The Skeleton Garden (8 page)

They parted and Pru drove to Greenoak, attempting to stomp out the fires of her imagination until she could talk with Polly and find out just who this Jack Snuggs thought he was. She set her bag on the table and lingered in the kitchen, leaning up against the Aga to warm herself before heading upstairs. She hadn't been there long before Orlando came bounding in.

Christopher followed, closed the door, and leaned against it, inhaling deeply and expelling the air in a big huff. He wore a badge with purple blinking lights around the edge and the image of a spaceship in the middle.

“Greetings, earthlings,” Pru said. “How was Galaxy Con?”

“Brilliant, Aunt Pru. It was brilliant.” Orlando seemed to be at a loss for a further description, and only beamed as he held up a bag of loot. “Is it all right if I go up?”

Pru nodded and off he went, thundering up the stairs. “You didn't arrest any two-headed aliens while you were at Galaxy Con, did you?” she asked Christopher.

“The queues,” he said, running his hand through his short hair. “We spent the day in lines—for autographs, to buy a cup of tea, to be on camera wearing Monstrosa's head. And we were just about the only two people in the entire place not wearing a costume.”

Pru snorted a giggle, and Christopher gave her a narrow look. “Sorry,” she said.

He hung up his coat, blinking badge still attached, and went to her. “And your day?”

She nodded and stared at her feet. “We ran into Jack Snuggs at the Blackbird this evening. He's Stan's son. Have you met him?”

“No,” Christopher said, leaning against the stove next to her. “He doesn't live round here, does he?”

“Canada,” Pru replied. “Polly knows him. And he knows her. And Simon, of course,” she added, but not before Christopher looked over to study her face.

“What's he doing here?”

“I don't know, but I intend to find out,” she said as she took his hand and they went upstairs.

After she had crawled into bed, she began to tell him about their trip to Inkpen. “The weavers do beautiful work. I took photos—let me show you.” She reached over and felt the pockets of her trousers. “No, I left my phone in my bag. I'll just pop down and get it.”

She padded downstairs and into the kitchen to find Orlando with her mobile phone in hand. He looked up, startled. After a stunned silence, she said, “What are you doing? You aren't allowed access to a mobile.”

He plunked it on the table and walked past her, out the door and into the hall.

She wanted to run the other way, but she steeled herself and followed, overtaking him at the door to the library. “In here, please,” she said, slapping the light on. Orlando stomped in and crossed to the window. She took a deep breath, attempting to keep her voice calm, her heart beating a mile a minute. “You've gone against your parents' wishes—they were quite clear. No computer. No mobile.”

The light on the stairs went on as Christopher came down and caught sight of the look on her face through the doorway. “What's this?”

“Orlando was in the kitchen with my mobile,” she said.

“How did that come about?” Christopher asked, his tone sharp and commanding. “Did it fall into your hands by accident?”

“I was borrowing it—I didn't steal it. I didn't do anything wrong,” Orlando said, his face red.

“And Simon's, when he took you in to Romsey the other day—did you ‘borrow' his as well? You broke the agreement, Orlando,” Pru replied. “You thought you could get away with it, and so you did. We've given you enough freedom here, but it seems as if you can't handle that.”

“I don't see why I should be punished for what I did at home.”

“You hacked into someone's private email account,” Christopher said sharply.

“The tosser,” Orlando said, spitting out the words. “I'm glad I showed him up—he's the one that needs punishing. Everyone's falling all over themselves to apologize for what I've done—but what about what he did to my sister?”

“To Bess? What did he do to her?” Pru asked.

“He led her on, told her he loved her”—Orlando shuddered—“to get inside information from the council. He's a builder and wanted to put in the lowest bid on some project.” He smirked. “I put a stop to that. I posted his emails.”

“You posted emails that were about your sister?”

“No,” Orlando said, waving his hand. “I made sure Bess's name never appeared. I posted his own confession that he was leading her on—they were emails to his wife. Yeah,” Orlando said, nodding violently, “he's married.”

“How did you know Bess was seeing a married man?”

“She told us. She said he was separated and that he told her they had to keep things quiet until his divorce was official. She even brought him round. He tried to make out like he was this great fellow.” Orlando clenched his jaw. “I didn't believe a word out of his mouth—she couldn't see it, but he was slime, oiling his way around, patting me on the head as if I were a dog.”

“And so you found a way to get into his private email account?” Christopher asked, interrogation in full swing.

Orlando rolled his eyes. “Shoddy encryption code, outdated software—it was a snap to break his password.” Christopher raised his eyebrows. “But I had good reason,” Orlando said. “One day when he was leaving our house, he got twitchy when Bess said she wanted to go with him. I knew something wasn't right, so I followed him. I saw him meet a woman—it was his wife,” Orlando said. “Didn't look like they were having any problems at all, I can tell you.”

