With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed (12 page)

He peered through the lock and, sure enough, the key was there. Countless films had taught him what to do next. He slid a piece of paper under the door, poked the key with a paper-knife so that it fell on the paper, and then pulled it back under the door. Shame this didn’t occur to me earlier, he thought, as he surveyed the devastation in the room and tried to staunch the bleeding of his hands with a wad of tissues. But on second thoughts, perhaps it was perfect this way. Those bastard perverts deserved it. Should he also scrawl ‘PIGS’ on the wall with his own blood, or would it be too sixties? He decided to have a go, but he ran out of free-flowing blood after ‘PI’. Oh well, if this kid was such a mathematical brainbox perhaps he could distract himself by trying to understand PI, as so many had done before him. So, taking the ‘Digger’ letter with him, he left the room, locking it carefully and pocketing the key, and crept away downstairs.

In the shed, things were not harmonious.

‘You’ve got nothing to go on,’ barked Angela. ‘That guy Osborne is a sweetheart. You nuts or something?’ She paced up and down, smoking furiously, while Gordon and his dad exchanged glances.

‘Tell her,’ said Gordon’s dad.

‘You realize he could sue you for this?’ she continued. ‘Holding someone against his will is what is technically known as deep shit, you know that? Jesus, and he was so cute, too. We were really getting along.’

Gordon looked like he was going to burst into tears. Angela glared at him some more, and he felt wretched.

‘So what you going to tell me? It better be good.’

Gordon pulled himself together. ‘It’s just that, well, you know that deal I did a couple of weeks ago? The one for the seaside postcards business? It included the magazine this Osborne chap works for, and I decided to close it down.’

‘So? You feel guilty about a guy, you lock him up?’

‘Well, and then he turns up here with his punchy sidekick, and they act very peculiar and shifty as though they’re hiding something –’

‘Big deal,’ grouched Angela.

‘And then the little one breaks into the B&B when we’re out, and every time this Osborne sees me he leaps a foot in the air. Dad went back to check on the little one, but he’s gone. And Dad had to break the door down to my office, and it’s all mangled and covered with blood, and Dad’s best hatchet has disappeared, and it’s getting dark, and to be honest,’ he gasped, ‘I am really really scared.’

Angela huffed, but she also steadied herself against a wall. What the hell was all this blood and hatchet stuff?

‘Where’s the bunny?’ she barked.

Gordon and his dad swapped dejected glances. ‘We think, um …’ they faltered, and cast grim looks towards the top of
the house, where Osborne currently languished. They didn’t need to finish.

‘Oh no,’ said Angela, ‘oh swell.’

By the time Lillian arrived unnoticed on the scene at seven o’clock that evening, Angela and the Clarkes had made a decision. They would telephone Trent Carmichael, the celebrated crime writer, and ask him for some expert help. They would not contact the police. Through the locked door to Osborne’s room, Angela had conducted a brief secret negotiation concerning the rabbit, with Osborne agreeing to let him out in return for some ham rolls, a few biscuits and a flask of tea. Osborne hastened to make it clear that he had not been holding the rabbit for purposes of ransom. The idea of taking a photo of the rabbit nervously holding a copy of today’s newspaper would simply never have occurred to him.

‘He seems like a nice rabbit,’ he added lamely as he handed him over, catching Angela’s eye and then looking away.

She felt terrible. ‘I’m sorry about all this,’ Angela said in an unusually meek voice.

Osborne, surprised, found himself reassuring her. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry too.’

She relocked the door and tiptoed away. Gordon and his dad would be furious to know she had talked with him. But then she tiptoed back again, and spoke very close to the door.

‘Listen. Osborne. Whatever your name is. Can you hear me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’

‘Somewhere, yes.’

‘Aren’t you going to tell me?’

‘Well, the trouble is I can’t remember.’

‘Swell. You can’t remember. That makes me feel much better.’

‘I’m sorry.’

There was a pause, during which Osborne assumed she had gone away, so he started eating his tea. But she hadn’t.

