Chapter and Hearse Page 18

  ‘I don’t like that,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘I also had a word with Sid Wetherspoon, the removals man,’ continued Sloan. ‘He took all the furniture over to a house right out in the country behind Almstone, but Christopher Cavendish had asked him particularly not to disclose where it was to anyone … He stressed that bit very heavily to Sid. Said there was woman trouble and he was sure Sid – man to man – would understand.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘Very nice place, actually, sir, that house, but empty except for the furniture that Sid had delivered there.’

  ‘The neighbours?’ Superintendent Leeyes always insisted that inquisitive neighbours were worth their weight in gold to an overworked police force.

  ‘The woman next door had seen a man and a young woman arrive there a week or so ago. She’d offered them the proverbial cup of tea over the garden fence but they said they had a plane to catch and wouldn’t be back until they’d had a long holiday.’

  ‘That’s a good one,’ snorted Leeyes.

  ‘The neighbour said the pair were collected by hire car and haven’t been seen since.’

  The Superintendent tapped his desk with his pencil. ‘I don’t like it at all, Sloan. I’m afraid that in the first place you’re going to have to open up that inspection pit.’

  ‘That’s what I thought too, sir.’

  ‘Then get a warrant.’

  * * *

  It was half an hour before the spades of the sweating diggers who were working in the garage struck anything.

  ‘It’s metal from the sound of it,’ called out Detective Constable Crosby.

  ‘Keep going,’ commanded Sloan.

  ‘Looks like a small strong box,’ said Crosby, while his fellow Constable scraped away the mixture of sand and aggregate that was covering a square metal edge.

  ‘A little water and cement in there,’ observed Sloan, ‘and that lot would have set into concrete overnight.’

  ‘Perhaps it was something he meant to do,’ said Crosby, straightening up. ‘And didn’t get round to.’ The Constable himself was a great procrastinator.

  ‘Criminals usually make mistakes,’ said Sloan. ‘Can you get a grip on it?’

  In the event the metal box came out quite easily.

  ‘It’s not even locked,’ said Crosby, surprised and somehow disappointed.

  Detective Inspector Sloan lifted the lid. The box contained nothing but a plastic bag. Inside it was a conventional Change of Address card of the variety bought at any stationer’s shop. The details had been completed with a waterproof pen and spelled out the address of a house.

  ‘But that’s where Sid Wetherspoon delivered the furniture,’ said Crosby.

  ‘It is indeed,’ agreed Sloan. ‘Read on, Crosby.’

  The Detective Constable peered over Sloan’s shoulder and read out aloud, ‘“To Whom It May Concern” … I don’t get it, sir. Who does It concern?’

  ‘Us,’ said Sloan pithily. ‘Keep going.’

  ‘It says “Strictly Confidential”,’ said Crosby.

  Detective Inspector Sloan tapped the card. ‘Don’t forget this last message.’

  At the bottom of the card was written ‘Important. We don’t want Mum to know where we are until after the baby’s arrived.’

  * * *

  ‘Christopher Cavendish was right when he told Sid Wetherspoon that he’d got woman trouble, sir,’ explained Sloan to Superintendent Leeyes later. ‘He had. We just thought of the wrong woman, that’s all.’

  Losing the Plot

  ‘What a truly magnificent view!’ exclaimed Marion Carstairs. Like everyone else who entered the sitting room of the house on the hill at Almstone known as the Toft for the first time, she had crossed straight to the bay window and gazed out.

  ‘It is indeed,’ agreed Kenneth Marsden of Messrs Crombie and Marsden, Estate Agents and Valuers, of Berebury, ‘although, as I am sure you already know, Miss Carstairs, you don’t own the view from your windows unless, that is,’ he added, ‘you own that land as well.’

  ‘Like dukes,’ murmured Marion absently. ‘They always made sure that they possessed all the land that could be seen from their mansions. After all, Capability Brown expected it of them.’

  ‘Really?’ said Kenneth Marsden politely. ‘How interesting.’

  ‘But this panorama is quite exceptional.’

