More Than Meets the Eye (11 page)

Unlike the other apprentices, Alex read each night as he collapsed with a pleasant lassitude upon his bed. He was reading a book about the Battle of Britain, about those young men of his age who had saved the nation in 1940 and 1941. He was excited by the descriptions of those dogfights against blue summer skies, with the fate of a nation at stake. But it was the first time he had read about the ‘phoney war', those strange months before the dogfights, when everyone waited for carnage and invasion and very little in fact happened.

The quiet week between his night in the cells and the defining event at Westbourne seemed afterwards to Alex Fraser to have been his own ‘phoney war'.

Like many young men in crisis, he thought himself much more the focus of other men's thoughts than was in fact the case. The other people around him were busy with their own lives. The Westbourne workers struggled with their own problems, which were unknown to the young man from Glasgow with the fiery red hair and the fiery red temper. In some cases, their dilemmas were even more serious and life-changing than those confronting Alex Fraser.

It was at the end of this strange hiatus that the weather broke. After four weeks of warm, dry nights and long, sunny days, the rain came late in the afternoon on Sunday, July the third. The gardens were packed with visitors and all the facilities of Westbourne Park were strained. The man giving his talks about the history of the gardens found that he had his biggest ever audience, so that those on the fringes missed much of what he said. Sales were high in the plant shop and in the National Trust shop by the courtyard. There were patient queues throughout the day outside the toilets.

It was heavy and humid, and by noon the sun had disappeared behind menacing grey clouds. The atmosphere grew increasingly airless and sticky during the afternoon. As the skies darkened, children grew fractious and tearful, the ceiling fans in the restaurant seemed scarcely to move the air, and visitors began to hurry back to their cars, casting anxious eyes at the sky in anticipation of the downpour everyone now knew was inevitable.

The thunderstorm was impressive. Lightning forked vividly down black clouds and the thunder cracked loud on its heels, rumbling impressively away into the distance. Then an eerie, expectant silence stretched for a few seconds before the next and even fiercer outburst. The deluge when it came fell in vertical rods, forming swiftly into rivulets over the parched earth. The heavy spattering of the downpour eliminated all other noise save the Wagnerian bursts of thunder.

The storm lasted in all for some six hours. The rain became intermittent, but each time that it seemed it was over there was a renewed short, heavy burst, as if nature was rebuking those who chose to venture forth before the drama was concluded. Eventually the lightning ceased to dazzle the sky and the thunder growled away to the east. By the time the rumbling ceased, natural darkness had fallen over Westbourne Park.

Its residents looked out of their opened windows and smelt the fresh green of vegetation as the great garden offered its gratitude for the rain. They settled down thankfully for a good night's sleep in this newly buoyant atmosphere. Only the occasional note of a screech owl disturbed the warm silence of the summer night.

The dawn chorus of birdsong woke Matt Garton. Usually he slept far too heavily to be disturbed by it. This day it seemed as if even the birds were rejoicing in the mini-monsoon which had for a few brief and precious hours irrigated Westbourne. Matt lay on his back for a while and congratulated himself upon the simple fact of existence. He relished the exhilarating sound of the birds; he relished the first rays of the sun amidst the coolness of the new morning; he relished anew being young and being alive.

He had heard the previous day that he was not to be charged with the possession of a class A drug. The police were content with a caution. The truth was that he was far too small a fish to be worth pursuing. He had not been dealing. He was merely a user and this was a first offence. They had given Garton a week to consider the error of his ways and the need to amend them, then informed him that on this occasion he was lucky.

It was an immense relief to him, for all that he had behaved with a brittle bravado amongst his fellows. His joy had only increased when his tentative enquiry elicited the news that his fellow-offender Alex Fraser had as yet heard nothing from the police about what action they proposed to take against him for his violence on that fateful night. Matt felt guilty about his pleasure, but he supposed it was a normal human reaction. And Fraser had after all shopped him to the fuzz, hadn't he? He was surely entitled to remember that. The fact that he would have done exactly the same if the circumstances had been reversed scarcely occurred to him. Matt Garton was not a deep thinker.

