Although the photographers had long left Norman Potts’ house in downtown Berebury, Charlie Marsden and his team of Scenes of Crime experts were still examining the place when the two policemen arrived back there.
‘We’ve done a preliminary search, Inspector,’ said Charlie Marsden as the two detectives stepped inside the door. ‘Not a lot of real interest,’ he jerked a finger in the direction of the sideboard, ‘unless you count those floral offerings over there.’
‘We’re looking for a true artist in crime here, Charlie, remember.’ It was something that Sloan was only just beginning properly to appreciate himself. The choice seemed wide enough. He cast his mind back to Anna Sutherland, effortlessly humping heavy loads about at their nursery. She could have hauled the body of an unconscious Norman Potts over a beam easily enough –
and she hadn’t liked his treatment of Marilyn, her friend. Benedict Feakins, bad back or not, was young and had the strength. So also did Russ Aqueel, although where he came into the equation was what the mathematicians called an unknown factor. Bob Steele of the Berebury Garden Centre, who had insisted he didn’t know Enid Osgathorp, would certainly have known Norman Potts and Norman Potts might have had some legal leverage on Jack Haines’ business through his late mother’s estate, thus thwarting Bob Steele’s ambitions. It was something he would have to look into.
‘We’ve checked the plant pots with the orchids in, Inspector.’ Charlie Marsden interrupted Sloan’s thoughts.
‘And?’
‘No joy. Handled with gloves on. By the way, you might like to know that we got some DNA off a bit of a toothbrush that wasn’t completely burnt on that chap Feakins’ bonfire over at Pelling. The report’s on its way.’
‘Bully for you,’ responded Sloan absently.
Marsden sniffed. ‘Can’t imagine why he didn’t want us to find it.’
‘Neither can I, Charlie, but that’ll have to wait.’ Sloan put the information at the back of his mind for the time being. It wasn’t by any means the only thing that he couldn’t explain. What he really wanted to know was where those dead orchids came in – well, not only the orchids – all the plants that had been destroyed by frost. As a keen gardener, he, Christopher Dennis Sloan, could blame Jack Frost for a lot; as a policeman, he, Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan, still couldn’t see where a low temperature in March came into the picture. What he could see, though,
was that there was undoubtedly a scheme of things in the background. And it was this scheme that was so puzzling.
It was easy to see who had lost out in it, not least Norman Potts, but there didn’t seem to be an obvious answer to the opposite question beloved by detectives of ‘Who benefits?’
‘What’s that, Charlie?’ he asked, suddenly conscious that the Scenes of Crime Officer had gone on speaking to him.
‘Bit bizarre in a place like this, if you ask me, those orchids,’ said Marsden. He waved an arm in a disparaging gesture at an unlovely and uncared for domestic interior.
‘Lacks a woman’s touch,’ agreed Sloan in an unconscious tribute to his wife, Margaret, as he mentally compared his own early bachelor surroundings with his present home comforts.
Charlie Marsden grinned. ‘No signs of a lady here at all. First thing we checked. No signs of much else either really.’
‘Cupboard bare?’ suggested Crosby.
‘The deceased doesn’t seem to have gone in for eating much at all,’ said the Scenes of Crime Officer. ‘There’s the odd tin of baked beans and half a loaf but that’s about it.’
‘“A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese”,’ chanted Crosby.
The other two men stared at him.
‘Birdsong,’ stammered the constable, abashed. ‘The yellowhammer. We did it at school.’
‘The only sort of birdsong that I know about,’ said Charlie Marsden heavily, ‘is called Twitter.’
Detective Inspector Sloan ignored them both while he
gave some thought to the possibility of Norman Potts’ meagre lifestyle being the end result of blackmail rather than alcohol or slow horses. This man too must at some stage in his life have been – when he had lived there with his mother – on the medical list of the late Doctor Heddon of Pelling and thus any weakness that he might have had surely been known to Enid Osgathorp. Although Doctor Dabbe hadn’t mentioned discovering any unmentionable disease at the man’s post-mortem, he would have to check back with the pathologist. Sloan sighed. He should have thought of that before but at this moment he felt like a juggler struggling to keep one ball too many in the air.
And therefore risking dropping the lot.
Was the near-squalor of these tawdry surroundings really down to the demon drink, a penchant for slow horses, or had Norman Potts too been subjected to blackmail? Sloan turned to Charlie Marsden. ‘Any money in the house?’
