Dead Heading

by Catherine Aird

  Detective Inspector Sloan asked the Coroner’s Officer what the rector had had to say about the contents of the letter, if anything.

  ‘Oh, yes, he said something all right,’ replied York promptly. ‘It was a quotation. He sounded very sad and said “Thy Mother’s son! Like enough, and thy Father’s shadow”. He told me it was from something Shakespeare wrote but I wouldn’t know about that myself.’

  ‘If we look smart about it, Crosby,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, taking a swift look at his watch, ‘we could interview Bob Steele before we go back to the crime scene.’ Clearing away the undergrowth as you go along was one of the superintendent’s great maxims. ‘It’ll give Charlie Marsden time to give the place a going-over.’

  Nothing loth, Crosby turned the police car in the direction of the Berebury Garden Centre.

  ‘We should probably have done it before,’ said Sloan. ‘There’s something going on there but I don’t know what. Norman Potts or Russ Aqueel might have known more about it than we do and taken action accordingly.’

  ‘Or Jack Haines might have done,’ said Crosby. The Berebury Garden Centre was on the outskirts of the market town and there were no open roads on the way, just winding streets with Anglo-Saxon origins. He negotiated these with virtuous attention to all the road signage. It was only when Sloan spotted a Traffic patrol car hidden up behind a school that he realised why.

  Bob Steele received the two detectives civilly and without any apparent anxiety. ‘Jack Haines? But I’ve already told you I know him. What’s up now?’

  ‘We are making enquiries into another matter that’s cropped up.’

  ‘Another matter …’ The man caught sight of Sloan’s face and said, ‘I see, and you aren’t going to tell me what it is. That right?’

  ‘If you would just answer our questions, sir, it would be very helpful.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said the other man roughly. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Russ Aqueel, the foreman at Jack Haines’ nursery, would appear to be a frequent visitor here.’

  Bob Steele visibly relaxed. ‘That’s no secret. If I run out of plants I buy them from old Jack. If Jack wants anything from me I do the same and Russ brings them over. Custom of the trade. We all help each other.’

  If Bob Steele heard the little snort that escaped Crosby at this he gave no sign of having done so.

  ‘I pay him on the nail, Inspector,’ went on Steele, ‘if that’s what’s worrying you. Ask that secretary of his over there – Mandy somebody. She wouldn’t let anyone get away without.’ He sniffed. ‘Proper watchdog, she is.’

  ‘And when exactly,’ asked Sloan, ‘did you last see Jack himself?’

  Steele’s eyes narrowed. ‘Ah, so this is what this is all about. Well, if you must know I spotted his car outside here pretty late last night. As you’re detectives I expect you’ll have worked out that I live on the premises.’

  ‘We were not unaware of the fact, sir,’ said Sloan, whose mother had taught him that politeness could be as sharp-edged a weapon as any knife. ‘What was Jack Haines doing?’

  ‘Besides sitting in his car,’ put in Crosby.

  ‘Waiting for Russ Aqueel to come out of my house I expect.’

  ‘And what was Russ Aqueel doing in there?’ asked Sloan patiently.

  Bob Steele spread out his hands in a gesture that included two thumbs-up. ‘Promising me he was going to hand in his notice to Jack Haines next Friday and agreeing to come to work for me instead. If you must know we were having a drink on it. Or three,’ he added after a moment’s thought. ‘Russ can put them away, all right.’

  ‘Thus,’ said Sloan regretfully, reporting back to Superintendent Leeyes when he’d checked everything out, ‘apparently giving all three of them an alibi for Norman Potts’ death last night.’

  ‘That’s if the pathologist’s got the estimated time of death right,’ said Leeyes, a last ditch man by nature.

  ‘There’s one thing the doctors have got right, sir,’ said Sloan, a sheet of paper still in his hand. ‘Benedict Feakins’ blood group has been confirmed by the haematologist. It matches the specimen on the window at Canonry Cottage. We’ll be charging him with breaking and entering.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, head of the Criminal Investigation Department of ‘F’ Division, was at a loss to explain why he was not gripped by this information.

  ‘And they’re in the process of seeing if they can confirm his DNA from some hair they collected from the scene,’ he added, equally unexcited by this.

