The Garden Plot (23 page)

That’s not right,
thought Pru.
Malcolm did know Jeremy.
“Mrs. Crisp, are you sure that he hadn’t met Mr. Pendergast?”

“Malcolm would not lie to his mother, Pru.”

Then Pru heard a key in the front door followed by Malcolm’s voice. “Mother? Mr. Davies had white peaches in again, but no artichokes at all …” His voice trailed off as he reached the door of the front room, his shopping bag in hand. “Pru?”

“Hello, Malcolm,” Pru said with a smile. “Your mother and I were just having coffee.”

“Malcolm,” Mrs. Crisp said, “do put those things down in the kitchen, and come out and join us.”

“Yes, Mother.” Malcolm turned toward the kitchen.

“But you’d better take the peaches out of the bag and set them on the table, so they don’t get bruised, and don’t forget to put the shopping bag away instead of leaving it out on a chair.” Mrs. Crisp’s voice remained as sweet as when she spoke to Pru.

“Yes, Mother.”

“Malcolm, you left the light on in the front hall again last night.”

“I don’t think I left it on, Mother …”

“And, Malcolm, the jar of coffee was so far back on the counter, I could barely reach it.” Pru looked at the floor. The jar of coffee had been near the edge of the counter, and Mrs. Crisp had had no trouble reaching it.

So that’s how it is,
she thought. Now her feelings toward him softened, at least slightly. Poor henpecked Malcolm. Pru thought perhaps the close quarters—both mother
and son living in the same house with nothing to occupy their time—had set them on each other. They played off each other’s weaknesses: Mrs. Crisp’s physical limitations and Malcolm’s stunted self-confidence.

When Malcolm returned, Pru said, “I’d love to see your roses, Malcolm. Is that all right with you, Mrs. Crisp?”

“Yes, of course, go right ahead,” Mrs. Crisp said in a gracious tone. “Malcolm, do be careful with the latch on the back door. Close it properly so that it doesn’t blow open, as it did yesterday.”

Malcolm led the way into the garden, regaining a bit of his usual cockiness as he told her the story of how he planted his roses. “I’m sorry so few are in bloom now,” he said.

“Oh, but I can tell it would be glorious in late June,” Pru said. “I had no idea all the climbers you had.” The walls were lined with neatly trained, extremely thorny stems, all pegged horizontally along the brick.

The subject of climbing roses seemed to make Malcolm uncomfortable. He changed course from walking toward the wall to walking toward the oval island bed that took up most of the center of the garden. “Now here are a few English roses still going,” he said. “Here’s Lady Emma Hamilton.”

She stuck her nose into an apricot-colored, bowl-shaped rose stuffed with petals. “That’s wonderful. What do you use for fertilizer?”

“I use manure every year. I wouldn’t put any chemicals on my roses.” Malcolm caressed the foliage of the shrub nearest him. “They’re too precious.”

“Just look how they respond to you,” Pru said sincerely, admiring another late flower, this one an antique pink. “Is this Heritage?” she asked, and he nodded approvingly. “You do a good job of pruning to keep the air circulating.”

He looked uneasy again and glanced about the garden. “I’ve installed a few water butts to collect rain from the roof, but I had to put them under the windows, where they wouldn’t bother Mother. I was caught out by a hosepipe ban one year, and it was devastating.”

The conversation lagged, and Pru wondered how she could resurrect the subject of the Wilsons and Alf. She decided there was no easy way and opted for the direct route.

“Malcolm,” she said, “Mrs. Wilson mentioned that you’ve become friends with her brother, Alf.”

His eyes darted to Pru. “Well, you might say we’re acquaintances.”

“Did Alf tell you that Mr. Wilson was the one who killed Jeremy?”

“Pru,” said Malcolm, once again taking on his instructional tone, “it isn’t fair that
you believe everything Harry and Vernona tell you. There’s another side to the story, you know, and you may not want to get mixed up in all this. It could get dangerous.”

It’s a little late for that warning,
she thought. “I got the impression that your mother thinks you don’t see Alf any longer. Didn’t she see him when he was here last week?”

“She was at her doctor’s appointment last week. And Mother can’t dictate who my friends are,” Malcolm said with his chest puffed out, but then he glanced behind him to the kitchen window and lowered his voice. “I mean, I may just run into Alf occasionally when he’s in town, that’s all.”

