She would have to break the news to Thomas that Diana was in trouble again. Perhaps he’d have some sane and sensible advice to give her, to calm the turmoil in her head.
She abandoned her notes to go out into the garden to see what damage had been done to the plants by Rose’s fall. In Miss Quicke’s day, the garden had been a dull rectangle of lawn edged by various shrubs and small trees of the low-maintenance variety. Miss Quicke’s gardener had approved as he could look after it without even breaking into a sweat, leaving ample time for gossip and cups of tea in the kitchen.
When Rose arrived to look after the elderly lady, she’d introduced colour with an enthusiasm which had sometimes outstripped her knowledge of what would or would not flourish in a clay soil. The gardener had disapproved, but Miss Quicke had enjoyed the result. Rose had managed to nibble away at the lawn to create wide flower beds filled with any plant bright enough to take her fancy. And roses; she loved roses. She’d introduced a curve here and a wooden seat there until the garden was a delight to the eye.
Ellie, who’d always loved gardening herself, had approved the changes Rose had made, and whenever the gardener complained about the extra work, she told him to stop grumbling and get on with it. He, of course, got back at her by neglecting to do all he should . . . hence the rambler rose left dangling from the wall.
Ellie considered the problem of the rose and decided to leave it as it was till a professional could deal with it.
Thomas came out to join her as she tried to lift the ladder off the border.
‘Let me do that. No point having two of you ending up in casualty.’ He took it off her to stow away in the garden shed. She gazed at the destruction Rose had wrought: some marguerites had been flattened, some petunias and a patch of alchemilla mollis had been crushed, a lupin decapitated. Not much damage, really. Their marauding cat Midge skittered across the lawn, pouncing on insects only he could see.
Thomas retrieved the secateurs and the lengths of wire which Rose had intended to use on the rambler rose. It was a prolific bloomer called American Pillar: spectacular in June and a nuisance for the rest of the year.
Ellie could feel Thomas studying her. As often happened with a happy marriage, each knew when the other was distressed or hiding something.
Thomas said, ‘You’re very quiet. Is something worrying you – apart from the con artist?’
She couldn’t tell him yet. She bent to poke around in the herbaceous border. ‘Rose lost one of her shoes. It must be somewhere here.’
‘Has Diana been around?’
‘I’ll tell you all about it later.’
He accepted that. ‘You said Rose fell off the ladder. Why was she on it in the first place?’
‘You might well ask. She said she was frightened by a face at the window of that house over there.’ Ellie pointed to a small window under a gable of the Pryce house. The evening sunlight was reflected in the glass. ‘A trick of the light. She’s not getting any younger.’
Thomas stroked his beard. ‘She insists she sees your aunt around the house now and then. When did she last have her eyes tested?’
‘She reads the newspapers without glasses. Well, she doesn’t read newspapers, but she does read the Radio Times to see what’s on the telly, and she’s got sharp enough eyesight to see if the cleaners have missed anything.’ Ellie rooted around among some purple salvias and found Rose’s missing shoe. ‘Thank goodness it hasn’t rained recently, or her shoe would have been fit for nothing but the dustbin. You think she’s developing Alzheimer’s?’
‘It’s a possibility, I suppose. Your visitor said the Pryce house has been stripped of furniture?’
‘I’m so sorry about your Kindle. I ought to have realized he was up to no good.’
‘I’m sorry about your ring, too, but both can be replaced. I found my mobile, by the way. It was on the desk in my study. Do you fancy a walk around the houses?’
Ellie stared. ‘You mean, visit the scene of the crime? Not that there is a crime, of course.’
‘Of course. I’ll tell Mia what we’re up to, and we’ll be off, shall we? We can at least check to see if your light-fingered caller is living there or not. Right?’
Ellie couldn’t think why they hadn’t gone for a walk on a summer evening before, since they lived in a pleasant, quiet suburb with mature trees in the street. The houses were nearly all large with extensive gardens, built in the days when there’d been plenty of servants, who slept in the attics while labouring to keep the floors polished and meals on the tables.
