Death in the Garden

by Jennie Melville

  Bello:

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  Contents

  Jennie Melville

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jennie Melville

  Death in the Garden

  Jennie Melville, a pseudonym for Gwendoline Butler, was born and brought up in south London, and was one of the most universally praised of English mystery authors. She wrote over fifty novels under both names. Educated at Haberdashers, she read history at Oxford, and later married Dr Lionel Butler, Principal of Royal Holloway College. She had one daughter, who survives her.

  Gwendoline Butler’s crime novels are hugely popular in both Britain and the United States, and her many awards included the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger. She was also selected as being one of the top two hundred crime writers in the world by The Times.

  Chapter One

  Inside every murderer is a lover trying to get out.

  This truth, a truth for her, for truth can come in all shapes and sizes and there is a truth for everyone, was discovered by Edwina Fortune the summer of her father’s second wedding and her own crisis.

  A time when she was pregnant, and alone, and hunted.

  Three months before that terrible period Tim Croft and Kit Langley were travelling south from Edinburgh in adjoining sleepers. Young barristers in the same chambers, they had both been working on a prolonged public enquiry in Scotland.

  Kit was woken up in the middle of the night by shouts from Tim’s compartment. He lay for a minute listening, half awake, half asleep. Then Tim shouted again: a dark, throttled sound from the back of his throat.

  Kit knocked at his door. There was silence, then a sound of movement and Tim called out:

  ‘Come in. It’s not locked.’

  He was sitting on the edge of his sleeper with his head in his hands.

  ‘You all right?’

  Tim raised his head. ‘Yes. Just a nightmare.’

  ‘Oh well. OK then.’ Kit made a move away.

  ‘No, don’t go.’

  Kit sat on a suitcase and looked at Tim. ‘You look rotten. Have some whisky – I’ve got a bottle next door. Old Baggers pressed it on me.’ Baggers was his noble Lordship, Lord Baggally: one of Her Majesty’s judges. He had presided in Edinburgh.

  ‘I think he fancies you,’ muttered Tim. Kit laughed. ‘No, no. He’s my godfather. Married to my mother’s cousin – I thought you were being strangled.’

  ‘Not me, no.… It was a rotten dream. The worst ever – I was strangling someone.’ He looked at Kit. ‘I thought I was strangling Edwina.… She’s got such a lovely neck and I had my hands right round it, squeezing.’

  ‘Knowing Edwina, she fought back,’ said Kit lightly.

  Tim did not laugh. ‘Yes, yes, she did. I could feel her hands pulling on mine. But I killed her all the same. I strangled her.’ He shuddered.

  ‘Oh come on, Tim. You’re in love with the girl. You won’t kill her.’

  ‘No.’ Tim put his head down in his hands. ‘You don’t understand. Women worry me, people hang on so.’

  ‘Do you mean Edwina?’ Kit was prepared to be defensive.

  ‘No.’ He hesitated. ‘Not Eddie. Forget it.’

  ‘I’ll get the whisky.’

  When he came back, Tim’s hand was trembling as he took the drink.

  ‘I’m a bloody murderer.’ He spilled the whisky. I know, Kit thought. But he did not say it aloud. He took the glass away.

  Later, lying on his narrow bed as the train swung along the east coast route to London, he wondered what to do.

  There had been blood on Tim’s hands from scratches as if he had clawed himself in his nightmare. Somehow this made it serious, something not to be brushed aside.

  Should he tell Edwina? Was that the right thing to do? But he was more than half in love with Edwina himself, which put up a barrier. Besides, he liked his friend Tim.

  Tell Alice then, who was Edwina’s close friend? But he guessed that Alice was more than half in love with him. Cassie then, her other close friend, the third in the triangle? But Cassie’s tongue was suspect and her discretion not absolute.

  He decided to say nothing, nothing at all.

