Martin Edwards - The Cipher Garden

He looked around and saw the cottage grounds with new eyes. Paths leading nowhere, false turnings, dead ends. Belladonna, foxgloves, hellebore. Poisonous plants in a beautiful landscape. Even the loveliest blooms seemed sinister this morning. Weren’t lilies by tradition the flowers of funerals?

‘Daniel!’ Miranda had emerged from the cottage. ‘Phone for you. Marc Amos, from the bookshop.’

‘You talked about Jacob Quiller.’ Marc sounded pleased with himself. ‘He’s mentioned in a book I picked up in a job lot at a book fair. Riddles of South Lakeland. I spotted his name when I was flicking through a chapter on Brackdale. It talks about Quiller’s garden at the cottage in Tarn Fold.’

‘The cipher garden.’

‘So you know all about it?’

‘I wish.’

‘This book was published by a local firm, the print run must have been minuscule.’

‘Which company?’

‘RG Publications, they’re based near Hawkshead. A small press, a one-woman band. She’s been churning out a title a month for ten or twelve years now. Local interest stuff for tourists rather than the natives. A crowded market, but she keeps her head above water. This isn’t a book I recall. Must have been one of her earliest.’

‘What does RG stand for?’ Daniel asked, although he could guess.

‘Roz Gleave, that’s the publisher’s name. The author is called Eleanor Sawtell. Never heard of her. According to the blurb, she is — or was — a former primary school teacher. She also boasts that she’s a lifelong resident of Staveley and has three children and eleven grandchildren.’

‘What does she have to say about the garden?’

‘Not a lot, disappointingly. I’ll copy the paragraphs and put them in the post to you.’

‘Thanks, but I’ll call in and pick them up.’

‘In a hurry?’

‘Puzzling over the garden will take my mind off yesterday.’

‘Hannah said you were at the airfield.’ He sighed. ‘Frankly, she was in hell of a state last night. A horrific business, by the sound of it. That poor young girl. I suppose it couldn’t have been an accident?’

‘Hannah would know better than me, but the girl’s behaviour looked calculated enough from where we were standing. She just ripped off her helmet and parachute and dropped like a stone.’

‘My God, how could you hate life enough to want to do that to yourself?’

‘Don’t ask me. How is Hannah today?’

A pause. ‘For once in a blue moon, she’s not fit enough to go into work. Though she took some persuading. Of course, she’s a workaholic, you must have noticed.’

‘She’s obviously very committed to the job.’

A brief laugh. ‘That’s one way of putting it. Between you and me, she takes it all too much to heart. Naturally, she’s shocked by what happened. She’s not as thick-skinned as most police officers. In fact, she’s not thick-skinned at all. God knows what she was doing at the airfield. I’ve never heard her express an interest in skydiving before.’

‘Something to do with work?’ Daniel had assumed it was no coincidence that Hannah and her sergeant had shown up at an event featuring Warren Howe’s daughter. But he didn’t want to say too much.

‘Suppose so.’ A pause. ‘She was on her own, I suppose?’

Daniel hesitated. ‘We didn’t have time for conversation. But I didn’t see her interrogating spectators, if that’s what you mean. And of course the suicide jump stunned all of us. Nobody could have expected that.’

If Marc Amos realised that Daniel had dodged his question, his voice didn’t betray it. ‘No, the girl must have had mental problems, it’s not a rational act. You’re coming over to the shop sometime?’

‘I’ll be with you in half an hour.’

Far below the Sacrifice Stone, the tranquil and secluded corner known as Tarn Fold is associated with a story about the garden created in the late nineteenth century by Jacob Quiller. Quiller’s mother was the younger sister of Richard Skelding, whose father had bought Brack Hall fifty years before. The Skeldings and the Quillers were God-fearing folk, much-respected pillars of the Brackdale community and Jacob himself was a churchwarden and staunch supporter of the church at Brack. His wife Alice was a local girl of humble stock who worked at the Hall as a housemaid before catching Jacob’s eye. Originally the Fold, like most of the rest of the valley, formed part of the sprawling Brack Estate. Richard, well known for his generosity, transferred ownership of the Fold to Jacob as a wedding gift, and Jacob built a pretty little cottage in a clearing close to the lower slopes of Tarn Fell. Alice’s life revolved around their only child, John, to whom she was utterly devoted.

It was said that the Quillers struggled to keep their faith after John’s tragic death. He was a soldier who fought in the Boer War and died one day short of his twenty-first birthday. Neither Jacob nor Alice seems ever to have recovered from that dreadful blow. Indeed, the story goes that after John’s funeral, Alice became a recluse who refused to leave the cottage and would not speak to a single soul other than her distraught husband. Before long they were both dead — departing this mortal coil on the very same day. One suspects that in truth their lives ended the moment they received the tragic news from South Africa. The simple epitaph on their gravestone close to the lych gate at their beloved church records poignantly that the couple died of broken hearts.

Jacob Quiller was reputed to have laboured unceasingly in his garden in the months leading up to his demise and it may be that he overtaxed himself. Village wisdom had it that there is a secret about their deaths to be discovered by unravelling a cipher that Jacob hid in the garden, yet little seems to be known about it. The Quillers had no family other than the Skeldings, to whom the cottage passed back on their deaths. Richard paid for a memorial to John that can be seen in the church to this day. He sold the cottage and it remains in private hands, although the present owner does not encourage sightseers. The cipher has presumably disappeared, if it ever existed. Possibly it was no more than a tantalising rural legend. In any event, it seems to this author to be crass to intrude upon personal grief. How much more romantic to take at face value the words that the Quillers chose for their headstone. Let us pause and reflect that, whatever learned medical men tell us, folk may indeed die from broken hearts.

Daniel handed the book back to Marc Amos. It was a battered trade paperback. On the back cover was a black and white photograph of Eleanor Sawtell. Seventy-five at a guess, she had white hair, a kindly expression and a cardigan with a missing button. An obese and complacent tabby sat on her lap, smirking as though it had solved the cipher but wasn’t telling.

‘An unsatisfactory story, really,’ Marc said.

‘A puzzle without an obvious solution, that’s the challenge. I’ve been mugging up about gardens and things that grow in them. Odd, I always thought of gardens as life-enhancing. Plants, too. Surprising how many of them have macabre connotations.’

Marc shook his head. ‘Not my subject, I’m afraid.’

‘The monkey puzzle tree, for instance. Originates from Chile, and guess what? The climate in Cumbria suits it perfectly.’

‘It’s chilly enough here most of the time. Sorry, terrible joke. I looked Eleanor Sawtell up in the phone book, but couldn’t find her in Staveley. She might be ex-directory, but…’

‘I’ll have a word with Roz Gleave, see if she can help.’

A chance too good for someone so obsessively curious to miss, a chance to kill two birds. To find out more about the cipher — and the murder of Warren Howe.