Ellie had heard about those days from Miss Quicke: hampers of fresh vegetables were brought up weekly from country houses or delivered from Harrods; the butcher’s boy came round daily with the meat; and the milk was delivered in the early hours of the morning.
No two houses in the road were alike, but nearly all had a coach house at the side. Nowadays, instead of live-in maids, there were contract cleaners to keep the dust down, and the coach houses had been converted into separate living quarters for live-in staff, with garage accommodation below. Or – as was the case with Ellie’s domain – the coach building had been adapted and let out as separate living accommodation.
The upkeep of such large houses was steep; some had been well maintained and still looked prosperous, as did Ellie’s. Some were sliding gently into decay, and one or two had already been demolished to make way for blocks of flats of indifferent design. As Stewart had said, there was never enough housing stock in London to satisfy demand.
As they walked along, Ellie thought that when God had made trees he’d been on a roll. What a variety there was to choose from: laburnum, viburnum, cherry, magnolia, dogwood . . . chestnut and plane . . . and those were just the ones she could see at a glance. She wondered if the huge old oak tree in a garden nearby had been there before the house behind it was built.
Not all the gardens had succumbed to the Victorian notion of covering the ground with shrubs such as laurel. Some front gardens were well worth looking at: bright with bedding plants, their driveways freshly tarred or paved.
‘Is this the one?’ Thomas stopped by a stone gatepost on which someone had carved the legend ‘Pryce House’ in the dim and distant. The green-painted gate to the drive had recently been shoved back into some overgrown privet. That was the trouble with privet; if you neglected to keep it trimmed, it put on a foot of growth in no time at all.
Pryce House was even larger than Ellie’s; perhaps half as big again. As Stewart had said, it was reminiscent of Disneyland with turrets and gables galore. There was no other building quite so far over the top in the neighbourhood. Perhaps some Victorian ironmaster had made good and wanted to show off?
The drive hadn’t seen attention for some time, and what had once been the front lawn was fast turning into a meadow. Overgrown shrubs shrouded the windows on the ground floor, but ivy hadn’t yet taken hold of the brickwork.
There were curtains at some windows, but not at others. The windows hadn’t been cleaned for a while, though the declining sun was reflected in the glass of the upper storeys from houses on the other side of the road.
‘Dracula’s Castle?’ Thomas was enjoying this. ‘Bats and spiders?’
‘Do we dare explore?’ Ellie considered the sandals she was wearing, which had a small heel. There were deep ruts in the clay and shingle of the driveway, but with care she wouldn’t turn her ankle over. ‘It certainly looks deserted.’
She took a few steps up the drive. ‘The house itself isn’t in bad condition. No tiles or pieces of fretwork missing. No windows broken.’
‘Give it time.’
‘Stewart wondered if the charity might like to buy it, but I can’t see it myself. Too many turrets, which are a waste of space in my book.’ She pushed her way between neglected bushes to peer into the ground-floor windows. Empty rooms, shadowy and dark. ‘No one’s living here.’
Thomas had his reading glasses out, inspecting the gate post. ‘Somebody’s drilled holes and nailed
a piece of wood to this gatepost recently, and then broken it off. An estate agent’s board? If it’s still around, and I can find it . . .’
Ellie tried the front doorbell. It worked, but produced no response from inside the house. Naturally. The place was empty. Whatever had made her think otherwise? To the right the house bellied out into an extension with stained-glass windows rather high up – a billiard room, perhaps? Her progress after that was halted by a high wall with a door in it. The wall linked the house to what had once been a coach house, but which was probably now used as a garage. The double doors of the garage had windows above them which didn’t look as if they were made to open. The doors themselves had been fitted with a bright, new padlock.
Ellie disregarded the garage and retraced her steps to the door which pierced the wall. She depressed the latch and pushed. To her surprise the door grated open.
