Dead Heading (4 page)

Marilyn Potts surveyed a greenhouse that had once been full of thriving young orchids and now was nothing more than a home for the blackened stubs of dead plants fit only for the compost heap.

‘All my chicks and the dam,’ she moaned. ‘Ruined. Every last one of them. Now I know how that Scottish chap felt. In
Macbeth
.’

‘Macduff,’ supplied the friend standing beside her.

‘Anna,’ Marilyn pleaded, turning in her direction, ‘tell me it wasn’t you who left the door open. Please.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ snapped Anna Sutherland. ‘Of course it wasn’t. Besides, if it had been me who’d forgotten to shut the door I would have told you. You should know me well enough by now to know that.’

Marilyn jerked her head in tacit acknowledgement of this. Anna was invariably nothing if not forthright.
‘Then who did?’ she demanded. ‘It certainly wasn’t me.’

‘I don’t know. How could I?’

‘There’s only the two of us here,’ Marilyn said tonelessly.

‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ responded Anna Sutherland tersely. The nursery at Capstan Purlieu Plants was run by the two hard-working women and nobody else.

Marilyn made her way slowly up the greenhouse, looking to the right and left, and shaking her head in disbelief. ‘Beyond aid – every last one.’ She turned, her face stricken, and said ‘And the dam – all the stock plants too.’

‘Our seed corn, you might say,’ agreed Anna bleakly.

‘And I’m supposed to be speaking to the Staple St James Horticultural Society on orchids tomorrow evening, remember? Standing in for Enid,’ wailed Marilyn Potts. ‘How can I possibly do that now? Just talking about orchids will upset me.’

Anna Sutherland was bracing. ‘Of course you can. Besides, they’ve already put a notice in this week’s Berebury Gazette saying that old Enid’s been delayed on her travels and that you’re giving the talk instead. Take some slides or something – they oughtn’t to mind too much. After all, you’re doing them a favour and at short notice into the bargain.’

Marilyn shook her head. ‘No, I needn’t do that. Their secretary’s quite sure Enid will have ordered some orchids for the evening and she’s ringing round to find out where. Enid just hasn’t come back from one of her famous trips.’

‘It’s all very well for some,’ remarked Anna. ‘I wish I could go abroad at the drop of a hat like she does.’

‘She is retired now,’ murmured her friend absently, still regarding her plants with a doleful face. She stroked one now as if the touch of a human hand could restore it to life. ‘I guess old Doctor Heddon left her something when he died.’

‘Where was it this time?’ asked Anna as much to divert her friend as anything.

‘The next-door neighbour wasn’t sure – she couldn’t decide from her note whether it was Carmarthen or Carinthia.’

‘I thought it was only doctors who couldn’t write clearly,’ remarked Anna acidly, ‘not their receptionists.’

Marilyn wasn’t listening. ‘I don’t think that there’s a single orchid left alive in the whole greenhouse.’

‘Then I’ll turn the heating and the humidifier off,’ murmured Anna, pointing to equipment that were meant to keep the temperature of the greenhouse high and its atmosphere moist.

‘You’re always so practical,’ complained Marilyn. ‘Have you no soul?’

‘You can see yourself that they’re all dead,’ said Anna, pointing to the plants on the staging. ‘And not even you, Marilyn, can bring the dead back to life.’

‘I know that,’ said Marilyn with dignity, ‘but don’t you have any feelings?’

‘Heating costs money,’ retorted Anna, ‘and from the looks of things we’re going to need every penny we’ve got to get going again.’

‘Get going again?’ Marilyn stared at her. ‘You must be mad. We can’t catch up this year even if we started again now.’

‘And if we don’t get going again this year,’ pointed out her friend, ‘we’ve still got to live, haven’t we?’

‘I don’t know that I want to,’ said Marilyn, picking up a pot and staring moodily at the collapsed plant lying on the potting mixture.

‘A few dead plants are not a good reason to give up living,’ said her friend.

‘A few dead plants?’ shrieked Marilyn. ‘How can you say that when every last one of this year’s orchids that we’ve slaved over since they were potted is done for?’

‘Some you win, some you lose, in this line. We’ve always known that,’ said Anna calmly, ‘and I must say it looks as if we’ve lost this time.’

‘A greenhouse full of dead plants is a very good reason to give up trying to make a living from horticulture,’ sighed Marilyn. She raised her head suddenly, turning an unhappy face in Anna Sutherland’s direction as another thought struck her. ‘You don’t think, Anna, that someone somewhere is trying to tell us something, do you?’

