‘It was brave of you to come in here,’ I said, ‘if you thought I was a burglar.’
He braced his shoulders in an old automatic movement. ‘I was in the army once.’ He relaxed and shrugged. ‘Tell you the truth, I was coming in quietly-like to phone the police, then you started down the stairs.’
‘And… the gun?’
‘Brought it with me just in case. I go after rabbits… I keep the gun handy.’
I nodded. It was the gardener’s own gun, I thought. Malcolm had never owned one, as far as I knew.
‘Has my father paid you for the week?’ I said.
His eyes at once brightened hopefully. ‘He paid me last Friday, same as usual. Then Saturday morning he phoned my house to tell me to come round here to see to the dogs. Take them home with me, same as I always do when he’s away. So I did. But he was gone off the line before I could ask him how long he’d be wanting me to have them.’
I pulled out my cheque-book and wrote him a cheque for the amount he specified. Arthur Bel I brook, he said his name was. I tore out the cheque and gave it to him and asked him if there was anyone else who needed wages.
He shook his head. ‘The cleaner left when Mrs Pembroke was done in… er… murdered. Said she didn’t fancy the place any more.’
‘Where exactly was Mrs Pembroke… er… murdered?’
‘I’ll show you if you like.’ He stored the cheque away in a pocket. ‘Outside in the greenhouse.’
He took me, however, not as I’d imagined to the rickety old familiar greenhouse sagging against a mellowed wall in the kitchen garden, but to a bright white octagonal wrought-iron construction like a fancy bird-cage set as a summer-house on a secluded patch of lawn. From far outside, one could clearly see the flourishing geraniums within.
‘Well, well,’ I said.
Arthur Bellbrook uttered ‘Huh’ as expressing his disapproval and opened the metal-and-glass door.
‘Cost a fortune to heat, will this place,’ he observed. ‘And it got too hot in the summer. The only thing as will survive in it is geraniums. Mrs Pembroke’s passion, geraniums.’
An almost full sack of potting compost lay along one of the work surfaces, the top side of it slit from end to end to make the soil mixture easy to reach. A box of small pots stood nearby, some of them occupied by cuttings.
I looked at the compost with revulsion. ‘Is that where…?’ I began.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Poor lady. There’s no one ought to die like that, however difficult they could be.’
‘No,’ I agreed. A thought struck me. ‘It was you who found her, wasn’t it?’
‘I went home like always at four o’clock, but I was out for a stroll about seven, and I thought I would just come in to see what state she’d left the place in. See, she played at gardening. Never cleaned the tools, things like that.’ He looked at the boarded floor as if still seeing her there. ‘She was lying face down, and I turned her over. She was dead all right. She was white like always but she had these little pink dots in her skin. They say you get those dots from asphyxiation. They found potting compost in her lungs, poor lady.’ He had undoubtedly been shocked and moved at the time, but there was an echo of countless repetitions in his voice now and precious little feeling.
‘Thank you for showing me,’ I said.
He nodded and we both went out, shutting the door behind us.
i don’t think Mr Pembroke liked this place much,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Last spring, when she chose it, he said she could have it only if he couldn’t see it from the house. Otherwise he wouldn’t pay the bill. I wasn’t supposed to hear, of course, but there you are, I did. They’d got to shouting, you see.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do see.’ Shouting, slammed doors, the lot.
‘They were all lovey-dovey when I first came here,’ he said, ‘but then I reckon her little ways got to him, like, and you could see it all going downhill like a runaway train. I’m here all day long, see, and in and out of the house, and you couldn’t miss it.’
‘What little ways?’ I asked casually.
He glanced at me sideways with reawakening suspicions, ‘I thought you were his son. You must have known her.’