Death in the Greenhouse Read online

  ‘By all means. It does not seem likely that I can do much to help you, but you may count on me for anything that may assist in clearing up the dreadful mystery of Eustace’s death.’

  *

  Mr Predell’s doubts of his ability to help reflected the general outcome of all inquiries in the case. Inspector Rosyth had half-hoped that Miss Sutherland might be a formidable woman over six feet in height unable to account for her actions on the night of Mr Quenenden’s death, but she turned out to be the headmistress of a comprehensive school in Lancashire, slight in build and patently innocent of anything in connection with the events at Vine Cottage. She was also patently astonished by Mr Quenenden’s will. ‘I knew Eustace Quenenden, of course, and had a great admiration for him. He was exceptionally nice to me when I was a young teacher at a Mission School in his district in Africa,’ she said. ‘But I have seen him only two or three times since he came to live in England. We exchanged cards at Christmas. Once he called on me when he was motoring through Lancashire on his way to the Lake District, and on two occasions he wrote inviting me to be his guest at the Chelsea Flower Show – he was a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society, you see. Apart from those few meetings our recent acquaintance was really of the slightest. Why he should leave his property to me I have absolutely no idea. I’m sure there must be some mistake.’ Inspector Rosyth put her in touch with Mr Predell, who assured her that there was no mistake, that the will was perfectly in order, and that Mr Quenenden had certainly wished to make her his heir. Satisfied that her inheritance was real, Miss Sutherland saw to everything with great efficiency. After the inquest, at which only evidence of identification and medical evidence was given, and which was then adjourned for police inquiries to be pursued, Miss Sutherland arranged for Mr Quenenden to be buried in Newton Blaize churchyard, which, as he had been a regular churchgoer, the village considered entirely proper. There was a large attendance at the funeral – almost the whole village out of curiosity, and representatives of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and of a number of learned societies out of respect.

  Police inquiries got nowhere. A farmer who lived a few hundred yards from Vine Cottage, and who had been up between five and six a.m. to assist a cow to calve, thought he might have heard a shot, but he had thought nothing of it because several people used bird-scarers to keep off pigeons after sowing peas. All the local papers published a police request for information about any tall man of six feet or more who might have been seen in the neighbourhood, but nobody seemed to have any information to give. Miss Sutherland helped loyally with the distasteful job of going through all Mr Quenenden’s things and tidying up the cottage, but what, if anything, had been taken either from the cottage or the greenhouse did not emerge. The police found traces of earth and compost similar to that scattered on the greenhouse floor on the drive and in the road just outside Vine Cottage, suggesting that pots containing something had been carried to a waiting vehicle – a car seemed probable, but if the rings on the potting tray were anything to go by the pots would not have been very big, and they could have been carried in a basket on a bicycle. Analysis of the earth and compost yielded no indication of what might have been growing in it.

  There were gaps in the shelves of Mr Quenenden’s considerable library, but there was no way of telling whether they represented missing volumes or shelves which had always been incompletely filled. The most hopeful line of inquiry seemed to relate to a set of leather-bound notebooks, containing field notes and notes on propagation in Mr Quenenden’s neat, small handwriting, going back for many years. The notebooks completely filled one shelf and half-filled another. Were any of his notebooks missing? The dates suggested that there were not, because the date entries went up to the day before his death. But it was impossible to be sure, for Mr Quenenden used some books for making general entries and others for notes of his work on particular plants.

  Miss Sutherland’s inheritance turned out to be substantially larger than the lawyer’s estimate. With the cottage, the greenhouse and the garden she inherited investments not far short of a quarter of a million pounds.

