EG02 - The Lost Gardens

by Anthony Eglin

  ‘Most likely sometime in the early to mid-sixties.’

  ‘That would mean the phony Ryder would have had to pull off the charade for over thirty years. Highly unlikely, wouldn’t you think?’

  Kingston nodded.

  ‘Though similar cases have been known,’ Chadwick added. ‘Pity we don’t have some DNA to compare.’

  A pause followed while Chadwick scribbled a note on his desk pad, then he turned his attention back to Kingston.

  ‘The other scenario I came up with,’ said Kingston, ‘was that it could have been Kershaw who was killed and the bones in the well are his. From what Loftus remembers, he and Ryder were about the same height and were close in age.’

  Chadwick’s expression was stolid.

  Sensing that there was nothing more to be said by either of them, Kingston gestured with open hands. ‘Well, that’s about it,’ he said. What he really wanted to say was that he was disappointed in Chadwick’s seeming lack of enthusiasm for what Kingston thought was diligent work on his part. At least some acknowledgement for his time and effort would have been appreciated.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Chadwick, with a slight shake of the head, as if reading Kingston’s mind. ‘Your theory about the body being Kershaw’s is certainly admissible but we have a new piece of evidence that would suggest that that’s not the case.’

  ‘A new piece of evidence?’

  ‘Yes. It was found after the remains were analysed at the lab. Tangled up in some of the debris and sludge that came up with the bones there was a wristwatch. We found a leather belt at the site but the watch wasn’t discovered till later.’

  ‘How does the watch corroborate that it’s not Ryder’s or Kershaw’s body?’

  ‘Because it had initials engraved on the back. CMA. Not anyone you know, by chance?’

  Kingston was thrown off balance. This was not what he wanted to hear. For a moment he said nothing. He was subconsciously rubbing his chin, thinking hard, looking away, to avoid Chadwick’s gaze. Then he looked up. ‘CMA. No, nobody I can think of.’

  Chadwick leaned back in his swivel chair. ‘Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like it’s going to help us much.’

  ‘The watch. Obviously you know the make?’

  ‘It was a Hamilton. A tank watch, I think it’s called.’

  ‘Hamilton? That’s American, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re right, it is.’

  ‘Hmm. Any idea when it was made?’

  ‘Late thirties, as best I recall.’

  ‘Meaning, it could have been purchased several years later.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So we know that the body couldn’t have been in the well prior to 1937 or thereabouts?’

  ‘But any time after. Up to today as a matter of fact because that particular watch is now a collector’s item. Worth quite a few bob, I’m told.’

  ‘But American made?’

  ‘Yes, but we know they were exported to Britain, if that’s what you’re thinking, so it doesn’t tell us much.’

  Kingston looked up at the ceiling. ‘CMA,’ he said shaking his head. ‘I’ve no idea. Unless it was bought as used.’ He got up from his chair. ‘Well, inspector, thanks for taking the time to see me. I trust that if you learn any more you’ll let Jamie or me know. That would be appreciated.’

  Chadwick rose. ‘Unfortunately, none of this sheds any more light on why Ryder left his estate to Miss Gibson. Which, I believe you said, is what motivated you in the first place.’ He walked around the desk. ‘Not unless you can connect CMA with Jamie in any way.’

  ‘I’ll ask her, of course, but I would seriously doubt it.’

  ‘Good,’ Chadwick said with a smile. ‘Let me know. Meanwhile tell Jamie that the case is by no means closed but given everything we know at this point—which I’m afraid is not much—we may never discover whose bones they are and how they came to end up in the well.’

  Kingston paused, one hand gripping the back of the chair. ‘I have one more question, inspector,’ he said. ‘You had a phone conversation with Jamie shortly after the skeleton was found.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. We’d just got the results back from pathology.’

  ‘The victim was a male, roughly sixty years old, about five eleven. Been down there a long time, I believe you said?’

  ‘Sounds right.’

  ‘She said there was more but it was a bit over her head. You know, medical terminology.’

