Elizabeth George - Missing Joseph

“What do you want?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I knocked. You didn’t hear me. Detective Inspector Lynley. New Scotland Yard.”

“I see.”

He reached for his identifi cation. She waved him off, revealing a large hole in her pullover’s armpit. It acted as companion, evidently, to the threadbare condition of her muddy jeans.

“That’s unnecessary,” she said. “I believe you. Colin told me you’d probably come round this morning.” She placed the pump on the work top amid the plants and fingered the remaining leaves of the nearest fuchsia. He could see that they were abnormally ragged. “Capsids,” she said in explanation. “They’re insidious. Like thrips. You generally can’t tell they’re attacking the plant until the damage is evident.”

“Isn’t that always the case?”

She shook her head, giving another blast of insecticide to one of the plants. “Sometimes the pest leaves a calling card. Other times you don’t know he’s come for a visit until it’s too late to do anything but kill him and hope you don’t kill the plant in the process. Except that I don’t suppose I ought to be talking to you about killing as if I enjoy it, even when I do.”

“Perhaps when a creature is the instrument of another’s destruction, it has to be killed.”

“That’s certainly my feeling. I’ve never been one to welcome aphids into my garden, Inspector.”

He started to enter the greenhouse. She said, “In there first, please,” and pointed to a shallow plastic tray of green powder just inside the door. “Disinfectant,” she explained. “It kills micro-organisms. There’s no sense in bringing other unwelcome visitors inside on the soles of one’s shoes.”

He obliged her, closing the door and stepping into the tray in which her own footprints had already left their mark. He could see the residue of disinfectant speckling the sides and crusting the seams of her round-toed boots.

“You spend a great deal of time in here,” he noted.

“I like to grow things.”

“A hobby?”

“It’s very peaceful — raising plants. A few minutes with one’s hands in the soil and the rest of the world seems to fade away. It’s a form of escape.”

“And you need to escape?”

“Doesn’t everyone at one time or another? Don’t you?”

“I can’t deny it.”

The floor consisted of gravel and a slightly elevated path of brick. He walked along this between the central table and the peripheral work top and joined her. With the door closed, the air in the greenhouse was some degrees warmer than the air outside. It was heavily tinctured with the scent of potting soil, fi sh emulsion, and the odour of the insecticide she’d been pumping.

“What sorts of plants do you grow in here?” he asked. “Aside from the fuchsias.”

She leaned against the work top as she spoke, pointing out the examples with a hand whose nails were clipped like a man’s and crusted with dirt. She didn’t appear to mind or even to notice. “I’ve been babying along some cyclamen for ages. They’re the ones with the stems that look nearly transparent, lined up over there in the yellow pots. The others are philodendrons, grape ivy, amaryllis. I’ve got African violets, ferns, and palms, but something tells me you probably recognise them well enough. And these”—she moved to a shelf above which a grow-light glowed over four wide, black trays where tiny plants were sprouting—“are my seedlings.”

“Seedlings?”

“I start my garden in here in the winter. Green beans, cucumbers, peas, lettuce, tomatoes. These are carrots and onions. I’m trying Vidalias although every gardening book I’ve read predicts utter failure there.”

“What do you do with it all?”

“The plants I generally offer in Preston’s car-boot sale. The vegetables we eat. My daughter and I.”

“And parsnips? Do you grow those as well?”

“No,” she said and folded her arms. “But we’ve come to it, haven’t we?”

“We have. Yes. I’m sorry.”

“There’s no need to apologise, Inspector. You’ve a job to do. But I hope you won’t mind if I work while we talk.” She gave him little choice in the minding. She picked up a small cultivator from among the clutter of gardening utensils which filled a tin pail underneath the central table. She began to move along the potted houseplants, gently loosening their soil.

“Have you eaten wild parsnip from this area before?”

“Several times.”

“So you know it when you see it.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“But you didn’t last month.”

“I thought I did.”

“Tell me about it.”

“The plant, the dinner? What?”

“Both. Where did the water hemlock come from?”

She pinched a straggly stem from one of the larger philodendrons and threw it into a plastic sack of rubbish beneath the table. “I thought it was wild parsnip,” she clarifi ed.

“Accepted for the moment. Where did it come from?”

“Not far from the Hall. There’s a pond on the grounds. It’s terribly overgrown — you probably noticed the state things are in — and I found a stand of wild parsnip there. What I thought was parsnip.”

“Had you eaten parsnip from the pond before?”

“From the grounds. But not from that location by the pond. I’d only seen the plants.”

“What was the root stock like?”

“Like parsnip, obviously.”

“A single root? A bundle?”

She bent over a particularly verdant fern, parted its fronds, examined its base, and then lifted the plant to the work top opposite. She went on with her cultivating. “It must have been a single, but I don’t actually recall the look of it.”

“You know what it should have been.”

“A single root. Yes. I know that, Inspector. And it would make it far easier on both of us if I just lied and declared it was definitely a single root I dug up. But the fact is I was in a rush that day. I’d gone to the cellar, discovered I had only two small parsnips, and hurried out to the pond where I thought I’d seen more. I dug one up and came back to the cottage. I assume the root I brought with me was a single, but I can’t recall for a fact that it was. I can’t picture it dangling from my hand.”

“Odd, wouldn’t you say? It is, after all, one of the most important details.”

“I can’t help that. But I would appreciate being given some credit for telling the truth. Believe me, a lie would be far more convenient.”

“And your illness?”

She set down her cultivator and pressed the back of her wrist to the faded red headband. She dislodged upon it a speckling of soil. “What illness?”

“Constable Shepherd said you were ill yourself that night. He said you’d eaten some of the hemlock as well. He claimed to have dropped by that evening and found you—”

“Colin’s trying to protect me. He’s afraid. He’s worried.”

“Now?”

“Then as well.” She replaced the cultivator among the other tools and went to adjust a dial on what appeared to be the irrigation system. The slow dripping of water began a moment later, somewhere to their right. She kept her eyes and her hand on the dial as she continued. “That was part of the convenience, Inspector, Colin’s saying he’d just dropped by.”

Lynley followed the previously established euphemism. “I take it he didn’t drop by at all.”

“Oh, he did. He was here. But it wasn’t a coincidence. He didn’t just happen to be on his rounds. That’s what he told the inquest. That’s what he told his father and Sergeant Hawkins. That’s what he told everyone. But that’s not what happened.”

“You arranged for him to come?”

“I telephoned him.”

“I see. The alibi.”