Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Potting Shed Mystery (Potting Shed Mystery series Book 3) (6 page)

Pru strolled back toward her flat, glancing in windows and watching passersby, attempting to suss out whether there was a different look to people in Edinburgh. Mostly they looked well wrapped up against the cold. When it began to rain, she picked up her pace to Mrs. Murchie’s, two streets away from her own flat.

A cross-looking Siamese, dark chocolate face with eyes the color of cornflowers, was settled on the back of the sofa that sat against the front window. When Pru rang the bell, the cat jumped down, and Pru heard the latch on the door.

“I’m delighted you were able to stop,” Mrs. Murchie said, leading the way to the front room, the tea table already laid. “And at the end of your first day, too. I hope it went well for you.”

Yes and no, Pru thought. “It’s always exhausting to settle into a new place,” she said. An idea occurred to her. “Mrs. Murchie, how would you pronounce the name ‘Menzies’ – spelled with a ‘Z’?” Pru waved her finger in a zigzag.

“Well now, I suppose it could be ‘Men-zees’ or it could be ‘Ming-is,’ ” she said. “It’s that pesky letter zed, you see. In the Scottish language, there was a letter that had a little tail, so it looked like the zed you make in joined-up writing, but it made an entirely different sound. Some would still pronounce it the old way.”

Would it have killed Iain to tell her that?

They sat on the sofa, and as Mrs. Murchie poured, Pru glanced around at the furnishings. On the wall near the door, a collection of wool scarves in every color of the rainbow hung from the long twisted pegs of a wooden rack. The mantel held a single exhibit: an old photo of a man wearing a tam and a thick fisherman’s sweater; he had a bushy mustache and a wide grin, and he stood near a stream with a rocky hillside behind him.

Over tea, the two women peeled off the surface layers of their lives the way that new acquaintances do—how did she find London, will it be a mild spring, what a fine English oak sideboard you have. Pru started in on a slice of cake studded with candied peel and sultana raisins. “Mmm. Delicious.”

“It’s Selkirk bannock—not the usual oat bannock. The baker is just round on Hamilton Place,” she said in a confidential tone.

“Good to know.”

“We working women don’t always have time for baking, now do we? Not like Morven, that old woman next door.” Her eyes cut toward the fireplace wall, which, Pru thought, must divide that old woman from this one. “She cooks and knits and weaves, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she didn’t have a cow or two hidden in her back garden for milking. She’s an old cow herself,” she said, pursing her lips.

Pru told herself not to get on Mrs. Murchie’s bad side. “Yes, it’s difficult to find the time when you have a job outside the home. What did you do?”

Mrs. Murchie smiled and nodded behind her to the drinks table, which held a crystal jug in pride of place. There was a thistle engraved on it along with writing Pru couldn’t read.

“I owned my own business,” Mrs. Murchie said, her chest puffed out. “For twenty years I owned a newsagent in Marchmont. The chamber gave me that claret jug when I sold the shop and retired a few years ago.” She smiled. “My father went down the mines in Fife and died when he was only thirty-seven, and my mum worked in a factory that made sewing machine needles, so I did all right for myself.”

“And”—Pru cleared her throat—“Mr. Murchie?”

“Mr. Murchie,” the woman said, “is no longer with us.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for your loss. Do you have any other family?”

The Siamese leapt onto the coffee table, sat down, and gazed at them. “Prumper is my family now,” Mrs. Murchie said.

“Pets can help see you through bad times, can’t they?”

Mrs. Murchie nodded and stared off into the distance. “It was Jess, an old black-and-white cat, that saved me when my husband died.”

“You didn’t have Prumper when Mr. Murchie died?”

The old woman blinked and looked at Pru. “Oh, not Mr. Murchie. My first husband, when I lived north of here. He died a long time ago. I had to leave our home and my Jess.” She frowned. “I had to leave my wee boy behind, too.”

“You had to leave your son?”

“He wasn’t my own, although it felt as if he was. I hoped that he and Jess would comfort each other.” Mrs. Murchie shook her head. “I still miss him.”

Pru looked over at Prumper, who had raised a paw and held it out to her. “Do cats shake hands?” she asked. “Like dogs?”

