Peter Lovesey - Murder on the Short List

“So he’ll be interested in Blackberry Farm if it comes on the market?” Rosemary said.

“No question.” The vicar sighed. “I happen to know he made Douglas a handsome offer last week, far more than it’s worth, and I heard that Douglas was willing at last to sell.”

“Every man has his price,” Laura remarked.

“Yes, and it is also said that gold goes in at any gate except the gate of heaven. As it turns out, Ben will get the farm for a fraction of that offer if Kitty Boon wants to sell.” He looked wistful. “I’ll be sorry if the cows go. They hold up the traffic when they’re being driven along the lane for milking, but rows of daffodils wouldn’t be the same at all.”

Laura had a vision of rows of daffies holding up the traffic.

“Do you mind if I ask about someone else?” she said. “On Christmas Eve Gertrude Appleton called with some mince pies.”

“Gertrude?” The vicar had a special smile for this member of his flock. “That’s one of her many superstitions. Something about exchanging pies to avoid bad luck. False worship really. I don’t approve, but we all indulge her because she’s such a formidable lady.”

“Harmless?”

“We have to hope so.”

“Is she on good terms with my friends, Jane and Michael Eadington?”

“As far as I know.”

“No boundary disputes? Complaints about the greyhound? Excessive noise?”

“I’ve never heard of any. Why do you ask?”

Rosemary said quickly, “It’s a joke. Those pies she brought round aren’t the most appetising.”

The vicar smiled. “Now I understand. Did you try one?”

She shook her head. “It’s the look of them, paler than Hamlet’s father.”

His eyes twinkled at that. “I’m afraid not one of the carollers could face one the other night.”

“And will you indulge her, as you put it, and exchange mince pies?”

He smiled, “The annual batch of pies for Gertrude is one more parochial duty for me. I don’t have a wife to cook for me, unfortunately.”

“Your pies are delicious, I’m sure,” Laura said, liking this young clergyman.

Rosemary said in her no-nonsense voice, “The third of the Three Kings was Caspar, right?”

“Little Colin Price the other night,” the vicar said. “He’s my tenor, at the other end of the scale from Ben Black.”

“As a singer, do you mean?”

“I was thinking of his situation. Colin’s up against it financially. He was a dairy farmer like Douglas, but less efficient. He lost a big contract with the Milk Marketing Board a couple of years ago and Douglas bought him out. He’s reduced to work as a jobbing gardener these days.”

Laura exchanged a wry smile with Rosemary. “There are worse ways to make a living.”

“True. But I have to object when he does it on Sundays sometimes and misses Morning Service. Colin just smiles and quotes those lines ‘One is nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.’ That isn’t scripture, I tell him, It’s a bit of doggerel.”

The vicar came out to see them off and Rosemary admired the yew hedge and asked if he clipped it himself.

“Every twig,” he said. “Can’t afford a gardener on my stipend. Some people seem to have the idea that yew is slow-growing. From experience I can tell you that’s a myth.”

“What do you do with the clippings — burn them?”

“No, I bag them up and send them away to be used in cancer treatment.”

“For the taxol in them,” Rosemary said. “Very public-spirited.”

“I must admit they pay me as well,” the vicar said with a fleeting smile at Laura.

Their return across the frost-white fields was spoiled by a blue police light snaking through the lanes. Laura said, “I just know it’s going to stop at The Withers.”

She was right.

When they got there the inspector was looking smug. “You might be thinking the forensics lab was closed over Christmas, but I happen to know one scientist who is a perfect Scrooge, can’t stand the parties and the eating and only too grateful to earn double overtime. It’s bad news for you, I’m afraid, Mrs Thyme. The late Douglas Boon was poisoned. My scientist found significant amounts of taxin in his body.”

“Toxin?” Laura said.

“Taxin. It comes from the yew,” Rosemary murmured. “Just like taxol, only this is no help to anyone, not to be taken in any form.”

“You’re well informed,” the inspector said.

“I’m a plant biologist.”

“And Mrs Thyme? Are you also an expert?”

“Only an amateur,” Laura said.

About as amateur as a million-pound-a-week footballer, if the inspector’s look was anything to go by. “I’ve got a warrant to search this house.”

“Here? What are you looking for?” Rosemary asked.

“We know from the stomach contents that the last food Mr Boon ingested was a mince pie. In your statement of Christmas Eve, Mrs Thyme, you admitted administering a pie to the deceased.”

“ Administering ?” said Rosemary. “She handed round a plate of pies, that’s all.”

“And we’d like to have them examined, if they aren’t already destroyed.”

This was a defining moment for Laura. Should she confess to changing the lids on Gertrude’s pies? She glanced towards Rosemary, who nodded back. “Inspector,” she said, “there’s something I ought to tell you, something I didn’t mention last time.”

The inspector raised both hands as if a wall was about to collapse. “Don’t say another word. I’m going to issue an official caution and you’re going to accompany me to the police station.”

“Oh, what nonsense,” Rosemary said. “The pies were made by someone else, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Don’t put ideas in her head, Miss Boxer. She’s in enough trouble already.”

As Laura got into the police car, Wilbur whimpered. The hand pressing down on the back of Laura’s head felt like an executioner’s this time. They kept her waiting more than an hour while the house was searched. The plate of mince pies, wrapped now in a polythene evidence bag, was carried from the kitchen in triumph.

Rosemary watched in silence, sickened and infuriated by this turn of events. She could see Laura’s troubled face through the rear window of the patrol car as they drove away. She thought about following in the Land Rover, and then decided they wouldn’t let her near the interview room. She’d be more useful finding out precisely what had been going on in this sinister village.

By asking around, she tracked Colin Price (the little man Laura knew as Caspar) to the garden behind the village hall. He was up a ladder pruning a huge rambler rose. The clippings were going into a trailer he’d wheeled across the lawn.

“What’s that — an albertine?” Rosemary asked, seeing how the new shoots sprouted from well up the old stems.

“Spot on.”

“Late pruning, then?”

“It’s a matter of getting round to these jobs,” he said. “I can only do so much. It’s mostly grass-cutting through the summer and well into autumn. Other jobs have to wait.”

She introduced herself and mentioned that she was Laura Thyme’s friend. “Laura had the unpleasant job of driving poor Mr Boon to hospital on Christmas Eve. You met her earlier, of course.”

“That’s correct,” he said. “And now she’s been picked up by the police, I hear.”

“Word travels fast,” Rosemary said.

“Fields have eyes, and woods have ears, as the saying goes.” He got down from his ladder. “But all of us can see a police car with the light flashing. What do you want to ask me?”

“It’s about the man who died, Douglas Boon. Could anyone have predicted that he’d take one of the mince pies my friend offered round?”