I had forgotten how young she had been, and how pretty. Thirty years younger than Malcolm; thirty-five when she'd married him and, in the painting anyway, unlined. Reddish-gold hair, pale un freckled skin, pointed chin, delicate neck. The artist seemed to me to have caught the calculation in her eyes with disconcerting clarity, and when I glanced at the name scrawled at the bottom I understood why. Malcolm might not have given her diamonds, but her portrait had been painted by the best.
I put her back face down under the chest of drawers as I'd found her, where Malcolm, I was sure, had consigned her.
Fetching a suitcase from the box room (no decor changes there), I packed Malcolm's things and went downstairs, and in the hall came face to face with a smallish man carrying a large shotgun, the business end pointing my way.
I stopped abruptly, as one would.
"Put your hands up," he said hoarsely.
I set the suitcase on the floor and did as he bid. He wore earth- stained dark trousers and had mud on his hands, and I asked him immediately, "Are you the gardener?"
"What if I am? What are you doing here?"
"Collecting clothes for my fatherer… Mr Pembroke. I'm his son."
"I don't know you. I'm getting the police." His voice was belligerent but quavery, the shotgun none too steady in his hands.
"All right," I said.
He was faced then with the problem of how to telephone while aiming my way.
I said, seeing his hesitation, "I can prove I'm Mr Pembroke's son, and I'll open the suitcase to show you I'm not stealing anything. Would that help?"
After a pause, he nodded. "You stay over there, though," he said.
I judged that if I alarmed him there would be a further death in my father's house, so I very slowly and carefully opened the suitcase, removed the underpants and the rest, and laid them out on the hall floor. After that, I equally slowly took my own wallet out of my pocket, opened it, removed a credit card and laid it on the floor face upwards. Then I retreated backwards from the exhibits, ending with my back against the closed and locked front door.
The elderly gardener came suspiciously forward and inspected the show, dropping his- eyes only in split seconds, raising them quickly, giving me no chance to jump him.
"That's his passport," he said accusingly.
"He asked me to fetch it."
"Where is he?" he said. "Where's he gone?"
"I have to meet him with his passport. I don't know where he's going." I paused. "I really am his son. You must be new here. I haven't seen you before."
"Two years," he said defensively. "I've worked here two years." He seemed to come quite suddenly to a decision to believe me, and almost apologetically lowered the gun. "This house is supposed to be locked UP," he said. "Then I see you moving about upstairs."
"Upsetting," I agreed.
He gestured to Malcolm's things. "You'd better pack them again."
I began to do so under his still watchful eye.
"It was brave of you to come in here," I said, "if you thought I was a burglar."
He braced his shoulders in an old automatic movement. "I was in the army once." He relaxed and shrugged. "Tell you the truth, I was coming in quietly-like to phone the police, then you started down the stairs." "And… the gun?"
"Brought it with me just in case. I go after rabbits… I keep the gun handy."
I nodded. It was the gardener's own gun, I thought. Malcolm had never owned one, as far as I knew.
"Has my father paid you for the week?" I said.
His eyes at once brightened hopefully. "He paid me last Friday, same as usual. Then Saturday morning he phoned my house to tell me to come round here to see to the dogs. Take them home with me, same as I always do when he's away. So I did. But he was gone off the line before I could ask him how long he'd be wanting me to have them."
I pulled out my cheque-book and wrote him a cheque for the amount he specified. Arthur Bellbrook, he said his name was. I tore out the cheque and gave it to him and asked him if there was anyone else who needed wages.
He shook his head. "The cleaner left when Mrs Pembroke was done in… er… murdered. Said she didn't fancy the place any more."
"Where exactly was Mrs Pembroke… er… murdered?"
"I'll show you if you like." He stored the cheque away in a pocket. "Outside in the greenhouse."
He took me, however, not as I'd imagined to the rickety old familiar -greenhouse sagging against a mellowed wall in the kitchen garden, but to a bright white octagonal wrought-iron construction like a fancy bird-cage set as a summer-house on a secluded patch of lawn. From far outside, one could clearly see the flourishing geraniums within.
"Well, well," I said.
Arthur Bellbrook uttered "Huh" as expressing his disapproval and opened the metal-and-glass door.
"Cost a fortune to heat, will this place, "he observed. "And it got too hot in the summer. The only thing as will survive in it is geraniums. Mrs Pembroke's passion, geraniums."
An almost full sack of potting compost lay along one of the work surfaces, the top side of it slit from end to end to make the soil mixture easy to reach. A box of small pots stood nearby, some of them occupied by cuttings.
I looked at the compost with revulsion. "Is that where…?" I began.
"Yes," he said. "Poor lady. There's no one ought to die like that, however difficult they could be."
"No," I agreed. A thought struck me. "it was you who found her, wasn't it?"
"I went home like always at four o'clock, but I was out for a stroll about seven, and I thought I would just come in to see what state she'd left the place in. See, she played at gardening. Never cleaned the tools, things like that." He looked at the boarded floor as if still seeing her there. "She was lying face down, and I turned her over. She was dead all right. She was white like always but she had these little pink dots in her skin. They say you get those dots from asphyxiation. They found potting compost in her lungs, poor lady." He had undoubtedly been shocked and moved at the time, but there was an echo of countless repetitions in his voice now and precious little feeling. "Thank you for showing me," I said.
He nodded and we both went out, shutting the door behind US.
"I don't think Mr Pembroke liked this place much," he said unexpectedly. "Last spring, when she chose it, he said she could have it only if he couldn't see it from the house. Otherwise he wouldn't pay the bill. I wasn't supposed to hear, of course, but there you are, I did. They'd got to shouting, you see."
"Yes," I said, "I do see." Shouting, slammed doors, the lot.
"They were all lovey-dovey when I first came here," he said, "but then I reckon her little ways got to him, like, and you could see it all going downhill like a runaway train. I'm here all day long, see, and in and out of the house, and you couldn't miss it."
"What little ways?" I asked casually.
He glanced at me sideways with reawakening suspicions. "I thought you were his son. You must have known her."
"I didn't come here. I didn't like her."
He seemed to find that easily believable.
"She could be as sweet as sugar…" He paused, remembering. "I don't know what you'd call it, really, what she was. But for instance, last year, as well as the ordinary vegetables for the house, I grew a special little patch separately… fed them, and so on… to enter in the local show. just runner beans, carrots and onions, for one of the produce classes. I'm good at that, see? Well, Mrs Pembroke happened to spot them a day or two before I was ready to harvest. On the Thursday, with the show on the Saturday. What huge vegetables,' she says, and I tell her I'm going to exhibit them on Saturday. And she looks at me sweet as syrup and says, Oh no, Arthur. Mr Pembroke and I both like vegetables, as you know. We'll have some of these for dinner tomorrow and I'll freeze the rest. They are our vegetables, aren't they, Arthur? If you want to grow vegetables to show, you must do it in your own garden in your own time.' And blow me, when I came to work the next morning, the whole little patch had been picked over, beans, carrots, onions, the lot. She'd taken them, right enough. Pounds and pounds of them, all the best ones. Maybe they ate some, but she never did bother with the freezing. On the Monday, I found a load of the beans in the dustbin."