There were two or three old men working on their allotments and they watched with open curiosity as Pascoe and Wildgoose picked their way across to the latter's strip. It was indeed sadly neglected though no more so than half a dozen others.
'Here we are,' said Wildgoose. 'If you seek my memorial, look around you.'
Pascoe bent and examined the furrowed ground. There were potatoes here still, some straggly carrot tops, something which could have been leaf spinach.
'What happened?' he asked.
'A couple of years ago it seemed a good idea. Self-sufficiency. Part of the male menopause.'
'You're a little young for that, surely?'
'Forty,' said Wildgoose. 'I just know a good couturier. And the male menopause has nothing to do with age or physical changes. It has to do with meanings.'
'And you found something more meaningful?'
'Still looking, Inspector.'
Pascoe too was looking. The rickety old shed in which June McCarthy's body had been found stood about twenty-five yards away. As he watched, the door opened and a man emerged. He had a bucket in one hand and a garden fork in the other. Carefully with the economic movements of age and experience he began to unearth some potatoes. This was Mr Ribble, the owner of the shed and the only one of the allotment holders that Pascoe had interviewed personally. A man in his late sixties, he had taken the discovery of the body with a phlegm which was to some extent explained when Pascoe found out that he had cancer of the bowel and had already outlived the surgeon's estimate by eighteen months.
Pascoe turned back to Wildgoose and coldly wondered how such a diagnosis would affect his search for meanings.
'I see you keep your greenhouse locked,' he said. 'Worried about your tomatoes?'
'I kept my tools in there,' said Wildgoose. ‘I didn't really grow much. It came with the allotment. The old boy who had it before me died and it seemed a kindness to pay his missus a couple of quid for the thing. Would you like a look?'
He searched in his pocket for a key while Pascoe examined the greenhouse from the outside. It was very much a homemade affair, more of a converted garden shed than a proper greenhouse. It was glazed with panels of translucent plastic which had the advantage of not being so fragile as glass. In one or two places kids had hurled stones without doing more damage than denting and cracking, easily repaired with transparent tape.
Wildgoose found the key and unlocked the padlock which fastened the door. Pascoe let him go in first. Mrs Wildgoose had been wrong. While you could not see clearly through the plastic, you could certainly distinguish shapes and it would take either irresistible passion or brazen exhibitionism to persuade a couple to fornicate in here. Pascoe did not dismiss the possibility. But it was unlikely that one of the elderly gardeners would not have passed on details of this shadowy entertainment to Sergeant Brady.
The interior of the greenhouse smelt hot and stuffy. There was a rusty spade in one corner, a broken hoe in another. A few earthenware plant pots were stacked along a sagging shelf. Nothing was growing in here, though the mummified remains of some unidentifiable plants crowded together sadly in a propagating tray. The floor was wooden, beginning to rot in places. A couple of sacks were draped across a particularly decayed section. An almost empty plastic bag of some proprietary fertilizer lay alongside them. Pascoe's memory was stirred. Among many other things, the laboratory examination of June McCarthy's clothes had revealed the presence of traces of peat and other fibrous organic material associated with gardening, precisely the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a garden shed.
He wondered whether anyone had bothered to make sure they were definitely present in Mr Ribble's shed.
For Wildgoose to kill her in his greenhouse and then lug the body twenty-five yards across the allotment didn't seem likely. It had been early in the morning, but broad daylight.
Still, when you had nothing, anything was something.
He stooped to pick up the bag.
And smiled with incredulous delight as he saw the small adhesive price tag still clinging to the grubby plastic. The name of the retailer was still on it.
The Linden Garden Centre.
He picked it up carefully.
'You use a lot of this stuff?' he asked.
'In the first flush of enthusiasm, I used everything,' said Wildgoose. 'Soot, blood, horse-shit, sea-weed. Why?'
'And where did you buy your garden stuff, Mr Wildgoose?'
'Where? Hell, wherever I was. Garden shops, market stalls, Woolworth's even. They're very good in Woolworth's these days.'
'Garden centres? This price tag says Linden Garden Centre.'
'I don't remember that. Is it important?'
'It's on the East Coast Road,' said Pascoe. 'Four, five miles.'
'Sorry. I don't recall, for all I know that stuff was here when I took the allotment on. Don't tell me it's a clue!'
For someone who had seemed so bright and alert to every innuendo, he was being very dim about this, thought Pascoe.
'I'd like to take this if I may.'
'I'll need a receipt,' mocked Wildgoose. 'What about a few old plant pots into the bargain?'
The plastic bag was leaking, Pascoe discovered, and the remaining fertilizer was spilling out of it. Picking up one of the old sacks from the floor, he thrust the bag inside.
'Let's go,' he said.
'Where?'
'Why, back to your flat, of course, Mr Wildgoose. Unless I can drop you anywhere else?'
'No, that'll be fine.'
He managed not to sound relieved.
On the drive back, Pascoe stopped by a telephone kiosk, 'to check what my boss wants next,' he explained half grumblingly to Wildgoose.
He stopped a little later to get some cigarettes, then got stuck behind a slow double-decker bus.
'Sorry to have taken up so much of your time,' he said to Wildgoose as he got out of the car in front of the house which contained the flat.
'Always a pleasure,' said Wildgoose. 'Will I see you again?'
'Who knows? Nothing is impossible to coincidence.'
Pascoe watched Wildgoose walk jauntily up the steps to the front door. Then he looked across the street to make sure that there'd been time to carry out his telephoned instructions. Detective-Constable Preece sitting in a dilapidated VW Beetle raised a languid hand. He looked half asleep. Pascoe hoped it was an act.
He drove round the corner and waited. After a couple of minutes the door of the car opened and Preece slid in. He still looked tired.
'OK?' said Pascoe.
Preece passed him a film cartridge.
'I shot off half a dozen,' he said. 'One should be all right. You want me to hang about, sir?'
'Please,' said Pascoe. 'I want to know where he goes, who he talks to.'
'These houses have got a lane running down the back,' said Preece diffidently.
'Sorry,' said Pascoe. 'You're on your own. You'll just have to hope he comes out of the front. Or be in two places at the same time. Do your best. Which is to say, please don't lose him. And Preece. It doesn't bother me if you don't sleep in your own bed. But make bloody sure you sleep in your own time. OK? Enjoy yourself.'
Preece nodded and left. As he walked away he thought, Christ! He may be politer than Dalziel but he's just as fucking impossible!
Pascoe decided to short-circuit normal lines of communication and drive round to the police labs himself. These were a fairly recent acquisition, very up to date and a source of such pride to the Chief Constable that he tended to skirt round the fact that shortage of space in the congested city centre had obliged them to be built some considerable distance from the central police HQ. An efficient shuttle service had been devised and all officers were given strict instructions that this was the only channel to be used.