‘Osborne, tell me, how about if I came along to see you later, and brought a bottle of wine or something? How would you feel about it? Would you think I was taking advantage?’

Osborne choked on a piece of ham roll.

‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘Stupid, stupid.’

‘No!’ yelled Osborne, just catching her as she turned to go. ‘That would be great. But, do you mean, just you and me?’

She looked hard at the closed door as if hoping to read its expression.

‘Well, yes –’

‘I mean, you wouldn’t tell young Gordon?’

‘Why, do you want Gordon along too?’

‘No, no.’

‘Thank goodness for that. But you shouldn’t hate him, you know. He’s a good kid. And he’s really sorry about you losing your job. I think it’s your little friend that worries him more than you. With good cause, by all accounts. Did you know he’s on the loose with a hatchet, after ransacking Gordon’s office and spraying the walls with blood?’

‘What?’ Osborne slumped to the floor. ‘Oh God.’

‘Osborne?’

Osborne made a small, high-pitched, inarticulate noise, something that sounded like
‘Ing?’
but probably didn’t signify anything other than despair.

Angela tapped on the door. ‘You think he’s dangerous, Osborne?’

‘Oh God.
Ing?’

‘Speak to me.’

‘I can’t.
Ing?
Oh God. Sorry.
Ing?’

‘I’ll come and see you later. I can bring some blankets and stuff. I know you’re a nice man, Osborne. So tell me. All this locking you up is just a crazy misunderstanding, right?’

She waited, but no further words were forthcoming.

On the floor of the junk-room, Osborne lay in a curled position with a faraway look in his eyes, saying
‘Ing?’
from time to time. He kept seeing this awful vision of Makepeace on the war-path, felling to the ground with a single blow from his hatchet all his natural foes – ranging from someone innocently pointing out that the lights on his bike weren’t working, to a friendly pedant in a pub discussion mildly suggesting that his knowledge of North African nomadic ritual left a couple of smallish gaps.

Osborne felt he should open the window and warn the world that, in Honiton at the present moment, ‘You’re wrong there, you know’ was the most dangerous expression a man could utter.

And now Lillian was here. She had booked herself a room in a pub, phoned a very confused Mister Bunny at home to tell him not to worry, and was now sitting in the dark in Angela Farmer’s shed while deciding what to do next. She smoked and muttered compulsively. Much of her initial impetus, of course, had drained away in the course of the rather difficult train journey, but now that she had actually caught sight of Osborne at an upstairs window pacing about, she knew she had been right to come. Confronting Michelle must wait. If Lillian didn’t get to the bottom of the G. Clarke stuff here and now, Osborne might suffer, and that would be terrible. Why was she there? Well, analysing her own motives required more effort than Lillian was prepared to give. However, it did occur to her that it was not just hatred of Michelle that had driven her
to this peculiar behaviour. The cuteness of Osborne surely had something to do with it.

How Angela Farmer fitted into the scheme, she neither knew nor cared. Through the kitchen windows, she watched Ms Farmer in a family group with a big man and a red-haired youth, talking, making coffee, doing normal things (Lillian watched in agony; she would have killed for a cup-soup). These people seemed quite oblivious to the presence of an alien journalist two floors up. Lillian started to feel angry again. And where was Makepeace? There were quite a few things she wanted to say to him, when the time came.

She grimaced, took a final drag, stood up and chucked the cigarette into the back of the shed. Time to retrace her footsteps to the pub and consider a plan of action. Of course, she had no idea, in the dark, that Makepeace was lying in the shed behind her, asleep and unmoving, exhausted by a couple of hours’ frenzied digging in Angela Farmer’s garden. She did not know that he was sleeping the sleep of the vindicated, having located in the cold hard ground something that had been definitely hidden there – buried, as opposed to planted. And as she left the shed, and strode off into the night without a backward glance, she failed entirely to notice how the cigarette kindled into a small flame in the old, dry sheet music on which Makepeace slumbered, and then caught and burned and started to spread.

