Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Potting Shed Mystery (Potting Shed Mystery series Book 3)
Authors: Marty Wingate
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2015 Alibi eBook Edition
Copyright © 2015 by Marty Wingate
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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LIBI
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eBook ISBN 9780804177726
Cover design: Scott Biel
Cover images: (bridge) Danita Delmont/Gallo Images/Getty Images; (hat) Ryan McVay/Photodisc/Getty Images; (cat) Susan Schmitz/Shutterstock
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Three boys in school uniforms, their ties askew now at the end of the day, edged their way over the imaginary line drawn on the pavement by the police constable. “Stay there,” the PC had said only minutes before as he pointed to an invisible spot on the ground. “Don’t come any closer to the bridge.” The boys, none of them more than ten years old, did as they were told.
It was a stone bridge only ten feet above the Water of Leith— not the Forth Road Bridge that connected Edinburgh to the north of Scotland—but it wasn’t the bridge that concerned the PC, it was the soaked corpse that the boys had pulled out of the shallow water.
The PC watched as Detective Sergeant Tamsin Duncan climbed the steps up from the bank below, all the while furiously chewing on her piece of nicotine gum. The gray stones of the bridge matched the bleak sky—a
dreich
day, he had said to his sergeant when they arrived on the scene, and she had nodded in return.
The boys had stumbled upon the man’s body lying facedown in the water. The ambulance workers, first on the scene, had given way to police forensic specialists. The boys now jostled for a closer look and hoped to claim credit for the discovery. They’d not stopped asking questions since the police arrived.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“I knew he was dead, I saw him first.”
“Is there blood? Can we see?”
“
Wheesht!
” the PC hissed at them.
The boys did as they were told and fell silent, except for the littlest one who was bold enough to complain, “You sound like my granny.”
“It’s your granny we’re waiting for,” Duncan said, “so that she can take you all home.”
Across the road, an older woman sat stiffly upright on a stone bench, cup of tea in hand. “That isn’t their granny, is it?” Duncan asked the PC.
“No, that woman is the one who came across the body first, actually, but the boys were just after her. Someone helped her ring us, and a neighbor gave her tea, and she’s been waiting for us since. She was quite shaken at first, kept saying she was looking for something she lost. As soon as we arrived, we diverted the rest of the schoolchildren, made them walk up to Saxe Coburg and down Hamilton Place.” His eyes shifted back to the body. “How does it look?”
“Head trauma—we’ll take a close look at the steps—could be he slipped. That’s all we have at the moment—so, we’d better get to it.”
The boys had started to squirm again. “Right now, lads,” the PC said, “it’s ice creams for you if you can hold still until your granny arrives.”
Damson Hill Manor Farm House Gardens
2 Tumbly Hill Road
nr Quedgeley, Cheltenham
Gloucestershire
GL2 5DH
25 September
Primrose House
Dear Ms. Parke,
On behalf of the board, I would like to extend to you an invitation to talk with us at your earliest opportunity about the post of head gardener at Damson Hill Manor Farm House Gardens. Your knowledge of garden history in the UK, and particularly your recent work in Sussex on the Humphry Repton landscape, as well as your deep interest, expressed to us last year, in the Arts & Crafts movement and William Morris’s influence on garden design in the Cotswolds, lead us to believe you would be ideal for this post.
We hope you will ring us on (0204) 559078 just as soon as possible so that we can set up a time to meet with you.
Yours sincerely,
Lionel F. Arbuthnott, director
Damson Hill Manor Farm House Gardens Charitable Trust
LFA/sar
Halstead House
12 The Vicarage
Long Melford, Sudbury
Suffolk
CO10 9JL
27 January
Primrose House
Dear Ms. Parke,
On behalf of the garden committee, I would like to invite you to talk with us concerning the post of head gardener of Halstead House. Last year, you shared with us your ideas for incorporating both Saxon and Viking elements in the garden to echo Suffolk’s ancient history. I write to say that we would appreciate discussing this aspect of the garden further, knowing that your qualifications and ideas would be most suitable to our long-range goals for the estate.
We hope that your future endeavours will include Halstead House. Please ring us on (0334) 679112 at your earliest convenience.
Yours sincerely,
Marietta Woods-Russell, chair
Halstead House
MWR/lmw
Pru watched Christopher watch the boats. He stood at one of the tall windows, steam rising from the mug of tea he held up to his face. When he noticed that she’d walked in from the bedroom, he smiled, reached down to the table for her mug, and handed it to her before slipping his arm around her waist and kissing her temple. They kept their silent vigil until the flotilla of fishing boats—looking like little windup toys from this vantage point, with puffs of white sea foam at their stern—vanished from sight over the horizon.
Just as their idyll had vanished before her eyes. Now a note of frustrated melancholy had taken the place of freedom. Six months’ leave he’d had—where had the time gone? When she’d left her head-gardener post at Primrose House, and Christopher had taken a leave from his job as detective chief inspector with London’s Metropolitan Police, the world had been theirs. Although they’d never left the shores of England, they had traveled through each other’s lives, growing accustomed to the other’s daily routines and finding new routines together. It had been the most pleasant interlude she could imagine.