  Two weeks later Tim was dead, and Kit was glad he had not spoken. Tim was dead, killed in a car crash on a winding Perthshire road. The Procurator Fiscal examined the evidence with the police and called it an accident. No details were ever made public. In fact, he had been dead for some days before anyone except his mother in Northumberland knew. It was a shock to them all. Their first intimation of the way life can, without warning, rub you out, leaving no message behind. It was hard to believe Tim was dead. It seemed almost as if he was not.

  A few weeks after that, when Tim was buried and while he was at a wedding, he thought that, after all, perhaps he should have said something.

  It was the wedding of the year, the wedding of the decade, some said it was the wedding of the century. A small, intimate wedding for family and friends. Just one thousand of them shut into a converted warehouse in Covent Garden, eating smoked salmon, drinking champagne and shouting. There was laughter too. There was always laughter when those three entertained: Edwina, Cassie and Alice. It was they who were giving the wedding for the bride, Lily Dex, who was marrying Edwina Fortune’s noble father, the Lord Bulkley. The warehouse was being converted by Cassie Ross, architect, into her offices, drawing room and living apartment combined. She would live on the job. The wedding itself had taken place in St Godrun’s church in the tiny ancient parish no more than three streets square. It was a glittering social occasion.

  Five kings were dancing at the wedding. Have you ever seen five kings all at once, let alone dancing on nimble feet? King Edward VII once led five kings to church at Sandringham and a fine sight it must have been, but that was a long while ago.

  The kings were Peter Lloydd who was playing King Lear at the National, Pip Cardew who was King of Hearts in the new ballet at the Garden, and Eddie King, the rising young comedian. The other two kings were actors from the Cardboard-Cut-Out Theatre that performed from a travelling booth in the Piazza of the Garden, several days a week. Cassie had hired them to perform because she had heard the Sandringham story and wanted to make up the number. They were wearing long robes, masks and glittery cardboard crowns, glitz personified, and had promised an amusing act with silver balls. But since no one seemed to be watching them they soon ceased to juggle and quietly joined the party. They popped up everywhere, yet so cunningly that at least one person wondered exactly how many of them there were and felt bemused. Five kings, a three and a two, with different claims on the name, but all important. The whole designed by Cassie so she could have her joke. At the time she thought what a marvellous publicity hook for Luke Tory to use. Afterwards, of course, she saw things differently, even wondering if the idea had been fed to her without her realising it. Bee Linker smiled
at her nephew and shook her head so that he thought it was time to go home – Bee couldn’t stand too much noise – and he wondered if Janine Grandy, her part-time secretary, would be with them that evening. She was so good with Bee. Involved. He had an idea that Janine always did, but never wanted to, get drawn into people’s lives.

  ‘Mine eyes dazzle,’ thought Cassie, catching sight of a clown; she was slightly drunk on champagne and on the occasion. As so often the three of them stood together in a group. Perhaps they were unaware how frequently they stood together just so, but their friends noticed it and called it their trademark: the three of them together, studying the world. Perhaps a hint removed, even superior? Their enemies hinted as much, but they need not have been envious. The world was about to strike back.

  Kit Langley, who liked them all, stood watching. He was tall, clever and ambitious, but sometimes, in their successful femininity, they made him feel like some strange animal from another species. This was such a time.

  He studied Edwina whom he loved: beneath the party glitter her face looked strained. He’d heard a bit about her lately. She did attract the oddities of life, some people did. She always had done.

  He had known Edwina since childhood and it had been Edwina who had almost caught fire on her own Guy Fawkes bonfire, and Edwina who had very nearly been hanged in the dormitory at school.

  Should I have spoken? he asked himself. To arm her, to protect her?

  Could you protect her?

  Oh, you three, he thought.

  At the moment they were admiring the picture presented by their friend Lily, now the new Lady Bulkley, departing for her honeymoon in natural silk tussore and a froth of blonde curls. ‘ Goodbye, my trio of darlings. Edwina, remember I am a wicked stepmother, not the good fairy.’ There were kisses all round and with a wave she was gone.

