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  ‘Number one was full of young orchids for any commercial customers who wanted them and number two had Strelitizia, Bouganvillia, Gardenia – that sort of thing – being grown for a posh new Mediterranean garden. Oh, and a lot of baby palms and some citrus trees. You name it, and we were growing on cuttings and raising seedlings in it for sale to our commercial customers too.’ He groaned aloud. ‘I’ve just thought …’

  ‘Yes?’ said Sloan.

  ‘Some of those orchids in number one greenhouse are in our spring catalogue. We must have taken orders for them from all over the place.’ He ran his fingers through what was left of his hair. ‘I can’t begin think what I’m going to do about that.’

  ‘Then there’s the rest of that special order from Anthony Berra for Pelling Grange,’ his secretary reminded him. ‘All those plants of his for the Lingards at the Grange were in there too. Don’t forget that.’

  ‘I haven’t. I’ve told him already and he isn’t happy.’ Jack Haines groaned again and turned to her. ‘Proper Job’s comforter, aren’t you, Mandy?’

  ‘Just a realist, Jack,’ she said, adding meaningfully, ‘and someone round here has to be.’

  ‘A special order?’ queried Sloan sharply. The out-of-the-ordinary was always of interest to the police.

  ‘It’s for a local landscape designer,’ explained Haines. ‘The plants were being grown to order.’

  ‘His order,’ supplemented Mandy Lamb. ‘Very fussy about it, he was, too.’

  ‘A bit precious about his reputation, being local and on the young side still, is Anthony Berra,’ conceded Haines, ‘but he knows his onions. I’ll give him that.’

  ‘At least,’ Mandy Lamb reminded him, ‘the other orchids – those that we’d got ready for Enid Osgathorp to collect yesterday – are safely in the packing shed. The black Phalaenopsis, the single Oncidium and those big Cymbidiums – oh, and the two Dracula orchids …’

  ‘Don’t let her catch you calling her Enid,’ said Jack Haines, momentarily diverted. ‘She’s Miss Osgathorp to you like she is to everyone else in Pelling and you’d better not forget it.’

  He wasn’t quite correct in what he said. To the police Miss Osgathorp was simply Enid Maude Osgathorp, aged 65, missing person, but Sloan did not say so.

  ‘She seems to have forgotten to collect them anyway,’ retorted Mandy pertly. ‘She’d arranged to pick them up yesterday for some demonstration she was supposed to be giving somewhere tomorrow evening but she didn’t turn up for them.’

  Detective Constable Crosby looked around and asked with interest, ‘Who are your nearest business rivals?’

  ‘Rivals?’ Jack Haines stiffened. ‘I don’t know that I’ve got …’

  ‘All businesses have competitors,’ said Crosby laconically, ‘like all God’s chillum got rhythm. Fact of life.’

  Haines paused. ‘Well, I suppose my nearest ones would be Staple St James Nurseries over towards Cullingoak and then there’s always the Leanaig Brothers’ place and the Berebury Garden Centre. I’ve heard that Bob Steele there has just started to go in for orchids himself.’

  ‘And Marilyn,’ added the girl behind him swiftly. ‘Mustn’t forget our Marilyn, must we?’

  ‘Marilyn?’ queried Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘Just another grower,’ said Jack Haines, stiffening, ‘that’s all.’

  ‘Got another name, has she?’ asked Crosby.

  ‘Trades as Capstan Purlieu Plants,’ said Jack Haines briefly, nothing mellow about him now, ‘but I don’t think any competitor would stoop to something like sabotage.’

  ‘Except at Show time,’ put in Mandy Lamb softly in the background.

  ‘Showing’s different,’ said Jack Haines quickly. ‘We’re all rivals then.’

  ‘No holds barred,’ agreed Sloan, who knew all about Flower Shows from long experience. His own roses hadn’t collected a prize at the Berebury Horticultural Society Summer Show yet but he lived in hope. He said, ‘What about Girdler’s place over Luston way? They’ve got a big nursery there.’ Sloan, a keen gardener himself, knew that.

  Haines sniffed. ‘Joe Girdler’s trying to breed the best rose in Christendom and good luck to him.’

  ‘Right.’ Actually Sloan was into roses himself but he didn’t say so.

  ‘Otherwise,’ insisted the nurseryman, ‘it’s a pretty friendly trade.’

