The Garden Plot Read online

  On their way to 72 Grovehill Square—Pru tried to give Pearse her address, but he said, “Yes, I remember where you live”—she began to speak in a casual way about the Wilsons.

  “Mr. Wilson’s archaeology group has a university sponsor, you know,” she said. “It’s an educational endeavor, really. They do it because they love learning.” She glanced out of the corner of her eye at Pearse, who made no comment. “You probably saw all the awards and commendations he’s received, from people and places thanking him for what he’s done.”

  “Ms. Parke,” Pearse said, “did you accept a lift from me just to give a testimonial on Harry Wilson’s behalf?”

  Pru didn’t answer, and they were quiet for the last few minutes of the journey. Pearse pulled up in front of her house, stopped, and turned to her. “We are not in the habit of arresting and prosecuting innocent people,” he said. “Harry Wilson is part of this investigation, and so questions must be asked.”

  “I don’t believe that Mr. Wilson murdered Jeremy Pendergast.”

  “Yes, I understand that. I hope you understand that I must do my job.” Pru reached for the door handle. “Ms. Parke, please take care.”

  He took her by surprise with a kind and gentle admonition instead of an officious warning. She flashed him a smile. “I will.”

  Pru arrived before Sammy the next morning. She picked up the spade she’d left just inside the basement door and took it with her to the bottom of the garden, where the sun already had warmed the brick wall. She sat down with her back against the wall, surveying the view that the Wilsons would have from this end of their new garden. She closed her eyes, enjoying the sun on her face. Perhaps she did miss the Texas sunshine just a bit, but not the summer heat. With less intense sun exposure, her hair had turned from blond to its original medium brown, and she was surprised to find that now she could clearly see a dash of silvery gray at each temple.

  She opened her eyes again and looked at the blue-and-white tape surrounding the shed. The forensics team had attached the tape to the brick wall, so that the small space—about two feet wide—between the shed and the wall shared with Malcolm’s garden was marked as off-limits. Still, Pru reasoned, that couldn’t really be part of the murder scene. She thought that if she put the spade in the ground behind the shed, it wouldn’t be noticed.

  She would have to deal with the wet soil if she made a garden for the Wilsons, so perhaps she should investigate … the soil. Perhaps she would find out just how far the mosaic extended, but that would be secondary, she told herself, to researching the conditions for the new garden. With a cursory glance around, she ducked under the tape, and had just plunged the spade in the soil behind the shed when she heard voices.

  “Listen, Saxsby.” It was Malcolm’s voice quite close on the other side of the wall. “You can’t go over there now. It’s broad daylight.” Malcolm’s voice bounced as if he were hurrying along.

  “Calm down, Crisp,” said another man’s voice. “I won’t be caught breaking and entering, if that’s what you’re worried about. Look, I want this business finished up—my latest deal didn’t go through, and I’m a bit hard up right now.”

  “The house? What happened?” Malcolm asked.

  “Never you mind,” the man said. “Did you get in to look?”

  “No, no, there’s no way in now. We’ll just have to wait until the police are finished,” Malcolm said. “Although after that, Pru will probably start on the garden.”

  “Pru? Who is Pru?” Saxsby said.

  “She’s the American gardener Harry and Vernona hired. It’s all right. I can handle her—she won’t be a problem.”

  “What’s Vernona doing hiring a bloody American gardener? Didn’t Pendergast tell them to leave off the garden?”

  Alarmed that her name would come up in such a conversation—and annoyed to be called a “bloody American gardener”—Pru tried to breathe as quietly as possible so that they wouldn’t discover her eavesdropping.

  “I said I’d take care of it.”

  “Does she know something?” Saxsby asked. “Haven’t you told her she might be in danger herself around Harry?”

  “I’ve tried to warn her,” Malcolm said, “but she thinks he’s harmless.”

  “You just remember what I told you, Crisp,” said Saxsby. “He’s no harmless old git.” He paused for a moment, and Pru wondered if they’d left. Then Saxsby said, “Did she see what was there?”

