Murder My Neighbour (5 page)

Ellie put her head in her hands. She'd been brought up to fear bankruptcy. Her father had always been afraid of getting into debt, wouldn't even buy something on the never-never, had never held a credit card . . . though you didn't have them in those days, did you? Nowadays, of course, that was the way most people bought things. She'd heard that many businessmen regarded bankruptcy as a temporary embarrassment and somehow managed to get back on their feet again in next to no time.

But to bail Diana out by buying Denis off . . . and at such a cost! Ellie couldn't see how it was to be done.

When Ellie had decided to use her money for charitable purposes, she'd reserved an income for herself which had seemed ample to her at the time, though she knew Diana had sneered at it. Ellie wasn't extravagant, and though the upkeep of this big house was a drain on their finances, Thomas covered nearly all of their living expenses from his salary. True, they lived quietly, but they still enjoyed the little treats that made all the difference: meals out, trips to the theatre, a new television set, the occasional holiday; that sort of thing.

Of course, if Rose were going to need extra care, the cost of that must be taken into consideration . . . except that Miss Quicke had left Rose some money in her will, which might well cover it.

Ellie tried to work out how much she could manage to give Diana without going cap in hand to her charity for funds and decided there was no way she was going to be able to do it.

She would have to break the news to Thomas that Diana was in trouble again. Perhaps he'd have some sane and sensible advice to give her, to calm the turmoil in her head.

She abandoned her notes to go out into the garden to see what damage had been done to the plants by Rose's fall. In Miss Quicke's day, the garden had been a dull rectangle of lawn edged by various shrubs and small trees of the low-maintenance variety. Miss Quicke's gardener had approved as he could look after it without even breaking into a sweat, leaving ample time for gossip and cups of tea in the kitchen.

When Rose arrived to look after the elderly lady, she'd introduced colour with an enthusiasm which had sometimes outstripped her knowledge of what would or would not flourish in a clay soil. The gardener had disapproved, but Miss Quicke had enjoyed the result. Rose had managed to nibble away at the lawn to create wide flower beds filled with any plant bright enough to take her fancy. And roses; she loved roses. She'd introduced a curve here and a wooden seat there until the garden was a delight to the eye.

Ellie, who'd always loved gardening herself, had approved the changes Rose had made, and whenever the gardener complained about the extra work, she told him to stop grumbling and get on with it. He, of course, got back at her by neglecting to do all he should . . . hence the rambler rose left dangling from the wall.

Ellie considered the problem of the rose and decided to leave it as it was till a professional could deal with it.

Thomas came out to join her as she tried to lift the ladder off the border.

‘Let me do that. No point having two of you ending up in casualty.' He took it off her to stow away in the garden shed. She gazed at the destruction Rose had wrought: some marguerites had been flattened, some petunias and a patch of alchemilla mollis had been crushed, a lupin decapitated. Not much damage, really. Their marauding cat Midge skittered across the lawn, pouncing on insects only he could see.

Thomas retrieved the secateurs and the lengths of wire which Rose had intended to use on the rambler rose. It was a prolific bloomer called American Pillar: spectacular in June and a nuisance for the rest of the year.

Ellie could feel Thomas studying her. As often happened with a happy marriage, each knew when the other was distressed or hiding something.

Thomas said, ‘You're very quiet. Is something worrying you – apart from the con artist?'

She couldn't tell him yet. She bent to poke around in the herbaceous border. ‘Rose lost one of her shoes. It must be somewhere here.'

‘Has Diana been around?'

‘I'll tell you all about it later.'

He accepted that. ‘You said Rose fell off the ladder. Why was she on it in the first place?'

‘You might well ask. She said she was frightened by a face at the window of that house over there.' Ellie pointed to a small window under a gable of the Pryce house. The evening sunlight was reflected in the glass. ‘A trick of the light. She's not getting any younger.'