“You followed him, and he didn't notice?” Pru asked.

Christopher answered. “Most people are oblivious to what's going on around them. He wouldn't have a clue he was being tailed—if it was done well.” Pru heard a note of respect creep into his voice, followed by a tiny crack in the solid front they presented to Orlando.

“It's true,” the boy said, nodding vigorously. “He didn't suspect a thing. He's too thick.”

“But, son, why not just tell Bess?” Christopher asked. “Why make it public by posting it on his website?”

“He was using her, and he needed to pay for it,” Orlando said. “I couldn't let anyone do that to Bess.”

“Oh, Orlando,” Pru whispered. He was protecting his sister, she thought. Another crack.

“All right,” Christopher said, “you wanted to punish him—you wanted his underhanded doings revealed. But didn't that get your sister in trouble?”

Orlando shook his head. “Bess is in the clear. She didn't give him any information; she would never do that.”

“There were other ways to go about this—you didn't have to break the law,” Christopher said.

“Got the job done, didn't it?” Orlando caught sight of the look on Christopher's face and said, “Sorry, sir.”

“Orlando,” Pru said, having found her voice. “What a wonderful, caring brother you are to want to protect your sister…” She felt Christopher's eyes on her. She held up an index finger and continued, “Although, of course, it was not the most appropriate method.”

Orlando swallowed. “She isn't speaking to me.”

“Bess?”

“She's angry. She's quit her job. She says I should've minded my own business, that I've ruined her life.”

Pru wanted to hug him, but was afraid he would bolt, so she settled for putting a hand on his arm. “Don't you worry about that. She'll get over it. She'll understand why you did it. Bess loves you—she could never stay mad at such a good brother.”

She felt him tremble. His eyes widened as he cleared his throat and said, “May I go up to my room now?”

Christopher nodded. “Go on.”

Orlando slipped out the door and thundered up the stairs.

Pru turned to Christopher, her eyes full of tears. “He should have a good cry—it would make him feel better. I know he wanted to.”

“Trust me, the last thing a teenage boy wants to do is cry.” He put his arms around Pru's waist and she rested her head on his chest, drained. “You did well with him,” he said.

She gave him a squeeze of gratitude. She had sometimes imagined what it would be like to have children, but she had mostly stuck to the happy images—crayon drawings on the fridge, school prizes, picking strawberries from the garden—and had judiciously avoided picturing traumatic confrontations. “Did you have trouble with Graham when he was this age?”

“Phyl was the one who had to put up with most of it,” Christopher said, referring to his ex-wife. “I do recall that the summer he was twelve, he and a friend tried to hitchhike to Glastonbury Festival. Got turfed out of a lorry in the middle of the night after the driver relieved them of what few quid they had. They had to bang on the door of a vicarage and ask the reverend to use the phone.” He shook his head. “Well,” he said, nodding upstairs in the direction of Orlando's room, “present danger is over.”

We're jaded now, the war's gone on so long. That Messerschmitt that crashed two months ago, no one cares. I hear that the old man who lives in the house is going to bury it.

—Letter from Home Farm, Ratley

Garden work in the parterre lawn ceased, and the following week police created fresh chaos. The pit had been widened, and now the outer ring of boxwoods had roots sticking out of the soil. The police decided to look further afield and had dug exploratory holes in each of the four large mixed beds just to make sure they overlooked nothing. Out came the hebes in each corner, along with clumps of perennials. Pru tried to minimize damage by wrapping the rootballs in damp burlap and setting the plants near the yew hedge for protection. She considered staying close by to make sure the garden didn't suffer any further damage, but after she heard one of the diggers say, “Bloody hell, Eddie, get your foot off that iris,” she avoided the place altogether. Her heart couldn't take it.

Instead, Pru and Simon focused on the new Mediterranean garden on the other side of the house, well out of the way of the police. The masons laid the flagstones, leaving generous holes here and there for ornamental grasses and agapanthus. They set three enormous reproduction Italian olive jars in the middle and laid out the hedge plants, which looked like tiny flags waving in the breeze. They would look little different by summer, Pru thought.

Simon would stop work occasionally, staring off into space, gripping a heavy black nursery pot between index finger and thumb. Pru decided he was having second thoughts about the magazine article, but she said nothing, wanting him to come to his own conclusion about the futility of the endeavor.

“Should we leave the agapanthus until spring?” he asked Wednesday afternoon, nodding to the terrace where twenty pots were lined up in two rows, wide, strappy leaves bursting from each.

