Agatha Raisin 03 (1994) - The Potted Gardener

by M C Beaton

  “What do you mean?”

  “She would never usually say anything directly nasty, but she had a way of making people feel silly and provincial.”

  “Perhaps. But not enough to cause murder. It surely has something to do with gardens. In some way it all must tie in with the destruction of the gardens.”

  Agatha thought again about Mrs Bloxby and wished she could tell him. Instead, she said, “Whoever did the murder must have been mentally unbalanced. It was a murder that was planned and thought out, thought out in a sort of smouldering, burning hate. Let’s see. You said she had a daughter. She seemed to be a very wealthy woman. Money might be the motive, with the ruin of the gardens and the elaborate way of dealing with the body as a sort of smokescreen, to make it look as if it had been done by some sort of barmy local. The daughter, you said, is at Oxford University. She could be somewhere abroad during the holidays. But if not, she’ll be there today. I wonder if she inherits, and how much. I suppose the press will hang around.”

  “Even with a murder like this, only a few days and then they’ll leave it to the local men. We could call at Mary’s this evening to offer our condolences, if the daughter is there.”

  “There’ll be press at the gate and a copper on the door,” Agatha pointed out. “I think we should leave it. I would like to ask some of the people who knew Mary what they really thought of her.”

  “She’s too recently dead. I don’t think anyone’s going to come right out at the moment and say they didn’t like her.”

  Agatha thought of Mrs Bloxby, Mrs Bloxby of all people, whom Mary had managed to rile up. “I don’t know about that,” she said cautiously. She looked at him awkwardly. “In your situation, you must have known her better than anybody.”

  “I didn’t, actually. It was a brief fling.”

  “And why did the brief fling, as you call it, come to an end?”

  There was silence as their meals were delivered to the table. When the waitress had left, James said, “She came on to me very strongly and she gave the impression that she was used to affairs and only wanted to have a good time. She was charming and she could be very funny.” He shifted uncomfortably. Mary’s humour, he remembered, had often consisted of being funny about the villagers. And then Agatha Raisin had come back among them, squat, blunt Agatha, who somehow seemed very much a part of the village. But it was not only that contrast that had brought about the end of the affair.

  “I think,” he said slowly, “that Mary had begun to expect marriage. She became very proprietorial.” Then he thought, the sex was competent and efficient but lacking tenderness or warmth, and a feeling of revulsion had set in, a feeling of shame.

  “You’re not eating your steak,” said Agatha, looking at it longingly.

  “You’re not giving me much of a chance.”

  She waited until he had eaten several mouth-fuls and then asked, “You must have said something to her to break it off.”

  “Well, yes, of course. At first I did the usual cowardly masculine thing of staying clear. But then she called at my home and asked me bluntly what I was playing at. I told her it was over. For one awful moment I thought she was going to strike me. Her eyes blazed with pure hate. But the next moment, she laughed and said, “Well, you are quite right. You are not exactly God’s gift to women in bed,” and…and…a few other things I do not care to repeat, but all in an amused voice and I did not get angry because I thought I deserved it. We agreed to remain friends. I then began to see more of her again when she became so unpopular in the village. I thought it unkind. She never at any time referred to our affair.”

  “Do the police suspect you?”

  “A crime of passion? Possibly. They’ve certainly searched my house thoroughly in the middle of the night looking for bits of rope and examining my clothes and fingernails for traces of earth.”

  “So you told them about your affair?”

  “Of course.”

  So Bill Wong would know, thought Agatha miserably.

  “That friend of yours, Bill Wong, took me aside and told me to make sure you did not interfere in the investigation,” said James.

  “Considering the success I’ve had in the past – we’ve had in the past,” added Agatha charitably, “I think that’s a bit cheeky.”

  “It’s because he’s fond of you and doesn’t want you coming across some maniac of a murderer on your own.”

  Agatha thought guiltily of her garden. She sent up a prayer that the CID would not decide to turn over her house. They would see the garden and the sight of that bare garden with the huge high fence might lead them to believe she was mentally unstable.

  “So,” she said, “it looks as if we’ll have to let the dust settle before we start asking questions.”

  They discussed the wreck of the gardens, wondering over and over who in the village could possibly have done such a thing.

  When lunch was over, James drove her back to the village. For the first time, he was reluctant to be on his own. It was as if the full horror of Mary’s death had hit him for the first time. Agatha was a comfortable, sensible woman. She had not gone in for any of her odd behaviour for ages.

  “Why don’t you come into my place,” he said. “I’ll light up the computer and we could start putting down some ideas.”

  How much I would have enjoyed this only a few days ago, thought Agatha, after she had agreed and followed him into his book-lined living-room, before the fact of his affair with Mary destroyed silly hopeful innocence.

  He got them mugs of coffee and switched on the computer.

  “Right,” he said. “Let’s start with the attacks on the gardens and list all those whose gardens were destroyed. You didn’t suffer.”

  “No, but I’ve got the gates to the back, the one at the side of the house, padlocked.”

  “Okay.” He tapped the keys. “We have the Boggles, Miss Simms, Mrs Mason…What is it?” For Agatha had put a hand on his arm.

