Death in the Greenhouse Read online

  ‘How did Gita – Mrs Boscombe – die?’ I asked.

  ‘She was drowned. Boscombe was trying to sell the coffee farm, but he and his wife were still living there. The land ran down to the Ga river, the great river that drains an enormous area of Central Africa and finally reaches the Gulf of Guinea a bit to the south of Cameroon. It also gives its name to Mpuga, which means, according to a monograph by Eustace Quenenden, “The Garden of Ga”, Ga being a deity symbolised by the river as well as the name of the river itself. The Boscombe farm was fairly remote, and apparently you had to cross the river to get to the nearest village where there was a store. The crossing was normally by canoe, and normally it was considered safe enough. But after rain the river could be dangerous, and it seems that Mrs Boscombe tried to cross too soon after heavy rain. Her canoe overturned. Her body was found about a mile downstream, and the overturned canoe a few hundred yards from the body.’

  ‘All this was a long time ago?’

  ‘Yes, about twenty years ago. Meredith Boscombe came back to England and with the substantial capital acquired from his wife went into business in the City. The rest is more recent history, the broad lines of which you will know – the success of Boscombe Securities, how Meredith Boscombe got into Parliament at a sensational by-election, held the seat at the next general election and, to the surprise of most political commentators, was given his present job at the Foreign Office in the Government reshuffle at the end of last year.’

  ‘Wasn’t there something rather smelly about Boscombe Securities?’

  ‘Well, they didn’t stay the darlings of the Stock Exchange that for a time they were – as the advertisements say, they could go down as well as up, and they suffered with a number of other such funds containing a large property element. They don’t exist any longer, for when he became an MP Meredith Boscombe sold his entire interest to the big All Seasons Trust, insisting that his name was no longer to be used. The old Boscombe Securities were amalgamated with the Trust, which as far as I know is wholly reputable as a financial institution. Boscombe is not on the board, and has played no part in business management since his election. He remains, of course, an extremely wealthy man.

  ‘So much for the background. Now for Giles Hewitt’s story. Last night he brought me this.’ Sir Edmund handed me a single sheet of poor quality notepaper, on which was written in irregular-sized capital letters,

  Now that your paid protector Eustace

  Quenenden has got what was coming to him

  you will have to deal with me. When I

  phone I shall say Brand speaking. Just

  listen.

  Sir Edmund went on, ‘That note was delivered in the ordinary post to Meredith Boscombe’s private house in Mayfair. He knew who Quenenden was because he’d known him in Africa, but, according to his statement to Giles Hewitt, had not seen him since.

  ‘Boscombe did nothing about the note at the time, and nothing happened for nearly three weeks. Then, near midnight, his phone rang, and a man’s voice said “Brand speaking”. The man went on to say that Boscombe would realise that his political career would be ruined if the truth about his wife’s death came out but that security could be purchased for one million pounds in untraceable used notes. Boscombe tried to say something like “Preposterous! I don’t know what you’re talking about”, but the voice on the phone went on (in his description to Hewitt) “like a record”. It said, as far as Boscombe can recall, “I am no fool, and I realise that it will take a little time for you to collect the notes. You will get further instructions later”. Then the caller rang off.’

  ‘Is his private telephone number listed in the directory?’

  ‘Yes, it is. He has always made a point in his election campaigns that an MP should be available to his constituents. In fact, his last election address said, “My phone number is in the book. If you think I can help, ring me”. He has a private office at his home, staffed by a secretary and two other girls. They deal with all phone calls during the day, and, on a rota system, staying on in turn, up to nine o’clock at night. There is an extension by his bedside, and if the phone rings late at night he answers it himself.’

  ‘So his caller knew that if he rang late at night he’d be likely to get Meredith Boscombe himself.’

  ‘Yes, but so do thousands of other people. And it’s a fairly obvious thing to do.’

  ‘Why didn’t he take the letter to the police as soon as it came?’