“If we have a mild winter, wouldn't it be better for them to be in the ground working on a root system?” Pru asked as she poured sand into the crevices between paving stones.

Simon looked down at the pot he held. “I've been thinking,” he said.

Pru didn't look up from her task, but thought,
Yes, at last. He'll admit it's time to chuck it in.
She would try to keep the relief from her face.

“I've been thinking,” he started again. “We should put in a cutting garden.”

“What?” Pru's head jerked up, scattering a spadeful of sand across the stones.

“In the walled garden with the veg—on the far end where the peaches are trained against the wall. They've never done well there—not really enough heat for them. We could take the peaches out and put in a full-on cutting garden, great color for summer and a real eye-catcher.” He shrugged. “ 'Course we'll need to start flats of annuals in the next month or so—and that'll mean cleaning out the glasshouse first.”

Pru leaned on her spade and hung her head down, hoping to restart the flow of blood to her brain before she fainted. In the real world, the “glasshouse” occupied one end of the potting shed. It had shelves fitted out for about two dozen seed trays along windows that were now crusted with moss and covered with grime. Stacks of black nursery containers and various sizes of terra-cotta pots covered the floor. Two ancient gas-powered lawn mowers and an erratic collection of hazel stems used for staking blocked any access.

“Could we wait until we see how it goes here?” She gestured around the almost empty space. “And after we move the herb garden and replant everything they've dug up in the parterre lawn.”

But Simon was on a roll. “Why don't we use germander to line the cutting garden beds? It would be a bit different from box.”

“Wouldn't it look out of place, though?” Pru asked. “There's boxwood everywhere else in there.”

“Right, so,” he continued, “we use germander on the opposite end, around the new herb beds, too. It would even out, you know, balance it.”

God help her—she liked the idea. “But we couldn't get any before next week, could we?”

“I know a fellow with a wholesale place in Southampton,” he said. “I'll start there. We'll clean out every nursery in the south if we have to. We'll explain to the editor that it'll fill in by summer.”

They'd have to explain a good many things to the editor, Pru thought.

“Right. Well.” Simon looked off toward the walled garden. “We can set Orlando to digging out the peaches. It'll be a start.”

Good luck to you,
Pru thought, going in search of the boy. Orlando had taken to dogging the heels of whatever uniform might be in the marquee, which also had attracted several local historians who came out to see the remains of the enemy plane for themselves. With local residents checking in regularly, too, the marquee had become as busy as the Blackbird on a Friday evening.

When Pru approached, Sonia the runner duck waited outside the tent, watching the comings and goings like a bouncer. Inside, Kitty filled Orlando in on wartime life. “Recipes during the war had to take into account our lack of meat and sugar and flour, you see,” she said to him. “Rationing on just about everything, why, you had to take care how much tea you drank. I remember my mum had a great love of Lord Woolton's pie during the war. I should uncover that recipe and bake one for my Jemima. She's a vegetarian and always looking for something else to do with swedes and parsnips.”

“Aunt Pru,” Orlando exclaimed, looking as if he might like to be rescued from Lord Woolton's pie. “Do you need me in the garden?”

“Simon has a job for you,” Pru said. “Unless, of course, you'd rather stay and chat with Mrs. Bassett.”

“I wouldn't want to shirk my responsibilities,” Orlando said. “Thanks very much, Mrs. Bassett, for telling me about what your mother cooked during the war and about the bomb falling in the field next to your house.” He edged his way out of the marquee, giving Sonia a wide berth.

“So, Kitty, what's this about a bomb?” Pru asked. “Were you down in the Blackbird cellars at the time?”

“We were caught out once. The sirens had gone off, but my mum was tired of running and hiding by then, and she was in the middle of cooking up some early plums with the precious little sugar we had. I sat at the table, helping to sort the jars, when here came the plane.” Kitty's voice dropped to a loud whisper. “We heard the whistle of the bomb, and then silence, only the noise of the plane flying off. My mum almost nailed my dress to the chair while my dad rang the ARP—Air Raid Precautions. They came round and defused it, as it hadn't gone off itself. It was written up, of course—they kept track of all incidents reported, no matter how big or small.”

“Do you remember this plane crashing?” Pru asked.

Kitty's face scrunched up in concentration. “Not as such,” she said. “It seemed as if things were exploding and crashing all round us all the time. And I was such a wee girl, what did I care about that?”

Pru studied the airplane parts, each laid out with its own white identification tag. “Would someone have written up this crash?”

“I'd say,” Kitty replied. “My son—Jemima's father—went to the archives in Winchester for a school report once and saw the report for our unexploded bomb. They've all the incidents for the Romsey district there—stacks and stacks of them.”