Anna paused, her hand suspended over the heating switches. ‘A business rival, you mean?’ she said cautiously.

Marilyn shook her head. ‘No, not one of them.’

‘Well, Bob Steele is trying to get started with orchids and Jack Haines over at Pelling reckons to sell three times as many young orchids as we do even though his aren’t half as good as ours,’ said Anna.

‘We can’t be any threat to him, surely,’ said Marilyn. ‘He’s big business by our standards.’

Anna shrugged her shoulders. ‘Who knows how his mind works?’ 

‘He mostly only goes in for the commercial market,’ Marilyn said. ‘And most of his domestic customers don’t know what they’re doing in the first place. They kill them quickly and then come back for more.’ She grimaced. ‘That’s business. His sort of business, of course, not ours.’

Anna frowned. ‘Anyway he sells so many other plants that I shouldn’t have thought our orchids were any threat to his business. His catalogue is crammed full of all sorts of plants besides orchids.’

‘What you mean is that he’s not a specialist like we are.’ Capstan Purlieu Plants concentrated on a few choice items for really knowledgeable gardeners. Actually they liked to think of their customers as plantsmen and plantswomen or even enthusiasts rather than mere gardeners.

‘I mean that he’s more of a knowing “nothing about everything” man while we’re knowing “everything about nothing” women,’ said Anna Sutherland eloquently. ‘So who else wouldn’t want us to succeed then?’ she asked.

A little silence fell between the two women and it took a moment or two for Marilyn Potts to put a worry into words. ‘Norman?’

‘He wouldn’t surely,’ said her friend expressionlessly.

Norman Potts was – had been once, anyway – Marilyn’s husband and their divorce had been notably spectacular in its acrimony.

‘He would,’ declared Norman’s former wife vehemently. ‘You don’t know the half of what he would do.’

‘And I don’t want to,’ said Anna Sutherland crisply. ‘I’m your business partner, remember? Not your therapist.’

‘If it was him,’ hissed Marilyn, ‘he’s going to regret 
it when the police get to him, let alone my solicitors.’

‘Besides,’ went on Anna, ‘I’m a spinster, remember? As far as I’m concerned the secrets of the bedroom are meant to be secret. And stay that way,’ she added for good measure. ‘I don’t need to know what else he could get up to.’

‘You’re a good friend, Anna, that’s what, and I shall never forget that.’

‘Talking of the police,’ remarked Anna, lifting her head, ‘they’re arriving now. Look, they’re at the gate.’

‘Where did you say Capstan Purlieu Plants were, sir?’ Detective Constable Crosby had asked Sloan while they were on their way.

‘Keep going,’ commanded Sloan tersely, his eyes glued to a large scale map of East Calleshire. He couldn’t see the police car’s sat-nav from the passenger seat and wasn’t sure if Crosby bothered to listen to it. ‘In about half a mile you should come to a little bridge over a stream and then you follow the right-hand lane until you get to the nursery.’

‘Only if we don’t meet anything coming the other way,’ muttered Crosby. Single-track roads seriously cramped his driving style. ‘I don’t know how their customers ever find them.’

Lurking somewhere at the back of Sloan’s mind was a saying that if you built a better mousetrap the world would beat a path to your door. Instead he pointed out that if someone had damaged the greenhouse at Capstan Purlieu then they at least had found their way there to do it. ‘In the dark, too, probably,’ he said.

‘No one out here to see you in daylight,’ countered Crosby, ‘except sheep.’

‘Where there’s sheep there’s a shepherd,’ said Sloan, less bothered by the high hedges and narrow lanes of deepest Calleshire than the constable. ‘Ah, I see a sign.’

A hand-painted wooden board rested on the road verge propped up against a tree. There was an arrow pointing ahead and the words ‘Capstan Purlieu Plants’ painted beside it in freehand. As the police car drew up in front of the nursery two women emerged from a cottage nearby to greet them. Crosby muttered ‘Dr Livingstone and Mr Stanley, I presume,’ but under his breath.

‘Anna Sutherland,’ said a tall, rather gaunt figure with her hair severely scraped back into a bun.

‘Marilyn Potts,’ said a shorter, plumper woman, standing slightly behind her, curly hair flopping about just above her shoulders. Both were dressed in workman-like trousers and grubby shirts.

‘I hear you’ve had some trouble out here, ladies,’ began Sloan formally.