  As Anthony Berra’s car disappeared down the road from Capstan Purlieu Plants nursery, Marilyn Potts took a deep breath and announced to her friend that she was going over to Pelling to see Jack Haines. ‘I want to talk to him, Anna.’

  ‘He may not want to talk to you,’ responded Anna Sutherland trenchantly. ‘He never did. Well, at least not since you married Norman and then started your matrimonial causes action or whatever it is they call it these days.’

  ‘Divorce proceedings,’ she said pithily, adding, ‘but this is different.’

  ‘Of course,’ suggested Anna thoughtfully, ‘we mustn’t forget that Jack may know more than we do.’

  ‘And what exactly is that supposed to mean?’ demanded Marilyn.

  ‘Those orchids you used last night came from his place the other day.’

  ‘But, Anna, the police didn’t say anything about where the ones they had had come from.’

  ‘Cagey, weren’t they?’ said her friend pleasantly.

  ‘You don’t think that Jack had anything to do with Norman’s death, do you? Not Jack, surely.’

  Anna shook her head. ‘Frankly, I wouldn’t have thought he was up to anything as strenuous as killing Norman, not with his figure. Too much tummy.’

  Marilyn stared at her. ‘Who said anything about Norman being killed? The police only said that he had been found dead.’

  The other woman shrugged her shoulders. ‘Stands to reason, doesn’t it? Me, I couldn’t see Norman killing himself. Not no way. He was a man with an eye for the main chance if anyone was.’

  ‘He certainly looked after number one first,’ admitted Marilyn sadly. ‘Even after we were married.’

  ‘Well, all I can say is that if someone has killed him then he didn’t look after himself well enough, number one or not.’ She stood up. ‘Now I must get on with some potting up. Besides, I’ve got a phone call to make. I’ve got a lot to do today.’

  Jack Haines barely looked up when Marilyn Potts came into his office. ‘Back again, Marilyn.’

  ‘Like the proverbial bad penny, I keep turning up.’ Uninvited, she pulled a chair up and sank into it.

  ‘What is it this time?’ he asked.

  ‘Call it curiosity.’

  ‘Dangerous thing, curiosity,’ said Haines.

  Mandy Lamb slid a couple of mugs of coffee before them and remarked, ‘It killed the cat too. Sugar?’

  ‘What’s to do with Enid’s orchids, Jack, and come to that, what’s to do with Enid?’ Marilyn Potts waved away the sugar. ‘There’s been no sign of her for weeks. She should have been back before now.’

  ‘Search me. I don’t know that either.’

  ‘Nobody tells him anything,’ said Mandy Lamb ironically.

  ‘Look here, Marilyn,’ said Jack Haines, stirred by this, ‘we don’t know that there is anything to tell.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we do,’ she said with unusual firmness.

  ‘Speak for yourself, my girl.’

  Marilyn Potts took a deep breath. ‘Two of Enid’s orchids were taken from our shed last night after we got back from my talk and they’ve been found by the police somewhere but they won’t say where. They had a photograph of them.’

  ‘Two Dracula,’ said Haines. ‘The police have been here too.’

  ‘Checking,’ contributed Mandy Lamb from the side-lines, ‘like they do.’

  Marilyn Potts sighed. ‘I don’t know what’s going on, Jack, but I know I don’t like it.’

  �
�Me neither,’ he said, ‘but I can’t think what either of us can do about it.’

  Marilyn Potts sat in her chair, twisting her hands together. ‘Why should it be two Dracula that were taken?’

  Mandy Lamb leant over the table that the other two were sitting at and remarked that Count Dracula was a vampire. ‘Vlad the Impaler, they called him.’

  Jack Haines shrugged his shoulders. ‘For heaven’s sake, Mandy, it’s only the name of an orchid – that’s all.’

  ‘A bloodsucker,’ the secretary persisted. ‘Perhaps Norman Potts was a blackmailer and someone was trying to tell you something about him.’

  ‘Two orchids …’ said Marilyn, frowning suddenly.

  Jack Haines stirred irritably. ‘For God’s sake, Marilyn, stop going on about them.’

