The Skeleton Garden Read online

“No.”

  But he knew better. “Does it bother Simon as much as it bothers you?”

  “Well, you heard them yesterday morning,” Pru said. “And Jack keeps reminding Polly about how it was when they were together. I hope that Simon hasn’t had to listen to those stories.”

  “Remembering an old relationship isn’t the same as wanting it back again.” He fixed her with those brown eyes. “Is it?”

  “No, it isn’t,” she conceded, running her hand through his short hair. Once only flecked with gray, she saw a few more now, just as she did in her own hair. But still mostly brown, she told herself. “Thanks for being the voice of reason in my head—it gets a little crazy in there sometimes.”

  “You need to take your mind off all this.” He loosened the belt on her robe. He traced the outline of the opening with his finger, and her skin continued to tingle where he’d touched it, like a jet trail in the sky. “Best leave Simon and Polly and Jack to sort this out themselves, don’t you think?”

  She bent over and kissed the hollow place at the base of his throat. “I could be persuaded.” He parted her robe just enough, and his lips brushed a spot on her further down. She marveled at how nerve endings there could be attached to so many other parts of her body. He pulled her down onto the bed, but she cut her eyes to the door. “Where’s Orlando?” she asked.

  “He is at the kitchen table with a book we found at a charity shop in town—Can You Solve These Mysteries? I told him if he solved three by dinner, we’d take him to a film in Winchester Tuesday evening.”

  “God, you’re good,” she whispered.

  “Needs must,” he said as she fell back against her pillow. “And I do need you.”

  I wish I had a mum to take you home to. I wish I had a home, but the Germans took care of that. Still, you are my home now.

  —Letter from Ratley Airfield

  Chapter 16

  Orlando, Simon, and Pru spent much of Monday uprooting peaches, all of them digging and chopping with mattocks until they could wrench the trees from the soil. Pru had sent Orlando off to the house, and she now sat on the ground, leaning against the wall with her eyes closed. She’d stripped her jacket and fleece, leaving only a long-sleeved cotton top. She pushed the sleeves up as far as they would go. Sweat dripped down the sides of her face. The walled garden may not have been hot enough for the peaches, but it certainly trapped enough of the sun’s warmth to heat her up.

  The garden bed looked as if a bomb had gone off, craters and twisted roots sticking up. They’d need to dig those out and prepare the soil for the array of annuals necessary for a good cutting-garden display. Before that, they would need to start seeds in the glasshouse and then move them out into the cold frames as early as possible. But the cold frames—brick boxes tucked up against the outside of the south-facing wall—would first need new glass covers. Every step forward needed two steps back. And they would have to hurry—they were well into November, and autumn was slipping away.

  “We need to decide on what to plant here.” Simon jotted another item down in the new notebook he’d started—Pru appreciated how clean, blank pages could make you feel organized, but the list of jobs that needed doing was already three pages long.

  “Dahlias,” Pru said, her eyes still closed. She could feel a chill breeze tickle her face and neck. “The Bishops—those dark-leaved selections—Bishop of Llandaff, Bishop of York—all the rest. If we say dahlias, then they won’t expect to see anything at all this late in the year.” When was the magazine editor coming out on a scouting visit—next week?

  “We could choose annuals they grew in the ’30s and ’40s,” he said. Pru opened her eyes and looked at her brother. “It’s sort of a theme, isn’t it?” Simon asked, nodding out toward the parterre lawn. “Everyone was supposed to grow as much food as they could during the war, but people still wanted flowers. We’ll show what they did grow.”

  Add research to the list. How long would it take to find out the most popular annuals grown during the war and locate a seed source?

  Orlando peeked inside the gate. “Aunt Pru?”

  “Did you find the sticking plasters?” she asked. Orlando had caught a finger on a sharp twig, and she’d told him to march indoors at once to wash the wound thoroughly and put on a Band-Aid.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He held up his hand as evidence. “Uncle Christopher is here.”

  But still in uniform, Pru saw when she followed Orlando out to the yard. Christopher, police cap in hand, was standing by his car in the drive—so he hadn’t finished work yet.

