Passing Strange

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Passing Strange

A C. D. Sloan Mystery

Catherine Aird

For a lifetime of friends in the Guide Movement

My story being done,

She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:

She swore, – in faith, 'twas strange,

'twas passing strange;

'Twas pitiful, 'twas wonderous pitiful:

She wish'd she had not heard it …

Othello, The Moor of Venice

by William Shakespeare,

Act 1, Scene 3

1

Open diapason

“Judges don't make mistakes,” said Fred Pearson.

“This one has.”

“If a judge has made it then it isn't a mistake,” declared Fred, shifting his dialectical ground a little.

“All right,” said his friend Ken Walls obligingly, “call it an error of judgement if you like.”

“Ah,” said Fred at once, “that's different.”

“But it's still a mistake,” persisted Walls, undeterred.

“The referee,” said Pearson with the air of one clinching an argument, “is always right even if he's wrong. Didn't you know that, Ken?”

Mr. Walls remained totally unimpressed. “Come and see for yourself if you don't believe me.”

Ken Walls was a big man and the dense crowd presented no problems to him. He led the way through the throng without effort. Fred Pearson wasn't far behind him. Walls impatiently waved away someone at the entrance who tried to sell him a raffle ticket, thrust his way towards a table in the middle of the big marquee, and pointed.

“There, Fred! Now do you believe me?”

Fred Pearson whistled softly and said, “I see what you mean.”

Both men had had duties since the opening of the Show and this was their first chance to look round at the exhibits. The two men were standing in front of one of the long trestle tables on which were displayed the entries to the summer Flower Show held annually by the Horticultural Society of the village of Almstone in the county of Calleshire. Although it was always called a Flower Show this term embraced – according to season – the whole horticultural field.

Fred Pearson and Ken Walls had halted before one of the vegetable exhibits. While taxonomists and other learned specialists laboured over the proper classification as fruit or vegetable of the fruit of the solanaceous plant popularly known as the tomato, no such doubts had ever assailed the Almstone Flower Show Committee. Long, long ago in the dark days of the last war when they had been the plain simple Allotment Society and concentrating on the Dig for Victory campaign the then secretary had put the tomato unhesitatingly in the vegetable class and there – as far as Almstone was concerned – it had stayed.

“Tomatoes,” said Fred Pearson. “Six.”

“Money-maker,” said Walls, naming the variety.

“Underfed,” observed Pearson, noting the condition.

“Not quite ripe, either,” supplemented Walls, adding sedulously, “Did you enter anything in this class, Fred?”

The enquiry was a pure formality. As well as being old friends the two men were deadly rivals in the matter of horticultural competitions and monitored each other's entries with keen interest. Ken Walls knew perfectly well that Fred Pearson wasn't a tomato man. The main Pearson entries were always in the onion and leek classes, in addition to which, for many years now, almost as a matter of course Fred had collected the first prize for his potatoes.

“Not me,” said Fred promptly. “Fickle things, tomatoes. Almost as bad as women. How did you do?”

“Not placed,” said Ken Walls. He had a nagging wife and never mentioned the opposite sex at all if he could help it. He moved down the table to where his entry sat on the paper exhibition plates provided by the Committee. (The paper plates had followed a certain amount of acrimony in the early nineteen-sixties when a disgruntled competitor had complained that the high colour on a well-decorated china plate had enhanced the visual appeal of the winner's entry. The life of a Flower Show Secretary had never been a bed of roses – as he never failed to remind everyone at the Annual General Meeting.)

“Not placed!” echoed Pearson indignantly. He eyed the six splendid tomatoes entered by Ken Walls and then cast his glance back to the six underfed and not quite ripe prize-winners. “Ken, the judge has made a mistake.”

“That's what I told you ten minutes ago,” pointed out Walls placidly, “and you said judges didn't make them, remember?”

“This is different. That lot over there … they're …” he struggled for the right simile … “they're no better than snooker balls.”

“Not as regular,” said the owner of the unplaced tomatoes judiciously, adding, “and nothing like as firm.”

Another thought had struck Pearson. He took a quick look back at the table. “Ken, yours are better than the seconds and thirds, too.”