  ‘Because he didn’t want publicity. He says – and that’s true enough – that there are always plenty of people ready to rake up any sort of scandal about a politician.’

  ‘The police wouldn’t have gone rushing round to newspapers.’

  ‘No. You and I know that – any policeman worth his salt keeps a load of other people’s confidences. But things do get out, particularly from other politicians if they happen to be questioned. He hasn’t even been to the police now. After the blackmailing call he went to Giles Hewitt for advice.’

  ‘And the advice was?’

  ‘Well, Giles is a man of great correctness. His advice was that Boscombe should call in the police straightaway, but he jibbed at that, saying that he was afraid of making a fool of himself. Then Giles asked his permission to discuss the matter with me, and after some argument he agreed. That’s where we are now.’

  ‘Did Sir Giles question him in any detail?’

  ‘Giles is a very able chap – he’s not head of the Foreign Service for nothing. He knew that I would ask him a lot of questions, and he wanted to be well briefed.’

  ‘So he discovered how the late Eustace Quenenden came into it?’

  ‘Up to a point, but only up to a point. Quenenden was a District Commissioner, and Boscombe’s coffee farm was on the edge of the Otaro region, which was the name of Quenenden’s district. It was an enormous district, thousands of square miles in extent. As District Commissioner Quenenden was ex officio a magistrate, and as such he held an inquiry into Gita Boscombe’s death. According to Boscombe the conclusion reached was that her death was entirely accidental. There has not been time yet to verify his story, and it won’t be at all easy to check. It all happened twenty years ago in Central Africa; worse, in the early days of Mpugan independence there was considerable inter-tribal trouble, and in one of the disturbances the Otaro District Court House, with all its offices and most of its records, was burned down.’

  I looked again at the note. ‘The “paid protector” bit would imply that Quenenden was bribed in some way to produce a finding favourable to Boscombe.’

  ‘It might. Knowing something of the calibre of men in the old Colonial Service it seems inconceivable, but all things are possible. Giles was able to get hold of his personal file easily enough, and his record is impeccable. Of course, a successful bit of bribery would not show in a man’s record. You can read “paid protector” in another way, though. It might relate to Quenenden’s continued existence – as long as he was alive he could come forward to testify against any allegations of Boscombe’s complicity in his wife’s death. The “paid” could be a reference to Quenenden’s Colonial Service pension.’

  ‘There are plenty of people with warped minds, but that seems rather far-fetched. It’s one of the things that will have to be gone into – to look for unexplained additions to his income, for instance.’

  ‘The implication there would be that Meredith Boscombe does have something to hide.’

  ‘How do we know that he hasn’t?’

  ‘We don’t. One is naturally inclined to take the word of one of Her Majesty’s Ministers, albeit a junior Minister. His reluctance to go to the police may seem to count against him, but it can also be regarded as wholly understandable. Blackmail is a vile business, and however innocent a victim may be there is always the risk that some of the insinuations against him may stick, particularly if he is a man in public life, with political and perhaps financial enemies. The fact that Boscombe did go to Giles Hewitt indicates that he accepts that there w
ill have to be inquiries into his past. It’s up to us to be discreet, to do as little harm as possible to the career of a man whom we must assume at present to be innocent of a blackmailer’s charges.’

  ‘It’s not going to be easy. You say that Eustace Quenenden was murdered some three months ago. Why did the blackmailer wait so long before trying to put pressure on Boscombe? Then there is the murder of Quenenden himself: if the police have got nowhere in three months there doesn’t seem any obvious way of making a new attack on the case.’

  ‘The police did not know of the blackmailer.’

  ‘I can’t see that his mere existence gets us far. Does Boscombe suspect an act of revenge by his late wife’s family? Some members of the family may have nursed a grievance over all these years – apart from the money, the girl may be held to have dishonoured the family by marrying a European, by marrying out of her caste? If one took that line I suppose it might be possible to investigate a few suspects, members of the girl’s family who may have come to England.’

