Just after four o’clock Dalgliesh drove slowly into Sprigg’s Green. It revealed itself as an undistinguished village lying between the Maidstone and Canterbury roads. He could not remember having passed through it before. There were few people about. The village, thought Dalgliesh, was too far from London to tempt the commuter and had no period charm to attract retired couples or artists and writers in search of country peace with a country cost of living. Most of the cottages were obviously lived in by farm workers, their front gardens clumped with cabbages and brussels sprouts, straggly and stem-scarred from recent pickings, their windows shut close against the treachery of an English autumn. Dalgliesh passed the church, its short flint-and-stone tower and clear glass windows only half-visible behind the surrounding chestnut trees. The churchyard was untidy but not offensively so. The grass had been mown between the graves and some attempt made to weed the gravel paths. Separated from the churchyard by a tall laurel hedge stood the vicarage, a sombre Victorian house built to accommodate a Victorian-size family and its appendages. Next came the green itself, a small square of grass bounded by a row of weather-boarded cottages and faced by a more than usually hideous modern pub and petrol station. Outside the King’s Head was a concrete bus shelter where a group of women waited dispiritedly. They gave Dalgliesh a brief and uninterested glance as he passed. In spring, no doubt, the surrounding cherry orchards would lend their charm even to Sprigg’s Green. Now, however, there was a chill dampness in the air, the fields looked perpetually sodden, a slow, mournful procession of cows being driven to the evening milking churned the road verges to mud. Dalgliesh slowed to a walking pace to pass them, keeping his watch for Sprigg’s Acre. He did not want to ask the way.
He was not long in finding it. The house lay a little back from the road and was sheltered from it by a six-foot beech hedge which shone golden in the fading light. There appeared to be no drive and Dalgliesh edged his Cooper Bristol carefully onto the grass verge before letting himself in through the white gates of the garden. The house lay before him, rambling, low built and thatched, with an air of comfort and simplicity. As he turned from latching the gate behind him, a woman turned the corner of the house and came down the path to meet him. She was very small. Somehow this surprised Dalgliesh. He had formed a mental picture of a stout, well-corseted colonel’s wife condescending to see him, but at her own time and place. The reality was less intimidating and more interesting. There was something gallant and a little pathetic in the way she came down the path towards him. She was wearing a thick skirt and a tweed jacket and was hatless, her thick white hair lifting with the evening breeze. She wore gardening gloves, incongruously large with vast gauntlets which made the trowel she carried look like a child’s toy. As they met she pulled off the right glove and held out her hand to him, looking up at him with anxious eyes which lightened, almost imperceptibly, with relief. But when she spoke, her voice was unexpectedly firm.
“Good afternoon. You must be Superintendent Dalgliesh. My name is Louise Fenton. Did you come by car? I thought I heard one.”
Dalgliesh explained where he had left it and said that he hoped that it would not be in anyone’s way.
“Oh, no! Not at all. Such an unpleasant way to travel. You could have come by train quite easily to Marden and I would have sent the trap for you. We haven’t a car. We both dislike them very much. I’m sorry you had to sit in one all the way from London.”
“It was the fastest way,” said Dalgliesh, wondering if he should apologize for living in the twentieth century. “And I wanted to see you as soon as possible.”
He was careful to keep the urgency from his voice, but he could see the sudden tensing of her shoulders.
“Yes. Yes, of course. Would you like to see the garden before we go in? The light is fading but we might just have time.”
An interest in the garden was apparently expected and Dalgliesh acquiesced. A light east wind, rising as the day died, whipped uncomfortably around his neck and ankles. But he never hurried an interview. This one promised to be difficult for Mrs. Fenton and she was entitled to take her time. He wondered at his own impatience even as he concealed it. For the last two days he had been irked by a foreboding of tragedy and failure which was the more disturbing because it was irrational. The case was young yet. His intelligence told him that he was making progress. Even at this moment he was within grasp of motive, and motive, he knew, was crucial to this case. He hadn’t failed yet in his career at the Yard and this case, with its limited number of suspects and careful contriving, was an unlikely candidate for a first failure. Yet he remained worried, vexed by this unreasonable fear that time was running out. Perhaps it was the autumn. Perhaps he was tired. He turned up his coat collar and prepared himself to look interested and appreciative.
They passed together through a wrought-iron gate at the side of the house and entered the main garden. Mrs. Fenton was saying: “I love the garden dearly but I’m not much good at it. Things don’t grow for me. My husband has the green fingers. He’s in Maidstone Hospital at present having an operation for hernia. It’s all been very successful, I’m happy to say. Do you garden, Superintendent?”
Dalgliesh explained that he lived in a flat high above the Thames in the city and had recently sold his Essex cottage.
“I really know very little about gardening,” he said.
“Then you will enjoy looking at ours,” replied Mrs. Fenton, with gentle if illogical persistence.
There was, indeed, plenty to see even in the fading light of an autumn day. The colonel had given his imagination full play, compensating perhaps for the enforced regimentation of much of his life by indulgence in a picturesque and undisciplined profusion. There was a small lawn surrounding a fish pond and edged with crazy paving. There was a succession of trellis archways leading from one carefully tended plot to another. There was a rose garden with a sundial where a few last roses still gleamed white on their leafless sterns. There were hedges of beech, yew and hawthorn as gold and green backcloths to the banked chrysanthemums. At the bottom of the garden ran a small stream, crossed every ten yards by wooden bridges which were a monument to the colonel’s industry, if not to his taste. The appetite had grown by what it fed on. The colonel, having once successfully bridged his brook, had been unable to resist further efforts. Together they stood for a moment on one of the bridges. Dalgliesh could see the colonel’s initials cut into the wood of the handrail. Beneath their feet the little stream, already half-choked with the first fallen leaves, made its own sad music.
Suddenly, Mrs. Fenton said: “So somebody killed her. I know I ought to feel pity for her whatever she did. But I can’t. Not yet. I should have realized that Matthew wouldn’t be the only victim. These people never stop at one victim, do they? I suppose someone couldn’t stand it any more and took that way out. It’s a very terrible thing, but I can understand it. I read about it in the papers, you know, before the medical director telephoned. Do you know, Superintendent, for a moment I was glad? That’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. I was glad she was dead. I thought that now Matthew needn’t worry any more.”
Dalgliesh said gently: “We don’t think that Miss Bolam was blackmailing your husband. It’s possible that she was, but not likely. We think she was killed because she had found out what was happening and meant to stop it. That’s why it’s so important that I talk to you.”