Suddenly While Gardening

by Elizabeth Lemarchand

  ‘That I wasn’t,’ she said at last, her voice unexpectedly shrill.

  ‘Why not, Mrs Broom?’ Henry Landfear asked quietly.

  ‘Well, sir, for one thing Miss Grant wasn’t looking poorly that morning, whatever Miss Davina said. She was joking and laughing while I was doing the drawing room, and talking about all the jobs she was going to do in the garden in the afternoon.’

  ‘And for another thing?’

  She hesitated once again, and then suddenly burst into rapid speech.

  ‘She’d never have bin wearin’ that watch. Not her best one for working in the garden, the one Miss Davina wears all the time now. Real valuable, she once told me it was. Solid gold, with her initials H.R.G. in tiny little pearls on the back. She’d always take it off for any messy work. Not that she did much o’ that except for the garden, and that by her own choice, she bein’ so wrapped up in it. But wear her best watch and risk gettin’ the dirt in it, no never. She was a careful lady, Miss Grant was, and looked after her things proper for all she was so rich.’

  ‘Do you mean, Mrs Broom, that she didn’t wear a watch at all when she was gardening?’ Pollard asked, breaking a tense silence.

  ‘Oh, no, sir, I didn’t mean that. She was a very punctual lady, and always had an eye to the time. She’d put on her silver watch for workin’ in the garden. The one Miss Davina’s given me. She had it put right first as it wasn’t goin’ well, she said. I won’t say she hasn’t bin generous in her way. I had a lovely coat of Miss Grant’s too, and a big handbag — real leather.’

  ‘You must value that watch a lot,’ Henry Landfear remarked. ‘Are you wearing it now, by any chance?’

  Proudly she shot her left wrist clear of the sleeve of her overall, and showed him an old-fashioned silver watch on a grey leather strap.

  ‘I always wears it except when I’m working, like Miss Grant did her gold one.’

  ‘If you didn’t believe that she was wearing the gold one for gardening the afternoon she was killed, why didn’t you tell me when I came to see you?’ Crookshank asked her.

  ‘I didn’t know nothing about what watch she was wearing, not till they said at the inquest. And seein’ how the coroner put me down when I told ’im Miss Grant was well that mornin’, sayin’ Miss Davina was best placed to know, I thought I’d keep mum, and so I have, right up to this.’

  ‘Caution to coroners,’ Crookshank remarked to nobody in particular. ‘Now then, ducks, here’s the crunch. We want you to lend us your silver watch for a short time. Only till tonight, it could be. Take it from us, it’ll be safe and sound. We’ll give you a receipt for it. Don’t look so worried. Our policemen are wonderful, you know. We just want whoever cleaned it to take a look at it.’

  At this Mrs Broom looked slightly less unhappy.

  ‘That’ll be Mr Dell down to Market Lane, for sure. He sees to the Manor clocks. Real valuable some of ’em, he told me once.’

  She reluctantly unfastened the strap and handed over the watch.

  ‘Here’s your receipt,’ Crookshank said. ‘You’ll get it back in a nice little box as soon as we’ve done with it.’

  ‘You must have more to do up at the Manor these days,’ Henry Landfear said casually. ‘Miss Davina Grant’s trying to carry on with all the things her aunt used to do, isn’t she? The hospital Comforts Fund and the Friends of Cattesmoor and so on?’

  ‘She’ll never manage it,’ Mrs Broom replied decisively. ‘She isn’t the woman her auntie was, not by a long chalk. Miss Grant had it all at her finger ends. Real business-like she was, and that way she got it all done. Now Miss Davina’s runnin’ from pillar to post trying to catch up with herself. Up till two o’clock this morning writin’ letters, she said she was, and then off to Wintlebury to some wholesale place for the Summer Fete stalls soon as I got to work this mornin’. That’s three times she’s trailed all the way up there these last few days, and all the stuff she’s brought back locked up in one of the bedrooms, if you please. Why, in all the years I worked for Miss Grant never did she once turn a key on anythin’, knowin’ me like she did. And Miss Davina’s off to a meetin’ tonight, after she gets back. Real irritable she is, tryin’ to fit it all in. I’ll be properly thankful when the blessed Fete’s over.’

  Henry Landfear was suitably sympathetic.

  ‘Well, we mustn’t keep you from your dinner any longer, Mrs Broom,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming along here and being so helpful.’

  A constable was summoned and instructed to show her out.

