The Red Book of Primrose House: A Potting Shed Mystery (Potting Shed Mystery series 2)

by Marty Wingate

  She eyed the crisps at the bar again. Tired, hungry, and uncomfortable, she grabbed a few of the cushions and made a nest for herself on the floor. Every few minutes Pru checked on Jamie, who stood alone at the bar, but gradually, another more pressing need overtook her stakeout: she needed the ladies’. That’s what she got for downing her entire pint so quickly. The door of the snug, in full view of Jamie at the bar, opened out to cover the door to the women’s toilet—could she slip out and back in again without his noticing? The more she thought about it, the more she realized she had no choice.

  Cracking open the snug door, she stayed out of the light that streamed in and waited until a woman pushed in the door to the ladies’. At that second, Pru pushed out the snug door and slipped in behind the woman. But when she finished, she had to get back into the snug—there was no way she could keep an eye on Jamie from the toilet, and she didn’t care to spend the rest of the evening in there wondering if it was safe to leave.

  She reversed her steps, but another woman, entering the toilet as she left, moved the snug door. For a split second, Pru thought she might have been seen by anyone at the bar before she made it back into the dark snug. She stood out of breath and shaking. Easing her way to the edge of the louvered window, she peered out and locked eyes with Jamie. She felt a cold wave of fear ripple down her back, and she jumped out of the way so quickly, she knocked into a stack of boxes and the one at the top tumbled to the floor. She closed her eyes tight and waited for the crash of glass, which would surely alert the crowd to her presence even if Jamie hadn’t seen her—but the box landed with little noise. She put her hand to her chest and waited for the pounding to subside. Aren’t you just the picture of a suave police officer on a stakeout, she thought.

  When she had the nerve to check the bar again, Jamie was reading the sports page over another fellow’s shoulder. He remained a solitary drinker until a man with a red ponytail walked up to the bar. Pru recognized him as Jamie’s co-worker—she met him when she went looking for Jamie after the yews had been destroyed.

  Pru sighed and sat down again. Her eyes lit on the fallen box; its contents had spilled out, and on the floor lay a pile of riches: packets of crisps. She would pay Ted later, she thought, grabbing a bag at the top—ick, prawn cocktail flavor—and then rummaging around for something more palatable.

  She was on her second packet when the door of the snug opened, and Pru jumped. It was the barmaid—Hayley? Heidi? Pru couldn’t remember.

  “Hello!” Pru said in a cheery whisper.

  “What are you doing in here?” Hayley or Heidi demanded. Then she peered closer and recognized Pru. “Oh, it’s you.”

  “I asked Ted if it was all right. You see, I just needed a little peace and quiet, what with all that’s going on at Primrose House these days, and he said it would be fine for me to sit in here on my own. You go ahead and ask him, really, but it’s just that I didn’t feel like anyone knowing I’m here, you know what I mean?” Breathless, Pru held up an empty bag. “How much are the crisps?”

  Hayley or Heidi nodded. She must hear all sorts of stories in this job. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Would you like another pint?”

  “No, thanks.” Pru smiled. “I’ll be leaving after a bit.”

  Hayley or Heidi went back to serving behind the bar. Pru checked on Jamie, who was involved in an agitated conversation, jabbing his index finger into the chest of the red ponytail guy, whose face was as red as his hair. Jamie nodded at Ted, who pulled two more pints.

  Pru sat down again, tugging at her cushions to rearrange them. She sighed and looked around the dim mustiness of the snug, now box room. A fine place to spend an evening, she thought. Her muscles ached with fatigue, and her skin ached to feel Christopher’s touch, his lips on her neck, his arms holding her as they drifted off to sleep. She reached inside her sweater, pulled out her necklace, and held the fan pendant to her lips. Her chin began to quiver. Some detective you are, she thought. Here she was trapped in a room with the only exit in full view of the one person she didn’t want to meet. Did she really think she could make a difference? Solve a mystery? You’re a gardener—and even that skill is debatable at the moment. She took a ragged breath before swallowing hard. Get a grip, she told herself. As soon as Jamie left, she would go home to bed, and tomorrow morning she would get up and by God get to work on that garden. She took another breath and let it out slowly. She leaned her head back into the corner and closed her eyes just for a moment, until she noticed the badger walk in.