  As befitted a man who had been in the Police Force all his working life, Detective Inspector Sloan took this last statement with a grain of salt, believing as he did that there was no such thing as a friendly trade. ‘What about the other greenhouse? What did you say was in there?’

  ‘Number one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Young orchids. And they’re all dead. Every blooming one of them …’

  ‘Except that they’re not going to bloom,’ murmured Crosby, sotto voce.

  ‘God knows what they were worth,’ said Haines, who hadn’t heard him.

  ‘This special order,’ said Sloan. ‘Was that for orchids too?’

  Jack Haines shook his head. ‘No, it’s for this landscape designer I told you about. Name of Anthony Berra. He’s got the contract for doing up a big old garden over the other side of Pelling on the way to Larking village and Berebury, like I said. It’s been neglected for years.’

  ‘Pelling Grange,’ supplied Mandy Lamb, studying the fingernails on her left hand. ‘Like I said, too.’

  ‘Has he got enemies?’ asked Crosby.

  ‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ said Haines stiffly.

  ‘Have you got enemies?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘No,’ said Jack Haines flatly.

  ‘All God’s children got enemies,’ chanted Crosby almost under his breath, ‘like they’ve got rhythm.’

  ‘And Anthony Berra wasn’t best pleased, I can tell you, Inspector,’ went on Jack Haines, reverting to his own worries, ‘when I told him what’s happened to all his plants.’

  ‘Very upset, I should say,’ offered Mandy Lamb from the side-lines.

  ‘I’d better have some names,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, tugging his notebook out of his pocket.

  ‘He’s called Anthony Berra,’ said Jack Haines. ‘His plants are … were … for one of those fashionable Mediterranean gardens that he’s creating for Oswald Lingard over at the Grange in Pelling.’

  ‘And Mrs Lingard,’ put in Mandy. ‘Mustn’t forget her.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Crosby curiously.

  ‘She’s the one with the money,’ said the secretary simply.

  ‘And Marilyn?’ prompted Sloan.

  ‘Marilyn Potts,’ gritted Jack Haines between clenched teeth.

  ‘She’s an orchid specialist,’ put in Mandy Lamb helpfully.

  Jack Haines glared at her.

  ‘One half of Capstan Purlieu Plants,’ said Mandy, transferring her studies from the fingernails of her left hand to those on her right hand. ‘The other half is Anna Sutherland.’ She did not amplify this.

  ‘I think,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, snapping his notebook shut, ‘that before we go any further we’d better take a look at these greenhouses of yours. And then I’d like to have a word with your foreman.’

  Jack Haines jerked his shoulder. ‘I’ve sent him into town on an errand.’

  ‘You have, have you?’ said Sloan, making a mental note.

  ‘In theory,’ began Jack Haines, ‘the last fingerprints on the door handles should be Russ’s …’

  ‘In practice,’ Sloan interrupted him, suppressing his irritation, ‘they may well belong to someone else.’ Policemen, like doctors, didn’t like being told what to do. All the same he would get Crosby to take any fingerprints off the door handles while they were at Pelling. It didn’t seem a serious enough case to get a Scenes of Crime Officer out all this way, not with the economic climate being what it was. He snapped his notebook shut. ‘My constable will soon be able to tell us that. Come along now, Crosby.’

  The two greenhouses presented a sorry sight.
In one, serried pots of infant orchid cuttings had been burnt by frost and were clearly beyond aid. In the other, tender young plants had collapsed, their leaves now drooped over their potting compost like so many dying swans. Detective Inspector Sloan led the way inside, noting that the heating of the orchid house was not on. Above the pipes was a mist-maker from which little bursts of spray should have been emerging but weren’t.

  ‘No sign of forced entry, sir,’ remarked Crosby, peering round. He started to apply his fingerprint gear to the door handle. ‘The door hasn’t been damaged at all.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Sloan, absently, his gaze still on the frosted orchids. They weren’t his favourite plants but no true gardener could fail to be moved by the sight of so much wanton destruction.

  ‘And there’s no key in sight,’ said the constable.

  ‘It wasn’t locked,’ growled Jack Haines at his elbow. ‘We’ve never had this sort of trouble before.’

  Sloan nodded, unsurprised. In his experience very few stable doors ever got locked until after the horse had bolted.