  ‘The beauty,’ murmured Alice appreciatively. ‘ She does wear clothes so well.’ Wearing clothes had been Lily’s profession as a much-photographed model. If she produced the heir Lord Bulkley longed for, then Lily had promised to dress the child in clothes designed by Alice and to be photographed herself with him. As she said: what was good enough for the Princess of Wales would do for her.

  The noise of Kit Langley’s laughter and the happy voices shouting pieces of really monstrous gossip floated out through the open windows where it joined the music from Tuttons and the shouts of the children watching a Punch and Judy show, full of matrimonial fighting. Or rather, Punch beating Judy and the baby, for that was the nature of the game and one which Edwina watched, marvelling at the way the children loved the violence. It said something about human nature she’d rather not dwell upon.

  Some of the guests had been drinking wine at Tuttons before they came on to the wedding, others had come from the Savoy, or the Ritz; the guests were a nice social mix. There was also a little grey cat, belonging to Cassie, who had sampled the champagne from someone’s glass and was now wandering around, unsure of paw and quite tipsy. Tomorrow it was going to have a hangover of human proportions. Another hangover was coming the way of Miss Drury and Miss Dover, the middle-aged ladies known to the Garden as Ginger and Pickles, whose travelling Help-Yourself-to-Health food stall set itself up in the Garden twice weekly, and who spent the rest of the week repairing the health of the outer suburbs of Staines and Chertsey. They were popular figures and glad to be asked to the wedding: Lily was one of their best customers. So was Canon Linker who had conducted the wedding service in his tiny ancient church of St Godrun’s, a stone’s throw behind St Paul’s, Covent Garden. He was in company with his illustrious Aunt Bee. It was the Canon’s champagne the little grey cat had tippled. If he had known, he would have been glad to share, for he was a generous man, a great expert on Anglo-Saxon poetry, which made him an appropriate choice for Rector of St Godrun’s. Also present was Dr Fisher, the local GP who got into everything. So they were all there, bar one person, who could not come and was not invited anyway; but who was there as a familiar or evil spirit.

  Janine, who worked for the trio and also for Canon Linker’s aunt, had stood in the sun, unobserved, outside St Godrun’s to watch the bride arrive. Lily was a real beauty whose intelligence and integrity shone through her professional glossy poise. Everyone loved her, and even Janine, a cynical spirit, responded to her charm. But she would have gone to the church anyway. She often went to church, especially to St Godrun’s, and in a funny kind of way she liked weddings. There was a theatrical side to church ritual (and St Godrun’s was very High) which pleased her. She liked a good production, with attention to detail. When the problem with the flowers for the wedding came up – cut flowers, no flowers or false flowers – it had been Janine who, making no fuss, had solved it, knowing exactly where to go to get the artificial flowers put together naturally. Left to themselves, she thought, those girls would have had the place full of bushes like jokes out of Davenport’s. A joke is always welcome, her Thespian father had said (he had often shopped for jokes at Davenport’s himself) but you don’t want it thrust in your face. Especially at a wedding. It was amazing, Janine’s thoughts continued, how wrong that talented trio could get things.

  As well as the champagne the wedding cake was going around, a deliciously rich cake with an icing not too hard to take a good bite, but hard enough to leave a toothmark in it when you had bitten into it. It was too rich for one guest, whose stomach was a little queasy and who put it aside on a ledge.

  It was a fantasy wedding, not the sort to end in death, but perhaps they should have been warned. It had been in the horoscopes for all three hostesses. A bad day, it had said, after which time things will never be the same again. The little grey cat was going to live to bear witness to that.