  “What if Mary did it? What if some maddened gardener took his revenge?”

  They both looked at each other, both thinking of smooth, cool and plastic Mary creeping around the gardens of Carsely.

  “No, I suppose not,” said Agatha.

  “I’m afraid we’re going to have to adopt your idea and start asking questions. But there’s not much we can do until the press thin out.”

  “We could go to the pub this evening,” said Agatha hopefully. “Perhaps when the locals have had a drink or two, they’ll open up. I mean, the conversation will be about nothing else.”

  “Good idea.” He switched off the computer and smiled at Agatha. “We’ll leave it for the moment.”

  To his surprise, Agatha said, “Right you are. See you later.” She picked up her handbag and left. Before, she would have stayed for as long as possible, ignoring any hints that it was time to go. Agatha returned to her own home, feeling she had scored a victory over her own juvenile emotions. But her elation was short-lived. For on the doorstep was Bill Wong with a group of men.

  “I’m sorry about this, Mrs Raisin,” said Bill formally. “But we are searching the houses in the village for anyone who knew Mary Fortune, and I’m afraid you can’t be excluded.”

  “Do you have a search warrant?” asked Agatha feebly.

  “Come on, now. You know we can get one. What have you got to hide?”

  “Joke,” said Agatha miserably.

  It was not the search of the house that troubled her but the dread moment when they moved out into the garden. The small group of men surveyed the neat lawn bordered by well-weeded empty flowerbeds. One scratched his head and said, “You’re a woman after my heart, Mrs Raisin. Can’t stand gardening myself. But why such a high fence? I see it’s got a top section which could be lifted off and let some of the sun in.”

  “I don’t like nosy neighbours,” said Agatha defiantly.

  “But the only person who could see into your garden is that Mr Lacey next door,” said another. “Doesn’t look the nos
y type to me.”

  “Just get on with what you have to do,” snapped Agatha and turned on her heel and walked back into the kitchen.

  The case simply had to be solved before Open Day or these coppers would still be around and would know she had created an instant garden, that she had cheated.

  At last the search was over. Bill Wong stayed behind.

  “Has the daughter arrived?” asked Agatha, setting a mug of coffee down in front of him.

  “Yes, her name is Beth Fortune and she is studying history at Oxford. She has brought a boyfriend with her who turns out to be the stranger you saw in the pub the day she was killed.”

  Agatha’s eyes gleamed. “There’s the motive. Beth inherits the lot and gets him to do the dirty work. Does he explain what he was doing in the village?”

  “His name is John Deny. He said he had been visiting friends in Warwick, and on the road home he decided to call in at Carsely. He had heard about it from Beth, he said, and was curious to see the village. He had not called on Mary because he had met her once with Beth for a lunch in Oxford and she had taken a dislike to him. We checked with his friends in Warwick and they swear he was there until seven in the evening.”

  “And when was Mary killed?”

  “They’re still finding out when and how.”

  “Will you let me know?”

  “Agatha, whoever killed Mary Fortune is mad and dangerous. Leave it alone.”

  “Okay,” said Agatha meekly, and Bill looked at her suspiciously.

  Six

  It had been a week since the murder, and the national press had exhausted every angle. Just when it looked as if interest was dying, some reporter found out that Mrs Josephs, the librarian, had been murdered in that very cottage, and that brought down the feature writers from the noisier tabloids to describe the ‘house of death’, and the more respectable heavies kept it going by sneering at the Grub Street tabloids and repeating paragraphs out of the ‘house of death’ stories to prove their point, which was their traditional way of seeming to avoid sensationalism while indulging in it.

  But a week is a long time in journalism, and so it was left to the local papers and news agencies to keep tabs on developments while the television people packed up their cameras and sound equipment and satellite dishes and went back to town.

  Agatha and James had had a non-productive evernng in the Red Lion and so had decided to let the dust settle before they started on their inquiries. It was James who reported at last to Agatha that the daughter, Beth, and her boyfriend were in residence at Mary’s cottage, that the press had gone from the gate and the policeman from the door. It was time to make a move.

  There was to be no funeral in the village. The body, when finally released by the pathologist, was to be cremated in Oxford and the ashes scattered out to sea at some point within the regulations of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. That much, said James, as he sat in Agatha’s kitchen, he had gleaned from Mrs Bloxby. He had asked if there was to be a memorial service in the church, and Mrs Bloxby, he said, had been strangely cold and had said that was a matter for Mrs Fortune’s family and the villagers to decide.

  “It seems,” said Agatha, “that the villagers will not really say what they thought of Mary until they’ve been given some time. I think the same applies to you. Mary was nasty to me on several occasions, so it follows she must have been nasty to other people. From what you said, or more from what you did not say, I think she was particularly poisonous to you in a highly personal way when you ended the affair, and yet you continued to see her on a friendly basis. Why?”

  He hesitated for a long moment, looking down into his coffee cup as if seeking inspiration. Then he looked up with a wry smile and said, “Shame and guilt. Guilt because I felt I had really hurt her. Shame because I felt I should never have had an affair with such as Mary. Also arrogance. I wanted to persuade myself that she was really all right and that we could be friends. As if any kind of emotional involvement can ever turn into friendship.”