  ‘Surely she’ll soon begin to wonder what all this has been in aid of?’ Pollard asked, when the door had closed again.

  ‘Her type and generation — down here, at least — is still inclined to write off the powers that be as incomprehensible,’ Henry Landfear replied. ‘But when she’s had time to mull it over, she’s sure to start talking to her cronies, so the sooner she gets her watch back, the better. What’s your plan of action, Crookshank?’

  ‘Start with Dell, sir, and hope to God that’s where the watch was taken for repairs. If not, I suppose there’ll have to be a circular to watch-repairers all over the country asking for details of what was wrong with it.’

  ‘Shall we be any further on if somebody reports that it had a broken mainspring, though? It couldn’t be proved that it was smashed deliberately,’ Pollard said.

  ‘You seem to have unearthed the perfect crime, don’t you?’ Henry replied gloomily. ‘Unfortunately it’s our case, not yours. What are you going to do about Akerman?’

  ‘I know we’ve now got official confirmation that he had a new car in May ’75, but I’d still like to wait for his back history before we move. I’ve been on to the Yard this morning, and we ought to hear something early this afternoon. The problem is what the charge against Akerman had better be.’

  After a lengthy discussion over sandwiches and coffee it was agreed that Pollard and Toye should interview Robert Dell, and that a further conference should be held at half past four. In the meantime enquiries would be made about the meeting Davina Grant and George Akerman were attending, and when they might reasonably be expected to return to Upway Manor.

  After hearing that Robert Dell was a rum little guy but a marvel with clocks and watches, Pollard had unconsciously formed a mental picture of a Disney workshop, and was surprised to walk into a small up-to-date establishment in Market Lane, presided over by a blonde with shoulder-length hair and violet eye shadow. The shelves were crowded with all types of modern clocks, from the severely functional to the grotesquely ornamental. Before he could speak, a deafening cacophony of whirring, wheezing, striking and explosive cuckooing announced three o’clock.

  ‘You don’t notice it once you’re used to it,’ the blonde reassured them. ‘You gentlemen wanting a clock?’

  ‘Not today, thank you,’ Pollard replied. ‘We’d like a word with Mr Dell, if he’s here.’

  ‘He’s in the workshop,’ she replied doubtfully, with a backward jerk of her head. ‘What name shall I say?’

  Pollard handed her his official card. Her mouth fell open, and with a strangled sound she vanished through a door behind her. They waited, contemplating the stock. Pollard pointed out a brick red plastic squirrel with protruding eyes which supported a clock face between its front paws.

  ‘Like me to buy you that one?’ he asked.

  Before Toye could answer the blonde reappeared still open-mouthed.

  ‘Will you step this way, please?’

  The workshop at least was traditional in appearance. It had a bench with an apparent confusion of tools, and a number of disembowelled clocks in the process of being repaired. A large leather-bound ledger occupied a table in a corner. As well as taking all this in at first glance, Pollard spotted a superb grandfather clock.

  ‘I keep him in here with me,’ said a quiet voice from somewhere in the neighbourhood of his elbow. ‘It’s no place for him out in the shop with all the tinpot rubbish folks buy these days.’

  Pollard lo
oked down into a pair of bright brown eyes set in a wrinkled rosy face. Mr Dell was about four foot ten, with a perfectly bald cranium encircled by a ragged fringe of white hair.

  ‘Mr Robert Dell?’ he said. ‘Good Lord, it’s one of Thomas Tompion’s?’

  ‘It is, sir. And not for sale. Not for all the oil in the Middle East,’ the little man added with startling modernity. ‘You have come about stolen property, perhaps? Pray be seated, and the other gentleman, too.’

  Pollard sat down on a battered upright chair. Mr Dell’s face, he decided, was both childlike and extremely sagacious.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s nothing to do with stolen property. I’ve come on a very confidential matter.’

  Mr Dell bowed without speaking.

  ‘I won’t beat about the bush,’ Pollard went on. ‘I’m quite sure you know why I’m in Stoneham: to enquire into the finding of that skeleton on Cattesmoor. Police enquiries sometimes lead one in very unexpected directions... I think you have done work for the late Miss Heloise Grant of Upway Manor for a good many years, haven’t you?’

  ‘And for her parents before her, sir.’

  ‘I understand that the watch which she was wearing when she was killed was afterwards brought to you to be repaired?’

