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‘Where had she been going?’ asked Sloan.

The woman reached into the pocket of her apron, produced an old envelope and proffered it to the two policemen. On it was a word that began with the letters ‘Carmarthen’ and then trailed off into an almost illegible scribble, finishing with the signature ‘Enid Osgathorp’. ‘Search me. Mind you,’ she added fairly, ‘she doesn’t always tell me where she’s going, me not being someone
to go about much. Proper traveller she’s been since the old doctor died.’ She sniffed. ‘I daresay he left her something.’

‘The old doctor?’ queried Sloan.

The woman looked surprised that he needed to ask. ‘Doctor Heddon, of course. Everyone knew him. Was our doctor out here at Pelling for years and Miss Osgathorp was his secretary and receptionist all the time he was here. Knew everyone, both of them.’

Sloan paused for a moment, seeking a tactful way to put his next question. He decided there wasn’t one. ‘Did she leave you a key to her house?’

The woman shook her head, unoffended. ‘No. I was glad about that. She used to say “Norah, you don’t want to be worried about my little old cottage. If it burns down, it burns down, and if burglars get in they won’t find all that much there to take and I’m not leaving a key with anyone else either”.’

Detective Inspector Sloan forbore to say that that aspect of theft hadn’t deterred a lot of housebreakers he had known. He didn’t mention either the feeling of outrage left behind by intruders, often worse than any loss of valuables. Instead he dispatched Crosby to take a look round the outside of the cottage next door.

The woman was still going on about her neighbour. ‘Miss Osgathorp always said what you had to concentrate on when you got to her age was not being a nuisance to anyone so she wasn’t going to be, not no-how. She was always one for spending her money on going places, not on buying trinkets that she didn’t need. And that she certainly did, officer. Travel, I mean. If it wasn’t one
country, it was another. Mostly ones with flowers.’

Sloan opened his notebook. ‘Can you remember exactly when it was she went away?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said the woman called Norah very readily. ‘It was the day after poor Mrs Beddowes done herself in.’ She jerked her head in the general direction of the policeman. ‘I expect you knew all about that what with you being in the police. The rector’s wife.’

Detective Inspector Sloan didn’t: this was partly because suicides weren’t usually within his remit – PC York, the Coroner’s Officer, usually dealt with the fall-out from those – but also because it was about three weeks ago that he, Christopher Dennis Sloan, family man, had taken some overdue annual leave. ‘And when exactly did that happen?’ he asked.

‘That’s just it, Inspector,’ said the woman. ‘Three weeks come last Friday. Balance of her mind disturbed, they said, though why she should do a thing like that, I can’t think. Nice husband and three lovely children. She left a note,’ Norah added lugubriously, ‘but they didn’t read it out at the inquest.’

‘Miss Osgathorp,’ prompted Sloan gently.

‘Oh, she never stays away anywhere as long as this as a rule. She’s her own woman, not like some,’ here the woman sighed and let her gaze settle momentarily on a pair of indisputably male boots in the corner of the room, ‘and so I suppose she can do just what she likes. Nothing to stop her.’

Sloan nodded. It was a sentiment with which the Force’s Family Support Officer would have been the first to agree.

The neighbour was still going on. ‘I wouldn’t have thought nothing of it at first only this secretary of the Horticultural Society over at Staple St James rang me up because she couldn’t get no answer from Miss Osgathorp’s telephone. Seems she’d promised to go over there tomorrow night and talk to them about the orchids of somewhere or other. Indonesia, I think it could have been. Or Crete.’

‘It could have been Crete,’ agreed Christopher Sloan, the gardener in him momentarily taking over from the policeman. It was one of the places he meant to visit one day. ‘I’m told the flowers there in the spring are something to write home about.’

‘Never mind her not writing home, officer,’ responded the woman with vigour. ‘It’s her not coming home that’s beginning to worry me. It’s just not like Miss Osgathorp to forget about giving a talk. Set a lot of store by that sort of thing, she did.’

‘Did you see the going of her?’ asked Sloan, hoping that Crosby would have had the sense to peer in a window or two next door while he was about it. Breaking into houses without demonstrable cause went down very badly with his superior officers and the Force’s auditors, to say nothing of the press.