With the train service from Waterloo to Honiton scheduled to take a long and dreary three and a quarter hours, Michelle stared glumly out of the train window and contemplated how incredibly miserable the next portion of her life was going to be. The compartment smelled of ancient dust, the window was smeary as though painted with yellow glue, and moreover, with ten minutes till departure time, the worn and crusty seats were filling up with alarming speed. Michelle, unaccustomed to the brusqueness of Intercity etiquette, flinched and clenched her teeth as each new pinstriped bum wordlessly slapped down in a space she had fondly hoped would be empty. She was horrified. Who were all these men? Why were they so rude? And what possible reason could they have for catching a train to Honiton at half-past eight in the morning? When agreeing to make this journey, she had been comforted by a pleasant vision (admittedly founded on nothing more substantial than bluesy British Rail TV advertisements) that included an idea of relaxation and room to breathe. But the sad truth was that Michelle had worked in an office for too long. She did not know the first rule of British Rail travel: that if there is more than one cubic metre of space per passenger, something is deemed to be wrong and the service is cut.

The worst thing about the journey in prospect, however, was not the cattle-truck discomfort, nor the danger that someone would sit next to her eating an individual fruit pie without first inquiring whether she wanted some. It was that she and Tim now faced three and a quarter hours in which to bemoan their common predicament, which was simply this: they no longer had a magazine to sacrifice their lives to. ‘No magazine’ – what a strange combination of words. Perhaps that
was
glue on the windows, she thought – but her mind was wandering. She glanced around, pulled herself together, looked at her shoes, and faced facts. In the course of twenty-four hours
Come Into the Garden
had ceased to exist, and now she and Tim had been left, bewildered, sacrificing their lives to nothing.

It was a weird feeling. Each of them carried a businesslike letter, received in the morning’s post, informing them of Digger Enterprises’ intention to cease publication of
Come Into the Garden
forthwith,
blah, blah,
sincere regret,
rhubarb –
but they still couldn’t take it in. It seemed like nonsense. As she fought for breath, Michelle could not remember ever experiencing a shock of equal proportions. The day before, when the magazine’s typesetters in Clerkenwell suddenly announced midway through the afternoon that they were laying down their tools, was a memory fresh as paint, and would remain so. When she thought of it, her mouth went all stiff, her shoulders came up around her ears, and she felt a terrible urge to hit someone.

Just like that, the typesetters had pulled the plug. The keyboard operatives stopped tapping; the compositors laid down their scalpels; and a few seconds’ silence were respectfully (or was it ironically?) observed before attention turned routinely to the late news pages of
Pigswill Gazette
or
Marmalade Monthly,
or some such other grisly specialist publication. No matter that
Come Into the Garden
had run uninterrupted for fifty years. No matter that Michelle had given it the best years of her life. Later in the day, acting on his own initiative, a typesetter’s
clerical assistant with a nasty rash on his neck gathered up all the standing artwork from the
Come Into the Garden
pigeon-hole (the ‘Me and My Shed’ logo, the ‘Dear Donald’ in big loopy handwriting, the list of editorial staff that always appeared on page three underneath the Contents) and tipped them in a bin. Such is the passing of a little magazine.

Obviously, with typesetting a moribund trade, the managers of this little company were rightly dismayed to lose a nice regular job like
Come Into the Garden.
But on the other hand, the matter also had its compensations. The pleasure of finally telling Michelle over the phone precisely where she could stick her forebears and twinges and far-be-its and etceteras was so highly relished and coveted that, after a scuffle broke out at the coffee-machine between volunteers for the job, the men actually drew lots in the toilets. The lucky winner was a young paste-up artist called Jim – a relative newcomer, unfortunately, who had been allowed to take part in the draw only because the older blokes felt awkward about leaving him out. Fair and square he won it, but understandably the others were sore. By rights, the job should have gone to someone who had known Michelle much longer, who wanted it more badly; but such was fate. The hapless losers made the best of it by crowding around the office phone while youthful Jim made the historic call.

