by H. Y. Hanna
“Er… well, I might have taken off a bit more than I planned to—”
“A bit? You’ve hacked them all down to nothing!” cried Nell.
Poppy winced. “I… um… was having such a good time, I sort of got carried away. But they’ll grow back… won’t they?” She looked at Nell hopefully.
“I don’t know. They look pretty awful,” said Nell, examining the barren stumps.
Poppy swallowed as she looked at them as well. Oh God, the more she looked at them, the worse they seemed. Nell was right—the woody stems looked stiff and dead. She couldn’t imagine anything growing from them again.
“But… but I saw Joe pruning other things in the garden,” Poppy said. “He cut them right down to the ground too and they all bounced back! Within a couple of days, they all had lots of fresh green shoots and leaves popping out.”
“Well, maybe they’re different. I mean, not every plant behaves the same way. You probably have to use different pruning methods for different things.”
“Oh Nell, what am I going to do?” wailed Poppy. “This was such a beautiful part of the cottage garden and it’s the path leading up to the front door too, so it’s the first thing people see. And now it’s ruined!”
Nell sighed. “Well, I did tell you to wait for Joe, dear. He would have shown you the correct way to do it.”
“I know—but I wanted to surprise him,” said Poppy miserably. “I want him to be proud of me when he comes back and sees what I’d done.”
“Well, he’ll certainly get a surprise all right,” said Nell dryly. She patted Poppy’s hand. “Never mind, dear. You can always plant new lavender bushes if these die. I suppose you have to make mistakes to learn.” She bent and picked up a pile of lavender flower spikes which had been trimmed from the bushes. She sniffed them appreciatively. “These are lovely though! They still smell gorgeous, even though they’re faded. You could use these in dried flower arrangements, you know. I’ll take them in and sort them into bunches.”
Left alone in the garden, Poppy glanced guiltily at the row of scraggly wooden stems once more and felt like kicking herself. Then she sighed and turned to look around at the rest of the garden. Somehow, seeing all the riotous flowerbeds bursting with colour cheered her up a bit. Nell’s comment about flower arrangements reminded her of her new business idea and she decided impulsively to make up a sample bouquet. Then she could take some photos on her phone and design a simple leaflet on her computer later that night. And tomorrow morning, she would head to the village post office shop, which offered a simple printing service, and get some material printed. She could also donate the arrangement to the postmistress, she decided; the whole village passed through the post office shop regularly and her flowers would be prominently displayed to all those who came in.
Poppy hurried through the beds, selecting various blooms at random. There were still some sweet peas twining their way up through old wooden supports, with ruffled blooms of soft pink, cream, and lilac; there were billowing white cosmos on slender stalks and stately snapdragons with columns of opulent flowers. At the front of the beds, pretty calendula in shades of coral and burnt orange vied for attention with bright zinnia blooms. And finally, she picked some dainty sprays of cow parsley together with aromatic stems of rosemary to provide fillers and foliage around the flowers.
She found an old metal jug and arranged the flowers in a loose, informal fashion, making sure to balance the colours and keep a nice shape overall. When at last she was done and stepped back to look at the beautiful arrangement, she felt her spirits lifting in spite of herself. She might have been a lousy gardener, but at least she was good at picking and arranging flowers!
Smiling with satisfaction, Poppy got hold of her phone and began snapping some photos. With her phone being an older model, the camera wasn’t the most powerful, but somehow the warm afternoon sunlight filtering through the trees and the slightly grainy quality of the photos combined to give them a soft vintage effect which looked very attractive—almost as if she had created the illusion on purpose!
Pleased with her efforts, Poppy took the arrangement into the cottage and left it in a cool corner of the sitting room. Nell heard her and called from the kitchen:
“Have you had lunch, dear? No? Well, you must eat something now! It’s terrible to skip meals, especially with all this hard gardening work you’re doing—you’ll wear yourself down to skin and bones! And then how are you ever going to find a man? Men don’t like scrawny women, you know, no matter what the magazines say. They appreciate a girl with a healthy appetite and some curves to fill out a dress…”
Poppy rolled her eyes, but she submitted to Nell’s fussing with good-natured grace. She wolfed the food down and, as soon as the last bite was gone, sprang up to head back out to the garden again.