They’d not been idle, but had occupied themselves with a variety of volunteer tasks, bouncing around the country as they did so. In Hastings, at the tourist office where Pru’s niece Peppy worked, they refilled racks of leaflets on topics ranging from the 1066 Norman invasion to World War II. Pru had helped with several Badger Care projects—an organization near and dear to Christopher’s heart—and worked the booth at a country fête in the Cotswolds. It was the same place that Pru and Christopher had first appeared on each other’s radar, so to speak, the year before, so the weekend was more about romance than badgers.
Christmas with the Wilsons and Pru’s brother, Simon Parke, and family. Neither Texas-born Pru nor England-born Simon had known the other existed until barely a year ago. The word “surprise” didn’t come close to their reactions—Pru in her early fifties and Simon in his mid-sixties. A freshly discovered sibling increased her family fourfold—counting her sister-in-law and two nieces. At dinner, Simon had stood, glass in hand, and said, “I don’t usually do a Christmas toast, but I want to say that we’re very happy you’re all here to celebrate with us”—he looked at Pru and Christopher—“and well…I give you family.” Everyone raised a glass and repeated the toast—“Family!”—except for Pru, who raised her glass but was unable to speak as tears streamed down her face.
She had arrived in England two years earlier with no actual family to speak of, but had made her own—in London, her friend Jo Howard and, by extension, Jo’s daughter, Cordelia, Dele’s partner, Lucy, and now baby Oliver. Harry and Vernona Wilson, clients in London, had moved back to their Hampshire home, Greenoak. Simon was the Wilsons’ gardener, which strengthened those ties. And there was Christopher, of course. In Sussex, she’d added Ivy Fox and son, Robbie, along with a few others. To her, they were each one family, and Pru held on to family fiercely, whether they be blood or not.
She and Christopher had spent part of the winter occupying a small National Trust property near Greystoke in Cumbria, filling a vacancy until the next, long-term leaseholders took over—a snowy January that kept them indoors and by the fire. The last few weeks they had taken up residence in a holiday flat in a small village on the south coast of Cornwall, where they walked short stretches of the coastal path when it wasn’t pouring rain. Christopher focused on teaching Pru to identify the seabirds, but her guesses were erratic. “Is it a tern? Arctic? Sandwich? Common?”—terns were her fallback guess, as there were only a few from which to choose; if it was a gull, she was lost. He knew the countryside too well, and she found it difficult to catch him out on the native plant landscape.
As their six months together drew to a close, Pru thought of Christopher back to his job in Chelsea and Pru to…what? If only those letters would stop, perhaps she could think clearly enough to make a decision. She had spent her first year in England, fresh from Texas, in search of a head-gardener post while filling her days with maintenance work in London—cutting grass, weeding, planting pots of annuals. No one had wanted to hire her until at last Davina and Bryan Templeton took her on to restore a historic Humphry Repton garden near Royal Tunbridge Wells. A murder notwithstanding, it had gone well enough to draw the attention of the gardening world—and now the gardens that had once rejected her were begging her to work for them.
“What about this one?” Christopher picked up the latest offer from an ever-growing stack on the coffee table.
She kissed him and took the letter from Sir Frank Chesterton Victorian Gardens and Grottoes. “I don’t want to live in Shropshire,” she explained—and not for the first time. Christopher seemed determined that she consider each offer no matter how far apart it put them. He kept telling her that he wanted to be fair, not assume too much.
“You don’t want to give up gardening, do you?”
“No,” she said, “but my priorities have shifted.” She raised her eyebrows and held his gaze until he smiled in acknowledgment and squeezed her hand. She would have to work; she knew that. And he would have to work—they couldn’t be vagabonds the rest of their lives. They’d settled into this life together with little talk of the future, because Christopher said he didn’t want to hold her back, but now the future breathed down their necks. “You’re not trying to get rid of me, are you?” she asked.
She was just joking, but his response was to take her in his arms and bury his face in her hair. “I want you with me always,” he whispered.
They had been about to head out the door to the pub, but that could wait.
“Could you please make a job come open at Chiswick House?” she asked, lying on her side in bed, head propped up in her hand. That would be quite near his flat.
“As if they’d listen to me.” And the conversation wandered off into discussing one more visit to family and friends in the south on their way back to London.
As much as Christopher had thrown himself into this gap, in reality, she knew he looked forward to getting back to police work. She could see it on his face and in the absentminded way he replied to simple questions—whether he wanted tea or coffee, digestive or gingernut biscuit. She caught him in pensive moods, staring out the window that faced the sea or stirring his coffee until it was too cold to drink. Yes, he wanted to get back to work, and if Pru could find something to do—even for a while—she thought that he would feel better about wanting it.
“This one,” she said one afternoon. For the past several months, Pru’s letters had been forwarded to Jo in London, who sent a packet off to Pru every few days—letters full of offers to discuss the head-gardener position at what now seemed like far-flung corners of the country. Pru left the ever-growing stack on the coffee table and read and reread them, but none had any appeal to her. Except for a letter that had arrived two days ago, in the latest batch. As she shuffled through pleas from Boars Hall Castle in Durham and Stonechat Gardens in Dorset, a letter from Scotland kept rising to the surface.
Pru held up the letter for Christopher to see. “I’m going to take this one.”
