‘No sentiment in business and all that?’
‘You could say something of the sort,’ Haines managed through clenched teeth. He waved a list in his hand. ‘I’ll get Russ to look out these plants you want.’
‘Thanks. I’ll have them as soon as you can get them – our Charmian will have my guts for garters if anything more goes wrong with her precious Mediterranean garden. I must have been mad to agree to do it for her.’ He broke off to cough.
‘I hope that’s not catching,’ said Mandy Lamb pointedly, edging away.
He stared at her and said stiffly, ‘Certainly not.’ Just as quickly his mood changed and he said, ‘I’ve just thought of a good quote for my new business card that I’d like to run past you.’
‘What’s that, then?’ asked Jack Haines, who didn’t believe in advertising.
Anthony Berra said ‘“A good garden is a painting come to life”. What do you think of that, Jack?’
‘I think,’ said the nurseryman firmly, ‘that you should tell them the truth – which is that a garden is hell’s half acre with everything in it fighting for survival night and day.’
‘Not “A lovesome thing, God wot” then?’ put in Mandy Lamb.
‘Certainly not,’ said Haines.
‘A man doesn’t bite the hand that feeds him,’ said Berra obscurely.
‘Coffee, Anthony?’ As always when dissention threatened, Mandy Lamb took refuge in her universal remedy.
Jack Haines said, ‘A cobbler should stick to his last and you should stick to yours, Anthony. Garden design, not playing with words.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ said the other man slowly, turning to go. ‘By the way, Jack,’ he asked, ‘had you thought of your stepson as a possible orchid killer?’
‘Yes,’ said Jack Haines shortly. ‘I had.’
Detective Constable Crosby stood up when Sloan got back to his office. ‘Where to now, sir?’
‘Where indeed?’ murmured Detective Inspector Sloan. Nothing with its roots in Pelling seemed to fit: in his book, events so far seemed more Rubik’s Cube than jigsaw.
‘The canteen?’ suggested Crosby hopefully.
‘Why not? At this stage, Crosby, it’s as good as anywhere else.’
The canteen at the police station served an all-day breakfast. The meal could not be further from the ‘five-a-day’ mantra of the healthy eating brigade. Sloan regarded the bacon, eggs, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, baked beans and fried potatoes with enthusiasm, only wondering in passing whether the fried mushrooms, tomatoes and beans could be deemed as three of his ‘five-a-day’ allotment of healthy fruit and vegetables. He decided not.
‘I brought some toast as well,’ said Crosby. ‘I hope that’s all right.’
‘Good thinking,’ said Sloan. When later in the day his wife Margaret enquired whether he had eaten at work, he could admit with some truth that he’d had some toast. It was not the whole truth, of course, which was important. He reminded himself that not saying anything was a form of lying. But the whole truth at Pelling was something that was beginning to bother him because he seemed to be no nearer to it today. Or to establishing whether the absence of the missing Enid Maude Osgathorp, whose home had been broken into twice, had any connection with frost-damaged plants at Pelling and Capstan Purlieu.
‘There’s only one thing we really know about Enid Osgathorp,’ he mused aloud, ‘apart from the two break-ins at her house and that we know she’s been missing for over three weeks.’
Detective Constable Crosby, having been brought up not talk when his mouth was full, for a wonder remained silent.
‘That’s that she wasn’t the flavour of the month,’ carried on Sloan, demolishing a sausage. ‘There is a certain absence of warmth whenever her name is mentioned although Anthony Berra sounded quite neutral when he told us he had given her a lift into Berebury.’
‘That reminds me, sir,’ said Crosby, when he had swallowed and regained the power of speech. He parked a piece of toast on his plate while he reached for his notebook. ‘I checked on that. I found two old ladies who had also been waiting at the bus stop that day. They remembered him stopping and picking her up.’
‘But not them?’ said Sloan. ‘He didn’t give them a lift too?’
‘Just her.’
‘Perhaps they didn’t like her either,’ said Sloan idly.
‘That man Benedict Feakins sure didn’t have any nice feelings about her,’ Crosby said. ‘He looked like a frightened rabbit when her name cropped up.’
‘And the admiral actually admitted he didn’t like her,’ said Sloan. There was something at the back of his mind niggling him about the admiral – something from way back that he felt he was missing but he couldn’t think what it was.
‘So that lets him out of anything that’s been going on,’ decided Crosby, attacking a rasher of bacon.
There would be a moment, resolved Sloan, when he would have to explain the concept of double bluff to the constable but, the man’s attention now being centred on the bacon, this didn’t seem to be it. Instead he said, ‘All the same, Crosby, I think we’ll have another word with him later.’
‘Don’t forget, sir, we haven’t traced the husband of one of those women at Capstan Purlieu yet,’ said Crosby. ‘Norman Potts.’