‘Oh, yes. She went off like she always does,’ said the woman called Norah. ‘To catch a bus to Berebury and then a train to wherever she’s going.’

‘Did you actually see her go?’ Sloan asked, possibilities such as a decaying corpse with a broken leg in an empty house coming into his mind.

‘Oh, yes, I did that. I was just popping down to the
butcher’s when I saw her go off towards the bus stop round the corner in time for the ten to ten bus on the Friday morning. With her suitcase. One of those with wheels that you can pull behind you. Besides,’ she said, as if this clinched the matter, ‘she waved to me as she walked down the road. And then that young Anthony Berra came by in his car. You know, the gardener man. He’s going to marry the bishop’s daughter in the summer. He pulled up when he spotted her and gave her a lift.’

Detective Inspector Sloan snapped his notebook shut at this. ‘Then you’ll let us know when she comes back, won’t you? I expect she’s just extended her holiday. Must like it where she is but I expect she’ll be back in touch soon.’

Looking back later, he was the first to admit that this was one of the least good predictions of his career.

Not at the time knowing this, he set off to collect Crosby and met that worthy as he was coming back down the path of Canonry Cottage. ‘Everything all right over there, Crosby?’

The constable shook his head and sounded puzzled. ‘I can’t quite make it out, sir. There looks to have been a bit of a break-in at the back of the cottage – there’s a broken window to the larder with quite a lot of glass about and a bit of blood. All the other doors and windows are secure but someone’s been in there through the front door as well but with a key. No doubt about it.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Sloan, suddenly alert.

‘Come and take a look through the letter box, sir.’
Crosby led the way back up the path to the front door of Canonry Cottage and carefully pushed open the flap of the letter box with a pencil. ‘See?’

Sloan bent down and took a look for himself. He saw what the constable meant. Letters that had been pushed through the letter box by the postman and landed on the doormat had been swept back as the door had been opened and stayed where they had then lain when the door had been closed again.

‘Someone’s been in this way, sir, I’m sure, and then come back out again.’

‘With a key,’ agreed Sloan.

The two detectives reached the same conclusions at the same time although they expressed them differently.

‘Not a professional at the front,’ decided Detective Inspector Sloan.

‘An amateur at the back,’ reasoned Detective Constable Crosby. ‘Glass everywhere and blood on a sharp bit.’

There was, though, complete unison in what they said next.

‘This’ll need a search warrant, sir,’ said Crosby.

‘And Forensics,’ said Sloan.

Superintendent Leeyes took a little persuading. ‘A search warrant?’ he barked. ‘On what grounds?’

‘A missing person whose house has been entered in her absence, twice,’ Sloan said. ‘Once with a key,’ he added fairly. ‘And once without.’

‘So?’

‘A key which she told a neighbour she hadn’t left with anyone else.’

Leeyes grunted. ‘That all you want?’

‘A check of all the hotels and boarding houses in Carmarthenshire for an Enid Osgathorp would be a help, sir. She’s retired and,’ he said as an afterthought, ‘as far as we know, travelling alone.’

The superintendent added something else. ‘And presumably under that name.’

It was something else, agreed Sloan, which they would have to consider.

‘More coffee, Jack?’ Mandy Lamb hovered near the kettle, concerned about the unusual immobility of her employer. Jack Haines had sat, motionless, at his desk ever since the two policemen had left his office.

‘What’s that?’ he jerked himself out of his reverie. ‘Oh, no thanks.’

She pointed to a stack of letters. ‘What about the post?’

He waved a hand. ‘You see to it, Mandy.’

‘Two whole greenhouses gone are going to set us back quite a bit,’ she mused presently.

‘You can say that again,’ he said, a tiny bit more animated.

‘It’s bad, this loss, isn’t it?’

‘Very bad.’ He continued to sit quite still, shoulders hunched.

‘But it’s not only the money, is it?’ said Mandy perceptively,
automatically herself turning to the kettle on the counter in the corner. Jack Haines was a widower and, although Mandy was years younger than he was, she often found herself in the same position of sympathetic listener and maker of comfortable responses as many a wife.