  ‘The point occurred to Giles – he is a diplomatist of long experience, and he has served in India. He did ask Boscombe about his late wife’s family, and, on Boscombe’s account it seems highly unlikely that they have anything to do with it. First, they are not Hindus, and although they objected to Gita’s marrying without her father’s consent they had no caste reasons against her marriage to a European: in their years of African trading, an uncle and two cousins have also married Europeans. More surprisingly, Boscombe is in touch with some members of his late wife’s family. On the expulsion of Indians from some of the new African states, some of Gita’s cousins came to England. He helped to set them up in business, and apparently is now regarded more as a benefactor than a villain. Again, there has not been time to check any of this, but it should be checkable.’

  ‘It doesn’t follow that all members of the family take the same view, but I agree that it makes murder for revenge seem less likely. And in any case, why murder the apparently harmless old Quenenden and not Boscombe? Still, it does open a new line of inquiry, of a sort. What, exactly, do you want me to do?’

  ‘I want you to take over the case for the department.’

  ‘But I’m on leave. I have a great many urgent personal affairs to deal with.’

  ‘Yes, Peter, I know . . . But the implications in this case are so damnable that I felt you would understand. You have, shall I say, a particular . . .’

  ‘Oh, let it go. At least you provide a decent whisky. I’ll have some more of it.’

  *

  That was how I became involved in the Quenenden case. On leaving Sir Edmund’s flat I wanted badly to talk to Ruth, but it was far too late to go back to Oxford, and I shuddered at the thought of trying to get her on the telephone at night. I had the bulky folder of papers that Sir Edmund had given me. They would have to be gone through some time, and it might as well be now. I got a taxi to the top of Fleet Street, and walked to my rooms in the Temple.

  Tiresome as it was to be dragged back from my leave, I began to be absorbed in the case. The unemotional police reports did scant justice to a vast amount of painstaking police work. The population of Newton Blaize was just under a thousand, scattered over a big area of fields and downland. Practically every one of them from a woman of ninety-seven to two four-year-old children had been interviewed, with next to nothing to show for it. The picture that emerged of Eustace Quenenden remained two-dimensional. He had been respected and liked as far as anyone knew anything about him, but that was not far, for nobody had known much. The vicar was the only person in the village with whom he seemed to have been on terms of more than nodding acquaintance, but that amounted only to a meal at the vicarage two or three times a year, hospitality scrupulously returned by dinner in a restaurant at Newbury. Mr Quenenden never entertained at home, but he was friendly enough if people called, offering sherry and biscuits. He seldom talked of Africa, and when he did it would be only to recount amusing little stories of his early days in the Colonial service. He would show people round his garden, and he was always ready to discuss a gardening problem, but the general opinion was that his advice, though usually helpful, tended to be ‘too scientific for ordinary folk’.

  The Wessex police had cast their net of inquiry far beyond the village. Doctors, veterinary surgeons, milkmen, anybody who might have been out on the roads early on that April morning had been called upon. One vet, on his way home from helping to deliver a foal at a rather isolated riding stables, had driven past Mr Quenenden’s cottage a little after five a.m. Shortly before getting to the cottage he had overtaken a tradesman’s van going in the same direction. He had thought nothing of it, had not kept the van under observation in his mirror, and had no idea whether it had stopped or not. He recalled vaguely that it seemed to be a greyish colour, but had no recollection of seeing any firm’s name on it. A notice in the local papers asking anyone who had been out with a van in the vicinity of Newton Blaize early that morning to get in touch with the police brought no response. That meant little. It was conceivable that the van had some connection with the events at Vine Cottage, but it was more probable that the driver had not seen the local papers, or that he was not a local man.

