‘I don’t think I’ve met Margaret,’ she said. ‘Is she the one everyone says is a cow?’
‘That’s right. She was writing a book about Tim – your colleague, yes? – but we burned the notes. He seems suddenly a great deal happier now.’
‘Tim never mentioned Margaret at the office, you know.’
‘Not even when they split up?’
‘No. But then we didn’t talk about our private lives. I didn’t know Michelle had a boyfriend. I just knew she wrote mad letters to Osborne. And I suppose, now I come to think of it, that personally I never talked about Mister Bunny – sorry, I mean, Jeff. No, hang on, no, not Jeff, what is it?’
‘Your husband?’
‘Mm. Jack. Jerry. George.’
They surveyed the ruined shed. Neither of them quite knew why they were doing it, or why they’d suddenly gone quiet.
‘Why did you call yourself Miss Dexter?’
‘I’ve forgotten.’
‘I liked the stuffed bunny-rabbit.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I sent it a lettuce leaf for breakfast.’
‘I know.’
‘Are you fond of Osborne?’
‘I suppose I must be. But not the way Michelle is. She wants to stick sprigs of rosemary up his nose and use his erect member to make holes in potting compost.’
‘You’d never guess, to look at her.’
Lillian laughed.
‘Could you fancy a walk into town?’ said Gordon’s dad, offering his arm. The gesture reminded her of Osborne.
‘That would be lovely.’
He opened the gate for her, and they set off down the lane.
‘I’m sorry about Come Into the Garden. Were you there a very long time?’
‘Only fifteen years.’
‘It must have been good, then?’
There was a pause.
‘No,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Not good. Just safe.’
‘Who in the name of alimentary tracts are – all – these people?’ barked Angela, hurling herself on to a soft sofa, her face white and shiny, her hair sticking flat to her head. ‘Who in particular is that woman shoving her body at Trent Carmichael and why is she waving an amputated mitt?’
‘She’s another of my sacked employees,’ said Gordon glumly, forgetting that she didn’t know this yet.
‘What? Are you Digger Enterprises?’ gasped Michelle, looking for confirmation to Tim, who nodded. ‘Good God.’ Stunned, she sat down and wrung her hands – her own, then the fake one, and then all three together.
‘So are you from the gardening magazine?’ asked Carmichael. ‘Not a nun, after all?’
Angela exchanged glances with Gordon and leaned forward. ‘I used to play scenes like this when I did Shakespeare,’ she whispered. ‘They’ll be talking about moles on their father’s cheek soon.’ He smiled. She spoke up. ‘Anyone else need to know who anyone else is? Feel free, I mean it. Since we are surely on the verge of clearing up a lot of misunderstandings, we might as well start with present company.’ She looked around. ‘You, sir!’ she pointed at Tim, who jumped. ‘Who the hell are you? And Gordon, are you aware that your dad just went down the road with a lady in a pink coat whom nobody knows from Zsa Zsa Gabor?’
‘Oh, that was Lillian,’ chorused Tim, Michelle and Gordon.
Angela raised her eyes.
‘And what does Lillian do, when she’s at home?’
‘Well, at an educated guess,’ said Michelle, ‘probably not much more than she does at work.’
‘What was the best thing about being a secretary?’ asked Gordon’s dad, as they strolled past Dunquenchin and down towards the Chimneypot nursery on the way to the shops.
‘The best thing about being a secretary?’ she repeated. She blinked, and thought quite hard, but somehow nothing would come.
‘I mean, did you take a pride in it?’
The question was definitely in English, but Lillian still seemed puzzled by it. She stopped, lit a cigarette and shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ she grimaced helplessly, ‘perhaps we should talk about you instead.’
‘I’m genuinely interested, really. When we took the decision to close down the magazine, we came and saw the office at the weekend. I probably saw your desk.’
‘Look, it’s really not interesting.’
‘It is, to me.’
‘All right. Mainly my job entailed a mail-sack and a pair of tongs, and the phone ringing, and messengers turning up, and the best bit was systematically throwing away all the readers’ letters to Ted’s Tips, Dear Donald and Katie’s Cuttings, because it meant Michelle had to make them all up in the evenings.’