  “She might have,” Malcolm replied. “But I’m taking care of it,” he said with emphasis.

  Pru had lost track of the spade in her hand as she listened in, and it slipped out of her loosened grip, hit against the wall, and landed with a plunk on the ground.

  She heard muffled exclamations and footsteps in the gravelly soil at the base of the wall. Malcolm must be heading to his brick-wall ladder. She grabbed the spade and looked for an escape. The shed was almost flush with the wall adjoining the next garden, and so she had to slip under the tape the way she came and then into the shed—using only her elbow to edge the door open. As she turned around to pull it closed with a finger on the edge of the door, she looked up to see Malcolm peering over the wall. Their eyes met, and she waited for him to call her out, but instead he turned back to Saxsby and said, “No, I don’t see anyone. Now, do you want to be out here when they come back? We’d better go.”

  Pru stuck her head out the door in time to hear the two voices retreating. She thought she heard Saxsby say, “Did you …” but she couldn’t catch the rest. After that, she heard a door close.

  “Pru?” Sammy asked as he came up from the Wilsons’ basement entrance. “You aren’t supposed to be in there, are you?” She had left the basement door open again and felt a little guilty about it. She hoped Pearse wouldn’t stop by and discover her misbehavior. “Who was that with the nosy parker?”

  She couldn’t quite figure out what had happened. Malcolm saw her—she was sure of that—but she didn’t know if he protected her by not revealing her presence or if he would tell Saxsby all about her eavesdropping when they were well and truly out of earshot. And she didn’t know if she would be in more or less danger either way.

  “Sammy, did you see Malcolm? Could you see the other fellow? What did he look like?” She stepped out of the shed quickly, but with a backward glance toward the mosaic, still partially uncovered, and the hole behind it, still open. The blood-soaked soil looked disturbed, as if a sample had been taken.

  “I saw them go up the steps to the door, but they didn’t go in. Then they went back down again. I suppose they went down the basement steps. Yeah, I caught a quick look at him … I don’t know—he looked sort of normal.” Sammy’s powers of observation were kept for estimating the size of a load he could get into the back of his truck. “Stringy black hair, thinning. Were you hiding from them?”

  “Well, I just didn’t want to be caught up in another discussion about roses,” Pru said. That was enough for Sammy, who had sat through one of those with Malcolm already. “Let’s mark off some beds.”

  As they measured, Sammy had to keep reminding her what they were doing. “Pru, we’ve done that side already, haven’t we?”

  “Sorry, Sammy, yes.” The questions in her mind pushed everything else out. Several times she found she’d stopped moving and stood thinking. How much more had Malcolm learned about the Roman mosaic, and how was Saxsby involved?

  Saxsby seemed to be pressuring Malcolm into thinking the worst of Mr. Wilson—Pru felt sure that explained the business about warning her. Pru thought Malcolm was full of himself if he thought he could “take care of her.” The conversation she had just overheard, along with her own feelings and opinions, were getting tossed around in her head like clothes in a dryer.

  Just after she and Sammy were finished with their work, she phoned Pearse.

  “Detective Chief Inspector Christopher Pearse, please leave a message,” said the recording. She believed this information needed to be delivered live, not on tape, so she d
idn’t leave any message and decided she’d phone again later. She considered looking into it herself in the meantime—maybe she could clarify a few things they’d said and so the evidence would be more helpful to the police.

  Her initial scare faded over the next couple of days in the rush to stuff four days of work into two, and although she kept meaning to phone Pearse again, she didn’t get round to it. Her mind shifted its focus to her interview at Primrose House on Thursday and spending the weekend in the Cotswolds with Jo and family, pushing aside the murder and its investigation.

  Chapter 5

  On Thursday, Pru took the train from Charing Cross station to Frant, the small rail station nearest Primrose House. It took only the short train journey for her to begin thinking about life in Bells Yew Green. With the town of Tunbridge Wells only four miles away, loads of services and shops would be near at hand, and the area was chock-full of fine gardens to visit for inspiration.