“Malcolm, did you actually see someone in the Wilsons’ garden the morning of the murder?”

His eyes darted around, and he stuck his hands in his pockets. He took a breath, let it out, and took another breath. “Well, I might not have actually seen someone in the garden, Pru, but I think we all know who was there.”

“Do we really?” she asked.

She had casually strolled the rest of the way down to the bottom wall as they talked.

“Oh, Malcolm, look,” she said, as if taken by surprise at the sight of the wrought-iron rungs in the wall. “This must be how you can talk to me while I’m in the Wilsons’ garden.” She put a hand on one of the metal rungs and her foot on the bottom.

“Well, those have been there for ages,” he said defensively. “I didn’t put them in.”

Pru pulled herself up, stepped on the second rung, and looked back at Malcolm. “This is quite handy, isn’t it? Why, from up here you could see all sorts of things.” She popped her head over the wall and looked straight at Christopher, standing just on the other side in the Wilsons’ garden.

“Hi.” She smiled at him.

“Hello.” He smiled back.

“Pru,” said Malcolm, “who is it?”

She looked down. “It’s DCI Pearse, Malcolm.”

“Oh.” Malcolm looked as if he’d lost a new toy.

Pru looked back at Christopher, who was, she was thankful to see, still smiling. “Malcolm was just showing me the roses.”

“Was he?”

“And I had coffee with his mother.”

“Did you?”

Pru knew she needed to face up to it. “I’ll just climb down and come around there, shall I?”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes locked on hers, “why don’t you. Unless you’d like to leap over the wall?”

“I would,” she said, “but I’m afraid you wouldn’t catch me.” A ghost of a smile remained around his mouth.

Pru said her thank-yous and goodbyes and walked back around the two corners. Christopher stood outside the Wilsons’ talking on his phone. As she got near, he finished his conversation, and for a moment, neither of them spoke.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine, really. I had a good night’s sleep at Jo’s. Her little sofa is quite comfortable, although I either have to hang my feet off or fold myself up.”

“Pru …” he started.

“Is Mrs. Wilson at home?” she asked.

“She’s on the phone, coordinating judges for a WI stitchery competition,” he said.

“Why are you here?” Pru asked, thinking to stall his inevitable question about why she was snooping at Malcolm’s.

“I was following up on the list of society members—we’ve talked with each of them. And then, I asked if I could walk down to the bottom of the garden, because I had seen a hole at the base of the wall leading next door. I believe that’s how the hedgehogs get in and out.”

“Oh, the hedgehogs, I’d forgotten about them,” she said.

“That’s when I heard you in Malcolm’s garden. Pru—”

She cut him off again. “Have you eaten lunch? We could get sandwiches and go back to my house. And talk.”

He considered that for a moment. “Yes, let’s do that,” he said. “I’ve my car. Where shall we stop?”

“I’ll phone the Cat—that’s my local—and Wilf can make something up for us and have it ready to collect.” They got in the car and she got out her phone. “What would you like?”

Pru phoned Wilf and ordered Christopher’s beef-and-cheddar and a chicken-and-brie for herself, paid for on her account. She watched Christopher drive, smiling to herself. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, and when he shifted gears, he placed his hand on her knee and gave it a squeeze.

“Christopher—”

This time, he cut her off. “I planned on stopping to see you this afternoon. To find out how you were doing.”

“Thanks again for my rescue.” She made it sound lighthearted only because she didn’t want to conjure up the memory of clinging to the side of a building fifty feet up in the air. He reached over and covered her hand; she put her other hand on top of his and rubbed it lightly.

“Why don’t you drop me off at the pub?” she suggested. “It’s just before you get to the square. I’ll meet you at the house. You’ll probably take at least that long to find a spot to park.”

At the house, Christopher took off his coat in the front sitting room while Pru made tea. They sat in the kitchen to eat, avoiding the issues at hand. “It’s a nice house,” he said, “but seems sparse.”

“I’m the sparse one,” said Pru. “The people who live here stored most of their things in the basement and locked the door. I brought over only a couple of suitcases. Easier to pack up,” she finished, almost to herself.

He didn’t speak, and she didn’t look at him. Finally he said, “Are you packing up?”