Mrs. Murchie’s musical laugh made Pru smile. “He’s wanting to give you a wee ‘poom’—just a tap, you see, to ask for a pet.”

Pru held out her hand and Prumper batted it—
poom!
No claws, but he did have a fair wallop. She stroked the cat’s back; his motor started up and his eyes closed to blue slits. When Pru took her hand away, the cat jumped down, rubbed against Mrs. Murchie’s legs, and yowled.

“Yes, I suppose it is almost time for your tea.”

Pru noticed the pointed look Prumper gave her, reminding her of the time, and so she stood and said, “Thanks very much for the tea.”

At the door, Mrs. Murchie turned to Pru. “We’ll just keep a sharp eye out. Prumper lives indoors, but you never know when he might get it into his head to make a dash for it.”

“Can’t you just tell him to stay?” Pru asked, and Mrs. Murchie broke out in a fit of giggles. Pru shrugged. “I’ve never had a cat,” she said.

“Yes, hen,” the woman replied. “I can tell.”

Out on the front step, Pru gathered her scarf about her as she heard the latch thrown. Early March and the sun had yet to make it to evening. She walked to the corner, over two short streets, and to her own flat.

She’d left no lamp on, and it was dark when Pru opened the door. She preferred a welcoming light and would need to get a timer—one more detail of getting settled into this new, albeit temporary, life. Her hand swept the wall inside the door until she felt the switch. There, that was better. Home. She opened a bottle of wine, rummaged in her welcome basket, came up with a packet of oatcakes—a dense sort of cracker—and paired them with the Scottish cheddar stashed in the fridge. She would take a walk at lunch tomorrow to get her bearings and find the nearest shops.

Pru pulled out her phone and rang Christopher. Nightly conversations, their old routine, were no substitute for being together—they enjoyed each other’s company too much. When he answered with “Hello, my darling,” she sighed and closed her eyes.

They fell back into “What did you do today?” inquiries, but Christopher kept either quiet or offered vague responses about work—police secrets. Pru filled in with tales of her first day, giving only a brief account of Iain, and concentrating on more pleasant topics.

“Madame Fiona wanted to know if you were a farmer,” Pru said, barely able to get the words out for laughing.

“Hang on, now,” he protested, but he was laughing, too.

That led them to exchanging innuendos that morphed into a fantasy about Pru lost in the countryside in the pouring rain, and finding her way into Farmer Christopher’s barn, where he discovered her stripping off her wet garments, after which he dropped his suspenders. “Braces,” he said, “we call them braces here.”

Her first two weeks on the job, Pru saw nothing of Alastair, more than enough of Iain, and a great deal of Murdo.

Once, she came out from arguing with Blackwell—every conversation ended with cold comments on his side and heated words on hers—and Murdo hovered near the door, his arms full of stacked black nursery pots. He was quick with a smile and a nod as he strolled off—“Must get these sorted, Pru. I’m tidying up the shed today.”

Pru knew when he was around or had been around without seeing him. Murdo carried about him a strong smell of Fairy washing-up liquid—Britain’s favorite dish detergent—that lingered in the air. Pru suspected Murdo to be a single man, and that perhaps Fairy liquid was his product of choice for all manner of washing up.

If only her encounters with Iain were as innocuous; she’d chalked up three arguments with him by the first Friday, surely some sort of workplace record. On Wednesday, she had steeled herself and knocked on his door, which stood halfway open.

“Yes?”

She poked her head in. “Iain, sorry to bother you, but I wanted to know if you’d like to look over the plant list I’ve made from the journal so far—it isn’t complete, but perhaps…you may want to check them.”

“Confused already?” he asked, his wavy mouth set to smirk.

She swallowed a biting retort. “No, I’m not confused. It’s going well so far. I thought you might want an update. That’s all.”

He held out his hand and snapped his fingers. “Give them here.”

She arched an eyebrow at this command, but handed him the paper.

His eyes scanned the list. She saw them catch toward the bottom, then continue before he let go of the paper, so that it floated down to the desk. “Yes, fine. Anything else?”

She snatched the paper back. The corner caught on a stack of books and tore off; her face reddened. “Alastair asked me to keep you apprised of my work,” she said, short and clipped. “I hope you won’t be too bothered by that.”

