The Garden Plot Read online

  “That’s the coin, that’s the same as the coins we’ve found—were there a lot produced?” Pru asked.

  “There’s a bit about commemorative coins in here—Hadrian visited Britain, and they could’ve made some for that reason.”

  “Did he visit his wall while he was here?”

  “Yes, I believe he visited his wall,” Christopher said.

  “Does it say anything about letters from Hadrian?” She handed the book back.

  “I couldn’t find anything.”

  Pru noticed the cracked yellow binding. “When was it published?”

  He looked inside the cover. “Nineteen sixty-three.”

  “Nineteen sixty-three? That’s ancient.”

  “It’s history,” he protested.

  “Yes,” Pru said, “but who knows what else they’ve found since then. Mr. Wilson told me the Duke of Northumberland just found a whole Roman villa or settlement or something in west London. Let’s look online. ‘Remember Vindolanda,’ Jeremy wrote. Let’s see what Vindolanda has to say.”

  She found the website for Vindolanda—a Roman fort along Hadrian’s Wall, and now a museum and site of many an archaeological dig—and began running her finger down the screen, looking for a timeline of discovery or a description of objects unearthed since the early 1960s.

  Christopher leaned on the back of her chair as she read. She could feel his breath on her hair. He kissed her neck and worked his way up to just behind her ear. She turned her head, and they looked at each other as his hand moved a strand of hair away from her eyes, and his finger traced the side of her face, her jawline, and continued down her throat to just inside her V-neck sweater.

  His phone rang. He didn’t move. “I could ignore it.”

  She smiled slowly. “No, you couldn’t.”

  “Pearse.” He walked into the kitchen as he answered. Pru took a deep breath and blinked at the computer screen a few times before it came back into focus.

  A few minutes later, he returned. “Pru, what did you say the name of—”

  “Christopher, look,” she cut him off in her excitement. “In 1973, archaeologists discovered wooden tablets at Vindolanda. Before then, they knew that Romans wrote on wax tablets and on papyrus, but these were wafer-thin pieces of wood—just slivers—that they wrote letters and receipts and all sorts of things on. They were found in a waterlogged tip. It was the wet conditions that saved them. It was anaerobic; there wasn’t enough air for decomposition to set in.” She turned to him. “Wet soil, like the wet soil in the shed under the mosaic.”

  She stood up and started to pace, removing her hair clip, combing through and reclipping. “ ‘Remember Vindolanda,’ Jeremy wrote. Vindolanda is at Hadrian’s Wall, and the letter has a drawing of a coin commemorating Hadrian’s visit. If Jeremy was referring to these wooden tablets, does that mean there could be a letter written by Hadrian sunk in that ooze?”

  She stopped pacing and sat down again. “A letter from Hadrian would be worth a lot of money, wouldn’t it?” she asked. “Alf needed money—the deal selling the house didn’t go through.”

  “We need someone to explain that old letter to us,” Christopher said. “We might as well begin with Harry Wilson.” He looked at her out of the corner of his eye and said casually, “I’ll take the letter with me, shall I?”

  Pru held up her hands in surrender. “Yes, please, you take it.” She thought for a moment. “Christopher, if he doesn’t already realize the amazing find that might be under the mosaic, Mr. Wilson will be astounded.”

  “Pru,” he cautioned, “there are still many things to clear up. For example—and you must admit this is important—we still don’t know who murdered Jeremy Pendergast.”

  She noticed his use of “we”—whether deliberate or not, he was including her in the investigation now. “Well, we’ll just ask Mr. Wilson what he thinks, now that all this new information has been uncovered.” She’d better check, just to be sure. “I get to be there, don’t I?”

  “Yes, of course you do,” he said as they stood up. “But please remember …”

  “I am not a police officer.”

  He narrowed his eyes, pulled her close, and kissed her. “That is correct.”

  When he put on his jacket, Pru could see a white crusting of dried tears on the dark lapel. As he headed for the door, he said, “I’m off to my flat for a shower.”

  “Me, too,” Pru said as she followed him. Christopher stopped. “Here, I mean. I’ll shower here.”