  ‘That is correct,’ Mr Dell replied. ‘As it was broken by her fall and registered the time when this took place, I was closely questioned about its condition by the police. I was able to inform them that the damage done was consistent with the poor lady’s fall, and that I had recently cleaned and regulated it for her. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, and kept virtually perfect time. I may add that I was surprised that she was wearing it for gardening as she valued it so much. It is all too easy to knock a wristwatch when one is engaged in manual work. And there is the risk of it being damaged by water or some noxious substance.’

  In the ensuing pause the grandfather clock chimed the first quarter. As the mellow notes died away Mr Dell smiled happily at Pollard.

  Pollard smiled back, and took a small box from his briefcase.

  ‘Do you recognise this?’ he asked, holding out Mrs Broom’s watch.

  Mr Dell took it, scrutinised it, and opened the back for further inspection.

  ‘This watch also belonged to the late Miss Grant,’ he said. ‘I have cleaned and regulated it for her from time to time. It is not in the same class as the other, of course, but very good of its kind and a reliable time-keeper.’

  ‘When was it last brought in to you?’

  Without answering Mr Dell got up and went over to the ledger. As he stood by the table turning over pages Pollard and Toye exchanged glances. In the enveloping silence the gentle remorseless ticking of a clock marked the passage of one second after another.

  ‘This watch,’ Mr Dell announced, ‘was brought in to me by Miss Davina Grant in person on the afternoon of Monday, 4 August, last year. It was collected by her on Wednesday, 3 September, in response to a postcard informing her that it was ready. I dislike the telephone intensely,’ he added, returning to his chair.

  ‘What repairs had you done to it?’

  ‘Miss Davina Grant informed me that shortly before she died her aunt had dropped it on the stone floor of the scullery while washing her hands after gardening. The glass and the mainspring were both broken and the winder was missing. The poor lady was a great gardener. I understood that this watch was to be given to the daily woman as a memento of her late mistress.’

  ‘What a wonderful memory you have,’ Pollard told him. ‘It’s astonishing that you can remember all this detail when so many watches must pass through your hands. Why, it’s almost a year ago.’

  Mr Dell gave the slow secretive smile of a child hugging a delectable memory.

  ‘I’ll always remember Monday, 4 August 1975,’ he said. ‘My grandson was born that day. Five little girls my daughter’d had, and we were on tenterhooks, my wife and I. My son-in-law had only telephoned an hour before Miss Davina came in with that watch. And talk about coincidence: the watch had stopped at twenty minutes past one, the very moment the little lad came into this world.’

  As Pollard and Toye commented a little incoherently, Mr Dell’s expression slowly became less childlike and more sagacious.

  ‘Gentlemen of your standing, sir, don’t come around asking questions about watch repairs unless it’s an important matter. I can’t see what the ones you’ve been asking me are leading to, but it’s the sort of thing makes a man uneasy.’

  ‘Unfortunately, Mr Dell,’ Pollard replied, ‘in our job we can’t avoid making a lot of people uneasy. Not that you personally have anything to worry about, I need hardly say. It’s possible you may be asked to make a formal statement about this watch. If it is, you’ll hear from Superintendent Crookshank. Thank you for the information you’ve given us, and now we won’t take up any more of your time.’

  A couple of minutes later they were walking back to the police station along Market Lane.

  ‘Why didn’t she shift the hands?’ Toye asked. ‘If the winder had come adrift and disappeared in a flowerbed when Miss Grant fell, surely she could have got hold of another?’

  ‘Not as easy as it sounds without making yourself conspicuous. It’s an old watch, remember, and winders aren’t standardised. And obviously by August she was overconfident. The inquest was over, and everything nicely rounded off. No questions asked about the gold watch, except whether it was reliable, and Dell had testified to that. So 1.20 was no more significant than any other time. The yarn about Miss Grant having a wash in the scullery as she came into the house is the commonplace sort of thing that’s so convincing. But I think she tripped up over the time. Their normal lunch hour was one o’clock, and according to Mrs Broom Miss Grant was a very punctual lady. Would she have come in unwashed twenty minutes late?’

  Toye considered.

  ‘You’ve got some points, there. But what Dell’s given us isn’t what you’d call conclusive, is it? Do you think they’ll charge her, all the same?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re rattled, and I don’t wonder, poor chaps. Anyway, it’s their business, not ours, thank the Lord.’