‘No,’ he roused himself to answer her, ‘although that’s bad enough.’

Since he would not do so, Mandy Lamb voiced a name herself. ‘Norman Potts?’

‘No, not Norman,’ he said roughly. ‘Norman knows exactly where he stands with me all right. Always has ever since the beginning. Nothing’s changed there.’

‘You surely don’t mean that it’s Bob Steele who’s worrying you?’

Jack Haines, impatiently pushing aside a pile of old seed catalogues, inclined his head into something approaching a nod. ‘Sort of.’

‘But the Berebury Garden Centre isn’t really into orchids,’ pointed out Mandy. ‘They only do common or garden stuff.’

‘I don’t know what they’re into,’ Haines growled. ‘Or up to. But I hope it’s not what I think.’

‘Sabotage?’ said Mandy Lamb and frowned. ‘You can’t mean that, Jack.’

‘Bob Steele came round the other day to see if we could spare him a dozen trays of Polemonium Jacob’s Ladder for a customer. Said he was clean out.’

‘I know. I saw him,’ she said. ‘Russ loaded them up for him. He paid for them all right – trade, of course.’

‘That wasn’t it.’ Jack Haines took a deep breath. ‘It’s that I happened to drive past his place myself a bit earlier
on that morning and could see quite clearly that he’d got hundreds of them on sale that day so he can’t have needed any more.’

‘Same variety?’ Mandy Lamb might not know a great deal about plants but she did know that varieties mattered.

‘Same variety,’ he said. Mandy wrinkled her nose and since once again Jack Haines seemed unwilling to voice his suspicions, she said, ‘So the Berebury Garden Centre is spying on us, is it?’

‘I’d rather call it a fishing expedition myself,’ said Haines.

She shook her head at him affectionately. ‘You never did like calling a spade a spade, did you, Jack?’

‘How do I know what to call it?’ her employer demanded. ‘Malicious damage, perhaps?’

‘You don’t think …’

‘I don’t know what to think but I do know that I saw Russ over there one day when I hadn’t sent him.’ He had begun to say something more when they were interrupted by the arrival of another visitor.

Minutes later Jack Haines was exhibiting rather more resolve than he had been doing with his secretary, but this time it was with an automatic well-mannered response to a customer. It was Benedict Feakins who had put his head round the office door. ‘Got a minute, Jack?’ he asked.

‘Of course.’ Jack Haines got to his feet, now every inch the helpful nurseryman. ‘Come for your plants?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Benedict awkwardly. ‘Well, in a way …’

‘I’m afraid we’ve had some trouble overnight. Some of your plants got damaged, but some are all right,’ began
Haines then, taking a second look at the man’s bent back, he said, ‘But you’re not all right, are you? I can see that.’

‘Too much digging, that’s what did it,’ the other man admitted. ‘I was just getting the ground ready for all these shrubs you’ve got for me. It’s getting late in the year for them as it is.’

The nurseryman gave him an indulgent smile. ‘Weekend gardeners get a lot of back problems. They’re not used to stoop labour.’

‘Too right,’ agreed Feakins fervently.

‘Now your father, he had everything at the right height with his cacti.’

‘His cacti are what I wanted to ask you about, Jack.’

‘Don’t overwater,’ said Jack Haines immediately. ‘A great mistake.’

‘It’s not that. It’s that I – we – were wondering if you’d take them back in part exchange for my order. Mary doesn’t like them and neither do I.’

The deliberate pause that followed was part of the commercial interplay that was innate in the nurseryman. ‘I might,’ Haines said slowly. ‘What’s the problem?’

Benedict Feakins flushed. ‘You see I may have to keep you waiting for a bit before I can pay you for all the plants I ordered. It’s lovely having Dad’s house but the upkeep’s proving a bit more than I bargained for and with a baby on the way …’

‘I get you,’ said Haines. ‘Tell you what – you bring your dad’s cacti in and I’ll have a look at them for you.’

‘Great. It would be good to get rid of them. To a good home, of course,’ he added hastily lest Jack Haines happened to be as fond of them as his father had been. 