  He turned and smiled at her. “Right, well, I’ll just take that image with me, then. Now, shall I come round for you after I stop by the station, and we’ll go to the Wilsons’ together?”

  “No, I’ll meet you there. In two hours?”

  It had begun to rain, and Christopher—for once without his umbrella—dashed for a cab, keeping the plastic-wrapped letter inside his jacket.

  Pru arrived at the Wilsons’ before Christopher, but he had phoned ahead and explained much of what they’d discovered and discussed. Mrs. Wilson looked as if she might start crying when she opened the door and saw Pru. She gave her a hug and, as they walked back to the kitchen, apologized profusely for her behavior.

  “I was so frightened of what Alf might do to you, and I’m appalled that he has become such a … thug,” she said.

  “There’s no need for an apology. You were trying to protect me,” Pru said. When they entered the kitchen, Mr. Wilson rose from the sofa in the small seating area. The kettle was on and a new cafetière was at the ready. A Victoria sponge had been placed on a footed cake stand. Murder or no, Mrs. Wilson would be a good hostess.

  “Do you think Alf was the one who … killed Jeremy?” Pru asked.

  “It doesn’t look good, Pru,” Mr. Wilson said. “The police still can’t find him, and they’ve been back questioning Malcolm. I’m sure he knows more than he’s saying. It sounds as if Alf had his fingers in every piece of this scandal.” He glanced up at his wife, who busied herself with pouring milk into the pitcher. Mr. Wilson appeared to have recovered from his bout of wild digging two nights earlier, but now Mrs. Wilson looked a bit pale.

  “If Alf …” Pru wondered how to put this question with tact. “Could you get your house back if Alf …” She still couldn’t quite say it aloud.

  “Yes,” Mr. Wilson said as he nodded toward his wife. “Yes, I know about the sale falling through. I believe we may be able to take the house again.”

  “If that happens, Pru,” Mrs. Wilson said, “we want you to come and visit us, see the garden, and meet Simon.”

  “That would be lovely, thank you,” Pru said, and thought it would indeed be lovely but seemed unlikely as she probably would be four thousand miles away. She tried to dispel the sadness that could creep in so quickly by asking, “Mr. Wilson, what do you think is buried out there?”

  Harry Wilson began to smile. “Well, no one has seen it yet, but from the brief time I examined that old letter”—Yes, thought Pru, before I snatched it away—“and the Latin lines that were copied there, I believe this could be a momentous find. The writing is from a letter written by Hadrian that many scholars believe is the start of his lost autobiography. No one has ever seen it, and only a copy in Greek of this one letter has ever been found. But so many of us can recite the English translation by heart.” Mr. Wilson looked off into the distance and said:

  “The Emperor Hadrian Augustus to his most esteemed Antoninus, greetings. Above all I want you to know that I am being released from my life neither before my time, nor unreasonably, nor piteously, nor unexpectedly, nor with faculties impaired …”

  They were quiet for a moment, while the ancient words hung in the air. Mr. Wilson blinked, cleared his throat, and looked at his wife and Pru. “But copied in Gaskell’s letter,” he said, “was the Latin text of the same letter—Hadrian’s own language. If it’s complete, Hadrian’s autobiography could be the biggest find since—” A knock at the front door interrupted him and gave Pru a start.

>   “It must be Christopher.” She got up. “I’ll let him in, shall I? This is amazing.”

  Christopher shook out his umbrella on the front step, set it in the stand inside, and hung his raincoat on a hook; the light rain had stopped but ominous clouds lingered overhead. Pru took his hand and said, “Wait till you hear what Mr. Wilson has to say. Here, in the Wilsons’ back garden of all places.” She gave him a quick rundown as they went back to the kitchen.

  Christopher pulled out the letter while Pru and Mrs. Wilson served coffee and cake. “Everyone has always talked about his autobiography,” Mr. Wilson said, “but only that one letter—possibly the beginning of his life story—was all that existed. Until, perhaps, now.”

  They all sat in stunned silence for a moment, and then Pru’s phone rang. She dashed into the front hall to answer.