  II

  The New Minister

  I WAS HAVING coffee with Ruth in her rooms at Oxford. It was a lovely, still, June morning, and the outlook from her windows on to centuries-old turf of Fellows’ Lawn was enchanting. I thought Ruth also looked enchanting, the glasses, which she said she needed, but which I thought were more probably part of her uniform as a mathematical don, adding a pleasing touch of gravitas to her delicately moulded features. King Alfred’s College claims to be the oldest college in Oxford, a claim disputed by Merton, Balliol and University. Its historical links with its nominal founder are dubious in the extreme, but it is certainly very old. The stone walls enclosing Fellows’ Lawn had been there since the fourteenth century, and although the Gloire de Dijon roses climbing on them must have come five hundred years later they are old-fashioned roses today, and their mellow beauty seemed entirely fitting on medieval walls, without bothering about historical arithmetic. Ruth herself was an anachronism, representing a staggering break with tradition. She was the first woman Fellow to be appointed by the College, and the Warden and his colleagues had given much thought to her accommodation. They had given her a splendid set of rooms, once occupied by a long succession of celibate theologians, and the Domestic Bursar, showing great daring, had changed the sombre theological paintwork to a gleaming, feminine white. He had also replaced leather armchairs by a set upholstered in gaily patterned chintz, and provided a silver rose bowl from the College’s remarkable collection of plate. It had not occurred to anybody, however, that a woman Fellow might also have a social life, and no one had thought to provide a telephone. But this was probably not male chauvinism so much as a general reluctance to accept the usefulness of the late Mr Bell’s invention. There was a telephone in the porter’s lodge, and if somebody from the outside world insisted on trying to telephone one of the residents in College, a written message would be civilly conveyed. Having survived without telephones for the best part of a millenium the College simply saw no need to have extensions of this new-fangled instrument about the place.

  It was the absence of a telephone that led to the interruption of my discussion with Ruth. There was a knock on the door and a porter handed me a note saying that Sir Edmund Pusey had telephoned to say that he was anxious to get in touch with Colonel Blair as soon as possible. ‘Damn,’ I said to Ruth when the man had gone. ‘I suppose this means that I shall have to ring up the old bloodsucker.’

  ‘He is not an old bloodsucker,’ she observed severely. ‘He has been extremely good to me, and we both owe him a lot. You have not resigned, so he is still your boss. Of course you must call him back. But don’t try to phone from the lodge, for there’s always a queue of people wanting to use the phone there. Go out through the gate, and you’ll find a call box across the road on the right, about fifty yards away. And don’t forget that you’re taking me out to lunch.’

  ‘I couldn’t possibly forget, but knowing Pusey I should regard our lunch as a somewhat uncertain meal,’ I said rather bitterly.

  *

  Sir Edmund Pusey is head of a powerful but unpublicised branch of the Home Office known as the Police Liaison Department. Under that unrevealing name the department acts as a kind of General Staff in the ceaseless war against crime, and also as a co-ordinating body when various other authorities, the Foreign Office, say, or the Customs, or the Army, Navy or the RAF, are concerned with the police in an investigation. After the collapse of two careers, first, the Army, when my regiment was amalgamated with two others and there were three majors for every major’s job, and next big business, when the firm of which I had become general sales director was taken over and I was made redundant, I had retired to lick my wounds in what had been my father’s old cottage in South Devon. My marriage had collapsed with my job, and I had to rebuild my life. I had begun to make a living with my hands by making furniture, which I found I could sell
, when a series of extraordinary events put me into Sir Edmund’s clutches and I was able to help in the clearing up of an exceedingly nasty crime. After that he took to calling me in as a sort of freelance investigator and finally persuaded me to join his staff. He got me back into the Army, promoted to Colonel, and seconded to represent the Armed Services in his department. The strange events* which had brought Ruth into my life (or me into hers) had left both of us sufficiently well-off not to be concerned with money, but neither of us was attracted by the prospect of living in tax exile. Ruth, who is American, had been Assistant Professor of Maths at a small university in the United States until Sir Edmund (who is an Oxford man) had brought her outstanding abilities as a mathematician to the notice of people in the right academic places. Hence a Readership in Maths at Oxford, and the Fellowship at King Alfred’s. I was taking some leave which even Sir Edmund called ‘well-earned’ and had much to try to sort out with Ruth. Thus I was not at all pleased to get his message. However, I was still on his staff, and for all his sometimes irritating characteristics Sir Edmund inspires loyalty, so there was no question of my not ringing back as he wanted.