  Chadwick gave the question frowning thought. ‘As I recall, there really wasn’t much more. I’d have to go back and look at the pathologist’s report.’

  ‘If it’s not asking too much, could you do that?’

  ‘It’s frowned upon to provide information to any outside source on an active case but in this case I don’t see why not. I’m curious, what do you expect to find?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Just grasping at straws, I suppose.’ Chadwick shrugged and got up from his chair. ‘It might take a couple of days. I’ll call you when I have it.’

  They shook hands and Kingston departed.

  Two days later, at eight o’clock in the morning, the phone rang in Kingston’s cottage. It was Chadwick.

  ‘I’ve just finished reading the pathologist’s report again,’ he said. ‘I’ve got it in front of me.’

  ‘Does it mention injuries of any kind?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, it does. Now I think of it, I believe I did mention it to Jamie at the time.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘That there was evidence of past trauma and reconstructive surgery to the left patella and left upper tibia.’

  ‘Hmm. Any idea what caused the damage?’

  ‘Nothing definitive, no. Why?’

  Kingston’s answer was slow in coming. ‘Well, if we knew it was from a gunshot—then it could very well be Ryder’s body, after all.’

  ‘You make a good point but I’m convinced more than ever that the likelihood of someone successfully posing as Ryder for that many years is either very slim or none.’

  There was a momentary gap in the conversation.

  ‘Did you ask Jamie about the watch?’

  ‘Damn. Stupid of me, I forgot to tell her.’

  ‘Well, let me know when you do.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  No more than a minute after his conversation with Chadwick, Kingston dialled Loftus’s number in Nottingham. His sister answered, clearly distraught. Her brother had suffered a mild stroke and was in hospital, she said. He had lost some movement on his right side but his speech wasn’t impaired. The doctor was confident that, given time and with therapy, he would make a complete recovery.

  Kingston had been hoping that Loftus might be able to clarify something. He remembered the old man saying that, in the struggle for Ryder’s pistol, Ryder had been shot. But he hadn’t said where on his body. In his note, he had said that Kershaw was wounded, too. Kingston was going to have to wait for a while to get the answers now.

  Over the summer, Kingston had developed the habit of winding up the day with Jamie at the office or sometimes at the house where he would bring her up to date on recent work and they could discuss the events of the day over a glass of wine. At first it was all business, mostly dealing with the gardens, but as their get-togethers became more frequent and drawn-out, they began to talk more and more about other things. It had reached the point now where Kingston looked upon her as much as a friend as an employer. He was glad that she’d given no signs of discouraging what he wanted to believe was an easygoing and symbiotic relationship.

  At first, it was just one glass of wine each evening. But lately their discussions invariably featured a special bottle of wine, often an unusual varietal. The tasting of le vin de soir as Kingston had come to call it became a much looked forward to ritual and the bottle was nearly always consumed by the time they parted. As the days progressed, he was quickly broadening his already respectable knowledge of wine and winemaking, which pleased him no end.

  Over
the years, Kingston had visited quite a few wineries in France, Italy, Spain and England and had inched along with the camera-toting shuffle of visitors through many a winery tour. Now, after many hours of listening to Jamie talk about the subject, he had come to realize how minuscule a picture those tours presented and how little he really knew about the complex business of producing great wines.

  The long journey from the day the first furrow is ploughed to the moment the precious liquid is poured into a glass can take five years or more. And along the way there are innumerable decisions to be made and no guarantees. Jamie quoted a writer who said that ‘there is nothing so irascibly difficult as making a truly fine wine, given a thousand unpredictable variables.’

  During one of their earlier chats, when they had tasted a particularly nice 1995 Musigny Burgundy wine, Kingston asked an innocent question about terroir, a French word that has no English equivalent. It attempts to describe all of the natural conditions in a vineyard as they relate to the growing of grapes: the land, soil, slope, elevation, orientation to the sun, rainfall, wind, fog and so on.