The nurseryman looked at Benedict Feakins and grinned. ‘You’re not a chip off the old block, then …’

To Jack Haines’ surprise Benedict Feakins stiffened, his face turning a pasty shade of white. ‘No harm in a man’s not liking cacti, is there?’ he said dully.

‘None,’ said Haines hastily. ‘It’s just that your dad was so keen on them, that’s all, and you don’t seem to be.’

‘I can’t imagine that it’s an inherited characteristic,’ Benedict Feakins said stiffly.

‘My father couldn’t stand lilies,’ volunteered Haines at once, ‘and I love them. That right, Mandy, isn’t it?’

‘You do, it’s only the cat that doesn’t,’ said Mandy Lamb tactfully. ‘They’re dangerous to cats, lilies. They really upset them.’

‘Well, cacti really upset me as much as lilies do cats,’ said Benedict Feakins more firmly. ‘See what you can do about them, Jack, there’s a good chap. There must be somebody out there who loves them more than I do.’

It was to the Park at Pelling that Anthony Berra headed when he left Jack Haines’ nursery. He was going to see another client who had lost plants – Admiral Waldo Catterick this time. As he steered his car through the decaying entrance gates, he cast a professional eye over the grounds. This was a very different garden from that of Oswald and Charmian Lingard at the Grange. Theirs had once been monastic; this garden was that of a small manor with eighteenth-century grandeur superimposed on its original layout.

It had always seemed to him that whoever had lived here in the Park’s glory days had not so much been
anxious to keep up with the Joneses as having been making it quite clear that they considered themselves to be the top dogs of the neighbourhood themselves. It still showed in the ghosts of a parterre and carefully sited trees cleverly leading the eye towards a distant perspective. An old pergola, one side hornbeam, one side pleached lime, led to a sunken garden, all very overgrown.

Whoever the grandees of the past had been, they had long gone and only old Admiral Waldo Catterick lived here now. Elderly and arthritic, his horticultural demands were very different from those of the ambitious Charmian Lingard. The landscape designer was prepared to bet that the admiral never even got as far as the sunken garden these days.

Fortunately the house had escaped the worst excesses of the Baroque epoch and it sat squarely as it had always done in a sheltered fold in the land. Anthony Berra metaphorically shrugged his shoulders, only too aware that while a neglected house will stand for years, a neglected garden less than a decade. The admiral wasn’t going to last for a decade. No way. Not now. Idly, he wondered who would live there when the old boy had gone and whether they would take an interest in the garden then. A widower for years, the man had no children that Berra knew of although he had heard that there had been a baby who had died.

He brought his car to a stop outside the front door and apologised for being later than he had planned, explaining that he had had to see someone else first. ‘Did you get my message that I was very busy, Admiral? And would get here as soon as I could?’

‘Signal received,’ said the admiral, adding genially, ‘You can’t make headway in a heavy sea, my boy. I know that.’ Elderly and arthritic the old sailor might be but he was still spritely.

‘I’m afraid there was a bit of problem over at Jack Haines’ nursery overnight,’ began Berra, coughing. ‘I’ve just been there to see the damage.’

The admiral regarded him with a pair of bright blue eyes. ‘A bit of a problem, eh? That’s what they said about the battle of Jutland too. Afterwards, of course.’

‘Vandalism,’ said Berra, who didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘Worse things happen at sea,’ said the old sailor philosophically.

‘I’m sure, but it’s a confounded nuisance all the same,’ said Berra. ‘All those exotic plants I’d got lined up for you are thoroughly frosted and quite useless now. The shrubs are all right, though.’ He coughed again.

‘What you need for that cough, Berra, is to go sea. Take it from me, a dose of sea air clears the tubes.’

‘Haven’t time,’ he said. ‘Not in the spring.’

The admiral said, ‘And I didn’t waste my time while I was waiting for you.’

‘No?’ asked Berra warily. He and his client had very different views on what should happen in the garden at the Park.

‘I’ve been thinking about scrapping those shrubs you got Haines to put by for me.’

Anthony Berra sighed. ‘They’re really very
labour-saving
, Admiral, and we did agree that low maintenance was what was needed here at the Park these days.’

