Death in the Greenhouse Page 6

  ‘What happened when a doctor examined the body?’

  ‘There wasn’t any doctor – I’m talking about a remote area of Central Africa. Everyone knew that Gita was dead, they were sorry for me and wanted to help. In that part of the world you can’t leave bodies unburied for long. The village carpenter made a coffin, we put Gita into it that night, and next morning the coffin was paddled up to the Christian Mission in a big canoe. I’d sent a runner there with a letter explaining what had happened, and asking if one of the Mission priests would conduct the funeral. Of course he did, and Gita was buried in the Mission graveyard.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a Mission doctor?’

  ‘Yes. There was a small hospital, but it was run mostly by Mission-trained nurses and dispensers. There was only one doctor, and he was away at the time.’

  ‘Didn’t you feel that someone in authority ought to have known what happened?’

  ‘What did happen? I’ve thought about it endlessly, and come to no conclusion. I assumed at the time, and think still, that the bullet must have been meant for me. But why? We were on good terms with all our people at the farm, and none of them would have wanted to hurt us. And if the bullet was meant for me, why wasn’t there another shot when I wasn’t hit?’

  ‘Whoever it was might think that the river would do the job.’

  ‘Yes, but why? At the time I thought that some of Gita’s family might have commissioned somebody to murder me, but I don’t know – I think they weren’t really like that.’

  ‘You have not explained why you allowed the cause of death to be covered up.’

  ‘My dear Colonel, you are forgetting the position I was in! I had recently married Gita, against her family’s wishes, and only a few weeks before her father had died suddenly, leaving her his heir. There was an all too obvious motive for me to murder Gita. And at that time her family would have done their best to press any charge against me – they were fairly powerful in the Colony then.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘After the funeral I went to Fort Edward to see Quenenden. He had known my father, and he was sympathetic and nice to me. I told him that the canoe had upset and that when I recovered Gita’s body from the river she was dead.’

  ‘And he just accepted it? I gather that you told Sir Giles that he had held an inquiry into her death.’

  ‘He did. He came back with me to the farm, I showed him where the canoe had gone over, and he went across to the village. Then he summoned what we used to call a daba – that’s a sort of public gathering. He could speak the Otaro language, you see, even the village dialect. People who had seen us go into the river came forward and said so, and the men who had paddled after us told their story. They told how they’d seen me drag Gita from the river, that they could see she was dead, and had given me a blanket to wrap her in. After that Quenenden had no doubt about what had happened, and he gave me an official certificate that Gita had died from drowning accidentally.’

  ‘He didn’t think the funeral had been rather quick?’

  ‘No. It had to be like that.’

  His voice still had that dream-like quality in it. He wasn’t sitting in a grand room at the Foreign Office, he was remote in the African bush. I had gently to bring him back to the present.

  ‘You said that nobody but you knew that your wife had been shot. Yet the mere fact of her death cannot explain the attempt to blackmail you now.’

  ‘I don’t see how anybody else could know. There was nobody else there.’

  ‘There must have been at least one other person – whoever fired the shot.’

  He looked up, sharply. ‘Then you think that the man who called himself Brand on the telephone is the man who murdered Gita?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think – I am trying to help you to sort out anything that we can call a fact. If everything you have said is an accurate memory, then by the mere process of elimination it would seem at least possible that the man who is blackmailing you now is the man who fired on you then.’

  He went back to the past. ‘I thought endlessly about it. Why did he say nothing? If he was after me, he could probably have got me tried for murder, which would have been as good from his point of view as shooting me.’

  ‘His note accuses the late Mr Quenenden of being paid to protect you. Perhaps he thought that with Mr Quenenden on your side he couldn’t get anywhere.’

  ‘Then he didn’t know Eustace Quenenden. He was the most upright old boy who ever lived.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t know him, or maybe he had some entirely different object in view, not even concerned with you directly. Try to think hard, really hard. Who of all the people you knew at that time might take a chance to try to get money out of you now?’