  “This is lovely—can you stay for a cup of tea?” Pru asked, just as Peachey’s van pulled into the drive, marking the approach to the end of Evelyn’s workday.

  He shook his head. “I’ve just been up at Kent’s Oak,” he explained, “and I’m on my way into the station, but thought I’d stop and let you know that Kitty rang to say she’d pulled out some old snapshots from the war. She thought you might send Orlando down for them.”

  Orlando, loitering nearby, overheard. “Yes, sir, I’ll go,” he said. A pause. “Will the ducks be there?”

  “I’d say they will be,” Pru said. “Does that worry you?”

  “They’re awfully strange—the way they walk around.” Orlando blushed. “And I don’t like the way that Sonia looks at me.”

  Pru hid a smile as she herded him indoors to wash up. Dragons on spaceships were fine, but face-to-face with a real-life fowl was a frightening prospect.

  —

  Orlando headed off to Kitty’s cottage a quarter mile down the lane, and Pru stood with Peachey in the yard as he examined the collection of gardening tools and accessories set aside for the Christmas fête jumble sale. Peachey had offered to transfer the collection to the church hall in his van. “At the moment, I’ve got the back full of an Aston Martin DBS engine from a fellow up at Mottisfont. Real collector’s item,” he said. “I’ll stop round tomorrow and collect this lot.”

  —

  Late afternoon the next day, a truck pulled in with the first delivery of germander. Simon was chuffed that he’d been able to locate eighty of the small broadleaf evergreens from patching together five different sources. They would set them out on two-foot centers; a row of small hedge plants outlining a bed at each end of the walled garden would, at least, make it look as if they were organized.

  Pru and Simon had already squabbled about planting procedure—Simon favored a hole for each plant, which Pru thought an enormous waste of time and preferred digging a trench. Orlando kept apart from the fray, ostensibly weeding the Brussels sprouts.

  They heard another vehicle pull into the drive, and Orlando scampered off to investigate and came back to say that the police had arrived to take down the marquee and untie the blue-and-white tape in the parterre lawn. The Messerschmitt, currently in police storage, would be donated to the local historical society by the Wilsons, paperwork pending. The bones, Pru didn’t want to think about.

  Orlando stayed on the heels of the police constables during the takedown. Pru heard him toss a few impressive words to the PCs—“police procedural” and “cold case”—showing off his ability to absorb information from television shows.

  Pru and Simon went back to the walled garden. Pru had promised Polly she’d give her brother a gentle nudge to get him to clear out Birdie’s cottage. Pru fretted about what she needed to say—it wasn’t the best time, but she’d rather get it over with. She thought she’d settled on a good approach to the subject that skirted the emotional center of his anger. She glanced at him as he groomed the plants, pinching a dead leaf off here and there. “So, you know about the Christmas fête and dance—the theme?”

  Of course he knew—it was common knowledge. He didn’t look at her. “Yeah, the war.”

  “Well, it’s just that now we’ve got to scramble to find decorations—and clothes, as well, for the fancy-dress part.” She cleared her throat, wishing that he would at least look at her; she thought he’d already got a whiff
of where she was going with this. “Everyone’s helping out—Dick, Stan, Kitty.” Simon didn’t respond. “And so, we thought that you might run across a dress Polly could wear or dishes or something for decoration when you go through Birdie’s house. Have you had a chance to start yet?”

  “You think I’d put Birdie’s life up on display at a party? You think that’s all it’s worth?”

  She should’ve pulled back at the first sign of resistance, but there was always something that made her want to push back with Simon. Damn the torpedoes, she thought. “Are you afraid to look at her life? At your life with Birdie and George?”

  He turned away from her, and she strained to hear him. “I thought she would tell me before she died. Tell me one important thing so that everything would make sense—why I was given away, why no one ever spoke up about it. But she died. Instead of telling me, she died.”

  She walked around and got in his face. “And she did that on purpose just to make your life miserable?”

  “I was lied to,” Simon half shouted at her.