  Too right, thought Agatha gloomily, wondering if she would ever get over a feeling of wistfulness when she looked at him.

  “There was something else,” he said quietly, “something I have only realized now. I think that somewhere inside Mary was a capacity for violence.”

  “Interesting, but it doesn’t get us anywhere,” Agatha pointed out. “Someone laid violent hands on her.”

  “But don’t you see,” he said eagerly, “violence can beget violence. And it’s usually in the family. We must try to find out where her ex-husband is and whether he is in this country. I gathered she was married in America, in Los Angeles.”

  “She said she lived in New York!”

  “Well, she may have moved there after the divorce.”

  Agatha rose to her feet. “I think we should get on with making a call on the daughter. Does the daughter know you were making love to her mother?”

  James coloured slightly. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so. I got the impression that mother and daughter were barely on speaking terms.”

  “Let’s go anyway. Should we take something? Does one usually take something?”

  “Flowers or cake? No, I don’t think so. Condolences in hushed whispers seem to be the order of the day.”

  Agatha left the living-room after shutting the door carefully behind her and let her cats out into the back garden. She winced as she looked at it. The cats made their way to the one patch of sun that had been able to shine over the high fence.

  They made their way to Mary’s cottage, each thinking of the last time they had walked there together. They went up the front garden to the glassed-in porch that Mary had had built at the front of the house, in addition to the conservatory at the back. In fact, she had altered and changed the cottage so much, it was hard to remember what a poky little place it had seemed when Mrs Josephs lived there.

  For a moment after James had rung the bell, Agatha almost expected Mary herself to answer the door. It suddenly seemed incredible that she was dead, that she had been killed in such a macabre way.

  But the door was answered by a girl in her early twenties who did not look at all like Mary. She had brown eyes, a sallow skin, a long thin nose, and a quantity of glossy black hair. She was wearing a man’s tartan shirt loose over a pair of brief shorts. Her legs were very long, very white, and quite hairy.

  “Miss Fortune?” asked James.

  “Yes?” The girl looked at him curiously and then her eyes moved to Agatha.

  “This is Mrs Agatha Raisin, a friend of your late mother. I am James Lacey, also a friend. We came to offer our condolences.”

  She stood back. “You’d better come in.”

  In the living-room, her boyfriend, John Deny, was slouched in an armchair. In the way of modern youth, Beth did not bother introducing them. “Coffee or tea?” she asked.

  “Neither,” said Agatha quickly, not wanting a moment to be lost while Beth disappeared into the kitchen. “Have the police found out how your mother died?” she asked.

  “Someone poisoned her first with weedkiller and then strung her up,” said Beth. Her eyes were dry and her voice hard and rather impatient, with an underlying faint twang of an American accent.

  “Don’t worry,” said James. “The police will soon find out who did it.”

  “How?” asked John Deny, speaking for the first time.

  “There must be loads of clues,” said James. “There’s the rope which tied her, the weedkiller, surely lots of things.”

  “The rope,” said Beth, “was old-fashioned Woolworth’s-type clothes-line, probably bought a long time ago, for all you can get now is the plastic stuff. There were no fingerprints at all apart from those of the two who found the body.” Her eyes widened a fraction. “Oh, that was you two, wasn’t it?”

  Agatha nodded. There was something almost intimidating about Beth’s self-possession. “Will your father be arriving for the funeral?” she asked.

  “Shouldn’t t
hink so. He hated Mother.”

  “So he’s still in America?”

  “Yes, Los Angeles.”

  “Have you heard from him?”

  “He phoned a few days ago and asked if he could help…financially. But Mother left me comfortably off.”

  “What does he do for a living?”

  “He’s a…” Beth’s eyes narrowed. “Look, it’s kind of you to call, but I am fed up with journalists and their cheeky questions and I don’t have to put up with being grilled in my own living-room.”

  “Sorry,” mumbled Agatha.

  James began to talk soothingly of Mary’s work for the horticultural society and how much she had been liked by the villagers. Agatha took a covert look around. Mary’s living-room had been altered already. The green wallpaper had been painted over, so that the walls were a uniform white. A lot of the little china ornaments which Mary had displayed on the mantelpiece and side-tables had gone. There were new bookshelves in the corner, or rather planks on bricks holding a great quantity of books. The green fitted carpet had been covered with faded and worn Persian rugs. The green curtains had been taken down and replaced with Venetian blinds. Beth or John Deny had tried to take as much green out of the room as possible.

  “And are you a gardener yourself, Miss Fortune?” Agatha realized James was asking.

  “No, I can’t be bothered. I took all those plants out of the conservatory and got a friend in Oxford who likes all that sort of tropical junk to take them away. I switched off the heating. The conservatory will make a good study.”

  “So you plan on staying here?” asked Agatha.

  Beth gave her a hard look. “Why not?”

  “I assumed you would have rooms in Oxford,” said Agatha weakly.

  “Of course. But these are the university holidays, or had you forgotten?” Beth suddenly rounded on James. “Wait a bit. Did you say your name was James Lacey?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want a word with you in private. John, show Mrs Raisin out.”