Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Potting Shed Mystery (Potting Shed Mystery series Book 3)

by Marty Wingate

  She walked in the west gate and made a beeline for the administration building on the east side, but the revving of a chainsaw caught her attention. She gave in to her gardener’s curiosity and followed the rip of the engine until she came across a crew taking down an enormous beech tree in the southwest corner of the garden.

  As she drew near, her steps slowed. A limb as big around as a telephone pole swung slightly in its rope harness as arborists lowered it to the ground. Yes, she had seen the warning signs on the tree—letting visitors know that the beech, far past its normal life span, needed to be removed for safety reasons.

  She looked over at the gardener she’d walked up beside—Murdo, his face enraptured by what was happening eighty feet up.

  “It’s always sad to lose a tree,” she said, “isn’t it?”

  He barely blinked as he watched the proceedings, and a small smile appeared on his face. “Not lost, Pru—not lost at all. She’s got another life in her yet.”

  Pru nodded. “Yes, the stump will sprout—but I don’t think we’ll see anything quite so grand again.”

  His eyes flickered toward her for a moment. He pulled off his green woolly cap and held it to his chest. “Can you not see the possibility?” he asked. “I see a table—a proper-size dining table from an angled cross section of the trunk, enough for ten or twelve people to sit down at. With that smooth gray bark left on and just a bit of dip and curve to the shape. Beech wood polishes up a light color, good dense grain.” He lifted his eyebrows. “And a wardrobe—oh, easy to get a wardrobe out of that tree, with turned barley twist legs or maybe those lion’s paws. And perhaps a small chest. She’s great potential in her.”

  Pru had ceased watching the tree come down and instead watched Murdo, transformed from a bungling, snooping junior gardener into an eloquent artist. “Do you make furniture, Murdo?”

  His eyes rested on her, and she saw the brightness fade. “No, Pru. I’m a gardener. It’s just—well, I might have tried my hand at a piece of wood once or twice.”

  “Didn’t you ever want to—”

  “Trotter!” a fellow called from down the path. “Will you bring the cart to the heath garden?”

  “Oh, aye, I’m right there,” he called, his shoulders sagging.

  As Murdo turned his attention back to Pru, she waved at Mrs. Murchie, far up the path, taking her daily constitutional through the Botanics. Murdo followed Pru’s gaze and watched the retreating figure.

  “Who’s that, then, Pru?” he asked.

  “My neighbor Mrs. Murchie.” And as the investigation was very much on her mind that morning, she added, “She’s the one who found Iain’s body.”

  As Murdo drove off in the electric cart, Pru took another path, the one that led her to the administration building and Alastair.

  What did she expect, that he would be in his office? She stood in the hall and contemplated shoving a note under the locked door, but realized that a surprise attack would work better. She’d try again in an hour. Down the stairs and out the door toward her building, where Marcus came round the corner and fell into step with her.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  “How is it going?”

  She shrugged. “All right.”

  “Is Christopher still here?”

  “No, he went back to London last night.” They stood at her door while she dug for her key.

  “Are you going to be okay on your own?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Yes, I’ll be fine.” The door opened, she dropped her bag on the floor by her desk while Marcus hovered in the doorway. “Would you switch the kettle on for me?” she asked. “Do you want a coffee?”

  “No, thanks.” Marcus reached over and flipped the switch on the electric kettle. No light appeared, so he switched it off and then on again. “I don’t think it’s working.”

  Pru pointed under the table. “Sorry, you need to switch on the power at the outlet on the wall, too.”

  As he reached down, he said, “I don’t understand why you have to turn everything on twice here.”

  “I know,” she said, shrugging. “Sometimes I still forget to check if the outlet is live. Have you seen Alastair this morning?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “What do you need him for?”

  “Ha—what do I need him for? I need him to answer a few questions, that’s what I need him for. Why did he give me this job? Is the garden paying my salary? Where did this new Menzies journal even come from? Why didn’t Iain get offered the whole project? Why isn’t Alastair the least bit interested in what I’m doing, what I’ve found? What’s he going to do with the paper I’m writing—going to write? Will it be published? Tossed into the back of his filing cabinet?”