  “They lied to me, too,” she shouted back, and the wall she’d built to hide her resentment cracked. “Every day of my life, our parents looked at me and lied. Do you want to know they were punished—would that make you feel better? Don’t you think it was punishment enough that they knew you were happy and it wasn’t with them? And anyway, what can we do about it now? You need to get over it, Simon.” Such grand advice—she should take some herself.

  He walked out of the garden and she waited ten minutes, unwilling to make a show of following him. When she did emerge, Evelyn and Peachey were gone—the jumble-sale donation remained in the yard. Orlando waited at the kitchen door, coat on, and ready for their evening in Winchester with Christopher in the mudroom, putting on his coat. But Pru had promised to look in on the uprooted plants in the parterre lawn, and she looked nervously at Simon when Orlando asked if she’d be ready soon.

  “You go on,” Simon said coolly, staring off into the distance at the low rolling hills. “I’m off to collect Pol at the station. I’ll stop later and see to them.” They talked as if the plants were in sick bay and needed someone to go over their charts, but they’d been dug up the week before and ignored since then, so that wasn’t far from the truth.

  She left Simon to it and hoped his mood would lighten by tomorrow. Christopher had promised Orlando a film and had come up trumps with a showing of the 1953 American sci-fi epic It Came From Outer Space, part of a series of black-and-white, space-invasion films.

  —

  The movie stunned Orlando; he saw many similarities to Galaxy Raiders, which he had thought, until that moment, to be the most original show in history.

  “I wonder if Jemima might be interested in seeing one of these other movies,” Pru said over dinner at PizzaExpress. She held the film series leaflet out far enough to read the fine print and keep Orlando in her peripheral vision. She saw his face redden. “You did say that she knows Galaxy Raiders?”

  “She looks like Princess Zeeorah from Torkonion, once thought to be an uninhabited asteroid in the Calcifereous Galaxy,” he said. “The—you know—her clothes.”

  Her clothes, yes—the only part of what he said that Pru understood.

  “I’d run the two of you up here for a film—you just let me know,” Christopher said. “I did that for your mum and dad a few times when they were first dating.”

  “Oh, we’ve all heard those stories,” Orlando said as he accepted Pru’s last piece of pizza. “I even remember Gran telling them. Mum says you were a right gooseberry.” Pru laughed at the word for an unwanted chaperone.

  “On your grandmother’s orders, I’ll point out,” Christopher said.

  “Gran said she always knew you’d be a policeman.”

  Christopher smiled and met Pru’s gaze. He wasn’t much of a policeman at the moment, and she hoped he wasn’t missing it too much.

  —

  The air was still and cold, and the full moon just past its zenith when they pulled into the drive at Greenoak. They’d have a frost tonight, Pru thought. She had heard a couple of enormous yawns from Orlando in the backseat and joined in. She thought sinking into bed and cuddling up with her husband under a thick duvet the perfect end to the day.

  Orlando went straight to his room, and Christopher lingered downstairs searching the liquor cabinet in the sitting room for a fresh bottle of brandy to replenish their bedroom stash. Pru thought she would survey the state of the parterre lawn from the upstairs hall window. The moonlight cast everything in sharp contrast—either silvery white or inky black, no gray areas. If she hadn’t known those were hebes wrapped in burlap against the hedge, she might’ve thought they were boulders. Perhaps they could lead the editor from The English Garden around by full moon and she wouldn’t notice the devastation, the holes, and works-in-progress.

  The police had been none too tidy in their excavations—they’d left a spade, and the dirt was strewn about into many small mounds, spilling onto the grass. The heaps looked like little pyramids, and without the marquee covering it, the pit was a black hole.

  The more she stared at the scene, the more she could make out, but the shadows and light played tricks on her, making her see things that couldn’t be there. Making her see a person—unmoving, arms and legs sprawled out—facedown, in a mound of dirt and stone.

  She blinked several times and the body became a contour of the soil, a configuration of rocks. She squinted, and it was a body again. A prickly sensation crept up the back of her neck, and her breath came in short, quick gasps. For a second, she waited for some movement—for a hand to wave at her, give her a thumbs-up sign, an acknowledgment of the madness of the image—but the vision remained static. The light shifted as the moon continued its journey, and now there was no mistake.