“Where are you rushing off to now?” complained Nell. “You’ve barely let your food go down!”
“I just thought—since I can’t work at Duxton House—today’s a good day to catch up on a lot of stuff I still need to do in the garden,” explained Poppy. “I’m a bit worried about the stone wall between us and Nick Forrest, you know. The section with the huge stand of ivy growing on it.”
“Oh, yes, that’s a terrible mess,” said Nell, making a face. “It’s a huge tangle with dead leaves and old birds’ nests and spiders’ webs—”
“Yes, it looks awful, doesn’t it? It’s one of the last things I need to tackle, but I’ve been putting it off…” Poppy took a deep breath. “I’m going to sort it out this afternoon.”
“But I thought Joe said the other day that you should prune most things in late winter or early spring?”
“Yes, but he also said that if the ivy is getting out of hand, then you can trim it any time to reduce the size. This one is horribly overgrown and it’s really top-heavy too. There are parts where you can see it pulling away from the wall and hanging down. And that wall is already old and crumbling—what if the ivy pulls it down?”
“My lordy Lord, yes, the last thing you need is the expense of replacing a stone wall,” Nell agreed. “It’s a shame Joe’s gone now—you could have asked him to help you.”
“It’s okay. I know what to do—”
“That’s what you said about the lavender,” said Nell, pursing her lips.
“No, no, this is different,” Poppy insisted. “This doesn’t need any special pruning technique. This is just cutting away overgrown stuff.”
“Well… he’s left the ladder out by the back door,” said Nell grudgingly. “But make sure you’re careful on it, dear. I watched this programme on telly about accidents in the home and workplace, and did you know that nearly half of all falls are from a ladder? It’s because people don’t use them properly. They’re impatient and careless, and they don’t make sure that the ladder is stable before they climb up.”
Poppy assured Nell that she would take care and lugged the ladder over to the section of the wall with the ivy. The ground beneath the wall was soft and uneven, and it was impossible to have the legs of the ladder evenly balanced, so she propped it against the wall. She gave it an experimental shake. It seemed secure enough. She climbed to the top and looked curiously around. Everything looked different from this higher vantage point—she could see across the entire cottage garden, all the way to the rear of the property.
And on the other side of the wall, she could see Nick’s garden. It was an elegantly landscaped area of low maintenance hedges and shrubs, combined with a well-tended lawn. It looked calm and inviting—nothing like the riotous mix of colours, shapes, and textures that dominated her own cottage garden—and for a moment, Poppy had the treacherous thought that something like Nick’s green haven would be so much less work and hassle.
Then she remembered how the crime author loved coming over to Hollyhock Cottage, because it seemed to magically help his writing. So much so, in fact, that her grandmother had invited him to visit whenever he was struggling with writer’s block—an arrangement that Poppy continued to
honour. Nick’s garden might have been neat and low-maintenance, but it was the wild, colourful wonderland on her side of the wall that helped to get the creative juices flowing!
She began clipping back the rampant new growth on the ivy, carefully making sure that she cut each stem just above a leaf bud. It was strange how she had never paid much attention to the architecture of a plant before, but ever since Joe had shown her how new growth would appear from the little nodes at the base of each leaf, she had been excited to spot it happening on plants all over the garden.
Humming to herself once more, Poppy was just settling into a comfortable rhythm of untangling and clipping when she heard a roar from inside the house on the other side of the wall.
“YOU BLOODY CAT! I'm going to kill you!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Poppy looked across the wall and saw a commotion in the open upstairs window opposite her. A large orange cat sprang up onto the windowsill. Oren! He was followed a second later by Nick Forrest himself, looking absolutely livid. He lunged for the cat, but Oren was too quick for him. The ginger tom sprang off the windowsill, sailed through the air, and landed nimbly on top of the wall next to Poppy.