‘Not a lot,’ said the worthy. ‘The odd note in a teapot, that’s all.’
‘All of a pattern,’ murmured Sloan, although it was another pattern he was trying to visualise – one that took in a still unexplained entry into Canonry Cottage with a key, a unloved missing person, the blackmailing of more than one poor soul, the probable suicide of one of them, the odd, naive behaviour of a maker of bonfires, inexplicable goings-on in the horticultural trade and, cast into the mixture for good measure, the destruction of hundreds of infant orchids.
To say nothing of the murder here of a man whom it appeared nobody liked much either. As soon as Norman
Potts’ face could be made recognisable he would get on with having the CCTV records scanned for him on the day Enid Osgathorp was last seen in Berebury.
If she had been, that is. That was something else that had to be considered too.
The river, that swift carrier of bodies down to the sea, wasn’t very far from the house where they were now. A body could have easily been slipped out unnoticed into the estuary on a dark night on the ebb of a spring tide, unnoticed by anyone – anyone that is except possibly Norman Potts. A watery burial would at least explain the absence of a body – and if he had observed it, perhaps the subsequent death of Norman Potts. That was if he hadn’t carried it out himself. Sloan didn’t know.
Not yet.
And where on earth did all those orchids come in – well, not only the orchids – all the plants that had been destroyed by frost? At least some of the plants for Anthony Berra’s clients, the Lingards, were already in the way of being replaced, well not so much replaced as substitutes found. Idly he wondered why the substitutes meant for the Lingards’ garden at Pelling Grange that he had seen in Jack Haines’ office had been so different from the ones he’d been told had been destroyed by frost. Sloan stiffened as he realised that they’d changed from being lime-hating plants to lime-lovers … His pulse quickened: all detectives had been well schooled in one of the important functions of lime.
Charlie Marsden started to draw his attention to something else he’d found in the house but Sloan wasn’t listening. Something that the superintendent had said
had swum into his mind, something about the police not being able to dig up half Calleshire. He’d agreed that they couldn’t, but it came to him that there was someone who could dig up at least some of the county without arousing suspicion.
‘Not now, Charlie,’ he said. He was trying to remember something that Crosby had said too. What had it been? Something about making your bed and lying on it – that was it. He breathed out very slowly, a picture of great villainy suddenly becoming very clear to him.
Before he could even begin to think this through and take action, the telephone in his pocket started to pulsate against his thigh. It was Superintendent Leeyes. ‘That you, Sloan?’ he barked. ‘I’m told there’s a woman called Marilyn Potts who’s been on the line screaming that we should get over to Capstan Purlieu Plants urgently. She says she can’t reach her friend on her mobile and she’s frightened for her. I don’t see why myself,’ he harrumphed, ‘that that constitutes a police emergency.’
‘I do, sir,’ said Sloan grimly. ‘Now.’ He cut the superintendent off without ceremony and turned. ‘Come along, Crosby. We need our time.’
As it was the two policemen got out to Capstan Purlieu Plants only just in time to stop Anthony Berra from strangling Anna Sutherland.
‘I guessed it had to be Anthony,’ said Anna Sutherland, anger and shock fighting for supremacy in her voice, leaving it reduced to a quaver. She was still shaking slightly. ‘It was when he obviously knew that it was two orchids that were missing that I thought it must be him. It had to be. You see, we hadn’t told him how many and I suddenly remembered that.’ The woman had the grace to look a bit sheepish. ‘I do know I shouldn’t have rung him but I did.’
‘No, you shouldn’t,’ exploded Marilyn Potts, who had just arrived hotfoot from Pelling. ‘He might have killed you too.’
‘He very nearly did,’ said her friend hoarsely, fingering her bruised throat. She looked awkwardly at Sloan and said, ‘I should be thanking you.’
‘You’ll have to unfriend him now,’ put in Detective Constable Crosby, a recent convert to online connections.
Marilyn Potts had just realised something else. She looked enquiringly at Sloan and said, ‘Are you saying Anthony killed poor Norman, then?’
For one moment it looked as if Anna Sutherland was going to bridle at the mention of ‘poor Norman’ but then she must have thought better of it because she sank back in her chair instead and held her peace.