  ‘I have thought, and there isn’t anybody.’

  ‘What about your wife’s family? You said you didn’t think that any of them would actually have tried to kill you, but you can’t be sure. Some member of the family may have wanted vengeance then, and see a chance of getting it now. What happened to the family over the past twenty years? Do you know where any of them are at present?’

  ‘I know a bit, yes. Poor devils, most of them haven’t done too well. With Africanisation after the old Colony became independent they were thrown out. They had plenty of money in the Colony, but they weren’t allowed to take much of it out, and their businesses were more or less expropriated – sold for a song, anyway. There’s an old uncle still alive – he and one of his sons went to the West Indies, where their old merchanting trade had ramifications. Two of Gita’s cousins came here. They are both professional men, one a dentist, the other a lawyer. I knew about them – in fact the dentist wrote to me about his chances of getting a practice in England. He had qualified in India, quite good qualifications, but he had to be registered before he could practise here. I was able to help him, both with getting the necessary English qualification, and financially, to keep him and his family while they were waiting. He is now in practice near Birmingham. I helped his brother, too. He is not practising as a lawyer, but he is an able businessman, and I provided him with the money to buy a small travel agency, also in the Midlands, where he is doing quite well. They are the only two in England. Far from wanting to harm me, I think they feel genuinely grateful to me. Certainly I have no feelings against them.’

  ‘They would have been children at the time of your wife’s death?’

  ‘Teenagers. One is now around thirty-eight, the other between thirty-five and thirty-six.’

  ‘They would be the sons of one of your wife’s father’s brothers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The money she inherited and passed on to you, all invested outside the Colony, would have been immensely valuable to them now.’

  ‘Yes, but it wasn’t quite like that at the time. Gita brought me a considerable sum of money, but it was nothing like as valuable as the business, businesses, I should say. I could have owned the business, too, or most of it. At her own suggestion before she died I surrendered all interest in this quite voluntarily. In the circumstances the uncles did quite well – their own lawyer certainly thought so.’

  I asked if I could have the names and addresses of the cousins in England. ‘Certainly. I have them in my diary,’ he said. He took a pad of notepaper from a drawer of his desk and copied them from the diary for me. The dentist was called Ram Das Chand, the lawyer now a travel agent, Shasta Chand. I put the addresses in my own pocketbook and said, ‘You have an appointment at noon, and there isn’t much more time. I want to talk about your telephone at home. We can easily arrange for the number to be changed at once, and for the line with the existing number to be transferred to New Scotland Yard, where we can keep a twenty-four-hour listening watch for the next time your caller rings.’

  ‘I don’t like that. What about all my constituency calls? Besides, the man who called himself Brand would probably recognise my voice and be suspicious at once if I didn’t answer.’

  ‘Those are good
points, but we’d like a watch kept on your phone all the same. I don’t want to send a man to your house, because your staff would wonder what he was doing. Would you mind if we had an extension to the nearest police station? Then we can keep a listening watch, but our observer will say nothing. It would mean, I’m afraid, having your personal calls monitored as well.’

  ‘That doesn’t worry me. Go ahead with whatever arrangements you like. What do you want me to do if the man Brand telephones again?’

  ‘Precisely what would you do if no one was listening to the call. We can’t plan what you should say, because we don’t know what he may say. If he dictates arrangements for the delivery of money to him, say that you will consider them, but that he must ring back at a given time in the afternoon of the following day. We shall know what you have been asked to do, and can act accordingly.’

  ‘Well, Colonel Blair, I can’t exactly say that you have comforted me, but it’s an enormous relief to have been able to talk to you. Do you have to tell Sir Giles of the points on which I – er – somewhat misled him?’

  ‘At the moment I have no intention of doing so and it may never be necessary. I must ask you, though, to trust my discretion about the action to be taken on what you have told me.’

  ‘I don’t see that I’ve much choice.’

  I got up. ‘This has been a hellish interview for you. You have responded, if I may say so, with both patience and courage.’