“ARRRRGGHH!” fumed Nick. He leaned out of the window and saw her. Pointing a finger at Oren, he snarled, "Hold him—don't let him get away! I'm going to wring his neck!"
“N-ow?” said Oren cheekily.
Poppy suppressed a laugh. “What did he do?” she asked, refraining from adding “this time”.
“He’s destroyed a book I borrowed from one of the Oxford college libraries!" snapped Nick. “It’s a valuable old edition that would normally never be allowed out of the library doors, but I managed to sweet-talk the librarian into letting me borrow it for book research and bring it home for a few days. I promised her I would take very good care of it…” He disappeared from the window, then returned a second later holding up a book for Poppy to see. “Look! Look what the bloody cat has done!”
Poppy flinched as she saw that the beautiful leatherbound cover had been shredded, with long claw marks raking in parallel lines across the embossed calf’s hide surface. Oren had obviously decided to use the priceless old book as a new scratching pad. Even now, the ginger tom looked unrepentant, licking a paw nonchalantly as if he hadn’t done anything wrong. Nick growled again as he eyed his cat and looked ready to make good his threat to come and strangle Oren. Poppy hastened to distract him.
“Can’t you just get a new binding for the book?” she asked. “I mean, isn’t the content the really valuable thing? So as long as Oren hasn’t damaged the pages—”
“It’s a rare edition! The value isn’t just in the printed pages but also in the aged leather covers and the marbled binding and tooling on the spine… I can’t just have a new cover stuck on! Besides, the point is—I gave the librarian my word that it would not be damaged.” Nick groaned and ran a hand through his unruly hair, making it look even wilder. “How am I going to explain this to her now?”
Poppy gave him a helpless smile. “Maybe she’s a cat-lover too and she’ll be understanding?”
Nick sighed, calming down slightly. “Well, I’d better head back to Darby College library tomorrow and face the music.”
Poppy pricked up her ears. “Did you say Darby College?”
“Yes, why?”
It was the same college that Henry had said he belonged to. In fact, he had said that he was in the college library all day yesterday, instead of being at the fête—and yet Bertie had claimed to see someone very like Henry with a red sportscar that carried Henry’s number plate…
"Is the college library very big?" Poppy asked.
"No, Darby is one of the smaller Oxford colleges. The library is really just one long room covering the south side of the main quad. Why?”
Poppy ignored his question, asking instead: “If it’s just one room, would you have been able to see everyone who came in or out?”
Nick raised an eyebrow. “That sounds a bit pointed. Is there someone in particular that you had in mind?"
“Henry Farnsworth—Muriel Farnsworth's great-nephew," said Poppy. She described him and looked hopefully at Nick. “Did you see him?”
“No. I was in the library most of the day before I came to the fête and I didn’t see anyone of that description.”
“So he was lying!” said Poppy triumphantly. She saw Nick looking at her quizzically and explained: “I met Henry at Duxton House this morning. He’s a student at Oxford—at Darby College—and he told me that he was studying in the college library all day yesterday. He said that he didn't return to Bunnington until the evening—but Bertie says that he saw Henry and his red sportscar when he was walking to the fête.”
Nick’s face darkened at the mention of Bertie and he growled, “Are you sure you can trust that old codger? It might have been another young man with a red sportscar.”
“No, I’m sure it was Henry. Bertie remembered the number plate on the car—because it resembled the value for the square root of two,” she added as she saw him start to protest again. Nick paused, then gave a wry nod, obviously knowing his father well enough to realise that was enough confirmation.
“So Henry lied about his whereabouts on the day of the murder,” Nick stated.
Poppy nodded. “It looks that way. But why?”
“Well, the obvious answer is to provide himself with an alibi. But does Henry have a motive to kill Ursula? Does he stand to gain in any way from her death?”