  Pollard spoke with enough vehemence to get a quick glance from Toye. As they walked in silence he faced the fact that he was feeling rattled himself, and wondered why. Whatever the Yard had managed to unearth about George Akerman could hardly affect the case against him. The identity of the skeleton had not been discovered and probably never would be, but surely Akerman’s involvement in the chap’s death and the concealment of the body was beyond doubt? And Geoffrey Ling had admitted to the fool’s trick of moving the skeleton to the kistvaen... After all, Pollard told himself, that was the job I was sent down here to do, and I’ve done it.

  It was not until they were going up the steps of the police station that he realised that his uneasiness was in connection with Davina Grant.

  He was temporarily distracted by the report on George Akerman which had come through. He was of working-class origin, won a free place at a grammar school and had been apprenticed to a printer. His war record had been satisfactory, if undistinguished, and he had subsequently had a job with a printing firm in South London. At the age of thirty he had married a girl ten years younger than himself, who had left him for another man a year later. He had divorced her, sold the house which he had been buying through a building society, and disappeared from London with a few thousand pounds left him by an uncle.

  ‘Well, we can fill in the rest,’ Pollard said. ‘An entirely new pattern of life emerges. He turns up in Stoneham, buys a moribund printing works, and settles down to make a success of it and play a part in local affairs, especially on the conservation side. He develops archaeological interests, and starts moving in quite a different social circle. At the same time he lives an oddly solitary sort of life.’

  ‘On the up and up, that’s plain enough,’ Toye commented.

  ‘Heading for what? Our theory is marriage with Davina Grant and living at Upway M
anor. But you know, the more I think of it, the more unbelievable it seems that a chap like Akerman could think the game worth the candle ... that hopelessly immature stupid girl would drive him round the bend, surely...’

  Pollard’s voice trailed off.

  Toye looked at him enquiringly.

  ‘There’s something pretty chilling about the way Akerman dealt with that body, isn’t there? I’m beginning to wonder if his long-term plan included a fatal accident for Davina? However, I suppose all this is beside the point, as we’re bringing his little game to a full stop... Come on, we’re due with the C.C. and Crookshank.’

  Of all the frustrating cases I’ve ever had, Pollard thought, as they walked along an echoing corridor smelling of disinfectant. Hopelessly tangled up with what looks like a perfect murder...

  It was as he arrived at Superintendent Crookshank’s door that a possible joint course of action sprang into his mind.

  Chapter 11

  At the end of Pollard’s account of his visit to Robert Dell, Henry Landfear and Superintendent Crookshank exchanged expressive looks.

  ‘Yes,’ Crookshank said gloomily. ‘That’s how it was done, all right. No doubt at all.’

  Henry Landfear agreed, stubbing out a cigarette end in an already over-full ashtray.

  ‘No doubt and no proof,’ he said with finality. ‘Can’t you hear the whole business about the watches being torn to shreds in court, always supposing the D.P.P. would let the case go forward?’

  As Pollard remained silent, he looked at him challengingly.

  ‘Hell! Would you charge Davina Grant with her aunt’s murder on the evidence we’ve got?’

  ‘Not on the evidence we’ve got at the moment.’

  ‘I’m not with you.’

  ‘I’d try shock tactics to get some more. All according to the book, of course.’

  ‘Well, if you’ve got any practicable suggestions, let’s have ’em, by all means.’

  ‘O.K.,’ Pollard replied, astonished by the speed at which his mind had been working, even while he was recounting the interview with Robert Dell. ‘Quite a simple plan has occurred to me. We know that Davina Grant and Akerman are going back to Upway Manor for supper after their meeting this evening, and that Peter Grant’s going out with Kate Ling. We’ve got a warrant for Akerman’s arrest on a charge of murdering the hippy. You get one for Davina’s arrest. Both of them are overconfident. It’s a year and over since the two deaths, and no questions asked, and they’re in a state of mind which makes people highly vulnerable to unexpected accusations. We arrive at the Manor, take them by surprise, and I charge Akerman. If he keeps his head and neither of them will talk, you — the Stoneham team — are as you were. You don’t execute your warrant, that’s all. But from the impression I’ve formed of Davina Grant I think she’ll go to pieces. She’s crazy about Akerman, and she’s a very stupid, if cunning, young woman. The whole thing may end in their going for each other: it wouldn’t surprise me if Akerman’s real feelings about her burst out. If this sort of fracas develops I think it’s highly probable that they’ll give themselves away, and it’ll be up to us to freeze on to anything relevant that’s said.’