‘That’s true, although we don’t know where he fits in the picture – or even if he does. Perhaps we’d better get on with that too.’
‘Nobody liked him either – at least, not his stepfather or his ex-wife,’ said Crosby.
Someone had once listed the reasons for murdering people: gain, conviction, elimination, the lust of killing, revenge, jealousy … Not being liked didn’t seem to be one of them. The absence of war from the list had struck Sloan as strange at the time he first read it but that was presumably different. Those intent on making war had always said so throughout history, hadn’t they?
‘More toast, sir?’ Crosby, hovering, interrupted his train of thought.
Without thinking, Sloan’s hand stretched out for it. He said absently, ‘There’s really only one thing about Enid Osgathorp that we do know for certai
n and that’s that she knew everyone in Pelling by virtue of her occupation as keeper of their medical records.’
‘And those two women out at Capstan Purlieu as well,’ pointed out Crosby. ‘She knew them too, because one of them is standing in for her at that talk she was supposed to be giving tonight.’
‘She must have known the rector’s wife, anyway,’ concluded Sloan, ‘talking of whom it would be interesting to know where she had stashed her wedding fund money. Not in the bank, anyway, because she’d taken the money out of the bank each month, not put it in there.’
‘And she couldn’t have put it anywhere in the house,’ concluded Crosby, ‘because the husband and children would have found it by now if she had.’
‘True.’
‘Perhaps it got stolen?’ suggested the constable.
‘Then we would have heard about it,’ said Sloan, qualifying this immediately by adding, ‘unless someone in the family had nicked it. We mightn’t have been told in that case, families being what they are. Unlikely, though, I admit.’ Struck by a sudden thought, he said, ‘If the question of probate has come up, we could always check with the family’s solicitor to see if he’s found it. Otherwise, Crosby, we might have to consider that Mrs Beddowes had been giving the money to someone else …’
‘What on earth for?’ asked the constable, who was now tackling the bacon.
‘What, indeed?’ said Detective Inspector Sloan rhetorically, ‘but in my book, regular cash payments out of someone’s bank account over a long period about which nobody else knows anything spells only one thing.’
‘What’s that, then?’ asked Crosby.
‘Blackmail,’ pronounced Sloan succinctly, ‘especially if it’s followed by suicide, so I think we’ll see if we can track down all that money of Mrs Ann Beddowes’ next. Whether we are dealing with a suicide followed by a murder is something else that has to be considered.’
Crosby chewed his toast for a moment and then said, ‘Ann Beddowes couldn’t have murdered Enid Osgathorp …’
‘No, Crosby,’ he agreed, letting out an exasperated sigh. ‘She couldn’t because she was already dead before Enid Osgathorp went walkabout. What I’m pretty sure about now is that someone else has done, though, and that one of the break-ins to her house was carried out by that someone else looking for the evidence that led to the blackmail.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘Back again, Anthony? You’re earlier than usual this morning.’ Charmian Lingard appeared in the grounds of the Grange at Pelling as if by magic as the garden designer was working there. She was wearing trousers so well-cut that they shouted as having come from a London couturier. They were of a light brown check, the outfit being topped by a plain cream blouse of expensive simplicity.
‘Nothing like as soon as those poor old monks would have been at their first office when they lived here. They had to get going really early.’ Anthony Berra straightened up and leant on his spade. ‘I wanted to get Flora’s plinth settled in.’ He gave the statue an affectionate pat. ‘I’m just finishing checking the levels of the base so that I can fix her properly. It’s very important to get her standing up straight.’
‘I quite agree,’ said Charmian Lingard whose own excellent deportment had been refined at the Swiss Finishing School. ‘We can’t have her doing a Leaning Tower of Pisa act. Not here.’
‘She’d look drunk and that would never do,’ agreed Anthony solemnly.
‘You’re teasing me, Anthony.’
He reverted to business. ‘I’m hoping to get everything ready before I go and then I’ll have to leave the concrete round the plinth to set. I’m going set off next and do another round of nurseries to see if I can replace some of the plants we’ve lost …’
‘You’ve lost,’ she corrected him, a touch of steel in her voice.
‘I’ve lost,’ he conceded at once, hiding a grimace. ‘I’ve already been to Jack Haines’ place and over to the nursery at Capstan Purlieu …’
‘I’ve heard of them. One of them’s a bit fierce, isn’t she?’
‘I wouldn’t want to tangle with Anna Sutherland myself,’ admitted Anthony Berra, adding hastily, ‘very sound on her subject, all the same. But I’ll have to try some other places too. And you’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve drawn up a new planting plan.’
‘You don’t waste much time, do you, Anthony?’
He essayed a smile. ‘It’s not so much time and tide that wait for no man, Charmian, as the length of time the plants are in the ground that matters.’ He added, grinning, ‘And we do have a deadline, don’t we?’