‘We’re not setting your stuff any more,’ Jim told Michelle excitedly, in a rush, not savouring it at all. The other blokes shrugged; what a waste. Michelle, caught halfway through one of her arch how-I-hate-to-be-a-nuisance-pestering-you-for-co-operation complaints about the late arrival of proofs, paused for breath and considered what she had heard. ‘Could I trouble you unforgivably and ask you to explain that last remark?’ she asked. ‘We’re not setting it, you see,’ said Jim, ‘because you’re going out of business.’ Michelle gasped loudly and knocked over her bottles of nail varnish, so that her sub-editors looked
up briefly from their work and bit their lips. ‘But what am I going to do with all this copy?’ she demanded crossly. At which she was surprised to hear the assembled typesetters, in the background, whoop with delight and crack up laughing. Ha ha, what could she do with that copy? Blimey, she walked right into that one.

Now she watched as Tim wiffled uncertainly down the platform to buy some coffees from the Waterloo concourse, and saw how thoroughly her life was tied up with
Come Into the Garden.
Just observing Tim’s departing form, she realized she had never before encountered him outside the context of the office. Someone suggested having a drink after work once (at Christmas?), but Michelle had made an excuse and left; probably, Tim had done the same. At work, Tim looked different, somehow older; at work, they both knew what they were doing. She yearned to be back at her desk. A pile of features waited to be subbed, and she saw them in her mind’s eye – all badly written, all straggly and formless, crying in the semantic wilderness for a decent sub to please, please show them the way (hoorah, a split infinitive) – and here she was, sitting on a train at the commencement of a fool’s errand, thinking only of her own future. She felt guilty. Those features needed her. Her mission in life was to straighten them out.

Fifteen years working to a weekly production schedule would not be eradicated overnight. Wednesday morning, for Michelle, meant the arrival of next week’s crossword (set since 1960 by an elderly cantankerous gaffer with dandruff, who signed himself ‘Tradescant’); it meant final proofs of ‘Ted’s Tips’; the writing of the cover-lines by the editor (she rewrote them afterwards, he didn’t seem to mind); and around lunch-time, it meant Osborne turning up in a flurry of string bags and oranges to write his terrible piece about celebrity sheds. Every week the same. The incontrovertible order of things. Whenever Michelle had taken holidays, it didn’t matter where
in the world she went, or how long she stayed away, she was aware hour by hour, almost minute by minute, of what ought to be happening at the office. Once, in a fabulous sea-front bar in Turkey, she had quite surprised her fellow Classical coach tour holiday makers by suddenly narrowing her eyes and snarling, ‘That eleven-thirty messenger is early again, I just know it.’

So it was jolly hard to adjust to the idea that nothing whatever was happening in the office this morning, apart from a couple of volunteer subs answering the phones and dolefully dividing up the reference books to take home. Lillian had disappeared the previous afternoon, and Tim refused to tell her why. In fact he was particularly jumpy on the subject. But on hearing the terrible news from the typesetters – and then receiving his own ghastly letter of dismissal – he had been insistent that they travel immediately to meet with Digger Enterprises with a personal plea for time, or negotiated redundancy, or both; so here they were. Michelle was not optimistic that they could make any difference to the outcome, but agreed to go – partly, she realized on reflection, because she was too dazed to argue, and partly because, having never been to Honiton, she was curious to see it. Perhaps she would at last discover why ‘Honiton, Devon’ was always her first inspiration when writing spoof letters to either Osborne or the magazine.

She picked up the book she had brought for the journey (the new Trent Carmichael in hardback), but put it down quickly. By page forty-two she already had a fair idea that the gardener did it. She stared out of the window again and sighed. To think that only a week ago she had subbed Osborne’s ropy Trent Carmichael piece so brilliantly. All those knowing references, all those clever puns; she had been born for this job, how could it possibly cease to exist? Morbid thoughts overwhelmed her. What would become of this highly specialized talent? Where could she take it? What was it worth? On the tube this morning she had come up with a superbly clever headline for a piece
combining Orson Welles and patio furniture (should one ever crop up), yet all of a sudden there was no connection whatever between clever horticultural headlines and the price of sprouts. Her chin began to wobble. ‘Nobody wants my
Sittings on Cane’
was possibly the saddest thought she had ever experienced.

‘Not enjoying your book?’