‘We think he must have done,’ said Sloan, although Crosby had so far devoted all his energies to arresting Anthony Berra on a charge of the attempted murder of Anna Sutherland and hadn’t had time to think of anything else at all. The constable had warned the handcuffed man that further charges might be preferred but he only got a cough in response.
‘Why?’ demanded Marilyn. ‘Why on earth Norman, I mean? He hadn’t done anything wrong, had he?’
Anna Sutherland had now recovered sufficiently to snort at this.
‘Not that we know of,’ said Sloan cautiously.
Anna Sutherland suddenly looked up and gave Sloan a very intelligent glance indeed. ‘And what,’ she said in a voice still croaky, ‘about Enid Osgathorp?’
‘We think we now know exactly where to look for her,’ he temporised before turning away. ‘Come along, Crosby, we’re going there next.’
‘And I need a stiff drink,’ announced Anna Sutherland. ‘Whatever you say, Marilyn, I am going back to the King’s Arms at Staple St James,’ here she cast a meaningful look in the direction of her friend and went on, ‘where I am not unknown.’
Charmian Lingard, who until now had thought her social skills equal to any occasion, discovered for the first time in her sheltered life that they weren’t. ‘You want to dig up the Mediterranean garden?’ she echoed as a squad of police officers in workmen’s overalls turned up on her doorstep. ‘Anthony won’t like it.’
‘And remove the statue,’ supplemented Sloan.
‘But it’s all planted up,’ she protested, ‘in time for the flowers to be ready for the garden party.’
Oswald Lingard took in the scenario more quickly and limped forward and took his wife’s arm. ‘I think you’d better come indoors, my dear,’ he said, leading her away.
Detective Inspector Sloan thought he heard her still protesting about Anthony’s plants as she left the garden but his mind was elsewhere. ‘Start here,’ he ordered the men with spades. ‘And go carefully.’
Their leader waved at the statue of the goddess Flora presiding over the long border. ‘What do you want doing with the lady, sir?’
‘That lady I want taking away. The other one I want finding,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘Carefully. Oh, I’ll be wanting some soil samples too, although I think I know what you’ll find. A lot of lime.’
Mary Feakins had helped her husband out of their car and back into the kitchen at The Hollies, settling him back in what he insisted was the only chair in the house that he found comfortable. Then she went upstairs to the airing cupboard and retrieved the photograph of her
father-in-law
. She set it down on the kitchen table in front of her husband and said in a tone that brooked no refusal, ‘Tell me why this photograph doesn’t matter and all your father’s other belongings did.’
Benedict Feakins passed a hand in front of his face as if he was clearing away something from his mind. ‘You won’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
‘It’s that awful woman.’ He struggled to speak her name. ‘Miss Osgathorp.’
‘What about her?’
‘She said I wasn’t who I thought I was.’
‘Don’t be silly. You’re Benedict Feakins.’
‘You don’t understand, Mary,’ he said earnestly. ‘She said I wasn’t.’
‘But she didn’t know you. She can’t have done. We’ve only just come to live in Pelling and she’d never seen you before.’
‘She knew Dad.’
Mary Feakins frowned. ‘Go on.’
‘She said she knew from his medical record that Dad was impotent. She said Dad had had mumps when he was a lad and that he was unable to have children because of that. She told me that therefore he couldn’t possibly have had me.’
Mary Feakins bounced back, light dawning. ‘And I suppose she wanted some money to keep quiet about it?’
‘I had such a lot to lose,’ he said dejectedly. ‘This house, you perhaps …’
That roused her. ‘Me?’ she said on a rising note of indignation. ‘What about that bit in the marriage service about for better or worse, or weren’t you listening at the time?’
‘I didn’t hear any of it,’ he confessed simply. ‘I was looking at you.’
‘Oh, Benedict, you’re hopeless.’ She was struck by something else. ‘So this is why we’re so skint and can’t pay the bills. You’ve been giving her money.’
He stared at the floor. ‘She was quite remorseless.’
‘And I suppose it never occurred to you to go to the police? Blackmail’s a serious crime, you know.’
He hung his head. ‘I just wanted us to be happy here.
If I wasn’t Dad’s son, then I had no claim on this place. Besides …’
‘Besides what?’
‘There’s young Benedict …’
‘Benedict the Third,’ she reminded him meaningfully.
‘I didn’t want him to grow up not knowing who he was either.’