  ‘That’s what everyone to whom I’ve shown the property says,’ murmured the estate agent, finding that there was something about this lean, intelligent woman that made him pay more than usual attention to his grammar.

  ‘You know, Mr Marsden, I do believe you can see the whole of the Alm valley from here.’ Marion scanned the horizon. ‘Isn’t that Billing Bridge over there? I’m sure I came over the river that way.’

  ‘It is,’ said the estate agent, adding with professional caution, ‘I am told that on a clear day you can see the spire of Calleford Minster.’ He was well aware that those now following his calling had to be so much more circumspect in what they said in these days of rules and regulation than hitherto.

  She was still looking eagerly out of the window. ‘South, south-west – the sunsets must be a real joy up here too.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Kenneth Marsden quickly, ‘but as it happens I haven’t ever been here in the evening to see.’

  She smiled. ‘And I am hoping that I shall be here quite soon to do just that. You’ve got the address of my solicitors, haven’t you?’

  ‘There are, of course, other prospective purchasers who wish to see over the property.’ He said this quite automatically, although in fact there had been very few and none of those were local. Miss Carstairs had come from London.

  ‘Naturally. I quite understand that.’ She turned back and said, ‘Tell me, how could Mr and Mrs Boness have borne to move away from here?’

  ‘Well, in a manner of speaking they haven’t.’ Kenneth Marsden pointed out of the window. ‘Do you see that little building down there to the left under the slope? It’s called the Croft…’

  ‘Toft and Croft!’ exclaimed Marion Carstairs, clapping her hands. ‘Of course! Toft and croft – that means the house and land on a hill in both Old English and Old Norse.’

  ‘Well, they just moved into the Croft,’ said Marsden, skating over the etymology.

  ‘Keeping the view.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But,’ she observed, pointing out of the window, ‘if that wire fence over there is anything to go by, they’ve also kept the land right up to just in front of the Toft.’

  ‘I am given to understand,’ said the estate agent carefully, ‘that Mrs Boness is quite a gardener and wished to retain as much of the original ground as possible.’

  ‘Ah, I see…’ All she could actually see were a few straggly wallflowers and an old felled birch tree.

  ‘In fact, Miss Carstairs, as you will note from the title deeds, they did move their boundary back a little for the previous owners – the Mullens, they were called.’

  ‘Oh, was there some trouble over it, then?’ she asked swiftly.

  ‘Mr Boness told me that it was to oblige the Mullens over some trees,’ said the estate agent. ‘They wanted them in their garden, not his. I believe, though, that Mr Boness had them cut down himself after the Mullens left.’

  ‘But –’ Marion Carstairs’s eyebrows came up – ‘I thought it was Mr Boness who is selling this house now. You hadn’t told me that there had been someone else occupying it after them.’

  ‘Oh, yes, but they were here only for four or five years. Michael Boness actually bought the place back from the new people, thinking he and his wife would move in again themselves.’

  ‘But they didn’t?’

  ‘No. I was advised that in the end Mrs Boness decided she was quite happy where she was down in the Croft, and that’s why they put the property back on the market.’

  ‘Some gardeners like making new gardens and some don’t,’ observed Marion Carstairs. From
what she could see of it, the garden of the house below had little to commend it besides the wallflowers but she did not say so. ‘We’re all different. That’s the joy of being a gardener.’

  The estate agent nodded. ‘And, as you will have seen on your way in, there is still plenty of land with the property. It’s just that it’s on both sides of the house rather than in the front of it.’

  ‘Oh, it’s quite enough for my wants, Mr Marsden, I do assure you,’ responded Marion Carstairs truthfully. ‘Quite enough. And it’s an alkaline soil, which is exactly what I am looking for.’

  ‘Good. Now, if you’d like to see the other rooms…’

  * * *

  It was early autumn by the time Marion Carstairs moved in to the Toft and was able to explore the garden properly for the first time. It was then that she took a really good look at the stretch of ground on her side of the wire fence opposite the bay window. What she saw was a row of sawn-off tree stumps, their remains now hardly visible above the grass. This had lain unmown through the summer months that the house had been on the market and it was now long and untidy.