She looked up in surprise to see a tanned, intense-looking man in a Barbour jacket and flat cap sitting opposite. Unlike everybody else on board, he must have sat down quietly, for he had completely escaped her notice. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t think why. Outdoors-ish with his orangey-brown face and startling blue eyes, this man nevertheless had hands that were small, pink and soft; and his Barbour looked as if it had just come off the hanger in a Piccadilly outfitter’s. No, she suppressed the idea as ridiculous; she didn’t know him. After all, she reflected bitterly, unless he had worked for
Come Into the Garden
at some point in the past fifteen years, chances were obviously against it.

‘So, not enjoying it, then?’ he repeated, looking her challengingly in the eye and patting his corduroyed knees in a self-satisfied manner. He evidently thought this was funny. Some of the other passengers were pretending not to listen, and he seemed to be pleased by the attention, as though he deserved it.

‘You ought to keep on with it, you know, the book. It might get better,’ he said in quite a loud voice, and shot her a wink that said ‘You know who I am, don’t you?’

Michelle gave him a non-committal stare and noticed, with a certain revulsion, that his lips were a strange unnatural shade of salmon pink. Was this a chat-up line? Michelle sincerely hoped it wasn’t. She peered exaggeratedly out of the window for Tim, but he was nowhere in sight.

‘Oh look, my friend is just coming,’ she said nevertheless, and – just for the sake of the fiction – waved pleasantly at a small bench in the middle distance.

Undeterred by her little ploy, however, the stranger reached forward and touched the book in her lap, the intimacy of the action sending a great shock-wave right through her body and out of her ears.

‘That’s mine actually,’ he said, with a glamorous and rather insinuating smile. ‘That’s my book.’

Michelle pulled herself together, and stopped bothering to look for Tim – who was quite honestly going to miss the train if he didn’t hurry.

‘No, it isn’t,’ she said sharply. ‘Look, I am on page forty-two.’ She shuffled herself upright in her seat, and prepared for a fight.

‘Oh no, I’m sorry, you misunderstand,’ he said, still smiling. Looking at him, she couldn’t decide whether he was handsome or vile. It was certainly a misfortune for a chap to have colouring so suggestive of cheap make-up from Woolworth’s. ‘What I meant was, well,
Murder, Shear Murder
was written by me. I take all the blame, ha ha. Guilty, your honour. I am the humble author.’ He sat back and gave her a look that said ‘Amazing, eh?’ and waited for her reaction.

Michelle’s eyes widened. Was this really Trent Carmichael? Author of
Dead for a Bucket?
What an extraordinary coincidence. She flipped the book over and looked at his picture, and then looked at him again. It was true. Of course, the man on the dustjacket was probably eight or ten years younger, and was pictured in black and white, and had evidently been told to assume a cold, murderous expression while resting on a shovel next to a freshly dug grave (it was rather a disturbing image, actually), but it was the same face, all right.

‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell you how the story comes out,’ he said teasingly (this sounded like a well-practised line). ‘I won’t disclose “who done it”!’

She laughed politely, wondering whether to mention she
had already formed a strong suspicion against the gardener. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘please don’t tell. That wouldn’t do at all.’ Feeling awkward, however, she carried on. ‘Actually I did guess the murderer in
S is for … Secateurs!’
she said brightly, confused to find herself sounding gushing and inarticulate. ‘Right at the very beginning, I thought that clever teenager, the girl, you know, the one who labels everybody, I guessed –’ But she broke off, realizing rather late that crime writers aren’t particularly interested to hear how easily you sussed their game.

She picked up the book and opened it again, but was confused about what to do next. Should she tell him she was a fan? That she had read every book? Should she mention the magazine article she had worked on? Or should she pretend to be so absorbed in
Murder, Shear Murder
that she couldn’t stop for a chat, but must read on furiously, biting her nails? It was an unusual situation in which to find oneself. Her discomfort wasn’t helped much, either, by Carmichael’s rather eerie fixed smile. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something, something that was perhaps due to him as a famous person. But since she didn’t know what it was, he was obliged to give her a hint.