  ‘Now that we’re alone,’ said Jack Haines, nevertheless looking over his shoulder, ‘there’s something else you guys need to know.’

  ‘Go on.’

  He pointed to a device on one of the windows. ‘I’ve got a frost alarm system rigged up in here. It’s connected to a thermostat and should have rung in my bedroom and woken me when the temperature fell.’

  ‘And it didn’t?’ said Crosby.

  ‘It didn’t,’ Haines said heavily.

  ‘Or you had been drugged,’ suggested the constable brightly.

  ‘No,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, going over and peering at a bimetallic strip. ‘It had been disabled.’ There wasn’t a greenhouse in his own garden yet but that hadn’t stopped him from studying the possibilities against the day when there would be. And then he would have such a thermostat in it. ‘You can see that’s it’s been broken.’

  ‘That must mean,’ concluded Haines uneasily, ‘that whoever left these two doors open knew what he was doing.’

  ‘Or she,’ said Crosby inevitably.

  ‘An ordinary thief,’ said Haines, carefully avoiding sexism, ‘wouldn’t have known what it was.’

  Sloan was just about to make a proper examination of the other greenhouse when his personal radio spluttered to life.

  ‘That you, Sloan?’ boomed a distant voice from Berebury. ‘Leeyes here. There’s just been a call in from a Marilyn Potts over at Capstan Purlieu complaining about dead orchids. She’s talking about sabotage … you’d better get over there as soon as you can.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Marilyn Potts surveyed a greenhouse that had once been full of thriving young orchids and now was nothing more than a home for the blackened stubs of dead plants fit only for the compost heap.

  ‘All my chicks and the dam,’ she moaned. ‘Ruined. Every last one of them. Now I know how that Scottish chap felt. In Macbeth.’

  ‘Macduff,’ supplied the friend standing beside her.

  ‘Anna,’ Marilyn pleaded, turning in her direction, ‘tell me it wasn’t you who left the door open. Please.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ snapped Anna Sutherland. ‘Of course it wasn’t. Besides, if it had been me who’d forgotten to shut the door I would have told you. You should know me well enough by now to know that.’

  Marilyn jerked her head in tacit acknowledgement of this. Anna was invariably nothing if not forthright. ‘Then who did?’ she demanded. ‘It certainly wasn’t me.’

  ‘I don’t know. How could I?’

  ‘There’s only the two of us here,’ Marilyn said tonelessly.

  ‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ responded Anna Sutherland tersely. The nursery at Capstan Purlieu Plants was run by the two hard-working women and nobody else.

  Marilyn made her way slowly up the greenhouse, looking to the right and left, and shaking her head in disbelief. ‘Beyond aid – every last one.’ She turned, her face stricken, and said ‘And the dam – all the stock plants too.’

  ‘Our seed corn, you might say,’ agreed Anna bleakly.

  ‘And I’m supposed to be speaking to the Staple St James Horticultural Society on orchids tomorrow evening, remember? Standing in for Enid,’ wailed Marilyn Potts. ‘How can I possibly do that now? Just talking about orchids will upset me.’

  Anna Sutherland was bracing. ‘Of course you can. Besides, they’ve already put a notice in this week’s Berebury Gazette saying that old Enid’s been delayed on her travels and that you’re giving the talk instead. Take some slides or something – they oughtn’t to mind too much. After all, you’re doing them a favour and at short notice into the bargain.’

  Marilyn shook her head. ‘No, I needn’t do that. Their secretary’s quite sure Enid will have ordered some orchids for the evening and she’s ringing round to find out where. Enid just hasn’t come back from one of her famous trips.’

  ‘It’s all very well for some,’ remarked Anna. ‘I wish I could go abroad at the drop of a hat like she does.’

  ‘She is retired now,’ murmured her friend absently, still regarding her plants with a doleful face. She stroked one now as if the touch of a human hand could restore it to life. ‘I guess old Doctor Heddon left her something when he died.’

  ‘Where was it this time?’ asked Anna as much to divert her friend as anything.

  ‘The next-door neighbour wasn’t sure – she couldn’t decide from her note whether it was Carmarthen or Carinthia.’

  ‘I thought it was only doctors who couldn’t write clearly,’ remarked Anna acidly, ‘not their receptionists.’