  It was the Hightowers, at their wits’ end because the new lawn service they’d hired was out there now, getting ready to spray. “Spray? Spray what?” The Hightowers didn’t know what, but they were sure it wasn’t organic, and they wanted Pru to come and do something about it. Now, before something terrible happened and all the good insects died and all the birds left.

  The Hightowers had been good clients, and Pru was proud that they had listened when she talked about organic practices for lawns, so she felt obligated to see their relationship through to its end. But it meant she would miss all the good parts of the Hadrian story. She went back to explain, and Christopher stood up. “Are you sure you need to go now?”

  “I might as well,” she said, “because I told some other clients that I’d stop by …” She almost added “one last time.” There it went again, reality making an appearance when she least needed it to. To the Wilsons, she said, “I’m sure everything is going to be all right now. I’ll talk to you later.” She took Christopher’s hand and led him to the front door. “I’ll phone you later. Or … perhaps I’ll see you?”

  “Pru, you should hear this, too,” he said.

  “Christopher, they’re probably about to broadcast some totally unnecessary weed and feed all over the lawn. I can’t let them. And I know everything’s under control now—you’ll see to it. And the Wilsons are fine.” Pru felt positively lighthearted, and even though the actual murderer hadn’t been identified or apprehended, she could see the situation resolving itself by the end of the day. The police would find Alf and question him; he probably would confess and be charged with murder. Malcolm would be questioned and … Pru decided not to dwell on details at the moment. What was important was that Christopher knew Mr. Wilson didn’t kill Jeremy, and she could leave the rest in his hands.

  “You’ll tell me about it later,” Pru said. She drew close to him and said in a quiet voice, “You can tell me this evening.”

  He laughed, stroked her hair, and kissed her. “Right, off you go, defend the lawn. I’ll see you later.”

  Pru relished a good chemical-versus-organics fight. When she arrived, the Hightowers stood in their front doorway, huddling under the small portico. A lorry from Green Your Lawn LLC was parked on the street. Two workers in dark coveralls and waterproofs stood near the gate to the back garden looking sullen.

  “ ’Ere,” one of them said when Pru approached them. “Are you the one we’re supposed to wait for? Reg and me’s got to get to work.”

  She smiled at the workers and looked through the gate at the Hightowers’ lawn, lush and green. “What are you fellows planning to do?” she said in a friendly voice.

  “What we need to do,” Reg said, “is to … restore”—he looked down at the clipboard he held and read from a coffee-stained piece of paper—“restore the balance of nutrients to the roots and stop the bugs and weeds from taking over.” He looked back up at Pru. “There, that’s what Nigel and me’s doing.”

  “What bugs do you suppose are out there, and what do you think they’re doing?” she asked. She walked through the gate, bent down, and ran her hand over the top of the damp lawn. “Do you see any weeds?”

  “It isn’t our job to look for bugs and weeds,” Nigel complained. “We’re to apply the remedy and go to the next stop.”

  “And just what were you going to apply?” she asked, still keeping a friendly tone.

  “Our product is guaranteed to make a lawn lush and green in just two weeks.” Reg puffed out his chest.

  “Take a look, Reg,” Pru said. “The lawn is already lush and green.”

  Pru could see, over Nigel’s shoulder, the large plastic container in the back of their truck, and she knew by the color of the bucket what they had planned to apply to her—the Hightowers’ precious organic lawn.

  “What do you think, fellows?” Pru reasoned. “Why don’t we let the Hightowers tell your boss that you did just what they asked you to do. No one has to tell them exactly what that was, now do they?”

  She missed Christopher’s call while she helped the Hightowers search online for a truly organic lawn-care company, and when she phoned him back, she got his voice mail. We’re not going to start this again, are we? she thought. He had left only a brief message in a voice on the edge of a whisper—“I’ll see you later”—which caused a tingle down her spine. She listened to it three times.

  One more client appointment, and with what were really her last two jobs out of the way, Pru made her way home. Lunch had consisted of a slice of Mrs. Wilson’s Victoria sponge, so she got her last Waitrose four-mushroom risotto out of the freezer to heat up. Maybe she’d eat just a few bites of it, in case she and Christopher went out for a meal later. Before she could dwell on the possibilities of the evening ahead, her mind circled around to the Wilsons’ garden.