  At first I couldn’t find the call box recommended by Ruth, but then I saw it, in an improbable little recess where a narrow passage joined King Alfred’s Lane. It could scarcely have been better placed to be invisible to anyone who might happen to need a telephone, but doubtless this was convenient to those with private information for it was seldom likely to be occupied. It was empty now, and I got through quickly to Rosemary, Sir Edmund’s secretary, giving her the number of the call box and asking her to ring me back so that I would not have to find coins to satisfy the insatiable appetite of public telephone boxes. In a couple of minutes Sir Edmund was on the line.

  ‘Good of you to ring back so quickly, Peter,’ he said. ‘Are you very busy?’

  ‘Yes. I have a lot of things to sort out with Ruth.’

  ‘Splendid. Have you decided to get married?’

  ‘Of course not. There are other matters to be considered.’

  ‘Your joint fortune, I suppose. Surely it would be much more convenient to be married!’

  ‘As a matter of fact the accountants say that there are material advantages to be gained by living in sin. Tax advantages, I mean.’

  ‘Of course. Well. Peter, it’s now just on 11.30. There’s a train from Oxford to Paddington at 12.03 – you ought to be able to get that, I think. Can you come straight to the office from Paddington?’

  I really did revolt at this. ‘I have not the slightest intention of getting your damned train,’ I said. ‘I am supposed to be on leave, and I’m having lunch with Ruth.’

  ‘Oh dear! I was counting on your normal rather barbarous habit of lunching on a sandwich in a pub. And the train I chose for you does have a buffet car. Perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much. How soon can you get to London after lunch?’

  ‘I don’t want to come to London at all – I was thinking of spending a few days on the river.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Peter, because there’s a little job that I want you to do.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t realise that? What if I don’t want to do it?’

  ‘Come, Peter, you must know your value to the department. It will be reflected in your pension when you retire.’

  ‘At my present rate of tax I doubt if it would buy me a bottle of whisky a month. You have no hold on me, and you know that perfectly well.’

  ‘I also know you, Peter.’

  ‘All right, I suppose you win,’ I said grudgingly. ‘But I’m not going to waste the whole afternoon in a train. I can’t get to London in time to see you at the office, but I can get to your flat around eight.’

  ‘That will do admirably – in nice time for supper. See you this evening, then, Peter.’

  I put down the phone in disgust.

  *

  Ruth was philosophical about things. ‘It’s tough on you, Peter – if you like, it’s tough on us.’ she said. ‘But I can’t help feeling that it’s one way of paying debts in life. And I’m not going to run away.’

  We didn’t waste time over lunch, but spent three memorable hours on the river. I suppose it ought to have been a punt, but at a time when others of my generation were learning to punt on the Cam or Cherwell, I was at Sandhurst. And although I feel at home with all sorts and conditions of boat, I have never really taken happily to a punt-pole. So I hired a skiff, which not only gave me a spell of rowing to work off my bad temper, but the added bonus of looking at Ruth as she sat in the stern-sheets.

  *

  ‘I really am sorry about your leave. We shall make it up, of course,’ Sir Edmund said. ‘Celia has prepared a special supper for you, and I have a bottle of a truly distinguished Nahe wine. The vineyards of the Rhine and the Moselle are more famous, but there is a quality about the best vintages of the Nahe that is found nowhere else, I think.’ It was difficult to be cross with him for long.

  After supper we retired to his study and a bottle of twenty years old malt whisky, an East Coast malt, of course.