  Marilyn wasn’t listening. ‘I don’t think that there’s a single orchid left alive in the whole greenhouse.’

  ‘Then I’ll turn the heating and the humidifier off,’ murmured Anna, pointing to equipment that were meant to keep the temperature of the greenhouse high and its atmosphere moist.

  ‘You’re always so practical,’ complained Marilyn. ‘Have you no soul?’

  ‘You can see yourself that they’re all dead,’ said Anna, pointing to the plants on the staging. ‘And not even you, Marilyn, can bring the dead back to life.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Marilyn with dignity, ‘but don’t you have any feelings?’

  ‘Heating costs money,’ retorted Anna, ‘and from the looks of things we’re going to need every penny we’ve got to get going again.’

  ‘Get going again?’ Marilyn stared at her. ‘You must be mad. We can’t catch up this year even if we started again now.’

  ‘And if we don’t get going again this year,’ pointed out her friend, ‘we’ve still got to live, haven’t we?’

  ‘I don’t know that I want to,’ said Marilyn, picking up a pot and staring moodily at the collapsed plant lying on the potting mixture.

  ‘A few dead plants are not a good reason to give up living,’ said her friend.

  ‘A few dead plants?’ shrieked Marilyn. ‘How can you say that when every last one of this year’s orchids that we’ve slaved over since they were potted is done for?’

  ‘Some you win, some you lose, in this line. We’ve always known that,’ said Anna calmly, ‘and I must say it looks as if we’ve lost this time.’

  ‘A greenhouse full of dead plants is a very good reason to give up trying to make a living from horticulture,’ sighed Marilyn. She raised her head suddenly, turning an unhappy face in Anna Sutherland’s direction as another thought struck her. ‘You don’t think, Anna, that someone somewhere is trying to tell us something, do you?’

  Anna paused, her hand suspended over the heating switches. ‘A business rival, you mean?’ she said cautiously.

  Marilyn shook her head. ‘No, not one of them.’

  ‘Well, Bob Steele is trying to get started with orchids and Jack Haines over at Pelling reckons to sell three times as many young orchids as we do even though his aren’t half as good as ours,’ said Anna.

  ‘We can’t be any threat to him, surel
y,’ said Marilyn. ‘He’s big business by our standards.’

  Anna shrugged her shoulders. ‘Who knows how his mind works?’

  ‘He mostly only goes in for the commercial market,’ Marilyn said. ‘And most of his domestic customers don’t know what they’re doing in the first place. They kill them quickly and then come back for more.’ She grimaced. ‘That’s business. His sort of business, of course, not ours.’

  Anna frowned. ‘Anyway he sells so many other plants that I shouldn’t have thought our orchids were any threat to his business. His catalogue is crammed full of all sorts of plants besides orchids.’

  ‘What you mean is that he’s not a specialist like we are.’ Capstan Purlieu Plants concentrated on a few choice items for really knowledgeable gardeners. Actually they liked to think of their customers as plantsmen and plantswomen or even enthusiasts rather than mere gardeners.

  ‘I mean that he’s more of a knowing “nothing about everything” man while we’re knowing “everything about nothing” women,’ said Anna Sutherland eloquently. ‘So who else wouldn’t want us to succeed then?’ she asked.

  A little silence fell between the two women and it took a moment or two for Marilyn Potts to put a worry into words. ‘Norman?’

  ‘He wouldn’t surely,’ said her friend expressionlessly.

  Norman Potts was – had been once, anyway – Marilyn’s husband and their divorce had been notably spectacular in its acrimony.

  ‘He would,’ declared Norman’s former wife vehemently. ‘You don’t know the half of what he would do.’

  ‘And I don’t want to,’ said Anna Sutherland crisply. ‘I’m your business partner, remember? Not your therapist.’

  ‘If it was him,’ hissed Marilyn, ‘he’s going to regret it when the police get to him, let alone my solicitors.’

  ‘Besides,’ went on Anna, ‘I’m a spinster, remember? As far as I’m concerned the secrets of the bedroom are meant to be secret. And stay that way,’ she added for good measure. ‘I don’t need to know what else he could get up to.’

  ‘You’re a good friend, Anna, that’s what, and I shall never forget that.’

  ‘Talking of the police,’ remarked Anna, lifting her head, ‘they’re arriving now. Look, they’re at the gate.’