He lay for a while with his hands behind his head, running his fingers through the thick black curls of his hair, staring contentedly at the ceiling whilst he listened to the birdsong spilling under the eaves of the old cottages where the apprentices slept. Presently he eased himself from the sheets and slid into the jeans and tee shirt he had discarded on the previous evening. Quarter to six. Plenty of time for a stroll before he showered and faced the new working day.

He crept quietly down the stairs and out into a perfect morning. Everything looked and smelled very fresh after the prolonged downpour. The dawn chorus was long over now, but the birds piped exultantly still, as if celebrating the fresh green of nature's response to the rain. Matt sniffed the air appreciatively, rubbed his hands together for a moment, then moved out to look with new eyes at the gardens which had hitherto been a source of employment rather than aesthetic delight to him.

He had never really walked round the place with a visitor's eyes before. In the perfect peace of the early summer morning, he saw exactly why people made long journeys to see what he was looking at. Even the water lilies seemed better for the rain, turning their flowers to the eastern sun as if seeking to display their freshness. The leaves and buds on the shrub roses in the rose walk were quite definitely greener and fuller after the storm. In the white garden, the white flowers and silver leaves which gave the place its name were surely purer in form and colour than when they had stood over parched earth twenty-four hours earlier.

He moved on through the red borders, brilliantly vivid in the early morning sun, exulting now in having this magnificent place to himself, looking with newly opened eyes at the glories he had helped to tend. He paused for a moment between the twin gazebos at the end of the Long Walk, gazing down the neatly mown grass between the hornbeam hedges to the distant wrought-iron gates and the Cotswold landscape beyond them.

It was a wonderful privilege to be alone in such a place – if you could call it alone, when birds sang all around you and invisible wildlife rustled occasionally in the longer grass. It was the first time in his young life that Matt Garton had enjoyed that thought. He wandered on, following the stream which ran through the lower and wilder part of the garden. You could hear the stream rushing cheerfully now, flashing bright where it rattled over tiny falls in its stony bed. Yesterday it had been no more than a silent trickle; today it seemed not only to have a new life of its own but to be bringing life to the area around it.

He wandered on into the lowest area of all, the one they called the Wilderness. Next month he would be planting bulbs here, scattering them first over the turf to give a natural effect, then using the special tool to take out a core of soil to set the bulbs at the correct depth. He'd seen the blaze of colour the daffodils and narcissi and scyllas brought here in the spring; now he would be making his own contribution to that picture.

He'd never been to the very end of the garden. He realized that with a little flush of shame. He'd put that right now; he'd stroll to the end of the Wilderness and then walk back towards the house between the hornbeams of the Long Walk. It was the first time he'd appreciated the gardens as a work of art. He was really enjoying having this magnificent creation to himself on such a glorious morning. He must do this more often.

He followed the busy stream down through the Wilderness to the southern extremity of the garden, stopping for a moment to watch a thrush singing a celebratory hymn to the heavens. He was amazed at the speed with which the sun was climbing against the unbroken blue of the sky to his left. He was about to turn back towards the house when he saw the thing he could scarcely believe.

It was so utterly wrong in this context that he thought at first he must be imagining it. He wanted to turn away, to break into a run, to flee in panic back to the cottage and his awakening friends, to a world which was safe and familiar. Yet his eyes would not follow the urgings of his other senses. They remained obstinately fixed upon the thing which was within five yards of him. The thing which was so utterly wrong in what he had thought was a perfect world.

A foot, perfectly still. Harmless in itself, but totally out of place here. Shattering the joyous and innocent world which had enveloped Matt Garton during his early-morning stroll. He moved slowly, reluctantly, towards it. The horror seemed to seep along his limbs with each grudging, inevitable step.