  “No wonder he’s hiding from you,” Marcus said, his dark eyes shining. “Reminds me of how you went off on Grady that quarter you were his teaching assistant and he made you go to the greenhouse every morning at five and take CO2 readings from his fifty flats of Arabidopsis—and then he lost your records.”

  She laughed at the memory. “I hated plant phys, and Grady was insufferable.” She sighed, reached for some papers, and shuffled them around. “Right, well—if you see Alastair, would you give me a ring? I may be able to outrun him if he tries to flee again.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Marcus turned to leave, but stopped. “They’ve put me up with Angus MacAdams. Do you know him?”

  “I think I met him when I first arrived. How is it?”

  “It’s all right, but he and his wife are gone for a week, and Alastair asked me over to dinner tonight. He said I could bring someone along. Do you want to go?”

  “Oh, well, um, thanks. But, I don’t know…it’s…I have to…”

  Marcus held his hands up to stop her. “I’m not asking you out on a date,” he said. “I thought you might want to take advantage of Alastair not being able to avoid you. Just forget it.” He headed down the hall.

  “Wait, Marcus—I’m sorry,” Pru said as she followed him out. “Yes, thank you for asking—I will go. And,” she added, “I didn’t think you were asking me out.”

  “You wouldn’t say yes, anyway.” He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Would you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Pru said. “Now, go away.”

  “Do you want me to stop by and pick you up?”

  She shook her head. “You don’t need to collect me. It’s a short walk. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Collect you,” Marcus muttered. “What are you—a buffalo-head nickel?”

  —

  Pru volunteered for a garden assignment, and spent the rest of the morning lightly pruning a dozen hydrangeas scattered throughout the oak lawn across from the perennial borders; when she finished, she raked up her clippings and hauled them off to the compost. It was good to be outdoors again; maybe they had a few trees that needed planting. Perhaps she could schedule one morning a week outdoors for the rest of her time at the garden. However long that would be. She returned tools to the shed, swung by the coffee bar at the east gate to get a sandwich, headed for her office, and worked through the afternoon. Another call to Lawlor Dale at Kew; another message left. Was Banks close to his housekeeper? Could she have been in possession of…The hope she held for an answer to Mr. Menzies’s found journal faded day by day.

  —

  Pru gathered her things and left for home, taking the route that led her past the sheds. She looked in and found Saskia standing at the long workbench with her back to the door.

  “Saskia?”

  The young woman whirled around. “Pru,” she said. “What are you doing in here?” She didn’t move from the bench; instead, she spread her arms and rested her hands on its edges.

  Pru smiled. “I used to do the same thing,” she said, nodding toward the bench.

  “Sorry?” Saskia raised her eyebrows.

  “Claim my own space. Hide my favorite tools.” Pru remembered staking out a particular corner of the work shed when she first st
arted at the Dallas Arboretum. She’d selected her trowel and weeder from the dozens that hung on the wall and secreted them away behind a wooden seed box, along with a pair of gloves and a sharpening stone—and woe be unto anyone who messed with them. “Once you find a pair of secateurs you like, you don’t want just anyone using them, do you?”

  Saskia laughed and crossed her arms in front of her. On the table behind her lay an open jar and mortar and pestle. “Well, I’m a bit tidier than some,” she said, and glanced over her shoulder. “Just a little propagation project on Euonymus europaeaus. They’ve a tough seed coat, so I’m scarifying them to get a good germination rate.”

  Pru nodded. “Just be sure you don’t pulverize them by accident.”

  “Oh, I’m an old hand at this from my school days,” Saskia said, as if her school days were decades in the past.

  “Was propagation your speciality?”

  “Native plants, actually. I wrote ‘A Compendium of Indigenous British Plants and Their Historic Uses.’ ”

  “Iain wrote about native plants,” Pru said. “It was published—I remember he told me that it was used as a textbook.”