“If you must.” He picked up the phone and hit a few buttons and then, as if an afterthought, said, “I’d like to see the text involved around each of those plants—Menzies’s descriptions, location of the find. That should give you something to do.”

Her hand gripped the door handle. She sniffed and turned to go, but her huff was lost on him as he’d turned his back on her to face the computer screen. “Joan,” he said to the phone, “how many do we have booked for the certificate course?”

A day later, they were at it again.

She stood in his office as he threw down another challenge, “Can’t you see the problem? Haven’t you read through the journal enough times?” Pru walked out in a huff, but Iain had followed on her heels. He brushed past Murdo, who hovered over an empty bed as if keeping vigil with his shovel.

Pru stopped just outside the door to the main building, her face red with frustration. “I don’t have to put up with this treatment,” she said.

“Certainly not,” Iain replied, “why work when you can buy a reputation?”

“How dare you!” she whispered fiercely, as two men in suits passed them and disappeared into the administration building. “I was asked to take this post—don’t you believe that anyone besides yourself could have the skills to work on the project?”

Iain didn’t answer, but turned and walked straight into Murdo. “What are you doing here?” Iain asked, brushing off his lapels.

He was a head shorter than Iain, but Murdo didn’t flinch. “Just getting ready to plant a few things. Everything all right, Pru?” he asked without taking his eyes off Iain, who tugged on the cuff of his sleeve and walked back into the building.

“Yes, Murdo, thanks,” Pru said quietly.

Pru took a breath, let it out slowly, and walked past him, but paused and looked back just in time to see Murdo take out his little black notebook. Over his shoulder, she caught a glimpse of pages filled with numbers and writing. Dog racing? “Murdo, how long have you worked at the garden?”

Murdo snapped the book shut, slipped it back into his breast pocket, and paused. “How long,” he echoed, “have I worked at the garden?”

“Yes, how long have you been here?”

“A couple of months, I’d say. Of course, before that I worked on an estate north of here. Do you know Scotland well, Pru?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Weel, I worked for many years at a large castle garden. At one time, I oversaw”—his eyes bounced from building to tree to bench—“whole sections of the landscape.”

“Why did you leave there?” Pru asked.

Murdo seemed to contemplate this for a moment. “Edinburgh, Pru—it was my dream.”

Instead of returning to her office, Pru headed for the Temperate Palm House. From almost her first day, it had become a favorite spot for an indoor break. Sitting on a bench off in a corner and surrounded by plants, she could watch visitors come and go. The greenhouse embodied Victorian elegance—the wrought-iron supports were painted white and rose like the bones of a dinosaur to an elegantly curved ceiling, seventy feet high at its center. The tops of a couple of palms brushed against its ceiling. About fifty feet up around the inner rim of the structure ran a metal catwalk, dotted with enormous old terra-cotta pots. The air smelled earthy and Pru detected the scent of lemon blossom, but it was cool, not warm and wet—that would be the Tropical Palm House through the far door. Pru stayed on the temperate side—not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry. Pru was Goldilocks and the Temperate Palm House her bowl of porridge, just right. Until that day.

“Ms. Parke?”

Her partial disguise behind a large Chinese palm hadn’t worked—Iain had sussed her out. He ducked under a frond and sat beside her, slightly loosening his tie and leaning forward, resting his elbows on his thighs.

“Have you come across a fuchsia?” he asked.

“I may have,” said Pru with caution. She had read about a fuchsia, but couldn’t recall the details, and although Iain’s voice was easy and his manner confidential, as if he shared a secret with her, Pru kept alert for the moment when his words would turn sharp. No sense in putting herself in the line of fire for an insult. And yet, she couldn’t keep from adding—“It’s not the Chilean species, though, is it?”

Iain raised his eyebrows at her—as close, she thought, as she would get to a compliment. “You’re right, not that one. Take another look and see what you think.”

“You wouldn’t want to remind me what page it’s on?” Pru asked, but the joke fell flat.

“From all accounts, Ms. Parke, you are perfectly capable of reading the pages of this journal yourself, and I see…”

He broke off and cocked his head as if listening. Pru heard a scraping sound overhead and looked up. In one frozen moment Pru saw the huge terra-cotta pot above them teetering over the edge of the catwalk. And then it fell.