  On Michael Boness’s side of the fence was a row of newly planted small young trees that had not been there when she had agreed to buy the Toft. The bed of the new trees extended almost exactly the length of her bay window.

  ‘Leyland cypress, unless I’m very much mistaken,’ she said to herself.

  She said nothing to Michael Boness, though, when she met him in the village store, accepting his welcome to the Toft and Almstone with her customary reserved politeness.

  * * *

  It’s Cupressocyparis leylandii, Jean,’ she told her sister later that week, when she telephoned her to report that she was settled in at the Toft. ‘It’ll grow a good three feet a year. What’s that? Oh, yes, it’ll be up to the level of the bay window in no time at all. And it’s planted as densely as possible too. Just like the hedge that was here before. I reckon that he moved the boundary back when he got possession so that the stumps wouldn’t be in the way of this new hedge.’

  ‘Naughty,’ said her sister.

  ‘Clever,’ said Marion.

  She spent the winter preparing the ground for a spring planting of little Christmas trees. These she installed in the ground to the sides of the house and adjacent to the boundary fence, tending them carefully until they were properly established. A good horticultural specialist might have considered her a little unwise to put them in ground so very near a rapidly growing hedge of leylandii since this would all too soon take both light and moisture from the infant Christmas trees, but this factor did not seem to have occurred to Marion Carstairs.

  Instead she seemed to be concentrating all her attention on the tree stumps.

  ‘Now that I’ve had the stumps freshly cut I’ll be able to kill them off before I have them taken out,’ she called cheerfully across to Michael Boness when he appeared near her boundary one day when she was in the garden, carefully painting the fresh surface of each stump with a clear liquid. ‘I’m sure they’ll be so much easier to lift when they’ve died off completely, aren’t you?’

  ‘If anything you’re using in the way of poison gets to the hedge on my side and damages it,’ her neighbour began belligerently, ‘you’ll be in trouble, I can tell you.’

  Marion Carstairs looked quite shocked. ‘I shouldn’t dream of letting that happen, Mr Boness. I promise you, I’ll be very careful.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ Boness grunted, ‘but I’ll have you know that that hedge stays where it is, no matter what you say.’

  ‘I shouldn’t dream of saying anything, Mr Boness,’ said Marion Carstairs in dulcet tones. ‘Why should I? It’s your hedge.’

  ‘Because if,’ he began heatedly and then fell suddenly silent.

  ‘Your hedge is nothing to do with me,’ went on Marion, still sweetly reasonable. ‘The very idea…’

  At the end of her first year at the house, the leylandii was growing fast and thickening up well. All that Marion Carstairs had seen of Mr and Mrs Boness had been when she had called with the church choir singing Christmas carols. ‘God rest you merry,’ she had sung with the rest of the choir at their door. ‘Let nothing you dismay…’

  By the end of Marion’s second summer at the Toft Mike Boness’s new leylandii hedge was beginning to show signs of interfering with the splendid view of the valley from her sitting room.

  ‘I’m planning on having these old stumps out in the spring, Mr Boness,’ she said one day when he was up near her boundary, examining his leylandii hedge.

  ‘You’d better not disturb any roots on my side,’ he said gruffly, ‘or there’ll be real trouble. That hedge stays.’

  ‘Oh, I think we’ll be able to get them out all right without doing any damage to your garden or mine,’ she said.

  ‘They’re coming along very well now, these trees of mine are,’ he said.

  ‘They are indeed,’ she said warmly.

  ‘They’re going to be fine, tall trees in no time at all.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Marion agreeably.

  ‘Give me and the missus a bit of privacy in our old age, they will,’ he went on, puzzled by her lack of reaction.

  ‘They will indeed,’ she said immediately. ‘Just what you want as time goes by.’

  ‘Doesn’t help your view much though, does it?’ Boness ventured slyly, watching her face.

  ‘True,’ admitted Marion Carstairs, ‘but then I’ve always thought Goethe got it right.’