Mary Feakins sighed. ‘And I suppose it never occurred to you to demand some proof from the woman?’
He looked really uncomfortable at that. ‘No, but I did try to find it.’
‘So you did break into her cottage, then?’
Shamefaced, he confessed to this. ‘I wasn’t a very good burglar and I couldn’t find anything there anyway.’
She shook her head. ‘You took all this nonsense from someone you ought to have known you couldn’t trust? And at face value?’
He wouldn’t meet her eye. ‘She was very convincing. Well, plausible, anyway. How was I to know whether it was true or false?’
Mary Feakins sat up, another thought crowding into her mind. ‘You realise that would have meant your mother had been playing around before you were born?’
‘Yes,’ he said, his despair evident. ‘Mind you, she was very beautiful when she was young. I did check that I hadn’t been adopted, though. And I hadn’t,’ he added.
‘So,’ she deduced logically, ‘you set about systematically destroying everything that might have had your father’s DNA on it so that whatever it was that this woman was alleging couldn’t be proved. Hence the bonfire.’
‘That’s right.’
Mary Feakins abruptly got to her feet and went upstairs again. Her husband could hear her moving about in their bedroom above. She came downstairs carrying a mirror. Placing it on the table she commanded him to turn his head to the left.
‘Why?’
‘Do it,’ she said in a tone he hadn’t heard her use to him before.
Obediently, he moved his head as instructed. As he did so she brought the photograph of his father alongside the mirror. She smiled at his expression. ‘You silly fool, Benedict, you’re too gullible for words but I love you. Where else do you think you got that nose?’
‘I love you too,’ he said humbly. ‘I should have told you all this before.’
‘So you should,’ she said briskly, ‘and now the woman has gone missing. No wonder the police are suspicious. Anyone would have been.’
‘I don’t care what happens to her as long as she stays away.’
‘But the police care,’ she said, exasperated. ‘They have to. It’s what they’re for. Hasn’t it dawned on you that that’s why they’ve been after you? After all, they must know that you’ve been behaving pretty suspiciously.’
He was almost indignant. ‘I didn’t kill her, Mary.’
‘Then,’ she said, ‘I suggest you ring that detective inspector and tell him what you have been doing and why.’
He hesitated. ‘Are you sure?’
‘If you don’t,’ she said implacably, conscious of having crossed yet another river in the marriage process, ‘I will. Here’s the phone.’
Minutes later he put it down and said to her, ‘They say that Detective Inspector Sloan is very busy just now. They promised he’d get back to me.’
Detective Inspector Sloan was indeed very busy. He was back at the police station in Berebury, dictating to Detective Constable Crosby the first of the charges to be preferred against Anthony Berra. ‘The assault on Anna Sutherland for starters,’ he said, ‘but warn him that further charges are to be preferred in due course.’
‘Like killing the Osgathorp woman?’
‘Just like that, Crosby. And Norman Potts too. Those Dracula orchids were a nice touch to divert blackmail – otherwise blood-sucking – in Potts’ direction and away from the major blackmailer. A very clever move.’
Mention of blood stirred Crosby. ‘You’re quite sure, sir, aren’t you, that he’s not infectious?’
Anthony Berra had not gone quietly but had proved no match for two trained police officers.
‘Quite sure, Crosby. His doctor assures me that although Berra is HIV Positive you are not at risk. Berra’s marriage would have been, though,’ Sloan added, ‘if his future wife or her family had ever found out about his having AIDS.’
‘That woman’d got him over a barrel, hadn’t she, sir?’
‘I’m afraid so and he knew it. Now, Crosby, what I want you to do next is to search the accused’s house for the key to Canonry Cottage. I think you’ll find it there while I’ve got to report to Superintendent Leeyes.’
‘No doubt about the identification, then?’ asked Leeyes when Sloan arrived.
‘None, sir. The body is that of the missing person, Enid Maude Osgathorp, all right. Her luggage was buried in the flower bed there with her and her handbag too. Her name’s on both of them.’ While the woman’s luggage and handbag had withstood three weeks under the soil quite well, her body was not a pretty sight, the insect world being no respecter of persons – especially dead ones.
Leeyes grunted.
‘Berra made the commonest of mistakes and buried her in quicklime,’ carried on Sloan. ‘Murderers will do it.’
‘The amateurs, anyway,’ said Leeyes grandly. ‘They read too much crime fiction.’