  “Here now, this is a funny sort of place for a drink,” he said as he hopped up onto a box of glasses.

  “I just wanted some peace and quiet,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t take offense.

  “You’re a long way from peace and quiet. I would think you’d know that,” he said.

  “I thought I might be able to find out who did it.”

  “You know who did it,” the badger replied.

  “I don’t,” Pru said crossly. “Ned told me the same thing, but I don’t know.”

  The badger peered down his snout at her and said, “I had a cousin once, who was a Boy Scout down in Dorset…”

  She snorted. “Badgers can’t be Boy Scouts.” He ignored the interruption and carried on with the story. Pru had no idea badgers could be so loquacious. The story, although interesting, was long, and she began to lose track of it. That’s when she heard Ted slap his hand on the bar and call, “Time! Time, please, ladies and gentlemen.”

  The badger hopped off the box. “Well, that’s me away,” he said. He started to leave, but then turned and added, “He’ll be looking for you, you know.”

  “Will he?” she asked. Perhaps that should make her afraid, but it didn’t.

  He seemed about to say something else, but instead walked out, leaving Pru confused: should she hide because he would be looking for her or should she go find him first?

  —

  “Look! I told you—here she is!” Pru started with fright, unable to figure out if he had found her or if the badger had come back. She opened her eyes to Ted and Hayley or Heidi standing over her.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said, trying to get her bearings, stand up, and sound coherent. “I must’ve dropped off. Is it closing time?”

  “Closing time?” Ted asked. “It’s morning. You must’ve slept the whole night—we forgot all about you until a bit ago when Hattie said, what about that American woman—didn’t you, love?”

  Hattie, yes, that was it.

  Pru shook her head, trying to dislodge a few of the cobwebs in her brain, but the only thing dislodged was her hair clip. “I’m sorry you had to come back over to get me.”

  “It was no trouble,” Hattie said. “We live upstairs. Would you like a cappuccino?”

  A cappuccino sounded like the most wonderful thing in the world. “Yes, thanks, that would be lovely,” she said, trying to stretch out the kinks. It had been a long time since she’d slept on a floor.

  “Double?” Ted asked when Pru emerged from the toilet, having attempted to stick her hair back up into its clip.

  Pru nodded. “So, I saw Robbie talking with Jamie Tanner last evening—you know Jamie?” she asked as she pulled the cup across the bar and scooped a spoonful of the deliciously bitter foam into her mouth.

  The two exchanged glances. “Look, I’m sorry I don’t have time to keep them apart,” Ted said.

  “Does Jamie cause problems?”

  “He gets into it now and then—nothing we need to ring the station for, and he cools off quickly. But,” Ted caught himself, “not with Robbie.”

  “And the fellow with the red ponytail. Do you know him?” Pru asked.

  “Those two,” Hattie said, shaking her head. “They argue constantly, but they’re always stuck to each other at the bar. Last night, did you hear, Ted?” She turned to her partner. “Tanner was doing this”—she imitated Jamie jabbing his finger at his friend—“and saying something about ‘And you’ll keep saying it, if you k
now what’s good for you.’ He’s a bully, if you ask me.”

  “Hmm? What? Yes, certainly sounds like it,” Pru agreed as she replayed Jamie’s statement in her mind. She remembered talking with the red-ponytail guy on that Thursday, when she went looking for Jamie at the parks building. The guy said Jamie might still be up at Dunorlan Park, but they had lost track of each other about midday. Tatt had said Jamie had an alibi, but if that was it, it certainly didn’t sound airtight.

  “Thanks very much for the coffee,” Pru said, hand on her bag.

  “That’s lovely, that is,” Hattie said, nodding at the fan pendant. “It looks old. Wherever did you find it?”