  ‘Who?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘Goethe. A German poet.’ Marion waved an arm over the valley. ‘He said that no one could look at the view for more than fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Did he?’ Michael Boness sounded baffled. ‘You do know these trees could get to more than a hundred feet if they’re not trimmed?’

  ‘Really? Do take care, won’t you?’ said Marion solicitously. ‘You wouldn’t want to fall off a ladder…’

  ‘I’m not going to fall off a ladder,’ he said crossly, ‘because I’m not going to trim them.’

  ‘Ah, then you won’t need to worry about falling, will you?’ she said.

  * * *

  She duly recounted the conversation to her sister, Jean, over the telephone that evening. ‘Poor man,’ she laughed. ‘He doesn’t know what to make of me.’

  ‘Poor nothing,’ snorted Jean. ‘He’s waiting for you to go down on bended knee and beg him to cut the leylandii down so that you can have your lovely view back.’

  ‘He’s going to be disappointed, then,’ said Marion Carstairs. ‘I will ask him, of course, but not just yet.’

  ‘So how are your Christmas trees coming along?’ asked her sister.

  ‘Slowly but well,’ said Marion. ‘Another twelve months should see them just right.’

  ‘And his leylandii?’

  ‘Just wrong,’ said Marion. ‘For him, I mean. Fomes spreads underground along the roots at about a yard a year.’

  ‘I’m very happy to hear it…’ She stopped. ‘But, Marion, won’t it look very odd if the whole of his hedge is attacked by it at once?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Marion mysteriously, ‘I’ve thought of that. And about what to do if he gets on to someone about the fomes, as I’m sure he will.’

  ‘I hope you have. After all, dear, fungi – what did you say the Latin name for fomes was?’

  ‘Heterobasidin annosum…’

  ‘Even ones with outlandish names like – er – that don’t usually travel in straight lines – and you know that, even if Mike Boness doesn’t.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘don’t forget that the source of the infection – the old tree stumps – is in a straight line too.’

  ‘But surely you don’t want him ever to know that that’s where it’s come from.’

  ‘No, of course not. That’s why I had the stumps out and the ground grassed over … Nobody will know they were ever there and as sure as eggs Michael Boness isn’t going to tell anyone.’

  �
��Why not?’

  ‘For one thing, when he’s had it spelled out to him, his estate agent won’t like to hear what his client has been up to.’

  ‘Go on…’

  ‘But it could be argued,’ Marion said cogently, ‘that recently planted trees such as his leylandii are unusually susceptible to that sort of infestation.’

  ‘I do hope,’ said Jean piously, ‘that you don’t have to argue anything.’

  * * *

  The next winter passed. This Christmas-tide the church choir sang the carol ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ at the front door of the Croft. When the choir came to the line ‘When they are both full-grown’ Michael Boness managed not to meet Marion Carstairs’s eye.

  * * *

  It was high summer when Marion started to see early signs of disease in the leylandii hedge, which was now both thick and tall. That was when Marion first asked Mike Boness if he would consider lowering his trees so that she could have her view back.

  ‘I thought you’d ask one day,’ he said, grinning unpleasantly. ‘All that talk about not minding what you looked at was hot air.’

  ‘It’s making my sitting room quite dark too,’ she said meekly.

  ‘That’s your problem,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, dear.’ Marion gave what she hoped was a womanly sigh. ‘I really don’t know what to do next.’

  ‘You can’t do anything,’ he said roughly. ‘It’s my hedge, not yours. I can plant it wherever I like and let it get as high as I like, and neither you nor anyone else can stop me, no matter what you say.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘And,’ he added, ‘since you’ve probably already thought about asking him, neither can your solicitor. They’re clever, all right, but not that clever.’

  ‘No.’ She sighed again. ‘I suppose not…’

  ‘So you might as well save your breath and your money.’

  ‘And that’s your last word, is it?’ she asked.

  Mike Boness paused and seemed to consider this. ‘Well,’ he drawled eventually, ‘I dare say I could buy the Toft back from you if I had a mind to.’

  ‘Buy it back?’

  ‘That’s if you were prepared to agree to my price, of course.’