  *

  ‘Just over three months ago a rather interesting elderly man was found shot in a village in the Lambourn Valley, six or seven miles from Newbury,’ Sir Edmund said. ‘His name was Eustace Quenenden, and he had a reasonably distinguished career in the African colonial service before being axed when the territory in which he was serving acquired independence. It was the area formerly known as British Equatorial Africa, now the Republic of Mpuga. But old Quenenden was rather more than a painstaking District Commissioner. He had two major interests in life, in both of which he earned an international reputation. One was African and Oriental languages – his linguistic map of Central Africa is still unmatched. The other was botany, from which derived Quenenden’s Flora of Equatorial Africa, which, although published over twenty years ago, remains the standard work on the plant life of the region. He was, of course, an Oxford man, though a bit before my time. He was at Pembroke – more famous for having been attended by Dr Johnson, of the Dictionary and Boswell’s biography, but the college can be fairly proud of Quenenden. He was an Arabic scholar of distinction, and turned to the study of African languages when his job took him to Africa.

  ‘He retired, or rather, his job left him, in his fifties. He got a pension, and he seems to have had a bit of money of his own. He bought a cottage with about an acre of garden at Newton Blaize – that’s the village in the Lambourn valley where he died. He devoted his retirement to his garden and his greenhouse, apparently specialising in the propagation of tropical and subtropical plants, trying by selective breeding to adapt some of them for cultivation in England. It seems a harmless enough activity, yet he was undoubtedly murdered – he was found early one morning lying in his greenhouse, shot through the back of his head. The Wessex police have spent a lot of time on the case, but so far they have discovered nothing to suggest the identity of the murderer – they have not even been able to determine a motive for the murder. The cottage was ransacked, but there is no evidence of what, if anything, was taken. I have all the papers in a file for you, so I won’t go into them in detail. There is slight evidence that seedlings of some sort are missing from the greenhouse, but what they are or were remains a mystery.

  ‘Now I must digress. You know that I served for a time at the Foreign Office before being translated to the Home service and our present department. I have maintained a number of old friendships, and one of them is with Sir Giles Hewitt, who is now the Permanent Secretary. He and I were at Oxford together, and we joined the service at the same time. He has, I think, never quite forgiven me for leaving it, but that is by the by. And, who knows, had I stayed, would he now be Permanent Secretary? Well, that is just one of the “ifs” of diplomatic history! Last night Giles came to see me with a curious story. It concerns Meredith Boscombe, the present Minister of State, or number two, in the political hierarchy at the Office.

  ‘Boscombe has had an interesting, if some would hol
d it a rather chequered, career. His father was in the old Colonial Service, and Meredith Boscombe was born in what was then British Equatorial Africa. His father, who was a good deal older than Eustace Quenenden, is long dead, but conceivably they may have known each other at some period of their service. They can scarcely have been close friends, for old Boscombe would have been much senior to Quenenden, and in any case spent the latter part of his service in Hong Kong. Young Boscombe was sent to school in England in the traditional way, but he seems to have been a restless youth and did not go on to university. Instead, he went back to Equatorial Africa – it was still a British colony then – and tried his hand at coffee farming. The farm was not particularly successful, but young Boscombe made an exceedingly profitable marriage. It was also, given his background, an improbable marriage, for his bride was an East Indian girl called Gita, whose father, originally from Bombay, had built up a hugely lucrative business in merchanting and money-lending over much of central and east Africa. A few days after the marriage the girl’s father died, and Gita – who was the only child – inherited a fortune.

  ‘There was trouble over the inheritance, for some of Gita’s family claimed that her father had told them that he had disowned her for marrying without his consent, and that he had intended to leave her nothing. He had not, however, put any of this in writing, at any rate no document was ever found. Gita – or Boscombe – suggested a compromise: she would take only her father’s investments, leaving the African business to be owned and carried on by her uncles. This did not exactly pacify the family, but it satisfied them. Three weeks after a settlement on these lines had been drawn up and legally executed Gita herself died, and her inheritance came to Boscombe. It was considerable – around £600,000 in gold deposited in a Swiss bank, and in shares in British and South African companies.’