“Is there no news?” It was the end of Thursday, and Pru perched in an armchair in the corner of their bedroom, watching Christopher pull off his uniform. He threw it onto the foot of the bed but then took it up again, gave it a shake, and put it away on a hanger.

“They've run a check on the police files from 1939 through 1945—no missing persons or suspicious disappearances in the area. Nothing matching the remains.”

“Is Martin working on the case?” she asked. Christopher's days had been filled with local rowdies defacing the mile marker near the A3057 to Timsbury—he spent most of one day taking statements from the neighbors—as well as sorting out the parking scheme for an upcoming autumn fête near Abbotswood.

“Martin has had a couple of shop break-ins to investigate in Romsey,” Christopher said. “He seems quite happy to stay in town these days.”

“Mmm,” Pru replied. She and Polly believed there was a woman involved—that Martin's blind date of a couple of weeks back had blossomed, although he would not reply to their thinly veiled inquiries. But Martin's love life didn't concern Pru as much as the bones she'd found. The skeleton, male, had been identified as British from dental work and the remnants of clothes.

“Apart from a shoulder wound that had healed, there's no indication of trauma on the skeleton,” Christopher said, pushing his head through the neck of a jumper. “He could've died in any number of ways.” But he knew better than to go into graphic descriptions with her—her imagination was graphic enough.

Christopher gave the same answer to Orlando at dinner. “Is that it, then?” the boy asked. “You won't ever know?”

“Of course we'll know,” Christopher said. He tapped the end of his fork on the table as if he wished he could knock the answer out.

“Dad says that his uncle Johnny was a flight engineer on a Lancaster,” Orlando said, reaching for the bowl of sprouts. He turned to Pru. “That was a bomber. Dad says there should be some record about the Messerschmitt, but one of the men here said that there are no records online.” Orlando shook his head in disbelief. “I thought he was having me on.”

“We can look at the real incident reports,” Pru said. “The archives are in Winchester. I thought I'd take tomorrow, go up, and take a look. Want to come with me?” she asked Orlando. “Are you up for it? No computers, no mobile phones.”

“I can read a book as well as the next fellow,” Orlando said. “When I have to.”

“I'll work over the weekend,” Pru said to Simon, who seemed to look on her trip to Winchester as scarpering. “Orlando and I will clear out the shed and get the glasshouse in working order. We'll get loads done, you'll see.” She left him digging out old, twiggy sunroses from between pavers that ran parallel to the back terrace. They would need to replant if it were to stay the sunrose walk.

Christopher ran them up to Winchester. After filling out forms and getting passes, they moved into the reading room, a large, airy, modern place with a wall of windows where researchers of all ages were at work. A young woman had scrolls unrolled and held open with paperweights while she photographed the contents; an older man used a magnifying glass on yellowed scraps of paper; five primary school students examined a hanging map of the coast with hands behind their backs.

Pru had made arrangements and now, on one of the high tables, sat four, thick, oversized ledgers, leather-bound and tied closed with cloth ribbons.

“Right,” Pru said, “let's get to it.”

They each took a ledger—Pru, 1940; Orlando, 1941. Across the top were categories: date, time, incident, locality, outcome, and remarks. They began reading down the pages, which were filled with line after line of incidents, some in more detail than others.
URGENT,
one read.
Please ring Mr. Jones near Ringwood (telephone is in shed so please ring a long time). He is excavating land at south end of water meadow called “the marsh” and has been told there is a BOMB unexploded.

They were bogged down by the handwriting and began consulting each other. It made for slow going. “Orlando, do you know what this word is?” “Aunt Pru, does that say ‘device'?”

By one o'clock they were both weary and hungry, so that little things seemed quite funny. “ ‘UXB, East Wellow, found by two cows,' ” Orlando read aloud, and Pru sniggered. “Oh look,” she said, pointing to a scrawl, “ ‘Squid Wood.' ” “They have a wood full of squids?” he asked, and they broke up, drawing the raised eyebrows of an elderly couple at the next table, sorting through boxes of parchment. Pru sobered up, thinking she really should be a better example to the younger generation.

By the time Orlando began reading the 1944 ledger, Pru needed a break. “How about lunch?” she asked.

“What's this?” Orlando set a ruler on the page, and Pru read across the entry: “21 May 1944, 7 p.m., number 453, Romsey, Ratley, Greenoak, enemy plane down, pilot ejected and found mile away in Whitcap Wood (broken leg).” Under “remarks,” was written:
Crash reported by Reginald Saxsby. Plane remains on-site.