‘You don’t like Michelle?’
‘Ha!’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘She’s supercilious, arch, martyrish, hostile –’
‘So you threw away the letters to Dear Donald?’
‘Yeah. Amongst other things.’ Lillian took a long drag on the cigarette and then chucked it into some dry leaves by the side of the road.
‘You can start fires like that, you know.’
‘Oh, give me a break.’
‘Sorry.’
They walked on.
‘I want to ask you something personal. When we looked around the office, I saw a corner with a lampstand and a square of carpet – was that yours?’
‘Yes.’ She giggled.
‘Well, the funny thing is that I assumed the person who worked there must be sixty years old, at least. So I’m a bit puzzled. Here you are, talking to your husband like you’re two and a half, and acting at work like you’re sixty. So what I want to know is: when do you get to be your real age – when you are, if I may say so without sounding creepy and smarmy like that smarmy creep Trent Carmichael, in your prime?’
Lillian looked crestfallen.
He hesitated, but on the other hand, having got this far, he thought he’d better continue.
‘I’m not a very clever man, and I don’t have Margaret’s knowledge, let alone her inquisitive inclinations. But on the other hand, I do wonder whether – good lord, did you see that?’
Lillian wiped a tear on her sleeve and sniffed. ‘What?’
‘There’s someone in the garden centre.’
‘Why shouldn’t there be?’
‘Because it’s Thursday.’
‘Oh.’
‘Someone’s broken in. And this is going to sound rather odd, but it appeared to be a chimp or a midget in a thin blue frock. You didn’t see it, Lillian? On the bike?’
Lillian smiled weakly. ‘I was thinking about something else.’
‘You don’t mind me calling you Lillian?’
‘As long as you promise not to call me Bunny.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘So what do you want to do?’
‘I’m thinking.’
But Lillian thought first.
‘Didn’t Tim say something about seeing Osborne abducted by a midget in a frock? I mean, it may be a different midget, of course, but –’
‘You’re right. I’d better get the others. You stay here and keep watch and I’ll run back. Can you do that?’
‘Of course I can.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean –’ He put his hand towards her, but didn’t touch. ‘Right, I’ll go.’
‘Just one thing, though. I think Tim also mentioned a pitchfork. And it seems to me, if I rack my memory, that this may be significant, and have something to do with nipples. The figure you saw, did it have a pitchfork too?’
‘I believe it did.’
‘Well, in that case you’d better get your skates on.’
‘Alone at last!’ cackled Makepeace, flinging wide the door of the Resteezy shed, and standing arms akimbo like the jolly Green Giant. ‘Ha ha ha ha ha.’
Osborne looked up wearily. He was a patient man by nature, but he was getting tired of this.
‘Oh for heaven’s sake, think what you’re saying,’ he said. ‘We’ve been alone lots of times. W
e were alone in the van coming down here, alone in our room at Dunquenchin. We’ve been alone at your flat, and at mine, and in pubs and down the caff. And besides, there’s the rabbit here now –’
‘Stop quibbling,’ said Makepeace.
‘But –’
‘Stop it.’
‘Oh, all right.’
Makepeace struggled to recapture his former confidence. He went ‘Ha ha ha, ha ha ha,’ again, which helped.
‘It seems to me you’re not taking this seriously enough, my lily-skinned friend. Why do you think I brought you here? Why, to fulfil my fantasies with you! The whole lot. Hose, pitchfork, lawn-feed, everything – even the dibber.’
Osborne looked at him. At last he’d fallen in, after all this time. It was so simple. This man was mad.
‘You’re mad,’ he said.
‘I’m not.’
‘You look like a chimp.’
‘I don’t.’
‘And there’s a woman behind you, about to hit you on the head with a shovel.’
‘No, there isn’t.’
‘There is, you know,’ said Lillian from behind, and with a fabulous ringing dung! noise, Osborne’s forty-eight hours in captivity were finally brought to a close.
14
Only one thing cast a faint pall over the celebratory tea held at Dunquenchin that Thursday afternoon. Margaret Sexton had been found dead in Angela’s garden.