Thomas stroked his beard. ‘She insists she sees your aunt around the house now and then. When did she last have her eyes tested?'

‘She reads the newspapers without glasses. Well, she doesn't read newspapers, but she does read the
Radio Times
to see what's on the telly, and she's got sharp enough eyesight to see if the cleaners have missed anything.' Ellie rooted around among some purple salvias and found Rose's missing shoe. ‘Thank goodness it hasn't rained recently, or her shoe would have been fit for nothing but the dustbin. You think she's developing Alzheimer's?'

‘It's a possibility, I suppose. Your visitor said the Pryce house has been stripped of furniture?'

‘I'm so sorry about your Kindle. I ought to have realized he was up to no good.'

‘I'm sorry about your ring, too, but both can be replaced. I found my mobile, by the way. It was on the desk in my study. Do you fancy a walk around the houses?'

Ellie stared. ‘You mean, visit the scene of the crime? Not that there is a crime, of course.'

‘Of course. I'll tell Mia what we're up to, and we'll be off, shall we? We can at least check to see if your light-fingered caller is living there or not. Right?'

Ellie couldn't think why they hadn't gone for a walk on a summer evening before, since they lived in a pleasant, quiet suburb with mature trees in the street. The houses were nearly all large with extensive gardens, built in the days when there'd been plenty of servants, who slept in the attics while labouring to keep the floors polished and meals on the tables.

Ellie had heard about those days from Miss Quicke: hampers of fresh vegetables were brought up weekly from country houses or delivered from Harrods; the butcher's boy came round daily with the meat; and the milk was delivered in the early hours of the morning.

No two houses in the road were alike, but nearly all had a coach house at the side. Nowadays, instead of live-in maids, there were contract cleaners to keep the dust down, and the coach houses had been converted into separate living quarters for live-in staff, with garage accommodation below. Or – as was the case with Ellie's domain – the coach building had been adapted and let out as separate living accommodation.

The upkeep of such large houses was steep; some had been well maintained and still looked prosperous, as did Ellie's. Some were sliding gently into decay, and one or two had already been demolished to make way for blocks of flats of indifferent design. As Stewart had said, there was never enough housing stock in London to satisfy demand.

As they walked along, Ellie thought that when God had made trees he'd been on a roll. What a variety there was to choose from: laburnum, viburnum, cherry, magnolia, dogwood . . . chestnut and plane . . . and those were just the ones she could see at a glance. She wondered if the huge old oak tree in a garden nearby had been there before the house behind it was built.

Not all the gardens had succumbed to the Victorian notion of covering the ground with shrubs such as laurel. Some front gardens were well worth looking at: bright with bedding plants, their driveways freshly tarred or paved.

‘Is this the one?' Thomas stopped by a stone gatepost on which someone had carved the legend ‘Pryce House' in the dim and distant. The green-painted gate to the drive had recently been shoved back into some overgrown privet. That was the trouble with privet; if you neglected to keep it trimmed, it put on a foot of growth in no time at all.

Pryce House was even larger than Ellie's; perhaps half as big again. As Stewart had said, it was reminiscent of Disneyland with turrets and gables galore. There was no other building quite so far over the top in the neighbourhood. Perhaps some Victorian ironmaster had made good and wanted to show off?

The drive hadn't seen attention for some time, and what had once been the front lawn was fast turning into a meadow. Overgrown shrubs shrouded the windows on the ground floor, but ivy hadn't yet taken hold of the brickwork.

There were curtains at some windows, but not at others. The windows hadn't been cleaned for a while, though the declining sun was reflected in the glass of the upper storeys from houses on the other side of the road.

‘Dracula's Castle?' Thomas was enjoying this. ‘Bats and spiders?'

‘Do we dare explore?' Ellie considered the sandals she was wearing, which had a small heel. There were deep ruts in the clay and shingle of the driveway, but with care she wouldn't turn her ankle over. ‘It certainly looks deserted.'