  She pushed her chair back and got to her feet, struggling to wrest her mobile phone from her pocket. ‘I must ring Anna. It’s important. Very important.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Although the photographers had long left Norman Potts’ house in downtown Berebury, Charlie Marsden and his team of Scenes of Crime experts were still examining the place when the two policemen arrived back there.

  ‘We’ve done a preliminary search, Inspector,’ said Charlie Marsden as the two detectives stepped inside the door. ‘Not a lot of real interest,’ he jerked a finger in the direction of the sideboard, ‘unless you count those floral offerings over there.’

  ‘We’re looking for a true artist in crime here, Charlie, remember.’ It was something that Sloan was only just beginning properly to appreciate himself. The choice seemed wide enough. He cast his mind back to Anna Sutherland, effortlessly humping heavy loads about at their nursery. She could have hauled the body of an unconscious Norman Potts over a beam easily enough – and she hadn’t liked his treatment of Marilyn, her friend. Benedict Feakins, bad back or not, was young and had the strength. So also did Russ Aqueel, although where he came into the equation was what the mathematicians called an unknown factor. Bob Steele of the Berebury Garden Centre, who had insisted he didn’t know Enid Osgathorp, would certainly have known Norman Potts and Norman Potts might have had some legal leverage on Jack Haines’ business through his late mother’s estate, thus thwarting Bob Steele’s ambitions. It was something he would have to look into.

  ‘We’ve checked the plant pots with the orchids in, Inspector.’ Charlie Marsden interrupted Sloan’s thoughts.

  ‘And?’

  ‘No joy. Handled with gloves on. By the way, you might like to know that we got some DNA off a bit of a toothbrush that wasn’t completely burnt on that chap Feakins’ bonfire over at Pelling. The report’s on its way.’

  ‘Bully for you,’ responded Sloan absently.

  Marsden sniffed. ‘Can’t imagine why he didn’t want us to find it.’

  ‘Neither can I, Charlie, but that’ll have to wait.’ Sloan put the information at the back of his mind for the time being. It wasn’t by any means the only thing that he couldn’t explain. What he really wanted to know was where those dead orchids came in – well, not only the orchids – all the plants that had been destroyed by frost. As a keen gardener, he, Christopher Dennis Sloan, could blame Jack Frost for a lot; as a policeman, he, Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan, still couldn’t see where a low temperature in March came into the picture. What he could see, though, was that there was undoubtedly a scheme of things in the background. And it was this scheme that was so puzzling.

  It was easy to see who had lost out in it, not least Norman Potts, but there didn’t seem to be an obvious answer to the opposite question beloved by detectives of ‘Who benefits?’

  ‘What’s that, Charlie?’ he asked, suddenly conscious that the Scenes of Crime Officer had gone on speaking to him.

  ‘Bit bizarre in a place like this, if you ask me, those orchids,’ said Marsden. He waved an arm in a disparaging gesture at an unlovely and uncared for domestic interior.

  ‘Lacks a woman’s touch,’ agreed Sloan in an unconscious tribute to his wife, Margaret, as he mentally compared his own early bachelor surroundings with his present home comforts.

  Charlie Marsden grinned. ‘No signs of a lady here at all. First thing we checked. No signs of much else either really.’

  ‘Cupboard bare?’ suggested Crosby.

  ‘The deceased doesn’t seem to have gone in for eating much at all,’ said the Scenes of Crime Officer. ‘There’s the odd tin of baked beans and half a loaf but that’s about it.’

  ‘“A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese”,’ chanted Crosby.

  The other two men stared at him.

  ‘Birdsong,’ stammered the constable, abashed. ‘The yellowhammer. We did it at school.’

  ‘The only sort of birdsong that I know about,’ said Charlie Marsden heavily, ‘is called Twitter.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan ignored them both while he gave some thought to the possibility of Norman Potts’ meagre lifestyle being the end result of blackmail rather than alcohol or slow horses. This man too must at some stage in his life have been – when he had lived there with his mother – on the medical list of the late Doctor Heddon of Pelling and thus any weakness that he might have had surely been known to Enid Osgathorp. Although Doctor Dabbe hadn’t mentioned discovering any unmentionable disease at the man’s post-mortem, he would have to check back with the pathologist. Sloan sighed. He should have thought of that before but at this moment he felt like a juggler struggling to keep one ball too many in the air.