  Saskia arched an eyebrow. “Are you saying he has a proprietary claim on British flora?”

  “No,” Pru said, “of course not. I just thought you might have used his book as a reference?”

  “No, I didn’t. My instructor kept my herbarium from that class—all my pressed and dried plant samples—as an example for other students.”

  “Saskia, have you ever thought of doing an internship abroad?” Pru asked. “There are gardens in the States that offer positions for a year or two. They would love to have a hard worker like you.”

  The young woman shook her head. “Oh, no, Pru, I couldn’t go off and leave my mum alone for that long.”

  “She’s lucky to have such a good daughter,” Pru said, but thought that Saskia was far old enough to be out on her own. Perhaps Saskia’s employer should mention this to the mother. “Why don’t you ask her to stop by for a coffee one day?”

  “She’d never want to interrupt our work,” Saskia said, shaking her head and frowning. “No one wants a mum hanging about when you’re trying to get something done.”

  Pru would dearly love to be able to invite her mum or her dad—both gone—down to see her workplace. But Saskia was young and couldn’t see that day coming yet. “Well, I look forward to meeting her one day.”

  Chapter 23

  Once in the door of her flat, Pru headed straight to the kitchen, but a knock caught her before she could fill the kettle.

  “Sergeant,” Pru said, her heart sinking. “What can I do for you?”

  Detective Sergeant Tamsin Duncan, all perfectly spiked hair and tidy dark suit, gave her a small, businesslike smile. “Ms. Parke. I have a couple of questions. I hope you don’t mind that I stopped.”

  “No, it’s fine, come in.” A wisp of cigarette smoke trailed after Duncan as she walked into the hall. Pru gestured to the sofa. “Sit down, please.” But the sergeant declined, and so Pru remained standing, too.

  “I won’t take too much of your time.” Duncan flipped open a notepad and said, “You told us that Mr. Blackwell appeared to be unwell the last time you saw him.”

  “Yes, he seemed a little shaky, I guess. Dizzy.”

  “This came up suddenly? While he was with you?”

  Pru pictured the scene. “Well, I didn’t notice it at first.” Duncan wrote something, and Pru said, “Maybe he had the flu.”

  “Did he eat or drink anything while he was with you?”

  Pru’s breathing quickened. “No. Was he poisoned?”

  “A screening test showed nothing out of the ordinary—no major toxins present. We are considering further testing, but…” Duncan glanced down to her notes and hurried on, “we’re trying to determine if that’s warranted.”

  “Why is it that you don’t think he was mugged? Couldn’t someone have attacked him to grab his wallet?”

  The sergeant tilted her head slightly. “His wallet was nearby—cash, credit cards, still there. We’ve checked all his accounts, and there’ve been no withdrawls. It did look as if someone had taken the contents out, but then stuffed them back in. Notes wrinkled, cards sticking out.”

  “Was he dead before he fell in the water?” Pru swallowed hard.

  Duncan looked at her for a moment. “No, he was alive. And so he drowned.”

  Pru sank onto the sofa. “Sergeant, there was an accident in the glasshouse the week before Iain died.” The sergeant stayed silent, and Pru continued with the story of the falling pot that she’d neglected to mention earlier.

  “As it turns out, Ms. Parke, we heard about that from one of the grounds crew, and I had planned to ask you. No one can tell us who had been working up there before this accident. We’ll continue to look into it. Now, you and Mr. Blackwell had several public disagreements since you arrived, hadn’t you? Had he threatened you—either personally or professionally?”

  “Certainly not,” Pru said hotly, standing again. “You’ve talked with other people Iain knew, haven’t you? Alastair Campbell?”

  “Mr. Campbell said that you and Mr. Blackwell had no disagreements whatsoever.” Duncan watched her closely.

  “He did?” It came out before she could stop it.

  “Was he telling the truth, Ms. Parke?”

