Martin Edwards: The Cipher Garden

‘Did she get her own back?’

‘During the inquiry, she played the loyal wife. I actually heard her saying that life with him had its compensations. Such as their kids. Kirsty was sixteen, Sam eighteen. And they looked after her. Both of them confirmed her alibi.’

‘Which was?’

‘Tina was a keen amateur photographer. The day of the murder, she took the SUV and drove over the Hardknott Pass towards Wasdale, looking for fresh scenes to snap. The kids came along with her for company. At the time her husband was killed, they were all up by the old Roman fort. No independent witnesses that we could trace, but she did show us the pictures she’d taken.’

‘Suppose the son drove and the daughter took the pictures?’

‘Quite a conspiracy.’

‘Stranger things have happened.’

‘You’re right. They could have been lying, but we couldn’t break their stories.’

‘Were the children suspects?’

‘We ruled nobody in and nobody out. Warren wasn’t exactly a caring father. But if there’d been sexual abuse, incest, whatever, nobody was admitting it. Kirsty constantly broke down in tears, but she was a kid and her dad had been murdered, so it wasn’t a surprise. We never got much sense out of her. When Sam was interviewed, he answered in sullen monosyllables. Chip off the old block. He’d felt the back of Warren’s hand more than once, even though he’d left school and was as big as his father. I could picture him retaliating with a punch or a kicking. But murder? We had nothing to pin on him.’

‘All the data tells us that patricide is rare,’ Linz said.

‘Sad epitaph for the tombstone,’ Hannah said. ‘Everyone wanted me dead.’

‘One more thing. Whoever killed Warren Howe pushed him into the trench he’d excavated and threw a bit of sacking and a few rose petals over him.’

A picture formed in Hannah’s mind, as dark as if painted by Cezanne in his bleakest mood. The torn and blood-soaked corpse, dumped in the damp ground.

‘To my mind,’ Nick said, ‘that was Warren Howe’s epitaph. He dug his own grave .’

The gathering dusk had become a favourite time for Daniel. He wandered outside the cottage and savoured the scent of old roses, and the colours mingling on the fell, tints of blue and indigo deepening as the sky grew dark. The slopes looked so rich and sensuous that if he could only brush them with his fingertips, it would be like touching velvet.

The evening air was chill after the heat of the day, but he stoked the cast-iron chiminea and smelled the logs as they burned. A fox on the prowl rustled in the bracken, a trio of brown-breasted mallards squealed and flapped as they rose from the tarn and fled over the trees. But whatever the tourist brochures said, Brackdale wasn’t a wholly peaceful place. Years back, a young man who lived at Tarn Cottage, Barrie Gilpin, had been suspected of killing a woman whose body was laid out on the Sacrifice Stone.

Thank God, that was done with. Sitting down on an upturned crate between the potted lavenders, he shut his eyes. It awed him that the bedrock of the Lake District was as old as any in the world. The constancy of the lakes and mountains satisfied a need within him. Ever since his father had torn their family apart, he’d burned with desire to belong, to feel complete. At last he’d found a place he wanted to become part of.

He would love Louise to see the Lakes as he saw them. Splitting up with Rodney might be the making of her. Like a modern counterpart of a tightly corseted Victorian, she needed to unbutton herself, learn the art of relaxation. The last time they’d spoken, she’d made it clear that for Daniel to downshift to the Lakes at the precise moment his career was taking off was madness.

But he’d needed to escape. For as long as he could remember — certainly since his father abandoned the family — Daniel had worked. And worked and worked. After school studies, academic research. Each year he set new goals, more demanding than the last. He didn’t care about the money, although he earned a lot of it. What mattered was to break new ground. Soon everyone wanted a piece of him. Success made him a minor celebrity, people he didn’t know envied him and he’d overheard someone in the Senior Common Room referring to him as The Lucky Kind. Always another project, always another offer he could not refuse. No time to think, no time to relax, but that didn’t matter because he was doing so well and you had to make the most of every opportunity and, and, and, and…

And he’d been away when his father died and he’d missed the funeral, and then Aimee, his lover, had embarked on another suicide attempt and he’d been too late to save her from throwing herself from the top of a tower.

Miranda came into the sitting room, wrapped in a yellow bath towel. She loved aromatherapy and there was a glow of contentment about her. He could smell rosemary and juniper.

‘Any luck at the church?’

‘I asked the rector if I could see the parish records, but all he could do was refer me to the County Records Office, and I didn’t find anything useful there. But I had a look around the graveyard and found where the Quillers were laid to rest.’

Their cottage had been built over a century ago, by a cousin of the man who owned Brack Hall. His name was Jacob Quiller and after he and his wife died the place had changed hands several times before the Gilpins arrived.

She feigned a yawn. ‘Am I right in thinking you won’t rest till you’ve made sense of that crazy garden?’

He glanced through the window. Outside, darkness had fallen. A lamp cast a pool of brightness over the path leading to the tarn, but the effect was to make the dark shapes of the trees beyond reach of the beam all the more mysterious. He caught sight of a movement in the plants by the side of the path. The fox was getting bolder. At night-time the garden became a different place, the kingdom of unseen creatures. The patterns that men imposed on the landscape were only skin deep.

‘I must admit I’m intrigued.’

‘Another crusade, huh?’ She wasn’t into the past; the present was all that mattered to her. Already she was preoccupied with unbuckling his belt. ‘Come and join me on the rug. Better make the most of our freedom before your sister arrives.’

He was glad she’d changed the subject. Too easy for him to develop a fresh obsession with the mystery of the garden. It had scarcely been touched for many years and he suspected that the underlying design dated back as far as the Quillers’ time. Their grave was situated under the leaves of a spreading oak in the churchyard. Its marble headstone was large, but lacked the grandeur of the vaults dedicated to the squires of Brack Hall and their families. No twee verses, no doleful epitaphs.

Three people were buried there. And here was an oddity: Quiller and his wife Alice had died on the same day, the first anniversary of the date given for the death of their son. He was named as Major John Quiller of 1st Northumberland Fusiliers and he’d died on 5 April 1902. The tail end of the Boer War, though there was no indication that he’d been killed in action. Beneath his parents’ names were four words.

Died of broken hearts.

Warren Howe’s face leered at Hannah out of the glossy file print, as if he were about to proposition her. Hannah contemplated the dead man, wondered how to climb inside his mind. Murder victims forfeited their privacy. Human rights? Forget them, they were an indulgence for the living. She stared into his eyes, searching for a clue to what he’d done to earn such a savage fate.

He wasn’t bad-looking in a louche kind of way. Unruly dark hair and old-fashioned sideburns, full lips, a wide fleshy face. Teeth marred by a chipped front incisor that accentuated a small gap. The deep-set eyes were his best feature, startling and blue. One ear had a discreet ring. A strong face, with a touch of devil-may-care. Easy to understand why some women fell for him, despite knowing he was a serial seducer.