  ‘There’s an industry cliché,’ said Jamie, ‘that wines are made in the vineyard. And I agree with that. If you screw up great grapes, you’ll never get a great wine.’ She held up a hand, fingers splayed. ‘It’s a bit embarrassing, you being a professor of botany and me spouting off about growing grapes. It’s more than just agriculture, though.’

  ‘Don’t you worry one bit, growing grapes was hardly a hot topic in my teaching days. I’m learning a lot, believe me.’ He paused to take a sip of the silky wine. ‘You were saying that it’s not necessarily a form of agriculture, right?’

  ‘Exactly. Most people assume that viticulture is a subset of agriculture but philosophically and in practice they are quite different. With conventional farming, the goal is usually to achieve standardization, uniformity, high yield and consistency on a large scale. Growing grapes for the purpose of making wines is much more a matter of individuality—manipulating the fruit in a lot of different ways, not to produce the biggest and meatiest grape but one that will make the kind of wine the winemaker is aiming for—often with low yield as opposed to high. The business of growing grapes and making wine is really all about balance. It’s one great year-long balancing act.’

  ‘You want the grape to conform to your ideal standard, is that it?’

  ‘Yes. And to reach that goal you have to thread your way through a minefield of variables. I’ll give you a few. To start, you have to regulate your soil and sub-soil, fertilizing it and maintaining the right pH levels. You have to figure out the water and drainage, exactly where in the vineyard you choose to plant, what rootstock to use, what clones, how far apart to plant the rows, which direction the rows will run, what kind of trellis to use, how you’re going to irrigate.’ She paused. ‘That’s just the beginning. And no matter how hard you try sometimes grapes have a mind of their own. We’ve taken identical clones, grafted on the same rootstock, exposed them to the same weather conditions and irrigated them identically and yet these presumably same vines, planted only a few feet apart, developed differently and bore grapes with totally different tastes. Go figure?’

  ‘That’s extraordinary,’ said Kingston.

  Jamie shook her head. ‘Sometimes it’s downright exasperating. Once the grapes start growing they’re sitting targets for all kinds of problems. The vagaries of the weather are the most difficult to deal with and the most crucial. Frosts and too much early rain can play havoc with the crop. Rain absorption dilutes sugar levels, one of the most important things to keep an eye on as the berries begin to develop. Not enough sun, too much sun, the angle of the sun, all can make a huge difference. The more sunlight that strikes the grape clusters, the sweeter they’ll be but the goal is not to grow the sweetest fruit. Sweetness or the sugar level is something that you have to monitor on a daily basis once the grapes reach a certain stage in their development. Grapes are harvested when they reach the Brix level that you’re shooting for and the flavours have matured to where you want them.’

  ‘Yes, Brix, I remember learning about that in France.’

  ‘It’s the scale used to measure the concentration of sugar in the grapes. It’s measured right in the vineyard with a small gadget called a refractometer.’

  ‘So how are you able to control the sugar content?’

  ‘Pruning, thinning, fertilization, irrigation—they all affect the ripening process including sugar accumulation. For example, thinning out the canopy can open it up to allow more sunlight and air circulation. It can be quite a guessing game because once you’ve removed leaves you can’t put them back on again.’

  ‘How about pruning?’

  ‘How you prune the vines at the very beginning of the year is another make-or-break operation. Good pruning hands are worth their weight in gold. Not only for how well and properly they can prune but also how fast. We have an annual pruning contest in Sonoma, pretty good prize money, too.’ She stopped for a moment to pour the remainder of the Burgundy in their glasses, taking a sip before she picked up where she left off.

  ‘The other consideration that helps maintain balanced sugar levels is to plant rows from east to west. In doing so, both sides of the vines get an equal share of sunlight through the day, whereas if you plant north to south, one side gets milder morning sun and the other side, the longer, much hotter afternoon sun.’