  “What about Iain’s partner—you’ve talked with him?”

  “We are following several lines of…”

  “Yes, yes, several lines of inquiry,” Pru cut in. Caught between exasperation and unease, she tried for a confident middle of the road. “It’s just that I told you what happened, and so I don’t know why you’re still asking me questions. I went out the east gate to my appointment at Madame Fiona’s. You said you checked with her.”

  DS Duncan nodded. “We need to speak to her again, but of course Madame Fiona has her own concerns.”

  Had the sergeant caught a glimpse of Pru’s dress? She dared not ask. “The last time I saw Iain, he was walking toward the west gate.”

  “Did he usually leave the Botanics out the west gate?”

  “How would I know that?” Pru asked. Her chest felt tight, and she tried to breathe slowly.

  Dropping the notebook into her bag, Duncan said, “Thank you, Ms. Parke. I appreciate your time, and I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  The tightness eased. Good, it was over. “I know that you have a job to do—I understand that.”

  Duncan walked to the hall and stopped. She turned around. Her brow was furrowed, and she bit her lower lip. “There is just one more thing I’d like to ask you, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t know anything else. I know next to nothing about Iain.” Pru threw her arms out. “What else could you have to ask me? What?”

  “Are you having a traditional wedding cake?”

  —

  Pru and Tamsin sat at the tiny kitchen table with coffee mugs in hand. “Most of my friends got married ten years ago, when we were all in our late twenties.” Tamsin shrugged. “A good many of them are divorced now. I’ve never been ready until Hamish, but now I feel so old doing all this.”

  Pru laughed. “You feel old? It’s my first marriage, too. And so far, we’ve got a minister and a dress. Well,” she said, “the promise of a dress. We haven’t made it to the cake part yet—were we supposed to order that a year ahead of time?”

  Tamsin shook her head. “But we’ve had such a time choosing,” she said. “We’ve finally settled on a traditional cake, but Hamish isn’t fond of sultanas, and wants stacks and stacks of individual Bakewell tarts for the groom’s cake.”

  Pru’s mind clicked along at a rapid pace. Wedding cake, groom’s cake. “I like the traditional fruitcake,” she said, “and that marzipan blanket. I’d better start looking round for a baker.” The sum total of her wedding plans: a minister, the promise of a dress, and the possibility of a cake.

  Tamsin and Hamish each had three attendants
. “Christopher has his son as best man. I’ll have two friends to stand with me—it’s all right that I have two and he has one?” Both Lydia and Jo had initially demurred, but on this point Pru was adamant and would press-gang them into it if need be.

  Tamsin mentioned a flower girl, and Pru dropped her head into her hands and groaned. “Does it never end?”

  Tamsin laughed. “It ends with a kiss and the first dance.”

  Pru’s head shot up. “Dance?”

  “I’ll be on my way,” Tamsin said, standing. “Thanks for the coffee. Listen, Pru, sometimes it’s easier to talk about what happened and what you remember when you aren’t on-site. That’s why I stopped by.” She smiled. “That and the cake.”

  “I wish I hadn’t argued with Iain,” Pru said. “He knew so much about what we were working on—it’s just that he could be sort of inflexible.”

  “Several other people at the Botanics commented on Mr. Blackwell’s manner and the way he treated them.”

  Pru’s thoughts flashed to Murdo. “Will I need to go back to the station?” she asked.

  Tamsin shook her head. “Ring me if you think of anything else. Blakie’s rapidly losing interest in this case—he’s moved his last day up to Friday.”

  “So you’ll have a new boss soon?” Pru stood at the door. Tamsin blushed, and Pru lifted her eyebrows. “Will you be promoted?” she asked. “Detective Inspector?”

  “There’s a chance,” Tamsin said, straightening herself up. “It would look good for me if this was over. But it’s a slog. That second-level blood test, now—I don’t know if the budget can take it. There are so many decisions to make in an investigation—what’s worth pursuing and what isn’t.”