Sloan agreed. ‘They all think that it destroys bodies. And slaked lime’s even worse,’ he added. ‘It’s only got to rain …’
‘So you reckon she never got as far as Berebury that day?’ said Leeyes.
Sloan had been thinking about this. ‘I think Berra gives her a lift – he almost certainly knew her holiday plans …’
‘That fool of a bonfire boy did,’ interjected Leeyes, ‘so I expect Berra did too.’
‘Feakins was talking his way into being a prime suspect,’ admitted Sloan, ‘but he’s off the hook now.’ He took a deep breath and went back to talking about Anthony Berra. ‘So he picks her up at the bus stop, quietens her with a few doses of control spray if she gets difficult while he drives her to the Grange. The Lingards are in Italy and so he’s been able to prepare the ground in the long border in his own time …’
‘If you mean dig a hole, Sloan, say so.’
‘Yes, sir. He kills her there …’
‘Weapon?’
‘Edge of a spade, probably. Doctor Dabbe is nearly sure but he won’t commit himself until he’s had a really good look at the post-mortem.’
‘Par for the course,’ said Leeyes, a weekend golfer. ‘He never will commit himself if he doesn’t have to and leopards don’t change their spots.’
Sloan ploughed on. ‘If she screams the peacocks there’ll get all the blame. He covers the body with quicklime and then soil and hightails it over to Berebury as quickly as he can.’
The superintendent flipped over an earlier report. ‘He says here that he visited a few charity shops there first …’
‘Which don’t have automated timed tills,’ Sloan reminded him. ‘So we couldn’t check on his timing until he got to the bank and cashed a cheque. Then he ends up having lunch at the Bellingham Hotel. We did check on that.’
‘Busy, busy,’ said Leeyes.
‘That’s right, sir, but he’s still got a lot to do. He doesn’t dare plant any of the lime-hating plants he’d got on order from Jack Haines because they’ll die if he does and that wouldn’t do. Besides, the ground would have needed time to settle and he needs to be able to smooth it out and delay the planting without anyone commenting. Well, not anyone – Mrs Charmian Lingard, to be precise.’
‘Ah,’ exclaimed Superintendent Leeyes, light dawning, ‘so he breaks in and causes mayhem at Haines’ nursery. Clever.’
‘Exactly so, sir. By killing all the orchids there and all those over at Capstan Purlieu as well, he muddies the
waters nicely. Everyone thinks the damage is all to do with the orchids – not what’s in the other greenhouse.’
‘You can get away with a lot as collateral damage,’ pronounced Leeyes, sometime soldier.
‘He loses all the plants he doesn’t want and at the same time gets a chance to order new …’
‘And different ones,’ concluded Leeyes smartly.
‘Precisely so, sir. Plants that do well in lime.’
‘So where does Norman Potts come in?’
‘I reckon,’ said Sloan, ‘that he caught sight of Berra driving into Berebury without a passenger in his vehicle. Don’t forget that they would have known each other from Haines’ nursery and Potts was living in Berebury. It was the only real risk Berra took but we’re a long way from Pelling here and the chances were pretty slim that he would have been seen by anyone who knew him before he got to the railway station. I expect he actually stopped outside that sandwich shop for a moment or two to add a little local colour to his story.’
‘Verisimilitude is the word you want,’ declared Leeyes.
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Sloan humbly. ‘I think it was just bad luck for both of them – Berra and Potts – that Potts spotted him. I daresay the silly fellow tried a little blackmail on his own account.’
‘Dicing with death if you ask me,’ said Leeyes. ‘The biter bit.’
‘Very unwise, I’d say.’
‘It’s what we call evidence of system, Sloan,’ said the superintendent loftily. ‘Especially when you’ve got means, motive and opportunity like Berra had.’
‘A dangerous thing to do, anyway,’ said Sloan. As
far as he was concerned, if there was evidence of system anywhere it had been in the behaviour of Enid Maude Osgathorp. He wondered how many other people in Pelling there were who would sleep more soundly tonight knowing that a blackmailer had literally gone to ground.
For ever.
They would never know.
Not now.
‘Sorry, sir, I didn’t quite catch that.’ He realised that the superintendent had been speaking to him.
Leeyes sounded tetchy. ‘I said you haven’t forgotten your annual assessment and Personal Development Discussion on Friday morning, have you, Sloan?’