‘Grisly, really,’ shuddered Trent, helping himself to another toasted teacake.
‘Horrible,’ agreed Michelle, spooning out some jam.
Momentarily, everyone in the room stopped laughing and chattering (‘So it was you, all the time!’ ‘Yes, me!’) and generally drawing the many laborious misunderstandings of the past few days to a satisfactory close. It was Trent who had found the body, and now all eyes turned to him, in hope of gauging his feelings. But although he made a loud burp and said, ‘Excuse me,’ he otherwise betrayed no sign of inner turmoil.
It looked like a suspicious death, however. Foul play was certainly indicated. Shears, rake, weed-killer, garden twine, bucket, all the usual things had been employed. Flower-pots, hose, watering-can, secateurs.
‘Someone must have thought she was a real cow,’ averred Osborne, in his innocence, and was surprised when the entire roomful of people stared guiltily into their tea.
‘I suppose, to be fair, we ought to investigate,’ said Gordon. ‘I mean, it must have been, ahem, to coin a phrase, someone in this room that did it. In fact, pretty obviously it was Trent.’
Trent looked up, but said nothing. Gordon, embarrassed, cleared his throat and continued.
‘Surely it’s obvious. For a start, (a) Trent can’t imagine killing anyone without popping into a garden centre first; (b) he knows most about murder; (c) he hated her; (d) she was blackmailing him; (e) she’d deceived him; and (f) he’s got a new girlfriend who might have put him up to it.’
Gordon looked at the floor, his heart thumping. ‘No hard feelings, of course, Mr Carmichael.’
‘Of course not,’ agreed Trent, with the weird smile of a man who has already killed off his young pipsqueak antagonist in his latest novel with a pair of shears. ‘Goes without saying.’
Michelle loyally spooned some jam on to the back of his hand. He looked her in the eye and licked it off slowly.
‘Perhaps it’s not as simple as all that, anyway,’ piped Angela. ‘Trent doesn’t know anything about real murder. And if we all start accusing each other –’
‘Well, I think you did it!’ said Michelle, jumping to her feet. ‘After all, Margaret broke up your marriage!’
‘She did?’ shrieked Angela, jumping up likewise. ‘Jesus, what a cow.’
Osborne felt slightly detached from all this. He didn’t know Margaret. He knew Trent Carmichael only by means of his boring shed in Highgate and the lousy plots of his books. And self-evidently he could proffer no useful insight into this nasty murder, since there had been scarcely a second in the past two days when he wasn’t either locked up with a long-suffering rabbit, or in bed with Angela Farmer investigating Daphne du Maurier’s Vanishing Cornwall. So while the others debated the murder in question, he just felt sad and preoccupied. It is not every day that a friend goes bonkers and is sectioned under the Mental Health Act. When they led Makepeace to the waiting car with his arm twisted behind his blue-chiffoned back, he had uttered an extraordinary plea which would live in Osborne’s memory in all his future years: ‘You can’t do this to me,’ he said with solemnity, ‘I am a contributor to The Times Literary Supplement.’
‘I think Osborne should look into it,’ said Lillian. ‘He would have a fresh eye.’
‘Yes, but he also doesn’t know who anyone is,’ snapped Trent.
‘He could find out.’
‘So could anybody.’
‘Well, someone’s got to do something.’
Angela interjected. ‘Well, I think Osborne must be tired, poor baby. Don’t you need a quiet lie-down?’ And she waggled her eyebrows at him in a suggestive manner.
Catching the unmissable nuance of this, Michelle stifled a scream of annoyance. ‘I’m phoning Mother,’ she said, running from the room. ‘And I think you’re all mad.’ She slammed the door behind her.
Angela looked around carefully. ‘Hey, I think I’ve been in this play,’ she said. ‘And unless I’m mistaken, this is the moment when the policeman appears at the front door in a very tall helmet and we all freeze with our hands to our mouths and the curtain comes down to a cloudburst of applause.’