  ‘It makes so much sense,’ said Kingston. ‘You know, you would make a great teacher.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said with a quick smile. ‘Anyway, you can see already that just the growing part alone is an art unto itself. And I haven’t even mentioned some of the other little tricks that Mother Nature sometimes springs on us, like botrytis mould, the dreaded phylloxera and insects such as the blue-green sharpshooter and the voracious glassy-winged sharpshooter, that can wipe out a vineyard in no time. When those show up it means deciding what to spray with and when to spray. If it’s phylloxera, forget it. All you can do is to rip all the vines out and replant.’ She offered a thin smile. ‘I don’t want to disillusion you but the entire farming year is nonstop pruning, monitoring, thinning, measuring, spraying, hoping and praying until you drop the crop and take it to the winery to turn the grapes into wine. And that’s where another thousand things can go wrong.’ She paused then smiled. ‘Still want to grow grapes?’

  Back at the cottage, stretched out on the sofa, reading, after another of their evening chats, Kingston became aware of subconsciously rereading the same sentence. Soon, he found it impossible to concentrate. His mind kept coming back to Jamie. Clasping his hands behind his head, he lay back, head on the plumped-up cushion, and stared up at the plaster rose that graced the ceiling above the tasselled lampshade. He thought back to his very first real conversation with her, that first day of theirs in Somerset. How he’d felt at the time, about his uncertainty, his apprehension regarding her lofty ambitions for Wickersham, his teetering between curiosity and indifference. It was extraordinary what had happened in the relatively short time since he’d arrived here. Not for the first time, he wondered how she regarded him. He smiled to himself. Most likely as a father figure, a sort of elder statesman-cum-horticultural sage, an inquisitive academic. Thinking more about it, any one or all three would not be far off the mark.

  Over the years Kingston had got to know a number of Americans, a few of whom had become more than nodding acquaintances. Jamie was certainly not a ‘wear your heart on your sleeve’ type, who thinks nothing of reciting their entire life and medical history at first introduction. She was the opposite. But over the last weeks there had been a noticeable shift in her reticence: her candour in telling him about her job and her garden, confiding in him about her parents that night at dinner, and the education she was giving him about winegrowing.

  Every now and then, he detected what he thought was a flicker of mutual attraction. It struck him as curious, too, that a woman as attractive and intelligent as Jamie should not have a boyfr
iend. Surely that couldn’t be the case? There was the chap she worked with—the one that was coming over—what was his name? Matthew. But from what little she had said, that was strictly an office relationship. Of course, there could be any number of explanations. For no particular reasons, he guessed that she’d never been married. If she had she would surely have mentioned it by now. And if it were recently ended, she would probably still be wearing a wedding ring. Women did that, he’d noticed. Maybe she had just had a bitter break-up with a boyfriend, a broken engagement? That would certainly explain why it was not so hard for her to drop everything and travel halfway around the world to start a new life.

  Why was he so concerned about her personal life? Why didn’t he just do what he came down to do? He knew the answer but wasn’t prepared to dwell on it. In his mind he wasn’t willing to accept the simple truth that he was growing very fond of Jamie—perhaps too fond.

  He picked up the book. ‘Christ,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘What are you thinking of?’

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘That’s very disturbing news,’ said Kingston, a sombre look on his face, the hard lines around his jaw accentuated by the shafts of sunlight deflecting through the nearby window. Jamie said nothing, her face, too, registering concern and noticeably drained of colour.

  Minutes earlier, a breathless Dot had found Kingston in the vegetable garden saying that Jamie wanted him up at the house right away.

  Facing Jamie and Kingston, Detective Chief Inspector Chadwick, in a dark grey pinstripe suit, sat leaning back into the sofa, his arm stretched casually along the back. ‘We’re not treating it as a homicide yet,’ he said. ‘But there’re sufficient reasons for us not to rule it out entirely.’ He had just informed Jamie and Kingston that, late the previous afternoon, Jack Harris had been discovered face down on the kitchen linoleum of his rented house, dead. His landlady had called the police after several unsuccessful attempts to serve him final notice on his rent that was two months in arrears.