“Would you mind letting me see the desk?”
Mrs. Jim’s face reddened and she stuck out her lower lip.
“Mrs. Jobbin,” Alleyn said. “Don’t think we’re here for any other purpose than to try and sort matters out in order that there shall be no injustice done to anybody, including Miss Prunella Foster, or if it comes to that, to the memory of her mother. I’m not setting traps at the moment, which is not to say a copper never does. As I expect you very well know. But not here and not now. I would simply like to see the desk, if you’ll show me where it is.”
She looked fixedly at him for an appreciable interval and then broke out: “It’s no business of mine, this isn’t. I don’t know anything about anything that goes on up here, sir, and if you’ll excuse my speaking out, I don’t want to. Miss Prue’s all right. She’s a nice young lady for all you can’t hear half she says and anyone can see she’s been upset. But she’s got her young man and he’s sharp enough for six and he’ll look after her. So’ll his old — his father,” amended Mrs. Jim. “He’s that pleased, anyway, with the match, seeing he’s getting what he’d set his heart on.”
“Really? What was that?” Alleyn asked still keeping an eye on the box hedge.
“This property. He wanted to buy it and they say he would have paid anything to get it. Well, in a sort of way he’ll get his wish now, won’t he? It’s settled he’s to have his own rooms; self-contained like. I’ll show you the desk, then, if you’ll come this way.”
It was in a smallish room, known in her lifetime as Sybil’s boudoir, which lay between the great drawing-room and the dining-room where, on the day of the old gardener’s death, the Upper Quintern ladies had held their meeting. The desk, a nice piece of Chippendale, stood in the window. Mrs. Jim indicated the centre drawer and Alleyn opened it. Letter paper, stamps and a diary were revealed.
“The drawer wasn’t locked?” he asked.
“Not before, it wasn’t. I left the envelope on top of some papers and then I thought it best to turn the key in the lock and keep it. I handed the key to Miss Prue. She doesn’t seem to have locked it.” She waited for a moment and then, for the second time, broke out
“If you want to know any more about it you can ask Bruce. He fetched it. Mrs. Foster give it to him.”
“Do you think he knows what was in it? The details, I mean?”
“Ask him. I don’t know. I don’t discuss the business of the house and I don’t ask questions: no more than I expect them to ask me.”
“Mrs. Jobbin, I’m sure you don’t and I won’t bother you much further.”
He was about to shut the drawer when he noticed a worn leather case. He opened it and disclosed a photograph, in faded sepia, of a group from a Scottish regiment. Among the officers was a second lieutenant, so emphatically handsome as to stand out from among his fellows.
“That’s her first,” said Mrs. Jim, at Alleyn’s back. “Third from the left. Front row. First war. Name of Carter.”
“He must have been a striking chap to look at.”
“Like a Greek god,” Mrs. Jim startled him by announcing, still in her wooden voice. “That’s what they used to say: them in the village that remembered him.”
Wondering which of the Upper Quintern worthies had employed this classy simile, Alleyn pushed the drawer shut and looked at the objects on the top of the desk. Prominent among them was a photograph of pretty Prunella Foster: one of the ultra-conservative kind, destined for glossy magazines and thought of by Alleyn as “Cabinet Pudding.” Further off, and equally conventional, was that of a middle-aged man of full habit and slightly prominent eyes who had signed himself “John.” That would be Foster: the second husband and Prunella’s father. Alleyn looked down into the pink-shaded lamp on Sybil Foster’s desk. The bulb was covered by a double-glass slipper. A faint rumour of sweet almonds still hung about it.
“Was there anything else you was wanting?” asked Mrs. Jim.
“Not from you, thank you, Mrs. Jobbin. I’d like a word with the gardener. I’ll find him somewhere out there, I expect.” He waited for a moment and then said cheerfully: “I gather you’re not madly keen on him.”
“Him,” said Mrs. Jim. “I wouldn’t rave and that’s a fact. Too much of the Great I Am.”
“The—?”
“Letting on what a treat he is to all and sundry.”
“Including Mrs. Foster?”
“Including everybody. It’s childish. One of these days he’ll burst into poetry and stifle himself,” said Mrs. Jim and then seemed to think better of it. “No harm in ’im, mind,” she amended. “Just asking for attention. Like a child, pathetic, reely. And good at his work, he is. You’ve got to hand it to him. He’s all right at bottom even if it is a long way down.”
“Mrs. Jobbin,” said Alleyn, “you are a very unexpected and observant lady. I will leave my card for Miss Foster and I wish you a grateful good morning.”
He held out his hand. Mrs. Jobbin, surprised into a blush, put her corroded little paw into it and then into her apron pocket.
“Bid you good-day, then,” she said. “Sir. You’ll likely find him near the old stables. First right from the front door and right again. Growing mushrooms, for Gawd’s sake.”
Bruce was not near the old stables but in them. As Alleyn approached he heard the drag and slam of a door and when he “turned right again,” found his man.
Bruce had evidently taken possession of what had originally been some kind of open-fronted lean-to abutting on the stables. He had removed part of the flooring and dug up the ground beneath. Bags of humus and a heap of compost awaited his attention.
In response to Alleyn’s greeting he straightened up, squared his shoulders and came forward. “Guid day, sir,” he said: “Were you looking for somebody?”
“For you,” Alleyn said, “if your name’s Gardener.”
“It is that. Gardener’s the name and gardener’s the occupation,” he said, evidently cracking a vintage quip. “What can I do for you, then?”
Alleyn made the usual announcement
“Police?” said Bruce loudly and stared at him. “Is that a fact? Ou aye, who’d have thowt it?”
“Would you like me to flash a card at you?” Alleyn asked lightly. Bruce put his head on one side, gazed at him, waited for a moment and then became expansive.
“Och, na, na, na, na,” he said. “Not at a’, not at a’. There’s no call for anything o’ the sort. You didna strike me at first sight as a constabulary figure, just. What can I do for you?”
Members of the police force develop a sixth sense about the undeclared presence of offstage characters. Alleyn had taken the impression that Bruce was aware, but not anxiously, of a third person somewhere in the offing.
“I wanted to have a word with you, if I might,” he said, “about the late Mrs. Foster. I expect you know about the adjourned inquest.”
Bruce looked fixedly at him. “He’s refocussing,” thought Alleyn. “He was expecting something else.”
“I do that,” Bruce said. “Aye. I do that.”
“You’ll realize, of course, that the reason for the adjournment was to settle, beyond doubt, the question of suicide.”
Bruce said slowly: “I wad never have believed it of her. Never. She was aye fu’ of enthusiasm. She like fine to look ahead to the pleasures of her garden. Making plans! What for would we be planning for mushrooms last time I spoke with her if she was of a mind to make awa’ wi’ herself?”
“When was that?”
He pushed his gardener’s fingers through his sandy hair and said it would have been when he visited her a week before it happened and that she had been in great good humour and they had drawn plans on the back of an envelope for a lily-pond and had discussed making a mushroom bed here in the old stables. He had promised to go into matters of plumbing and mulching and here he was, carrying on as if she’d be coming home to see it. Something, he said, must have happened during that last week to put sic’ awfu’ thoughts into her head.