Things were gathering unstoppable speed. For example, when Mister Bunny stepped gingerly from the train at Honiton station, he was promptly knocked over sideways, with some violence, by a woman in a motorized wheelchair careering wildly along the platform, ostensibly out of control. It was a bad start for a visit. A litter-bin broke his fall, but possibly at the cost of a fractured rib, so the benefit was questionable. ‘Aagh,’ he exclaimed, clutching his dented chestal area. ‘What was that?’ His glimpsed impression was of an old, cracked-looking female in a velour track-suit shouting ‘Out of my way’ and ‘Mind your backs’ as she gouged a path through the new arrivals before hurtling towards the far end of the platform, where it ended in a sheer drop and a small pile of gravel.
‘Aagh,’ he repeated, staggering towards a bench and sitting down. Not only had she knocked him sideways, she’d run over his foot, leaving a nasty black mark on his Hush Puppy. In some respects, the random childlike brutality of this woman reminded him fondly of Lillian, but he cast such thoughts from his mind. After all, he was a man with a mission. Beside him he placed a small square suitcase, which he patted affectionately, evidently glad that it was safe.
‘No harm done, I expect,’ he said aloud, although no one was present to hear him, least of all the death-on-wheels lady, who had now mysteriously vanished.
‘Oh well.’ He picked up the suitcase and placed it under his arm.
‘Come on,’ he said, again to nobody visible. He was hobbling slightly. ‘Ouch.’
Why was he here? Because, in his desperation to locate his bunnykins beloved, he had telephoned Come Into the Garden and spoken to Clement, the sub-editor; and against an unusually loud and echoing atmospheric clatter – suggestive of masons and electricians working inside the dome of St Paul’s – Clement had explained in a raised voice about redundancy and Digger Enterprises and Honiton, and so on. Which had led Mister Bunny straight to the Honiton train.
‘What’s that din?’ yelled Mister Bunny. ‘Is somebody using an electric saw in there?’
‘That’s right. Well, the editor said we should take home anything we liked, and my colleague Ferdie has decided he wants to dismantle the built-in bookcases.’
‘I see.’
‘Which is only fair because as well as half the furniture I’ve got the carpets and a few of the partition walls, and the light fittings and the boiler, and the sink from the Gents.’
‘What’s left, then?’
; Clement looked around.
‘This phone. And some underlay. And the old red mark on the wall where the franking machine exploded. I was saying to Lillian, it’s funny how you start off not wanting to take anything – just an angle-poise lamp or a dictionary, you know – and then somehow you can’t stop, and before you know it –’
At which point, mercifully, Mister Bunny’s money ran out.
‘Er, do you think these tyre tracks are significant?’ asked Osborne, worried that he was stating the obvious. At the scene of the crime, despite the trampling of many feet around the body (all had wanted to check that Margaret was really dead), the keen-eyed detective was able to discern a distinct and extensive criss-cross pattern of neat parallel ruts, about twenty-four inches apart. What could this mean? Osborne’s brain worked rapidly. These marks were suggestive of either a motorized wheelchair doing repeated three-point-turns, or a frenzied Dalek with mud on its eyeball, or possibly a pair of novelty-act synchronized twin cyclists of outstanding technical versatility.
‘Did trick cyclists kill this woman?’ he said, puzzled.
Angela, Trent and Michelle gathered around to look at the evidence – the others having sensibly stayed in the warm at Dunquenchin. Osborne explained his theory, waving at the tracks in a vague but hopeful way.
‘A trick cyclist homicide hit-team? That’s a new one,’ said Trent, fumbling in his inside pocket for a notebook and pencil.
But Michelle did not respond. She was staring at the tracks. ‘I’ve just had a horrible thought,’ she said.
Angela didn’t care very much, and suggested they go inside for coffee. ‘I say it was cyclists; and I say they won’t get far,’ she said. ‘Stand out a mile in any normal setting, pirouetting on their back wheels playing Ravel’s Bolero on the kazoo. I’d like to know their motive, that’s all. What do you think, Trent? Hey, perhaps Margaret was writing a book about their unnatural love for their bikes.’
‘You mean, velocipedophiles?’ suggested Michelle dismally, from force of sub-editorial habit.