The foot had a sturdy brown shoe upon it. Not the gardening boot which a worker here might have worn. Not the trainer which was the leisure wear of a gardener off duty. These thoughts ran swiftly across his brain when he did not want any thoughts at all. There was a trouser leg of good quality above the boot; cavalry twill, he thought, though that was a material he'd never worn himself.

Matt Garton paused, then stepped forward quickly, as if his discovery would conclude some macabre game of hide and seek. It was the man who controlled all this. The man who controlled the future of Matt Garton and most of the other people who worked in this perfect place.

Dennis Cooper lay with his sightless eyes wide open, glinting brightly and reflecting the light of the sun he would never see again.

C
hief Superintendent John Lambert wasn't good at meetings. In the modern police service, you needed to be, once you reached his rank. Indeed, some chief supers seemed to positively enjoy meetings.

But Lambert was a dinosaur among the higher ranks, in that he hated sitting behind a desk and directing operations. He was much happier investigating cases on the spot, much more efficient when meeting and questioning the people who were involved in a crime, whether innocently or otherwise. Despite affecting to despise modern technology, he made effective use of it whenever it was appropriate, recognizing that national as well as local registers of crime made vital contributions to the solution of serious offences such as fraud, rape and murder.

But John Lambert was at his best worrying away at serious crimes, especially suspicious deaths. Those around him, including his chief constable, had long since recognized that; they allowed this particular senior detective a latitude which they would not have accorded to a younger and less experienced man. Even amidst the bureaucracy of the modern police service, success makes its own rules, and Lambert had been notably successful over the years.

The CID section at Oldford police station was happiest when Lambert was in pursuit of villains. During quieter periods, when his attention turned from the wider world outside to the narrower one of Oldford police station, he asked penetrating questions of his juniors. At such times, he demonstrated that when he chose to he could play the lesser games of office as efficiently as those which surrounded life and death.

On this particular Monday morning, he had emerged from his meeting with the chief constable filled with a righteous energy. Already he had made queries about the use of the overtime budget and the expenses claims of two detective sergeants. People were scurrying to justify themselves. CID men moved out into the community to pursue mundane enquiries about stolen cars and missing husbands; this was a good time not to be around the station.

Detective Sergeant Bert Hook, who had recently graduated as an Open University BA and was thus a local police curiosity, had been Lambert's bagman for many years now and knew him better than any other man. He pronounced the scurrying activity his chief had set in motion in the CID section as a ‘necessary evil', a reminder that life was not always smooth and that perhaps it shouldn't be so.

Under questioning from the uniformed desk sergeant, who was observing this commotion in CID with wry amusement, Hook suggested that the only thing which would quell it was ‘a good juicy murder'. Not that anyone wished for any such thing, of course; that would be morally reprehensible. In the meantime, Bert had quietly checked his own claim for expenses.

At that very moment, as if responding to a cue, John Lambert marched quickly through the door behind them. ‘Ah, there you are, Bert! Time to stop your gossiping and get moving. We have a suspicious death on our hands! At Westbourne Park, of all places, amidst the roses and the lilies and the crowds of elderly, respectable National Trust visitors! Ten to one it's murder; I can feel it in my water! Chop chop, lad!'

Hook had long since ceased to be a lad. He looked at the desk sergeant, allowed his stolid features an inappropriate wink, and followed his chief through the swinging doors with a quickening pulse.

The whole of Westbourne Park might have been declared a crime scene, with the public denied access. But it would have been difficult and no doubt impractical to cordon off such a huge acreage for very long. Lambert, who had made several visits to Westbourne and knew the gardens well, instructed that the tract known as the Wilderness should be out of bounds to visitors and staff for an indefinite period. This was itself a large area for the detailed search normally conducted at the scene of a crime. Nevertheless, any evidence which might later be vital to prosecution or defence must be discovered and retained before even workers' feet trod here again.