She had trouble forming the words, facing up to approaching defeat. “Well, it doesn’t look good. My year’s almost up, and although I can’t find a job here, there’s one waiting for me in Dallas. That isn’t where I want to be, but my plan failed, obviously, and I have to face the consequences.” Even as she spoke, she knew how it sounded: it was her
way or the highway.

She felt him watching her as she stared down into her mug.

She took a deep breath. “So, you want to know why I was at Malcolm’s house today,” she said.

She heard him take a breath. “Yes, I’m quite keen on hearing about that.”

Pru recounted the morning. Christopher didn’t believe that threatening someone with a trowel meant Malcolm bludgeoned Jeremy with a spade.

She added her own interpretation. “He’s socially inept. He doesn’t know how to make friends, and he’s jealous of the friendship that Mr. Wilson and Jeremy had. And he has an overbearing mother.”

“This isn’t evidence, is it?” Christopher asked.

“No,” Pru admitted, remembering she had said much the same thing to Malcolm. “But it explains why he doesn’t like Mr. Wilson—he’s just a little kid with no social skills.”

“I wanted to ask you about something Malcolm told me,” Christopher said. “I showed him one of your photos, from the flash drive that shows him on his steps. I asked what he was doing.” He started searching his pockets.

“Are you looking for your glasses?” she asked. “I’ve got a pair.”

“No,” he said, “not this time. I was going to bring that flash drive with me, but I seem to have left it.”

“I downloaded all the photos on my laptop—we can look there.” They walked into the sitting room, and Pru booted up the computer. As they waited, she remembered Malcolm watching her put her phone into her pocket at the bus stop on the day of the murder. She said, “I believe Malcolm thinks I have a photo of something important. Did you find anything?”

“Not yet, but one photo looked as if he were talking with someone on the basement steps. We can just barely see the top of a person’s head when we zoom in. When I asked Malcolm about it, he said the photo showed him with a fellow who was going to help him prune the climbing roses. And then he asked if I please wouldn’t mention it to you, because he felt embarrassed that he hadn’t hired you to do it.”

“Prune his climbing roses? That’s not right,” Pru said.

“Why not?”

“Well, you don’t prune roses now, it’s too early in autumn—late autumn or winter is best. Malcolm knows better than that. It promotes new growth that could be killed in a cold snap.” She remembered how uneasy Malcolm became during the tour of his roses every time the topic of pruning came up. “Do you think it was Alf in the photo?”

“It’s possible. The Wilsons didn’t have a recent photo, and I haven’t shown them this one yet. Not that they could tell much.”

When the computer was up and running, Pru opened her photo library and looked for the folder that she had labeled “WilsonGarden,” but it wasn’t in the program. She searched the entire hard drive and still turned up nothing.

“That’s strange—I can’t find them.” And then she saw again, quite clearly, getting back from the country Monday, the footprint on the post, and the lid of her laptop open. Here’s something she forgot to tell Christopher. She felt him standing behind her chair, and so she got up and walked to the sofa, unconsciously taking the clip from her hair, running her hand through, and reclipping. “You’d better come sit down.”

His face was indiscernible, but she could well imagine what he was thinking. She held out her hand to him like a stop sign. “I didn’t think there was anything to tell, and I still don’t, but I will tell you this, anyway.”
Probably not the best way to begin,
she thought.

“When Jo dropped me off Monday afternoon, and I came inside, I almost felt as if someone had been here. But,” she hurried on, “no one could’ve been here—there was no break-in, everything was shut tight, no broken windows or busted locks, nothing missing—I would’ve phoned you about that. The lid on the laptop was up, and I thought I’d closed it.—But the computer was shut down, and I know I’ve forgotten to close the lid before. Also it looked as if there were part of a footprint.” Christopher still hadn’t said anything, and that made her a little nervous. “It was on the post on the floor in the front hall. One footprint,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “It had to be from the postman.”

He spoke in his police-officer tone of voice. “There are people who can break in without it looking like a break-in. Do you have anything left of that post?”

With a sinking feeling, she realized she had destroyed more evidence.
Good work, Pru.
“There was a check—Sarah Richards finally paid me for stringing lights around her terrace—and I took it to the bank. I think I threw the envelope in the bin there.” Why had she been so thoughtless? “It may still be in the recycling here.—Let me look.”