  Pru touched her necklace, her talisman, resting on the outside of her jacket. “It was a gift.” She smiled. “From…from my…” There she went again.

  Hattie seemed to understand. “Your fellow?”

  “Yeah,” Pru said, and gave a little laugh. That wasn’t too bad. “My fellow.”

  Primrose House

  16 February

  Pru,

  Just a note as Bryan and I dash off to Liverpool—I want to have a good, long talk when we return. There are several things we need to get straight. I don’t want to alarm you, but I know you will understand that it’s better to leave things alone rather than to stir up what could possibly end up being a great deal of trouble for you. We’ll say nothing else now, but do watch yourself.

  Best,

  Davina

  P.S. I’ve left something for you in the walled garden.

  Chapter 36

  She had seen Davina’s note stuck in the front door as she pulled her Mini up to the cottage. She read and reread it, attempting to decipher its veiled and mildly threatening advice. God, she felt alone. She needed some spark, some push to get her going. She needed some company. Repton. Time and time again she got out the Red Book, whether she was in need of inspiration or merely to hear his voice as she read his kind but pointed comments. Perhaps today, if she carried the Red Book along with her, she would absorb some of Repton’s wisdom about the landscape and clear her head of everything else.

  She retrieved the leather-bound book from its safe place under a stack of sweaters in her wardrobe, scattering a few sweaters onto the floor in the process. She ignored them and walked outside. While she walked, she opened the book to a random page and read:

  “I suppose every person who visits Primrose House will observe that the house is too near the road, but the house is not in fact too near the road but the road is unluckily too near the house. This is the great defect of the place, and although it cannot be turned in reality, it may so far be removed in appearance that it will be no longer an objection.”

  Sorry to say, Humphry, the road had gone nowhere.

  She pushed open the gate to the walled garden. Now what would Davina leave her here? Had she come up with a new idea for that lasting memorial to Ned? Perhaps she wanted a mural of him painted on the walls, or she would expect Pru to shear a topiary figure of the old man out of the yew. Pru glanced up to the center of the garden where two of the yews remained untouched and two remained a picture of devastation from the day they were hacked to pieces, leaving only uneven stumps. Sunk deep into the broken top of one was an ax.

  Her breath came quick and shallow; she blinked several times to clear the sight away, but it remained. She was alone, she was sure of that—there was nowhere to hide in the walled garden, they’d cleared everything away. She edged forward, making no sound on the bare dirt, and the thought came to her, unbidden, that she would need to order a load of gravel to finish off the paths. She crept up to the ax, as if it could fly out of the trunk of its own accord and attack her.

  Pru attempted to make sense of what she saw. Davina had left something for her in the walled garden. Was it this ax? Without touching it, Pru took a close look and could almost swear it was the one that had gone missing from the tool shed—she could still see a sheen on the wood handle from the oiling Liam and Fergal gave it. Surely Davina didn’t do this—hadn’t the Templetons been away when the yews were destroyed?

  Two tools for cutting had been taken from Pru’s garden shed. The hatchet had been used on Ned, but this ax had cut wood. That brought to mind one more tool for cutting wood—the pocketknife found with blood on it under Ned’s body. Just yesterday, she had left DS Hobbes a message to say that a pocketknife was a handy tool for grafting.

  Her eyes fell on the blank walls and the bare-root apple trees heeled into one of the beds. Yes, yes, she told them silently, I’ll get you planted. She pressed fingertips to her eyelids—two seconds, could she not go two seconds without worrying about what to do in the garden? The sight of the apples had loosened that shred of memory again, and she tried to catch it before it floated out of reach. She repeated what she knew: old varieties grafted onto dwarfing rootstock. Grafting—there it was again. She rubbed her hands on her trousers and looked down at her palms. Instead of her own hands, she saw another pair. Scars marred the pad of his left thumb—he held them up to her on that first day they met. “There you are,” Jamie had said, “gardeners’ hands.”

  —

  She had no sooner registered that memory than she noticed something flutter at her feet—a small red diary lay open, its pages caught by the breeze.