She stepped into a shadowy glass-covered yard between the garage and the house, wide enough to be called a room in itself. On the house side there was a kitchen door. She tried the handle; locked.
On the right there was a door and a window which let on to the garage, then two other doors . . . Possibly an outside toilet, and a tool shed? All these doors were padlocked.
Somewhere nearby a machine purred into action, which made her jump.
Absurd. She smiled at herself. It was only a gardener starting up a lawnmower in one of the adjoining gardens. Of course.
A door at the end of the yard was neither locked nor padlocked, and led out into an extensive back garden and the heat of the evening sun.
‘Wow!’
The garden was alive with roses. They were everywhere, in beds of their own, decorating the walls of the house and lining the brick walls of the garden. It took a lot of neglect before a rose stopped doing what came naturally.
The rose bushes in the beds near the house were mostly white and red: Iceberg and, probably, Ena Harkness. Over there she spotted Peace, pale peaches and cream. Smothering the wall on the right, and looking as if it would like to push it over, was that vigorous thug, Kiftsgate. On her left was Compassion, apricot and cream. Paul’s Scarlet dropped crimson petals into a shallow ornamental pond, bright with algae. That was the problem with ponds; you had to keep cleaning them. No goldfish; she assumed that a heron or a crow would have had any that had been left behind when Mrs Pryce moved away.
The lawn beyond had been sadly neglected – the grass was over her ankles – but two large greenhouses looked intact, though a grape vine was trying to push through the roof of one. An outside tap dripped nearby. Hadn’t the water been turned off at the mains?
Nearby was a rockery, which would be at its best in spring and now looked overgrown and unkempt. Beyond the greenhouses was a compost heap and a capacious shed with its door hanging open. Whatever had once been stored there had been removed. She smiled to see that ancient seed packets had been pinned to the door and left to fade and disintegrate in the sun. How many years had they been there? Forty, fifty? The gardener who had put them up must have died long ago.
A screen of fruit trees hid what had once been a vegetable garden, which looked as if it were producing a good crop of onions and broad beans.
How come?
The place was supposed to be deserted. Vegetables didn’t flourish without input from a gardener. Someone had even planted some runner beans on a bamboo wigwam. And watered them.
The soil was not as full of weeds as might have been expected. Ah, perhaps the Pryce’s gardener was still using the place to grow extra food for himself, treating it like an allotment for which he didn’t have to pay rent? Well, if so . . .
She was being watched.
What!
She turned round to look up at the myriad of windows which overlooked the garden. Nothing. Nobody. Not even in the top window from which Rose said she’d seen a face looking down at her.
Naturally, there wasn’t anyone there.
But . . .
She shivered, despite the warmth of the sun.
She looked round for Thomas, only to find that he hadn’t followed her into the garden. Well, of course not. He was looking for an estate agent’s board at the front, wasn’t he? He was within shouting distance, though.
She’d seen what there was to be seen, and now she’d better get back to find out how Rose was doing. And Frank.
A trailing rose caught at her skirt and held her back, as if the garden were reluctant to let her go. A breeze rustled the leaves in the trees overhead. If she’d been a fanciful woman, she might have imagined they were discussing her intrusion into their territory. Ridiculous; of course they weren’t.
Nevertheless, she had to fight down a desire to panic. The sooner she was out of this place the better. The light would be going soon.
She hastened back along the covered way, her footsteps sounding loud on the paving stones, and found the door to the front drive solidly shut. She pushed and kicked, but it wouldn’t open. She told herself not to panic. This was ridiculous!
‘Thomas!’
No reply. She closed her eyes, clenched her fists, breathed deeply. Was she still being watched? It felt like it, though of course she wasn’t.
Dear Lord, help! Please!
Ah. The door opened towards her, not outwards.
She pulled it open. It grated on the stone flag and let her out into the front drive. Thomas was standing over an estate agent’s board which he’d found in the bushes, taking a note of the name.
‘Hoopers Estate Agency,’ he said. ‘Have you done snooping?’