  “Christopher!” she screamed as she flew down the stairs. “Christopher!”

  He came out of the sitting room and set the bottle on the table without looking, knocking over a brass candlestick. He took hold of her arms. “What? What is it?”

  “In the parterre lawn.” She pulled out of his grasp and took hold of his hand. “Something’s wrong. There’s a—” The word she should say caught in her throat. “I saw someone.”

  The look on her face must’ve told him more. He ran for the kitchen just as Pru heard a thundering down the stairs behind her. She held up for an instant, but had no answer to Orlando’s question—“What’s going on?” Instead, she turned and ran after Christopher, and Orlando ran after her. Through the kitchen, out into the yard, and down to the opening in the hedge along the drive. Christopher made it into the center of the garden first, and turned back.

  “Pru,” he shouted, pointing to the boy.

  “Orlando,” Pru said, grabbing the boy’s arm just inside the hedge enclosure. “Wait. Wait here.”

  “I see someone, Aunt Pru. What’s going on? I want to help.”

  Pru gripped his arm, squeezing out her terror, and Orlando tried to pull it back.

  She lessened her grip but kept hold. “Sorry.”

  But Orlando had absorbed some of her fear. He looked past her. “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Pru whispered. She should keep her attention on her nephew, but couldn’t take her eyes off Christopher, kneeling over the figure. Her muscles froze.

  “Orlando,” Christopher called, “go get my mobile. It’s on the kitchen table. Bring it to me.”

  “Yes, sir. But, who is it?”

  “Go. I need it now.”

  Orlando flew. Pru held her breath as Christopher walked toward her, her eyes seeking a message on his face. “It’s Jack Snuggs,” he said. “He’s dead.”

  Chapter 17

  A sob exploded from Pru. She clapped her hand over her mouth and shook with guilty tears of relief.

  “You thought it was Simon?” Christopher asked.

  She gasped for air. “He…he said he would come back, check on the plants in here. We had just argued.” She
looked over Christopher’s shoulder. “What happened, can you tell?” she asked. “Did he have an accident?” She tried not to, but her glance flickered to the spade lying nearby.

  Christopher put his hands on her waist as he scanned the garden—the inside of the hedge, the ground at their feet, back to the body. “I didn’t see any trauma. But I can’t move him, not yet.”

  “Could he have fallen?” she asked.

  Orlando returned, panting, his breath coming out in clouds of fog, and handed Christopher the phone.

  Christopher stepped away to make the call, and Pru wiped her face before turning to the boy. She touched his arm. “Orlando,” she said in a quiet voice, “it’s Jack Snuggs. He has died, but we don’t know how. He might’ve had an accident, but the police need to come out to make sure.”

  “We can’t interfere with the crime scene,” Orlando said. He tried to look over Pru’s shoulder to get a better view.

  “We don’t know it’s a crime scene,” Pru replied, but the boy didn’t seem to hear.

  Christopher came back to them. “There’s no need for the two of you to wait out here. Why don’t you go into the kitchen?”

  “But, sir, can’t I stay and help? I won’t be in the way, I promise.” His face was the color of the moonlight and his eyes were dark pools. None of them had a coat on, and Pru, for one, had started to tremble.

  “Go with your aunt,” Christopher said. “I’d rather she’s not alone.”

  Orlando glanced at Pru, straightened his shoulders, and nodded.

  —

  Pru put the kettle on and reached for mugs, her hands shaking. She tried to get Orlando to sit down, but instead, he waited at the open mudroom door, calling out updates. “Two police cars. One has its lights flashing, but no siren. And a van.” He glanced back at Pru. “Forensics, probably.”

  “Orlando, sit down. Please.” She poured tea as the boy sank into a chair at the table. Even in the warm light of the kitchen, he continued to look pale, and she could see dark circles under his eyes. “Listen, come with me into the sitting room. You can help me get a fire going.” There was no way of knowing how long the night would be.