Pru and Iain sprang apart, and Pru collided with the Chinese palm as she jumped out of the way. The pot crashed onto the bench where they had been sitting two seconds ago. The bench collapsed under the weight, cracking wood, bending metal, and shattering terra-cotta.

The quiet in the next moment reverberated off the glass and metal walls. Pru’s heart pounded in her ears. Iain stood on the far side, and they both stared at the destruction. The pot had broken open, exposing dark soil and the white netted roots of the lemon tree. The tree itself sat askew, and as Pru took a slow, ragged breath to stop her shaking, a lemon dropped off a branch and bounced onto the floor.

“Ms. Parke?”

“Yes,” she managed to say. “I’m all right. You?”

“Fine,” Iain said, but she could see blood on the back of his hand. He noticed, too, and took his handkerchief and blotted it. “A piece of the clay,” he explained as his eyes scanned the catwalk. Pru peered at it, too—it appeared to be vibrating. “Did you see anyone?” Iain asked.

“What? A person?”

He didn’t reply but went for the metal stairs that hugged the side of the glasshouse and led to the catwalk. He leapt over the chain with the “Do Not Enter” sign and took the steps two at a time. Pru followed him to the bottom step and stopped.

“Come up here,” Iain said.

“Why?”

“Don’t you want to know what happened?” he asked, returning to his cold ways and looking down at her like a vulture.

I’m afraid of heights
, she said, but not aloud. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction—and she did want to see. She could do this—she took a deep breath, unhooked the barrier chain, and with both hands holding the right-hand rail, she began to climb.

With each step, she felt the blood drain from her head. She broke out in a cold sweat as out of the corner of her eye she saw the ground below her—growing ever so distant—tilt and sway, as if she were on the deck of a ship on a rolling sea. The queasiness in her stomach threatened to overwhelm her, but she knew the very act of throwing up would send her toppling over the side and she would crash into pieces just as the terra-cotta pot had.

“Ms. Parke? Pru? Are you in shock?”

Was that Iain who spoke? She couldn’t move—her feet were glued to a step and her hands squeezed the rail so hard they’d turned white.

“I need…some help,” she whispered.

Iain came down to her. “Let’s go back down,” he said quietly. “Shall I lead the way?”

Somehow he loosened her hands from the rail. She transferred her death grip to his forearms as he turned her round and led her, backing down the stairs one step at a time. Pru didn’t let go until they stood on solid ground.

“I’m sorry,” she said, with no energy to go farther. “Thank you.”

“Sit here,” Iain said, leading her to an ornate bench in the middle of the glasshouse. She sank down as Iain spoke with a worker who had heard the crash from the next glasshouse. The two of them ran up the steps to peer closely at the spot where the pot had sat. Pru couldn’t look up at them, but when they returned to ground level, she met Iain as the Palm house worker retrieved a bin and a large broom and began sweeping up shards of terra-cotta and clumps of soil.

“How did it fall?” she asked. “Do you know?”

“Someone was working up there last week and moved some of the pots round,” Iain said. “Not all got moved back again, apparently.” Iain glanced at the catwalk. “Why don’t you go on, Ms. Parke. I’ll need to see the glasshouse manager about this.”

Pru left, recovered enough to feel a pang of sympathy for the person to blame for the accident—especially if Iain dealt with him. On the path, she met Murdo who carried a four-foot section of a tree limb about five inches in diameter, broken and jagged at either end.

“What have you got there?” she asked.

Murdo admired the branch. “Dunno, Pru. Could be a shelf—one of those long, skinny ones with leaves carved along the edge. Or candlesticks made to look like vines. I need to study it awhile before I know.”

“Oh, right,” she said, taking a closer look. “What sort of wood is it?”

“Whitebeam. Came down in the wind last night.”

A man came out of the glasshouse pushing a cart with the lemon tree, now potless. “What happened there?” Murdo asked.

Pru told him. “Someone had been working on the catwalk inside and hadn’t put it back to rights. The pot fell—Iain and I were right there. It was an accident.”

Murdo’s face grew red. “What were you doing in there with Blackwell?”

For a moment, surprised at his indignation, Pru wondered the same thing. “It’s my project, Murdo,” she said, shaking her head. “There’s no escape from it.”