  And therefore risking dropping the lot.

  Was the near-squalor of these tawdry surroundings really down to the demon drink, a penchant for slow horses, or had Norman Potts too been subjected to blackmail? Sloan turned to Charlie Marsden. ‘Any money in the house?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ said the worthy. ‘The odd note in a teapot, that’s all.’

  ‘All of a pattern,’ murmured Sloan, although it was another pattern he was trying to visualise – one that took in a still unexplained entry into Canonry Cottage with a key, a unloved missing person, the blackmailing of more than one poor soul, the probable suicide of one of them, the odd, naive behaviour of a maker of bonfires, inexplicable goings-on in the horticultural trade and, cast into the mixture for good measure, the destruction of hundreds of infant orchids.

  To say nothing of the murder here of a man whom it appeared nobody liked much either. As soon as Norman Potts’ face could be made recognisable he would get on with having the CCTV records scanned for him on the day Enid Osgathorp was last seen in Berebury.

  If she had been, that is. That was something else that had to be considered too.

  The river, that swift carrier of bodies down to the sea, wasn’t very far from the house where they were now. A body could have easily been slipped out unnoticed into the estuary on a dark night on the ebb of a spring tide, unnoticed by anyone – anyone that is except possibly Norman Potts. A watery burial would at least explain the absence of a body – and if he had observed it, perhaps the subsequent death of Norman Potts. That was if he hadn’t carried it out himself. Sloan didn’t know.

  Not yet.

  And where on earth did all those orchids come in – well, not only the orchids – all the plants that had been destroyed by frost? At least some of the plants for Anthony Berra’s clients, the Lingards, were already in the way of being replaced, well not so much replaced as substitutes found. Idly he wondered why the substitutes meant for the Lingards’ garden at Pelling Grange that he had seen in Jack Haines’ office had been so different from the ones he’d been told had been destroyed by frost. Sloan stiffened as he realised that they’d changed from being lime-hating plants to lime-lovers … His pulse quickened: all detectives had been well schooled in one of the important functions of lime.

  Charlie Marsden started to draw his attention to something else he’d found in the house but Sloan wasn’t listening. Something that the superintendent had said had swum into his mind, something about the police not being able to dig up half Calles
hire. He’d agreed that they couldn’t, but it came to him that there was someone who could dig up at least some of the county without arousing suspicion.

  ‘Not now, Charlie,’ he said. He was trying to remember something that Crosby had said too. What had it been? Something about making your bed and lying on it – that was it. He breathed out very slowly, a picture of great villainy suddenly becoming very clear to him.

  Before he could even begin to think this through and take action, the telephone in his pocket started to pulsate against his thigh. It was Superintendent Leeyes. ‘That you, Sloan?’ he barked. ‘I’m told there’s a woman called Marilyn Potts who’s been on the line screaming that we should get over to Capstan Purlieu Plants urgently. She says she can’t reach her friend on her mobile and she’s frightened for her. I don’t see why myself,’ he harrumphed, ‘that that constitutes a police emergency.’

  ‘I do, sir,’ said Sloan grimly. ‘Now.’ He cut the superintendent off without ceremony and turned. ‘Come along, Crosby. We need our time.’

  As it was the two policemen got out to Capstan Purlieu Plants only just in time to stop Anthony Berra from strangling Anna Sutherland.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘I guessed it had to be Anthony,’ said Anna Sutherland, anger and shock fighting for supremacy in her voice, leaving it reduced to a quaver. She was still shaking slightly. ‘It was when he obviously knew that it was two orchids that were missing that I thought it must be him. It had to be. You see, we hadn’t told him how many and I suddenly remembered that.’ The woman had the grace to look a bit sheepish. ‘I do know I shouldn’t have rung him but I did.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t,’ exploded Marilyn Potts, who had just arrived hotfoot from Pelling. ‘He might have killed you too.’

  ‘He very nearly did,’ said her friend hoarsely, fingering her bruised throat. She looked awkwardly at Sloan and said, ‘I should be thanking you.’

  ‘You’ll have to unfriend him now,’ put in Detective Constable Crosby, a recent convert to online connections.