‘If by trouble you mean that we’ve lost half our livelihood for the foreseeable future,’ said Anna Sutherland tautly, ‘then yes, we’ve had trouble.’

‘That’s one way of describing the loss of a greenhouse full of valuable orchids,’ supplemented Marilyn Potts, tears beginning to well up in her eyes.

‘Trouble in spades then,’ muttered Crosby, pleased with the gardening metaphor.

‘Trouble with damage to some plants, I believe,’ soldiered on Sloan, ignoring him.

‘Trouble with all the young orchids growing in our
greenhouse,’ said Marilyn Potts more precisely. She led the way to their greenhouse and pointed. ‘As you can see for yourselves, every single one of them is dead.’

‘Big trouble,’ concluded Crosby, surveying the scene.

‘Someone opened the greenhouse door last night …’ began Marilyn.

‘And left it open,’ said Anna Sutherland.

‘And then the frost got at them.’ The tears in Marilyn Potts’ eyes looked perilously near to streaming out as she fondled the remains of what had once been a living plant. She sniffed and the tears receded a little.

‘Some person or persons unknown,’ contributed Anna Sutherland, echoing, had she known it, Sloan’s earlier sentiment. ‘In other words, Inspector,’ she said with emphasis, ‘not either of us.’

‘Definitely not either of us,’ said Marilyn Potts, still sniffing. ‘We would never have done a thing like that. Not in a hundred years.’

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, although experienced policeman that he was, he was not sure of anything at this stage. It was too early to say. He scanned the greenhouse. ‘Do you happen to have a thermostat in here to warn you of frost?’

‘Too expensive,’ said Anna Sutherland.

Marilyn Potts waved a hand towards the land at the side of their cottage. ‘The hardy plants out there are all right. I’ve checked that nothing’s happened to them.’

‘Yet,’ said her friend mordantly.

Detective Inspector Sloan took out his notebook and got down to business: police business. ‘Can you quantify your loss?’

‘A year’s work,’ said Marilyn Potts tremulously.

‘That’s if you don’t count anything we may have to pay out to get going again,’ said Anna Sutherland. ‘Such as restocking.’

‘Tell me,’ said Sloan, ‘do either of you have any thoughts on who might have left your greenhouse door open?’

‘Caused criminal damage you mean,’ said Anna Sutherland trenchantly.

‘The perpetrator,’ suggested Detective Crosby helpfully. It was word that had cropped up in his training that he didn’t often have a chance to use.

There was an awkward little silence which Sloan, experienced policeman that he was, did nothing to break. After a moment or two Marilyn Potts said with almost palpable reluctance, ‘It might just have been Norman.’

‘Norman?’ he said.

‘My husband – my former husband – that is. Norman Potts.’ She gave another little sniff and said, ‘We parted brass rags.’

‘Big time,’ contributed Anna Sutherland.

‘He wasn’t happy about splitting the money after the divorce, you see,’ explained Norman’s former wife. ‘He thought he should have had more of the final settlement than he did.’

Anna Sutherland gave a little snort. ‘Wanted to reduce Marilyn to total penury, I expect.’

This, Detective Inspector Sloan, happily married man, knew all too well was quite often the main object of some ex-husbands and often more important to them than securing funds for themselves. He had no doubt that a forensic psychiatrist could explain this – but then,
as anyone who had ever sat in a court of law could tell you – forensic psychiatrists could always explain everything.

‘So that I would come crawling back, I suppose,’ said Marilyn Potts. She gave a defiant shake of her head. ‘But I’m not going to do that even if I starve.’

‘Where does he live?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby militantly.

‘He used to live in Almstone when we were together but where he is now, I couldn’t say for sure,’ said Marilyn distantly. ‘I don’t know exactly where but I had heard it was over in Berebury near to a pub called The Railway Tavern.’

‘That figures,’ murmured Anna Sutherland enigmatically, turning to shift a large crate of plants to one side. She lifted this with great ease.

Detective Inspector Sloan made a note and asked, ‘Would he have known Jack Haines’ nursery over at Pelling by any chance?’

‘I’ll say, Inspector, very well indeed,’ she said without hesitation. ‘In fact, I know Norman went there when he was first trying to find me. I guess he thought I might be back there working for Jack at the time because he knew I was fond of orchids and Jack grows them too.’

‘At least Jack Haines had the grace to warn her that Norman had been over to him at Pelling to ask him if he knew where Marilyn was,’ interposed Anna Sutherland, hefting another crate and putting it on the staging. ‘That was something.’