She took a few steps up the drive. ‘The house itself isn't in bad condition. No tiles or pieces of fretwork missing. No windows broken.'

‘Give it time.'

‘Stewart wondered if the charity might like to buy it, but I can't see it myself. Too many turrets, which are a waste of space in my book.' She pushed her way between neglected bushes to peer into the ground-floor windows. Empty rooms, shadowy and dark. ‘No one's living here.'

Thomas had his reading glasses out, inspecting the gate post. ‘Somebody's drilled holes and nailed a piece of wood to this gatepost recently, and then broken it off. An estate agent's board? If it's still around, and I can find it . . .'

Ellie tried the front doorbell. It worked, but produced no response from inside the house. Naturally. The place was empty. Whatever had made her think otherwise? To the right the house bellied out into an extension with stained-glass windows rather high up – a billiard room, perhaps? Her progress after that was halted by a high wall with a door in it. The wall linked the house to what had once been a coach house, but which was probably now used as a garage. The double doors of the garage had windows above them which didn't look as if they were made to open. The doors themselves had been fitted with a bright, new padlock.

Ellie disregarded the garage and retraced her steps to the door which pierced the wall. She depressed the latch and pushed. To her surprise the door grated open.

She stepped into a shadowy glass-covered yard between the garage and the house, wide enough to be called a room in itself. On the house side there was a kitchen door. She tried the handle; locked.

On the right there was a door and a window which let on to the garage, then two other doors . . . Possibly an outside toilet, and a tool shed? All these doors were padlocked.

Somewhere nearby a machine purred into action, which made her jump.

Absurd. She smiled at herself. It was only a gardener starting up a lawnmower in one of the adjoining gardens. Of course.

A door at the end of the yard was neither locked nor padlocked, and led out into an extensive back garden and the heat of the evening sun.

‘Wow!'

The garden was alive with roses. They were everywhere, in beds of their own, decorating the walls of the house and lining the brick walls of the garden. It took a lot of neglect before a rose stopped doing what came naturally.

The rose bushes in the beds near the house were mostly white and red:
Iceberg
and, probably,
Ena Harkness
. Over there she spotted
Peace
, pale peaches and cream. Smothering the wall on the right, and looking as if it would like to push it over, was that vigorous thug,
Kiftsgate
. On her left was
Compassion
, apricot and cream.
Paul's Scarlet
dropped crimson petals into a shallow ornamental pond, bright with algae. That was the problem with ponds; you had to keep cleaning them. No goldfish; she assumed that a heron or a crow would have had any that had been left behind when Mrs Pryce moved away.

The lawn beyond had been sadly neglected – the grass was over her ankles – but two large greenhouses looked intact, though a grape vine was trying to push through the roof of one. An outside tap dripped nearby. Hadn't the water been turned off at the mains?

Nearby was a rockery, which would be at its best in spring and now looked overgrown and unkempt. Beyond the greenhouses was a compost heap and a capacious shed with its door hanging open. Whatever had once been stored there had been removed. She smiled to see that ancient seed packets had been pinned to the door and left to fade and disintegrate in the sun. How many years had they been there? Forty, fifty? The gardener who had put them up must have died long ago.

A screen of fruit trees hid what had once been a vegetable garden, which looked as if it were producing a good crop of onions and broad beans.

How come?

The place was supposed to be deserted. Vegetables didn't flourish without input from a gardener. Someone had even planted some runner beans on a bamboo wigwam. And watered them.

The soil was not as full of weeds as might have been expected. Ah, perhaps the Pryce's gardener was still using the place to grow extra food for himself, treating it like an allotment for which he didn't have to pay rent? Well, if so . . .

She was being watched.

What!

She turned round to look up at the myriad of windows which overlooked the garden. Nothing. Nobody. Not even in the top window from which Rose said she'd seen a face looking down at her.

Naturally, there wasn't anyone there.

But . . .

She shivered, despite the warmth of the sun.