‘You know we do and I know you’re teasing me again,’ said Charmian Lingard sweetly. ‘The garden party. I’m already working on the draft of the invitation to the printers. I’m really just waiting for the proof to come back and then I can give them the go-ahead.’ She gave a sigh of great satisfaction. ‘It’s going to be a great occasion. I do hope I can persuade the admiral to come. He’s such a game old chap and I’m sure he’ll turn up if he can. Besides, he must know the bishop and his wife.’
‘And everyone else who matters in Calleshire,’ added Anthony Berra, but under his breath.
‘It’s a bit like being in church, sir, isn’t it?’ whispered Detective Constable Crosby. ‘Sitting on these hard chairs and being so uncomfortable.’
The two policemen were in the waiting room of the offices of Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery, Solicitors and Notaries Public, of Berebury.
‘What you are sitting on, Crosby,’ Sloan informed him, ‘is what is known as a flea chair.’
The constable jumped to his feet. ‘I have never had fleas and I don’t want them now.’
‘But if you had, Crosby, they wouldn’t have jumped off you and onto these wooden chairs because they haven’t got cushions on them for the fleas to settle on. You may sit down again.’
Crosby resumed his seat with a certain caution.
‘You don’t need to worry,’ said Sloan kindly. ‘They’re hall chairs and they’re what the hoi polloi were supposed to sit on while they waited for the local nobs to ask them what they wanted.’
‘We’re not hoi polloi,’ objected Crosby. ‘We’re different. We’re sworn police officers.’
‘Just so,’ agreed Sloan as Miss Fennel appeared and said that Mr Puckle would see them now.
‘As you know, Inspector,’ said Simon Puckle pleasantly, ‘I can’t give you any information about any client – not without a court order, that is.’
‘We were just wondering,’ Sloan said to the solicitor, ‘if that applied to the affairs of deceased clients. I understand that death cancels all contracts.’
Simon Puckle frowned. ‘Inquest reports, probate records and court judgements are all in the public domain …’
‘Let alone what they put in the newspapers,’ grumbled Crosby who felt he had been misreported after making his first arrest. ‘Everyone sees that.’
‘That is,’ carried on the solicitor urbanely, ‘they all become available in the public domain in due course.’
‘The law’s delays,’ murmured Crosby, sotto voce, still put out over the mention of fleas.
‘What we are looking for,’ explained Sloan, ‘is missing money.’
‘Theft, you mean?’ Simon Puckle’s eyebrows went up.
‘Not necessarily.’
‘In that case you might need a forensic accountant rather than a solicitor.’
‘What I want,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan in a straightforward manner, ‘is to know what the late Mrs Ann Beddowes did with the money that she took out of the bank every month.’
‘Nobody else seems to know,’ contributed Crosby in an antiphon.
Simon Puckle sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers while he gave the matter some thought. After a moment he said, ‘Presently neither do I. Nor indeed does anyone else to whom I have spoken.’ He coughed. ‘As her executor I have a duty at law to establish the extent of her estate and …’
‘No joy?’ suggested
Crosby.
‘Not so far,’ he temporised. ‘And I think I am in a position to tell you also that her family haven’t been able to help in this respect. There is no trace of where it went every month although I still have the requirement to establish that it hasn’t been salted away somewhere and thus requires to be included in her estate. If it has simply been disbursed by the deceased in any way whatsoever it is not my responsibility as her executor to know on what. In my capacity as her executor I am only concerned with what remained in her estate at the time of her death.’
‘And it’s not there?’ asked Sloan, rising to take his leave. Solicitors, he had been told, unlike policemen, measured their time in minutes.
Simon Puckle shook his head. ‘Not to my knowledge, Inspector.’
‘Come along then, Crosby,’ said Sloan. He paused with his hand on the door, struck by a sudden thought. He thanked the solicitor and then said, ‘If you can tell us that perhaps you could tell us something else.’
‘Perhaps.’ Caution was obviously the watchword with Simon Puckle.
‘The late Doctor Heddon of Pelling. Did you act for him?’
The solicitor nodded. ‘Our firm were his executors and we duly submitted details of his estate for probate.’
‘And these aren’t secret?’
‘No. Probate was granted in due course.’
‘We would like to know how much money he left to Miss Enid Osgathorp. How do we find out?’
Simon Puckle said, ‘I can tell you that myself, gentlemen. He didn’t leave her anything at all. If I remember rightly – I could check for you if it’s important – everything went to a niece of his in Calleford.’
As the two policemen walked back from the solicitors’ premises through the streets of Berebury to the police station, Detective Inspector Sloan remarked to his subordinate, ‘So that’s someone else who didn’t like Enid Osgathorp either.’
‘Simon Puckle?’ said Crosby.
‘Doctor Heddon,’ said Sloan. ‘Enid Osgathorp had worked for him for years and years out there at Pelling but he didn’t remember her in his Will.’
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