  ‘Thank you, Colonel.’ He tried to smile, succeeded rather bleakly, and I left.

  IV

  Newbury

  LEAVING THE FOREIGN OFFICE just before midday left me in good time to get to Newbury in the early afternoon. I had a quick word with Sir Edmund before leaving, and asked him to arrange for an extension or duplicate line to Meredith Boscombe’s telephone, for it to be manned by a police watch, and for all conversations to be recorded. I also asked him to telephone the Wessex police for me. He is good at these things, and uses his considerable charm to soothe potentially ruffled feelings in advance.

  I had gone down by train when I went to Oxford to see Ruth, for Oxford is an appalling place to be encumbered with a car. But I needed a car now, so I drove to Newbury, a straightforward trip almost all of it on the M4 motorway. On the way I thought over what I had heard from Meredith Boscombe. His reluctance to tell the whole truth to the Permanent Secretary of the Department of which he was one of the political heads was understandable, but had he told the truth to me? I thought that probably he had, up to a point, but I was far from sure where that point was. The story as told to me would explain an attempt to blackmail Boscombe, but it did nothing to explain the murder of Eustace Quenenden. I still did not see how he came into things. As a District Officer and magistrate in what had been a British Colony he had played a small official part twenty years ago in investigating Mrs Boscombe’s death, but that was all, and how his own life could have safeguarded Boscombe, or his own death threatened Boscombe, remained a mystery. Having heard Meredith Boscombe’s story it might seem that the Quenenden investigation had been a bit perfunctory, but Quenenden had heard from Boscombe a quite different story, he had no reason to disbelieve him, and – so far as it counted in his mind – Boscombe was the son of an old service friend. The inquiry in the village by the river had produced ample evidence to corroborate the main outlines of Boscombe’s account of his wife’s death. Moreover, Quenenden was a linguist, talking to the villagers in their own tongue, and he would not have missed anything that seemed suspicious. In the circumstances the inquiry, and the finding, were quite reasonable.

  How much of all of this should I disclose to the local police? My instinct was to be frank, but Meredith Boscombe was a fairly prominent politician and even in discussions with the police I felt a little bound by my undertaking to be discreet. I decided to leave this problem to solve itself as it came up.

  I got to Newbury shortly before three, was received politely by the superintendent and introduced by him to Inspector Rosyth as the officer directly in charge of the case. Then he left us together. I could feel that the inspector was distinctly nervous, and I did my best to reassure him.

  ‘You must find it highly irritating to have outsiders barging in on your case,’ I said. ‘I can but apologise. As my boss, Sir Edmund Pusey, explained to your people when he telephoned about me, the Foreign Office is now somewhat involved in the late Mr Quenenden’s affairs, and as our Police Liaison Department exists to act in cases where a number of different authorities are concerned it was inevitable that we should be called in. I must add that there’s no criticism of anything you have done. I was studying your papers most of last night, and your investigation seems to me to be exemplary.’

  ‘It is good of you to say so, sir,’ the inspector said, ‘but the fact remains that we’ve got nowhere. I’m sorry if I seem a bit nervous – but I am rather nervous. I understand that you are very much top brass, and I’ve had no experience of dealing with your department. The nearest I’ve come to the Special Branch was helping to guard a school during a royal visit when I was a sergeant. I’ve never met a police officer with the rank of colonel before.’

  ‘That’s because I’m not a proper policeman. I am actually in the Army, but some years ago I was seconded to the Home Office for liaison work with Sir Edmund Pusey’s outfit. We do what we can, but for real police work we depend on the real police. But let’s stop talking about me and talk about the case. I’ve come here to meet you – to get your impressions and feelings about things. A feeling, or an instinct, or whatever you like to call it, which often can’t be put in an official report, is worth a whole library of documents.’

