Death in the Greenhouse Read online

  A further look downstairs bore out the impression that while Miss Sutherland was obviously not in the cottage, she had not intended to be away long. There was milk and butter in the refrigerator, fresh peas and broad beans in a vegetable rack, and a bowl of strawberries on the dresser. ‘Came from the garden I daresay, but she’d scarcely have picked them if she’d planned to go away,’ the inspector said. ‘Or if she’d been going to stay with friends, she’d have taken them with her.’

  There wasn’t much to search in the cottage, but we looked inside cupboards and wardrobes that might have concealed a trussed body, finding nothing in the least out of the ordinary. Then we turned to the garden. It was a big garden of at least half an acre, and as neat as Mr Quenenden had left it – Miss Sutherland may not have had his knowledge of botany, but she was clearly a devoted gardener. I was naturally interested in the greenhouse, which had figured so largely in the papers on the case. ‘Looks different, somehow,’ the inspector said. ‘Yes, she’s made it all much simpler – this is more the sort of greenhouse that I and my neighbours know about. The rare plants seem to have gone. Of course it’s June now and it was April then, but she cut down or turned off the heating. And I didn’t hear the alarm bell ring in the cottage when we opened the door. You try it again while I go inside to the bedroom.’ He went back to the cottage and called to me from the bedroom window. I opened and shut the greenhouse door two or three times, and then he came back. ‘The alarm system and the dials for temperature and humidity have been disconnected,’ he said. ‘She may have been bothered about the electricity bills, or maybe she just had no use for the equipment. I wonder what she did with the plants. Maybe we could find out through one of the botanical societies that old Quenenden belonged to – or more simply just ask Miss Sutherland when she comes back.’

  V

  A Trip North

  BUT MISS SUTHERLAND didn’t come back. I left it to the inspector to keep ringing the cottage, and to send men morning and afternoon to knock at the door. Milk and newspapers continued to be delivered, but Miss Sutherland was not there to receive them. After two days of this we had a conference with the Chief Constable of the Wessex force.

  ‘In the light of the still unexplained nature of Mr Quenenden’s death one cannot help fearing for Miss Sutherland,’ the Chief Constable said, ‘but it is extraordinarily hard to know what to do. There is no sign of forcible entry to the cottage, no sign of any struggle or disturbance inside it. There is no evidence whatever of any crime. Nobody has reported Miss Sutherland’s disappearance, or expressed any anxiety about her.’

  ‘That may be because she doesn’t yet know many people in this district, and her former friends in Lancashire simply think of her as having moved down here,’ I said.

  ‘True. I understand that you have seen her lawyer. What does he say?’

  ‘He is the same Mr Predell, a well-known Oxford solicitor, who acted for Mr Quenenden. I called on him yesterday. He says that Miss Sutherland is a competent, sensible woman, who has acted efficiently and promptly in everything connected with the winding up of Mr Quenenden’s estate. He does not know her well – she asked him to act for her over Mr Quenenden’s will, and he knows her only as a client, with no personal knowledge of her background. When I told him that she had failed to keep an appointment at Vine Cottage made with me he expressed mild surprise, saying that it seemed unlike her, but he didn’t attach much importance to it. There must, he thought, have been some misunderstanding.’

  ‘Are you sure there wasn’t?’

  ‘As sure as one can be in such matters. I telephoned her from Oxford, explained who I was, and asked if she could find it convenient to see me. She was perfectly friendly, and herself suggested that I should call at eleven o’clock. I suggested that she should ring Inspector Rosyth to check my credentials but she gave a little laugh and said that she was prepared to trust me, or something like that. I told her that it would be wiser to call the police about me, and left it at that. I gather that she didn’t ring the inspector.’

  ‘No, she certainly didn’t ring here. I was on duty that evening, and there was no call from her, nor is there any record of a call when I wasn’t available,’ the inspector said. ‘What time would you say it was when you telephoned Vine Cottage?’

  ‘About half-past six, or thereabouts. I rang as soon as I’d signed into the hotel where you’d booked a room for me.’

  ‘So she had plenty of time to change her mind and make another appointment. Did you give her a number to ring back?’

  ‘No. I didn’t particularly want to tell her that I was speaking from a hotel in Oxford. I said rather vaguely that I was a Home Office official concerned with certain aspects of Mr Quenenden’s death, and that Inspector Rosyth could vouch for me. I gave her the inspector’s name because she had met him several times, and he was local. If she’d wanted to change the time of the appointment the obvious thing would have been to ring Inspector Rosyth and ask him to get in touch with me. She’s said to be an intelligent woman, and that’s what any normally intelligent person would have done.’

  ‘From the newspaper and letters left lying on the mat it would appear that she had gone out early, perhaps even overnight. Do you think she was anxious to avoid any further questioning?’

  ‘I haven’t the slightest idea. As far as one can tell from someone else’s manner on the telephone she had no objection to my calling on her. She did say that she doubted if she could tell me anything of value, but I didn’t enlarge on what I wanted to ask her about – merely thanked her and said I was sure that she could be helpful. She was in no hurry to put the phone down. If anything, I got a slight impression that she was rather bored, and not at all sorry to have a visitor.’