  Pru rang for a cab from the station and took down the driver’s phone number so she could ring him for the return trip. She had barely settled back into the seat when they arrived.

  Good clay soils led to an abundance of brickworks in Kent and Sussex, and so brick buildings were a common sight in towns and villages—along with those made from local ironstone. Brick-built Primrose House sat slightly back from the road with an oval gravel drive leading to it and back to the road again.

  Although good-sized, it was certainly not enormous; it was the smallest of the manor farms on what had been a grand estate. The castle—owned by the Earl of Lamerton—came with a Grade-II listing, noting its historical status, but none of the manor farms had a listing and had been sold off individually over the past hundred years. They had been built in the late eighteenth century. It was reputed—or rumored, Pru couldn’t remember which—that the landscape around the estate, including Primrose House, had been designed, or perhaps influenced, by Humphry Repton, renowned landscape gardener, in the early nineteenth century. That’s all she had learned from the slip of a leaflet included in the letter from the Templetons.

  Pru glanced around the landscape. Away to the back, a tall row of yews ran parallel to the house. At the end of the row to the right, and behind what could only be the walled garden, she could see the looming figure of a mature cedar of Lebanon—at least two hundred years old, she thought—characteristically flat-topped with horizontal branches stretched out like a hen covering her chicks. Nothing grew up against the house—that wasn’t unusual, although it may have been that vines or roses had been cut down.

  Two columnar yews flanked the front door—she peeked inside the wall of foliage to see if they were sheared or one of the narrow-growing selections. Sheared, she thought, and by the looks of things, the only bit of gardening that had been done in a while.

  She arranged herself before knocking—she could see no bell. The knocker, an enormous brass piece fashioned in the shape of a badger’s head, made a marvelously deep sound on the wood and echoed inside. She heard footsteps, and the door opened.

  A short woman with bobbed white hair answered, offered her hand, and said, “Hello, Pru, I’m Davina Templeton. Please come in.”

  They shook hands and Davina led her down the hall. “We’re in the kitchen, I hope that’s all right with you.” Pru nodded her approval and glanced around as they went. It looked as if Primrose House had been “sympathetically restored,” as the saying goes. The exterior remained late eighteenth century, and the furnishings were traditional but with quirky twists throughout. She saw an enormous modern painting with splotches of bright color above a fireplace with a leather Chesterfield sofa in front of it, and on a nearby wall, a large gilded mirror with fat cherubs decorating the top. Flanking the mirror were two avant-garde wooden chairs, the kind you weren’t sure if you should sit in. In the corner of the room, Pru thought she saw a tall cactus in a pot.

  Davina and Bryan, gracious and just as eclectic as their décor, were a delight, and Pru felt a great burden lifted from her just talking with them; for a time she was able to forget her money problems, her life decisions, and anything associated with murder.

  Over coffee at the large farm table, Pru told them her background and they expressed understanding at her decisions. They in turn told her about how they’d moved from Manchester to live in Sussex and had spent five years restoring Primrose House. It sounded as if they threw themselves wholeheartedly into the project, living only for its completion. Pru thought that if the kitchen—which included a new British-racing-green Aga cooker, farm sink, tile backing everywhere, and one of those water spouts right over the stove for tall pots—was any indication of the care they took, the rest of the house must be amazing.

  “We care too much about our English heritage to completely wipe away the past,” Bryan said. “But we know it’s possible to respect the past and celebrate the present, too.” Although Bryan worked in international investments, he had gotten a second in history at Cambridge.

  Pru talked about the vernacular landscape as it tied into architecture and how the genius of English garden design lay in its ability to absorb international influences and reflect them in its own style. She included a bit on Humphry Repton’s contribution to English garden history and how she much preferred his ideas of more formality near the house that slowly changed to a more naturalistic landscape over those of Capability Brown’s projects that moved heaven and earth to make the landscape look as if nothing had happened. She hoped it sounded good. They asked questions about her style of working; she answered everything, touching only lightly on her diminishing window of opportunity to find a job.