“Not for me to say, is it?” said Walls piously, “specially with what you said just then about the referee being right even when he's wrong.”

“Don't be daft, man. I didn't mean if he was blind and stupid.”

“This isn't a football match, of course,” agreed Walls elliptically.

“He's got all the time he needs, too, hasn't he?” Another thought occurred to Pearson and he moved back to the offending prize-winning entry. Whose tomatoes were they, anyway?” His eye fell on the name on the label. “Oh, I see …”

Name cards identifying entries – placed upside down and therefore theoretically anonymous during judging – had been standardized in Almstone even before the advent of exhibition paper plates. That little innovation stemmed from the day when one of the keenest competitors in the Show had been Brigadier Richard Mellows of the Priory. The Brigadier had not been a man to scribble his name and address on any old scrap of paper. He had simply placed one of his visiting cards upside down beside each of his plants – all, naturally, entries in the restricted classes for those members of the Horticultural Society who employed gardeners.

Upside down or not, had complained more than one disgruntled entrant, the judge knew for sure from whose garden that particular entry had come. And, one malcontent had muttered darkly, knew which side their bread was buttered too, seeing as how the Show was always held in the Priory grounds. Brigadier Mellows himself had died long ago. With his death had gone too the competition classes ‘for those employing gardeners' – both class and classes, so to speak, were no more. But since that day the names and addresses of all competition entrants had had to be written on a uniform slip of paper.

One thing was unchanged though.

The Show was still held in the Priory grounds. This was so in spite of the fact that old Mrs Mellows, his widow, was dead too now. Actually she had died in the spring when plans for this year's Show were well in hand. After a respectful pause for the routine obsequies of one very old lady, Norman Burton, village schoolmaster and Honorary Secretary of the Horticultural Society, had raised the matter of this year's Summer Show with Mrs Mellows's agent.

“I don't see why it shouldn't go ahead,” Edward Hebbinge had said after some thought. The agent had run the Priory estate for so long that he knew all about its importance to the village.

The Honorary Secretary of Almstone Horticultural Society, whose path was never a primrose one, had breathed a visible sigh of relief.

“After all,” said the land agent reasonably, “we all know that it would have been what Mrs Mellows herself would have wished.”

This was pure window-dressing and they both knew it. Mrs Agatha Mellows had had a stroke years ago and hadn't been capable of an opinion since her husband's death. (That she had never been allowed to hold an opinion of her own while he was alive did not somehow crop up.)

“Quite,” said the Honorary Secretary thankfully, adding after a suitable pause, “Quite.”

What he had really wanted to know – but didn't really like to ask outright – was what was going to happen to the Priory and all the land now that Mrs Mellows had died too.

As it happened an answer was vouchsafed to him.

Edward Hebbinge had cleared his throat portentously. “Furthermore …”

“Yes?” said Norman Burton a little too eagerly.

“Furthermore,” said Hebbinge, “as the estate stays in the family we are hoping for very little change.”

“Good. No cause for alarm, then,” said the Honorary Secretary cheerfully. If a member of the family inherited the Priory there would be much less for the villagers of Almstone to worry about in the way of the danger of loss of traditional amenity.

“Though,” pointed out Hebbinge, “undoubtedly there are bound to be some – er – alterations.”

“Central heating, I hope,” responded Burton promptly. “Some change isn't necessarily a bad thing.”

“Mrs Mellows had been bedridden for so long that she was not aware of the necessity for having it installed,” said Edward Hebbinge a trifle defensively, “and it was not for me to say otherwise.”

“All the same, it must have been pretty cold in there in winter,” said the Honorary Secretary, unrepentant.

“As the Priory estate is settled land and will therefore remain in the family,” continued the land agent, firmly ignoring this, “I think you may take it that it will not be as if there will be newcomers in any real sense and that” – here he had smiled faintly – “the Show must go on.”

“When will they come?” enquired the Horticultural man delicately. There would be other Shows after this one. Besides, he had a wife at home who would be avid for such news as he had been able to glean from his visit to the land agent. What he had been told so far was not news in the village sense of the word. They all knew both that the Priory property was tied up somehow and that Richard and Agatha Mellows had had no children.