  ‘For a woman who’d been a busy headmistress, that would make sense. Yet she wasn’t there for your visit. She could have discussed your phone call with someone else, of course, and then decided to go away. But why?’

  ‘And why not stop the milk and papers? And why leave all that fresh food in the kitchen?’

  The Chief Constable ran his hand through his hair in a worried little gesture. ‘It’s no crime to go away, and if a woman does decide to go away for a few days it’s really no business of the police to start looking for her,’ he said. ‘But every aspect of this case is disquieting. The general condition of the cottage strongly suggests that Miss Sutherland had no intention of leaving it, and we must face the fact that some harm may have befallen her. I feel that we’ve got to act, but as I said earlier, it’s a puzzle to know what to do. Searching these wooded areas for a body is an enormous undertaking, and with no evidence about where to look more than likely to be fruitless. What do you feel about publicity? If we got a story about her disappearance in the newspapers and on the radio it might bring information from someone who has seen her. And if she has gone away normally it would make her get in touch with us to stop any further alarm.’

  This worried me. ‘If I may say so, the last thing we want at the moment is publicity. Miss Sutherland may be in possession of information of major importance to Mr Quenenden’s murder. What that information is we do not know, nor do we know who else may be interested in it. There are the documents she obtained from the bank. I have wondered whether she might have gone off because she didn’t want to be asked about them, but she can’t have known that we had any knowledge of them. I said nothing about them on the phone, and she can’t know of my visit to the bank manager. To make sure of this I saw the man again – I thought it just possible that he might have felt it his duty to a customer to ring up and tell her what he had disclosed to me. He assures me that he has done no such thing. Therefore she cannot have known what I wanted to question her about. Conceivably, she may have just feared questioning, in which case her disappearance is certainly significant and needs to be cleared up. Or she may be wholly innocent of any wish to avoid questioning, which makes her disappearance still more sinister. If we give it publicity we alert everyone to our new interest in Miss S
utherland herself, as distinct from our continuing interest in the unsolved murder of Mr Quenenden. I agree with you in taking a grave view of Miss Sutherland’s disappearance, but I feel that whatever we do must be done with the utmost discretion.’

  There was silence for a bit. Then the inspector said, ‘I think, sir, that Colonel Blair is right.’

  The Chief Constable was not a petty man, and what might have been an awkward disagreement turned out all right. ‘Oh yes, I don’t doubt that,’ he said. ‘I confess I hadn’t thought of things in quite those terms, but that’s because I haven’t been nearly so close to the case, and the personalities involved. I agree now that there must be no publicity, and that’s another reason for not mounting a big police search. But it’s difficult to make inquiries at all without arousing at least local interest.’

  ‘May I suggest that we invent another woman who’s disappeared?’ I said. ‘She will have Miss Sutherland’s description, of course, but we can call her anything you like – say Mrs Jill Brown. She’ll have to be a bit more serious than a missing wife, I think, to justify considerable police attention – let’s say she’s absconded from a women’s open prison where she was serving a sentence – oh, for deception with stolen cheques. We needn’t be too precise about the prison – let it be just in the north of England. She’s believed to have friends in this part of the world, but her offences were committed in Manchester and Liverpool. The police can reasonably issue a description of her. Miss Sutherland did not go off in her own car, so we can ask if anyone recalls having seen a woman of her description at a bus stop, or if any motorist gave her a lift. We can also ask in shops, and since cheque frauds tend to be repeated, shopkeepers will be interested in trying to remember if they’ve seen her.’

  The Chief Constable laughed. ‘I think I’m rather glad that you’re on our side of the law, Colonel Blair,’ he said. ‘I take it that you can arrange with the Home Office not – er – to dispute our small deception?’

  I undertook to see to this, and the Chief Constable went on, ‘You mentioned cheques in a fraudulent sense – it might be helpful to pursue some real ones. If Miss Sutherland is alive she must have money, and even if she is being held somewhere against her will her kidnappers may force her to sign cheques. Do you think your friend the bank manager could let us know if any cheques of hers dated after the evening of your telephone call turn up? Banks are reluctant – properly enough – to disclose details of their customers’ accounts. We can get powers to compel disclosure, but it’s quite a formidable process. It would be much simpler if your man would help us unofficially.’

  ‘I can ask him, anyway. It may mean telling him that we are slightly concerned about Miss Sutherland, but I can give him a different reason. She has inherited a considerable amount of money, and I can say that we are on the track of a confidence trickster who specialises in getting money out of women in her position. She has an executor’s account at the Oxford bank, but I don’t know if she has a personal account there. If she hasn’t, it will obviously be more difficult and you may need more formal authority.’

  ‘Well, have a go. But don’t say that I put you up to it.’

  ‘My boss, Sir Edmund Pusey, sometimes says that my chief value to the department is that I can be disowned if necessary.’

  The Chief Constable looked at his watch. ‘I know that policemen are not supposed to drink on duty, but I have some excellent Scotch in my cupboard – for visitors, of course. And surely you are a visitor, Colonel Blair.’