  Pru felt good about how it was all going, and when Bryan said, “You and Davina have a look around the garden, and I’ll get busy on lunch. You’ll stay, won’t you, Pru?” she had a fleeting urge to ask if they would adopt her.

  They walked out the front door, and Pru asked about the badger knocker. “It’s our nod to the country,” Davina said, “and made by a local artist. You know, I think we have a badger sett near the woods, but we haven’t really investigated yet.”

  Primrose House, as it turned out, had no primroses. “At least we’ve never seen any,” Davina said. “We don’t know where the name came from—were there primroses in the past, or was it just wishful thinking on someone’s part? Still, it’s such a charming name, we’d never want to change it.” Pru thought of Grenadine Hall, where she would spend the weekend. It had been known as Cromley Manor until the 1840s, when the owner, in a fit of Victorian fancy, renamed it in honor of the popular pomegranate-based syrup.

  Pru gave Davina a short treatise on primroses and cowslips, and how perhaps the beech wood had grown to cast more shade than they liked. She thought it perfectly reasonable to establish a patch in a sunnier spot, perhaps just beyond the wall of yew.

  The drive had been regraveled after the house restoration, but the oval bed in front, which had been the staging area during the work, held nothing but tufts of grass and weeds. “We removed all the creepers and climbing roses from the walls, too, I’m afraid,” she said. “So much work needed to be done on the house, we really couldn’t go any other way.”

  Behind the house, a path that led out from the terrace to the yew walk once had been lined with boxwood, but left to its own devices, it had grown into a boxwood allée—as the plants had achieved small-tree status, their upper canopies leaned gracefully into one another.

  “I believe we’d have a view of the Weald if the yew wasn’t there,” Davina said, referring to the rolling, wooded hills and sandstone outcroppings, a classic feature of the natural landscape in the Southeast.

  Pru suggested reducing the yew severely to keep its fine architectural lines. “It’s very forgiving, as long as it gets good drainage.”

  They walked across the gravel yard to the walled garden. Davina opened the wooden door for Pru and gestured widely, the countless layers of thin fabric that flowed from her arm following the movement like a wake.

  Within the wa
lls, devastation. “I should’ve prepared you,” Davina said. “We just turned a blind eye, because we were spending all our efforts on the house, and now look what’s happened.”

  The garden, thought Pru, always the last thing on the list. Weeds, weedy shrubs, weedy trees, and perhaps just the remnants of a path or two, impassable with so much overgrowth. In the center, where once there might have been a large square bed anchored at the corners by topiary yew, the yews had grown together to form one enormous green-black block.

  To Pru, it was a dream come true.

  They walked out of the walled garden, and Davina pointed to a small building set off on its own at the end of a short drive from the road. “There is the head gardener’s accommodation—it used to be a cow shed. Now, we won’t go over just at the moment, because the conversion hasn’t quite started, but I did want you to see how close to the garden and to our house it is. It isn’t large, but it will be cozy.”

  Pru tried to discern the condition of the building. Was it missing a door? There were openings in the wall, but could they be considered windows? The original advert for the post had described it as a “charming estate cottage.”

  “And just beyond—you can’t see from here—there are a few partial walls left from another outbuilding. I suppose we should remove them,” Davina said.

  Pru told her about the ruins of a fifteenth-century tithe barn at Sudeley Castle near Cheltenham that had been planted up with roses and climbers and what a romantic setting it was. Davina loved the idea.

  “There would be additional help, of course,” Davina said. “We have old Ned a couple of days a week and the two lads that live just down the road. Special jobs, especially as the garden gets going, need extra hands, we know. I’ve never thought a head gardener should bother with machines and mowing; a head gardener should be for design, inspiration, planting, tending.”

  Pru felt herself balanced on the thin tightrope between hope and despair. They returned to the kitchen to a lunch of ribollita—a hearty Tuscan soup. The Templetons had brought back the recipe from a small Italian hill town they visited often. A perfect lunch, thought Pru.