She nodded. ‘There’s no one living here but someone’s still looking after the vegetable garden. It’s a big place, spooky. Must have cost something to keep up. Are we trespassing, do you think?’
He shut up his notebook. ‘It’s a moot point.’
She said, ‘There’s some wonderful roses in the back garden. If I’d brought my secateurs, I might have been tempted . . . but that would have been theft, wouldn’t it?’
‘The police can contact Hoopers tomorrow. They’ll know where she’s gone and have keys to the place.’
They turned back into the road. Walking along, she matched her pace to his, her arm within his elbow. ‘Do you really think we’ll get our things back?’
He patted her hand. ‘Does it matter?’
Yes, it mattered. But she could tell he didn’t want to make a song and dance of it.
Monday evening
Two frightened young people.
‘Where have you been? I’ve been so scared. There was someone in the garden an hour ago.’
‘What? How could there have been?’
‘You promised me you’d put a padlock on the gate—’
‘I can’t. The gardener wouldn’t be able to come and go if I did that. Did they see you?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
They peered out of the window. There was no one in the garden now. Despite the trees and shrubs which lined the walls of the gardens around them, they were so high up they had a good view of the neighbourhood.
‘There,’ she said, pointing. ‘She came from that house. I often see her there.’
FOUR
Monday evening
As Ellie and Thomas strolled back home, he said, ‘I’m worried about Rose, aren’t you? If she gets too . . . If you need help to look after her . . . ?’
Ellie was very definite. ‘We are not going to put her into a home.’
He half smiled. ‘I would have taken a bet that you’d say that, if I were a betting man, which I’m not. No, what I meant was . . . Didn’t you say that your aunt left her some money? Well, would Rose want to be responsible for someone to come in and look after her, if she gets too frail to cope?’
Ellie had to think about this. Her instinct was to say that she’d look after Rose herself. Of course she would. The two of them went back a long way. Only, common sense reminded Ellie that she was no longer just a housewife, but had duties to fulfil.
She had to confer
with Stewart and his team about what houses should have work done on them, and which could be let out straight away – and to whom. She had to make decisions about buying or selling certain properties. She had to sit on the committee of her charity and rule on what good causes should be helped and by how much. She had a number of people to help her make these decisions, but hers was the casting vote.
Besides which, she had friends to see and the house to run. She had to look after Thomas and Mia and Rose, and to babysit Frank at least once a week.
Suppose Rose needed help to get to the bathroom in the middle of a board meeting, or when she’d taken Frank on an outing? Suppose Rose needed assistance when Ellie had gone to church on Sunday, or had left the house with Thomas to visit friends?
Thomas shook her arm gently. ‘I know you. You’d like to divide yourself into a hundred pieces and look after everyone. But you can’t. Well; you could try, I suppose, and make yourself ill. Then what good would you be to man or beast?’
‘Or to you.’ She put her head against his shoulder for a moment. ‘You hadn’t forgotten I might like to spend time with you every now and then?’
He put his arm about her shoulder. ‘It’s a tough one, isn’t it? While Mia is with us I don’t think we need to worry too much about it, but she’ll move on soon and then we’ll have to think again.’
Tuesday morning
Ellie woke with a feeling of impending doom. Ah yes, Rose had fallen off the ladder after seeing a face floating in mid-air . . . as if! Rose must be watched with care . . . Little Frank was in his room down the corridor . . . and might have wet the bed and – Ouch! Diana!
No, don’t think about Diana.
Then that dreadful young man had stolen Thomas’s Kindle and her ring and oh dear! She was going to have to talk to the police about it. Talking to the police did not score highly on Ellie’s pleasure chart. She knew she wasn’t Brain of Britain material, but she felt that in some of her previous contacts with them she’d come across as next door to an idiot.
‘Stupid housewife, sticking her nose in where she wasn’t wanted’ sort of thing. ‘Too much imagination, and no common sense. Wouldn’t know fact from fiction if you shoved it in her face.’
Murder My Neighbour Page 4