  ‘Inspector Rosyth and I are both visiting you, sir,’ I said.

  *

  It seemed to me that I could do nothing particularly useful by staying on round Newbury, and that it was time I got back to Meredith Boscombe’s affairs. I also thought that I’d make a trip to Lancashire and see if I could pick up anything of Miss Sutherland’s background from people who had known her as a schoolmistress. Shasta Chand, the East Indian cousin who was now a travel agent had his business near Coventry, and I could fit in a visit to him on my way north. Before leaving Oxford I had another word with the bank manager, who undertook to let Inspector Rosyth know of any cheques drawn on the executor’s account. I telephoned Sir Edmund Pusey to tell him of my movements, and learned that there had been no further communication from the man who called himself Brand.

  I considered whether to telephone Shasta Chand in advance of my visit, but decided not to. I didn’t want to worry him or give him time to work out a prepared statement for me.

  Seeing him was easier than I had expected. I went to the address of his travel agency, and found a small single-fronted shop, neatly painted and with a window full of bright travel posters. Inside there was a normal office counter with several telephones on it, attended by two girl clerks, one Asian and one English. At a table behind the counter a youngish East Indian man was seated, writing in a ledger. I asked one of the girls if I could see Mr Shasta Chand, but there was no need for her to reply: the office was small, and the man seated behind the counter heard my request. He got up and came to the counter. ‘I am Shasta Chand,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you, sir?’

  ‘I have been given your name as someone who may be able to help me,’ I said. ‘Is there somewhere I could have a word with you in private?’

  He lifted a flap in the counter and led the way into a small office opening from the back of the shop. Like the shop, it was clean, neat and tidy, and so was Shasta Chand. He went over to a desk, and indicated a chair for me. ‘What is the occasion of your visit, sir?’ he asked.

  He had a warmth of personality about him that Indians often have, as if they are more ready than the rest of us to treat strangers as fellow human beings. I took a chance and said, ‘Would it shock you if I told you that I represented the police?’

  ‘It would not shock me. I know that many duties fall to the English police, but I am not conscious of having done anything to invite a visit from the police.’

  ‘You haven’t. Do you by any chance recall reading in the newspapers some two or three months back of the murder of a retired Colonial official who had served in Equatorial Africa when it was a British colony? His name was Eustace Quenenden.’

  ‘Equatorial Africa, now Mpuga, was my home, but I know nothing of Mr Quenenden. I do not read newspapers much – I cannot afford them. I want the money for my business. I was expelled from Mpuga, sir, in common with many of my race. That is why I have come to live in England. I need the business to support my family.’

  ‘It looks quite a prosperous business. I hope it does well,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘It is easy to lose money with a travel agency, but if you are not greedy, and work hard, it is possible to make a profit. We Indians from Africa are accustomed to work hard, and I think many of us are good businessmen. I am more fortunate than some. I had a good education, I have a law degree, and I have friends who helped me with my business. It is hard to live now, but in three years – five years – ten years, I think I have a much bigger business. But what has this to do with the death of the man you spoke of?’

  ‘As I explained, he was an official in the old British Colony of Equatorial Africa. We think that his death may relate to events going far back in the past, and may concern a Mr Meredith Boscombe, whom I think you do know.’

  His manner changed, and he spoke more sharply. ‘I told you, sir, that I have a law degree. I do not know who you are, and I am not prepared to discuss third parties. I need advice from my English solicitor. I shall give you his name, and then if you have official business, and wish to approach me, it can be done through him.’

  He took a sheet of notepaper from a rack on his desk and began to write. I got out the identity card with my photograph on it that I carry, and offered it to him. ‘You will see,’ I said, ‘that I belong to a branch of the security service. You are entitled to consult a solicitor if you wish, but that may mean that I shall have to come back accompanied by a uniformed policeman, and it will waste much time – perhaps valuable time. Look
, let me talk to you for a bit – you are not committing yourself to anything by listening. If you will hear me out I think you will understand why I need to talk to you, and how you can help.’

  He said nothing, but he had stopped writing and was looking at me. I went on, ‘Mr Meredith Boscombe is a distinguished Member of Parliament who was promoted not long ago to a post in the Government. He has also been a highly successful financier. He may have political or personal enemies. Such men often have, though in his case I do not know of any. I do know that he has received an anonymous threat to harm him. It may, of course, be the work of some crank or lunatic, but such threats have always to be taken seriously. Mr Boscombe himself told me that you and your brother are cousins of his late wife Gita, and that he helped you to establish your business in England. I am making no allegations against you, and know nothing to your discredit – rather the other way, because in most difficult circumstances you seem to be making a gallant effort to restore your life after what must have been the shattering blow of expulsion from your homeland. I understand – again from Mr Boscombe himself – that his marriage did not please members of his late wife’s family at the time. We are going back twenty years, and there are few people who can be expected to have personal knowledge of matters affecting your own family and Mr Boscombe all those years ago. You will realise that it is necessary to eliminate everyone we can from the threat to Mr Boscombe. That is why I have come to you.’