Poppy shrugged. “I don’t know. The only thing I could think of is that with Ursula gone, he’s Muriel Farnsworth’s only remaining relative now and I assume that he would get the lion’s share of her estate.”
“I wouldn’t assume anything,” said Nick with a cynical smile. “People can be funny in their wills. For all you know, she could leave everything to that poodle of hers. In any case, even if that were true, it seems a bit strange for Henry to suddenly decide to kill Ursula now. Muriel is only in her seventies and she’s in good health—it’s not as if she’s on her deathbed. Why would Henry go to the trouble of murdering Ursula now, just for the chance of more money—which he won’t receive until several years into the future anyway? Unless they’re homicidal psychopaths, people need a good reason to embark on something as serious as murder.”
“It’s so hard to imagine him as a murderer, anyway,” said Poppy with a sigh. “I mean, I can’t imagine why Henry would need to kill anyone. He seems to have everything: he’s rich, good-looking, educated, charming—”
“Lots of murderers are charming,” said Nick with a grim smile. “Take it from me. I met several during my time in the CID.”
“I suppose it’s just as well, then, that I didn’t accept Henry’s dinner invitation.”
Nick raised his eyebrows. “He asked you out to dinner?”
Poppy felt her cheeks reddening. “Yes, he asked me out on a date. Not that I would have accepted anyway. For professional reasons,” she added primly.
Nick looked amused and was about to reply when he was interrupted by a loud yowl from Oren:
“N-owwww!”
The ginger tom was obviously bored with their conversation and peeved at being ignored. He walked along the top of the wall until he was level with Poppy’s shoulder, then peered down at the ladder. Before she could stop him, Oren sprang from the wall, aiming for one of the lower rungs. He missed his target, making the ladder shudder as he hit the metal frame, then it swayed precariously as Oren scrambled to climb back onto one of the rungs. Without stable footing on the ground, the ladder began to teeter as the cat’s weight rocked it.
“Whoa—Oren!” gasped Poppy. She clutched at the wall as the ladder swung away and her feet slipped from the rungs.
“Careful!” shouted Nick.
Oren gave a petulant “N-ow!” and jumped off the ladder, landing nimbly in the undergrowth. Poppy tried to do the same but she was too high and the ladder tangled with her legs as it fell away from the wall. She cried out, g
roping wildly for a handhold, and fell against the ivy covering the wall. Leaves and stems tore away from the stone and, for a moment, Poppy thought the whole vine was going to collapse with her buried underneath! Then, to her relief, she felt the sturdier, older branches break her fall and found herself hanging against the side of the wall, her face pressed into the thick carpet of ivy leaves.
“Poppy! Are you all right?” came Nick’s voice from the other side of the wall.
“Yes…” she mumbled. “Yes, I’m fine. The ivy saved me.”
Slowly, using the ivy branches as handholds, she climbed down and lowered herself to the ground. Stepping back from the wall, she dusted herself off and shot a dirty look at Oren who was sitting nearby, once more nonchalantly washing a paw. She was beginning to see why Nick found the feline so infuriating!
She paused as she turned back to the wall and something caught her eye. A section of the ivy had torn away, exposing the stone slabs behind it. She frowned, going closer and reaching out to push the ivy leaves aside for a better look. She could see a little alcove in the wall—a small recess where the mortar between the slabs had worn away, leaving a gap. Not deep enough to open through to the other side, but enough to form a sort of cubbyhole, the kind of place you might hide your secret treasures and belongings…
There was a tin wedged in the hole—a biscuit tin, with faded pictures and rusty edges showing that it had been there a long time. Poppy reached for it and carefully eased it out. Someone had stuck a home-made label across the top. Time and the elements had faded the ink, but Poppy could just make out the words written in a childish hand:
Private Property of Holly Lancaster
Do Not Open Without Permission!
She caught her breath, her heart pounding. This had belonged to her mother! Then she realised that she could hear Nick’s voice from the other side of the wall, sounding very concerned.
“Poppy? Poppy, are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” she called. “I’m down now. And I… I think I found something.”