  The police had naturally been interested in the substantial and somewhat surprising bequest to Miss Sutherland and had made discreet inquiries about her. A more blameless life could scarcely be imagined. She had gone from school to Manchester University, where she had taken a degree in English. After qualifying at a teachers’ training college she had taught for four years at a mission school in what was still British Equatorial Africa. She left some time before the colony became independent, returned to England and got a job with the Lancashire Education Authority. She was an excellent teacher, and progressed steadily from being Assistant English Mistress at a big secondary school to becoming head of her department. When the school was reorganised for comprehensive education she was appointed headmistress. She lived by herself in a small house a few miles from the school, driving to and from work in a Mini. Her chief private interest was music, but even that was partly an educational interest, for she had built up a school orchestra and choir considered to be among the best in the north of England. She appeared to have no financial problems, to live comfortably on her salary and to be able to afford a holiday abroad each year, spent mostly in attending musical festivals in Germany, Austria and Italy. A note at the end of the file on her said that it was understood that she was giving up her job and planned to live at Newton Blaize.

  By the time I had finished going through the police reports it was getting on for two a.m., but I was more interested than sleepy. I made a pot of coffee and considered what to do. It seemed improbable that I could achieve anything that the police investigation had not, but the police had known nothing of the strange links between death at Vine Cottage in the peaceful Berkshire countryside and the Minister of State at the Foreign Office. Apart from that there seemed hardly any loose ends. But something nagged me from the papers I’d been studying. For a time I could not think what it was, then I turned back to the interview with the vet about the van. He could recall having seen no lettering on it. Was that a little unusual? In my experience, if you overtake a van you don’t take any particular notice of it, but you are conscious of its general appearance, of some firm’s name painted on it. You may not take in the name of the firm, but you generally have a mental image of something written on the vehicle. Completely plain vans are not all that common – could this, perhaps, have been a hired van? The police didn’t seem to have made any inquiries among van-renting concerns. Did it matter? Probably not – the vet’s statement may have been simply a matter of phrasing, meaning that he could not remember having seen any advertising slogan or firm’s name on the van he passed. It might just be worth seeing him again, to try to find out more precisely what he did remember.

  That was a detail. More important was, what should be my own entry to the case? In a sense I was not – or not yet –c
oncerned with the murder at Newton Blaize. My job was to investigate the attempted blackmail of the Minister of State at the Foreign Office. That seemed bound to involve consideration of the Quenenden murder, but my starting point would have to be with Meredith Boscombe. What did I know of him?

  Not much. I am not a political animal, and while I vote dutifully at elections and try to keep myself roughly informed about what is going on, I have more contempt for than interest in the party-political dogfight. Certainly I knew nothing against Meredith Boscombe – indeed, if I had thought about it, I should have said that he was among the less awful of our political masters. He belonged to neither of the main parties, and, as Sir Edmund had reminded me, he had got into Parliament at a by-election that attracted much attention at the time, standing for a smallish group called the Popular Democrats. They were not a fringe group of lunatics, stood for pragmatic, middle-of-the-road policies, and had won a fair amount of support from the less dogmatic members of the Labour and Conservative parties, and even a few Liberals. They looked as if they had come to stay in politics, and had about twenty MPs. Small as their Parliamentary force was, it had become important when the so-called All-Party Government was formed, a loose coalition with a substantial Opposition of members entrenched in old party positions. The support of the Popular Democrats enabled the Government to survive, and naturally they had been rewarded with office. Boscombe’s promotion had been one of the surprises of the last reshuffle, but on the whole it had gone down well, many people feeling that the Prime Minister was both strengthening his present administration and preparing for the future by bringing forward an able new man to take his chance. Boscombe was in his middle forties, young enough in political terms to have a fine career ahead of him.

  I had never heard of his marriage. There was no reason why I should have heard of it, but a lot had been written about him in the papers and it seemed a trifle odd that the romantic tragedy of his youth had not been brought up. He was regarded in the gossip columns as a highly eligible bachelor, rich, good-looking, and with at least some of the glittering prizes of politics within his grasp.