  There were no flowers and not a single bridesmaid. Lily Dex, now Lady Bulkley, did not approve of cut flowers (nor of real fur, though real diamonds were all right) so all the floral decorations, all the roses, peonies and lupins that formed great splashes of colour against the white walls like a Dufy painting, were of paper, real paper, although you would never have known it. The few guests who noticed or cared said lovingly that it was just like darling Lily. One woman who was allergic to the peppery smell of peonies sneezed away happily just as if they were real.

  Lily’s bridal bouquet was of creamy-yellow silk. What about the silkworms before she gets her silk? Did Lily know what happens to a silkworm after it has made its silk? Or mind? No, Lily did not mind about the silkworms, all her wedding finery had been borrowed from the collection of antique wedding gowns owned by Alice Leather, and the silkworms had done their job and paid for it over a century ago. Even Lily could not weep over them.

  Luke Tory represented all three girls for publicity purposes, and so the matter of the flowers was grist to his mill. It could make a paragraph in Harpers and Queen if he handled it right, and a splash in the Evening Star where he was on special terms with a gossip columnist. Luke always had an eye to the main chance, whether for himself or a client, translating that chance into money in the pocket as soon as he could. Luke liked money. He also liked information. He was a great gatherer-up of gossip and valuable to the three women on that account also. The love affairs, quarrels and shifting alliances of Chelsea, Knightsbridge and Belgravia could be important professionally to Alice and Edwina, if less so to Cassie, but even she liked to know who might be thinking of endowing an extension to an art gallery or running up an office block. Amongst the very rich it was as well to know what your feet were treading in. Luke helped them to watch their step.

  Luke’s two interests combined in what he knew about his three principal clients. He knew more about them and their finances than they guessed. He knew that Cassie, who had left the large firm where she had won prizes and commendations, to set up her own business, was very short of money although high in contracts. He knew that Alice was working on a very tight cash margin and that her bank manager was not her best friend. He knew that Edwina had sold all her inheritance to invest in her gallery.

&
nbsp; He also knew the great capital of inner resources and talent each had to call upon; he regarded them as bankable. They were in the fast lane.

  Luke would have been on the job now, talking to the editor of a famous magazine, bussing, in his sexless way, a well-known beauty and party girl, if it had not been for a strange sensation.

  ‘You’re getting randy, dear.’ He was surprised at himself. ‘It must be the effect of the wedding bells.’

  But it couldn’t be. He knew himself too well. Nevertheless the feeling did not go away. Mild, but positive, it remained with him. He felt unreal. Floating, not happily either.

  He moved round the room, talking to the right people and seeing they talked to the other right people, all the time feeling increasingly unusual. Perhaps it was aggression he was feeling. Perhaps that was what masculine aggression felt like? But he knew himself; he was not an aggressive man, nor strongly sexual.

  He tried to reassure himself. ‘Lovely party. Just like the dear girls to give Lily a bash like this.’ He banged against one of the kings in a paper crown. ‘ Oh sorry, dear.’

  The king did not answer, but raised a bony hand in mock salute and drifted away, leaving Luke feeling no less unreal. In his opinion all the kings had been a mistake. He liked the Cardboard-Cut-Out Theatre and was very glad for them to earn a little extra money but now they should huff off to Deptford Broadway or Woolwich Arsenal where they also set up stage to perform their carefully composed mimes and mini-plays like the strolling players of the past. The company of three men and three women existed, when they existed at all, on a small grant from the Arts Council and patrons like Edwina and Cassie. They also passed the hat round and took other jobs as they came along, to keep them going. One of the kings was passing his crown round at this moment.

  To his fury, Luke saw a tenner being dropped in, and another, and not a penny taxable.

  Another king appeared with a tray of drinks. ‘Sorry.’ Luke refused the offer. He had the uncomfortable feeling that the kings were taking over the party. ‘ Can’t take champagne, doctor’s orders. Gives me gout. Have to stick to whisky.’ He held up his glass. ‘ Got my own supply.’ Cassie’s actually. She had laid on a special decanter of malt and left it in her pantry for him to help himself.