  ‘I don’t know about instincts – it’s more a matter of questions I can’t see any answer to.’ The inspector spoke more cheerfully. ‘Sheep-stealing, arson on farms, assaults outside pubs, and the occasional sad case of a wife killing a drunken husband, are mostly what we get round here. The Quenenden case is rare because he had no enemies as far as we could ever find out, and he was shot by a pistol. If we get a shooting, it’s generally done with a twelve bore.’

  ‘What stands out in your mind about the case?’

  ‘The mess in the cottage, I think. There was no need for it. Mr Quenenden was killed as far as we can make out around six o’clock in the morning, or perhaps a bit earlier. There was heat in the greenhouse which delayed the normal cooling of a body, and the doctor thinks he may have been shot before six – say some time between five and six. Whoever shot him had plenty of time to go through the cottage. He didn’t have to break in – Mr Quenenden had left the door open behind him when he went out to the greenhouse. It’s hard to explain the mess if you didn’t see it – it was a sort of brutal mess, if you know what I mean, books, papers from the desk, things chucked everywhere. And the smashing of the desk itself was a horrible job – he’d found a chopper in the kitchen, and seems to have gone at the desk in some kind of frenzy. Actually, most of the drawers weren’t locked. Two of them were, but the keys were on a key ring beside Mr Quenenden’s bed.’

  ‘He didn’t think to look for keys.’

  ‘Why not? He’d thought of a lot of other things. He wanted Mr Quenenden in the greenhouse, and he knew just how to get him there – by opening the greenhouse door. It was an elaborate job, that greenhouse. Mr Quenenden was taking no chances of cold air getting in – if the door opened for any reason it rang an alarm bell in his bedroom. You can’t find out that by accident. Someone had obviously studied the place, and made careful preparations. There’s a big French currant bush just to the left of the door, and from what we can tell of the probable path of the bullet the man who fired it was standing by the bush. He could have been behind it when Mr Quenenden came out so that he couldn’t be seen, then slipped to one side and shot him as soon as he was safely in the greenhouse. He was a cool customer, knew just what he was going to do, and did it. The mess in the cottage looked more like the work of someone who lost his head. The two things don’t add up.’


  ‘That’s good observation and sharp reasoning,’ I said. ‘Of course, it may have been meant like that.’

  ‘Meant to look like two people involved?’

  ‘Yes. Or the mess in the cottage may have been meant to draw attention away from something else. Or the man may indeed have lost his nerve – when you’ve just shot somebody in cold blood the psychological effect may be considerable. We can’t discount anything. The important thing is that you noticed the apparent discrepancy. Your report makes no suggestion of what might have been taken from the cottage. Have you any ideas on that?’

  ‘Not really, sir, because we don’t know what was there to be taken. It seems fairly clear that the chap wasn’t out for money. From the attack on the desk and the books scattered from the shelves it looks as though he was after some book or document. But what it was I don’t see how one can even guess.’

  ‘And we don’t know if he found what he was looking for . . . Has there been anything to indicate any further attempt to get into the cottage?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. For the first week after the murder we had a man on duty all the time, and I don’t think anyone could have got in. After that Miss Sutherland took over and the place was tidied up. She got a friend – a retired teacher, I think – to stay with her for a bit and she’s living there on her own now. She’s not reported any incident.’

  ‘I shall have to go to see her. Is the cottage on the phone?’

  ‘Yes, sir, It’s in the book, still under Mr Quenenden’s name.’

  *

  I asked about the vet who’d remembered passing a van not far from the cottage. The inspector had interviewed the vet himself, and his recollection was that the man’s memory was of seeing no lettering on the van, not of lettering that he didn’t take in. ‘It’s a good point, though I didn’t think anything of it at the time,’ he said. ‘Now you mention it I can see that it may be important. I’ll talk to him again this evening – he’s a Newbury man, and he has a surgery in the evenings. He’ll be out on his calls now – he’s got two partners, and they cover a big area. My impression was that when he said he could recall no lettering on the van he meant that it was a plain van, but I’ll find out just what he did mean. I ought to have thought of the possibility of a hired van myself, but I’m afraid I didn’t.’