  She wished she still had her before-and-after photos to look through—before-and-after ivy, she reminded herself, not murder. And then it came to her: she did still have another copy of the photos—on the second flash drive, the copy she had planned to give the Wilsons.

  It took her a few minutes to locate it buried at the bottom of her bag, under a small notebook of planting ideas, her change purse, and brochures from the Garden Museum near Lambeth Palace and the Chelsea Physic Garden. She found a hedgehog pin she got when she dropped £1 in a collection box for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. She had meant to go back and get two more so she could send them to Lydia’s girls but hadn’t managed that yet. The accumulated detritus of her year in England, each bit precious.

  Slowly, she clicked through the photos again, wondering if she had missed any clues that might seal the deal on Alf. She saw the photo Christopher had asked her about, showing Malcolm at the top of his basement steps, hands on hips, as if he were talking with someone at the bottom. The police computers could enlarge the photo enough to see the top of someone’s head—possibly Alf’s—but she couldn’t see much on her laptop.

  She flipped through to the morning of the murder, with the view of the Wilsons’ front door. If only she’d been able to plant the pots and add window boxes and … Pru looked again at the large man in his socks and no shoes. Out for a morning stroll? Pru thought. She tried enlarging the photo to get a better look at him. Sock feet, carrying a shopping bag and walking past the Wilsons’; her photo had caught him at the moment he passed the wrought-iron gate at the top of the stairs that led down to their basement. Or did it? It was difficult to tell, but it almost looked as if he had walked, not past the stairs and down the sidewalk, but up the basement stairs and had a hand in back to close the gate.

  As she considered that odd possibility, her phone rang. “Pru, it’s Lucy. I finally remembered to ask around about Archie Clarke. He isn’t in history; he’s in the archaeology department.”

  “Archaeology?” Pru asked, as she headed back to the kitchen, their conversation only skimming the surface of her mind.

  “And you might want to tell your inspector about him. Jo said Clarke was on sabbatical, but as it turns out, he was suspended from university over some theft. He had been on a dig early last year, when a silver jug that was intended for the
British Museum went missing.”

  Pru forgot about the newly thawed container of risotto she held in midair. “He stole it?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Lucy said. “Well, at least someone phoned in a tip that said he did and that he was about to sell it to a private dealer. He wasn’t charged because the tip came anonymously and they couldn’t track the dealer, and Archie said it was all a misunderstanding, and he had never even seen the silver jug. There was no record of it from the dig, so nothing could be done. But even though he wasn’t charged, he and university officials decided it would be best for him to take some time off. He left quickly, telling everyone he knew that he was off on sabbatical. That’s probably why you got your place for a song, because he and Pippa needed to do a bunk.”

  “I wonder if Mr. Wilson knows him,” Pru said, getting an uneasy feeling in her stomach.

  “Clarke is the university adviser to a local amateur archaeology group,” Lucy said.

  Pru heard Xanthe’s voice in her head: “Are you the American in Archie and Pippa’s place?” She had been too distracted to realize how out of place that question was; to her, Archie and Pippa were landlords, not part of Mr. Wilson’s group. “I must tell Archie,” Mr. Wilson had said. That hadn’t sunk in, either.

  “The AASL, Amateur Archaeology Society of London?” Pru asked.

  “Yes. He and his wife, Pippa, went on almost all their digs. My friend Tommy said that Archie had grown … cynical over the last few years. He seemed to resent finding all these valuable pieces of history and handing them over to someone else. Tommy had even heard him muttering, ‘And what do you think that would fetch?’ when he was examining some artifact.”

  Pru needed to sit down. In her head, she heard again Mrs. Wilson’s voice on the phone that first day. It seemed so long ago, but Mrs. Wilson had told the caller they didn’t know anything about a letter or what Jeremy had said about it.

  “Thanks, Lucy, for finding this out.”

  “I’m sorry it took me so long,” Lucy replied. “Are you going to phone