‘Can’t wait for shrubs to settle in at my time of life,’ he said with a touch of his quarter-deck manner of old. ‘I’ll be dead before they come into flower.’

‘But, Admiral …’

‘So I’m going to get you to order an extra load of bedding plants which I can enjoy from my sitting-room window this summer.’

Anthony Berra sighed again. ‘You haven’t been taking advice from Miss Osgathorp, have you? It’s the sort of thing she would say. She might know about orchids but she doesn’t know all her gardening onions.’

‘Certainly not,’ said the old man crisply. ‘That woman’s a downright menace.’

‘In what way?’ asked Berra curiously.

‘Always poking her nose into matters that are no concern of hers,’ said the admiral stiffly.

‘I thought all old ladies were like that,’ said Anthony Berra lightly. ‘Especially the unmarried ones.’

‘Doesn’t understand the meaning of the Hippocratic Oath, either,’ pronounced the admiral robustly.

Berra protested. ‘But she wasn’t the doctor.’

‘More’s the pity.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Then I could have sued her.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Dereliction of duty,’ said the old man, sometime martinet.

Anthony Berra stared at him, wide-eyed, but the admiral said nothing more.

The two women who comprised Capstan Purlieu Plants’ total workforce could not have been more different in
temperament as well as in appearance. Anna Sutherland, spare and sturdy, was the total opposite of the shorter, chubbier Marilyn Potts. She was also clear-sighted and uncompromising. Marilyn Potts on the other hand seemed capable of confusing any issue to the point of complete incomprehensibility to herself and everyone else.

Except Anna.

‘It’s no good your hanging about here, Marilyn, mooning over every single one of your dead plants,’ said Anna Sutherland implacably. ‘You’ve got to go over and collect those orchids from Jack Haines whether you like it not.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said Marilyn Potts mulishly.

‘There’s no sentiment in business. You should know that by now. You need those orchids for your demonstration tomorrow night and,’ she added grimly, ‘we need your fee for speaking. You’ve been told by the Society’s secretary exactly where Enid Osgathorp had arranged for the orchids to be ready for her talk and all you’ve got to do now is go over to Pelling and collect them.’

‘But from Jack Haines,’ she protested weakly.

‘He can’t eat you,’ said Anna.

‘I don’t know what Norman might have said to him when he went there looking for me.’

‘What Norman might have said about you to Jack Haines or anyone else doesn’t matter any more,’ said Anna. ‘Never did anyway,’ she added under her breath.

‘Norman used to say such nice things to me once upon a time,’ said Marilyn, now near to tears again.

‘Once upon a time is how all fairy tales begin,’ said Anna Sutherland tartly. ‘They usually end differently.’ 

‘And now I suppose all his sweet nothings are like all my orchids. Dead and dying, the lot of them. Frosted.’

‘The brothers Grimm didn’t write much about flowers in their fairy tales,’ Anna reminded her. ‘Just Jack and the Beanstalk.’

‘That was written by someone else,’ objected Marilyn.

‘I don’t care who it was written by,’ retorted Anna, ‘you’ve still got to get yourself over to Jack Haines’ place and pick up those orchids before tomorrow night.’

‘He doesn’t know yet that I’m standing in for old Enid.’

‘Then you’ll have to tell him, won’t you?’

‘Shall I ring him and let him know it’s me who’s going to be picking them up so that he can get them ready? And then I shan’t have to hang around his place.’

Anna Sutherland gave an unladylike snort. ‘Those orchids will be all ready and waiting for you when you get there, Marilyn, don’t you worry. Enid would have had his guts for garters if they weren’t and he knows she would – just as well as we do. I expect he’s as frightened of her as everyone else.’

‘Except you, Anna,’ said Marilyn Potts, ‘except you.’ She looked up and caught a curious look on her friend’s face. ‘You’re not afraid of anyone, are you?’

Anna’s face relaxed. ‘Not of anything in trousers, anyway.’

‘Just as well,’ said her friend drily, ‘because there’s one of them coming up the path now.’

Anna Sutherland looked over Marilyn’s shoulder at the approaching figure. ‘I wonder what our Anthony wants today?’