  As she reached for it, clutching Repton’s book to her chest, she could see handwriting—pages of neatly printed names, some crossed off, others not. The chill wind that swirled around inside the walls froze the sweat that broke out on her forehead. This was Jamie Tanner’s red book. What was it doing in the walled garden?

  Picking it up and paging through, she noticed that far into the book, the handwriting deteriorated, with fewer names written in poorer penmanship. By the time she reached the page with Liam’s name, the letters were large and badly formed. And there was more. She turned the page and saw the next name—each letter traced and retraced with the point of the pen until there was no need for ink to read it: NED. An X tore through both the name and the paper.

  Her hand hovered over the page before turning to see the name she knew would appear next. Just as his mood could switch from charming to creepy, his handwriting had morphed from large and uncontrolled to tiny and precise: PRU PARKE. A shudder swept through her.

  Ring the police. She slapped her pocket to locate her phone. No phone. Where was her phone? The second she remembered leaving it on the floor in the snug of the Two Bells was a second too late.

  He grabbed hold of the back of her collar and jerked hard, throwing her off balance. Something cut into her neck, and for a split second she couldn’t breathe. A snap, and she gasped as he let go and shoved her up against the yew stump. Repton’s Red Book went flying out of her hands. The handle of the ax, its blade deep in the yew trunk, hovered over her.

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  She had seen Jamie in various states before—tidy, unkempt, cool and collected, an emotional wreck—but she hadn’t seen this. His bloodshot eyes burned, the muscles in his neck bulged, and his fists clenched at his sides.

  “Jamie, you need to calm down,” she said, putting her hand up as if to stop him.

  “You shouldn’t’ve done that, Pru. You chose your side—you’ll help pretty boy Liam, won’t you, but not me,” he said. “You shouldn’t’ve interfered.” He leaned down into her face. “She’s my wife and this should’ve been my job. You can’t just come in here and take what should’ve been mine.”

  “It wasn’t your job—what made you think it was?” Pru sat up bit by bit as they talked, hoping to get in a better position to run.

  “He promised!” Jamie shouted in her face, spraying her with spit. “He promised me the job. He said it was to keep an eye on me, to make sure Cate was all right, but he failed, didn’t he? He couldn’t even do that for her. But with you gone, they’ll pick me, like they should’ve done to begin with.” He waved his arm vaguely in the direction of Primrose House.

  “Ned tried to get you the job, didn’t he?�
� Pru scooted a tiny bit farther as Jamie looked away for a moment, still quaking. He was a talker—and although he now seemed a distorted version of his saner self, perhaps she could keep him talking until a better idea occurred to her.

  “He told me he’d get me the job, and then he turned around and told me he’d see me in jail first for what I did to her. It was Liam—he’s the one who turned Ned against me. Ned said to keep away from her, that he was on his way to the police. I couldn’t let him do that—he can’t keep me from Cate.” Jamie looked over the walls and grew quiet.

  “Did you steal Robbie’s jacket? Did you go to Chaffinch’s and take him away?”

  Jamie turned his attention back to her and tapped his finger on his temple. “You see, I know how to take care of things, how to get something done,” he said in a loud whisper. “It takes brains to organize something this good—who would care what a half-wit does? It isn’t as if he’d get in trouble.”

  Her foot shot out to kick at him before she could stop herself. “He isn’t a half-wit.”

  The kick barely grazed him, but it made an impact. He lunged, shouting as he shook her. “I took care of it—I always take care of it. And they’d have Duffy locked up now if it wasn’t for your interfering.” He threw her back down again.

  “You’re checking us off your list, are you?” She glanced past him to the open front gate. They weren’t scheduled to work in the walled garden today, and so no one would know where she was—she must get out of here.

  He looked left and right in a panic. “Where is it? What did you do with it?”

  She knew he wasn’t talking about Repton’s Red Book—she could see that off to her right where it landed in one of the beds. It was his own red book Jamie wanted. Pru thought she was sitting on it, but flung her hand out, pointing behind him. “It’s over there,” she said.