PART THREE
CHAPTER 11
Rosemary dibbed the forefinger of her left hand into the soft soil several times and drew it out again, the fingernail clogged with dirt. She ripped the top off the small brightly coloured envelope she was holding in her other hand, and poured a stream of tiny black grains into her palm.
‘You see?’ she muttered fiercely. ‘They come from Suttons at 75p a packet, you old fool!’
A car came down the tree-lined drive leading to the road which ran along the top of the ridge. It crunched across the weed-strewn gravel sweep in front of the house and drew up by the front door. Two men got out, looking about them.
Rosemary wiped the tears from her cheeks with her sleeve. Bending over the flowerbed, she busied herself with the seeds, letting each fall into its shallow grave and smoothing the earth over it.
‘Afternoon.’
Detective Inspector Stanley Jarvis stood looking at Rosemary from the other side of the flowerbed. His companion, who wore dark glasses and appeared to be chewing gum, remained by the car.
‘Good afternoon, Inspector,’ Rosemary replied.
Jarvis nodded sagely.
‘Planting something?’ he observed.
‘Just a few seeds.’
‘Bit late for that, isn’t it?’
Rosemary did not reply. Jarvis walked round the flowerbed and plucked the packet from her fingers.
‘Poppies?’ he exclaimed. ‘I never knew they needed sowing. Thought they just happened.’
‘They do grow wild, of course, but sometimes nature can do with a helping hand.’
Retrieving the packet, she filled the rest of the hollows with seeds.
‘It’s much the same as planting clues in a whodunnit, if you like,’ she mused. ‘It may seem a bit contrived, but the results are so much more interesting than the dreary crimes you read about in the papers.’
Jarvis made a face.
‘I don’t like,’ he said. ‘Now then, do you know where Mrs Hargreaves is? My colleague and I are here to take her statement.’
‘I believe, in the house. Go through the French windows, I should. No one will mind, and it’s quicker.’
Jarvis nodded briskly.
‘Right you are. Tomkins!’
The two men converged on the house. Rosemary upended the packet of seeds, scattering the remainder across the flowerbed.
There, now,’ she murmured. ‘You’ll just have to fend for yourselves. I’ve interfered quite enough as it is.’
She raised one arm in response to a wave from Jack Weatherby, who had appeared from the grove of rhododendrons beyond the croquet lawn. He called out something that Rosemary couldn’t quite catch.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ she returned heartily.
With a broad smile, Weatherby continued along the path. In his straw hat and linen suit, recovered from a trunk of his belongings discovered in the attic, he looked and moved like a younger brother of the man who used to sit slumped in his chair by the fireplace until the time came to shuffle back to bed. A change no less dramatic was to be seen in the other residents of Eventide Lodge. It was only now that Rosemary realised the extent to which she had come to accept that their condition was an inevitable consequence of the ageing process, only to be expected in people who were virtually at death’s door. She had been astounded by the effect of a healthy diet, exercise, fresh air and renewed contact with their families and the outside world.
Not that the transition had been entirely smooth. Purvey was still under medical supervision after suffering a nervous collapse due to his belief that the ‘new owners’ were going to turn him out. Charles Symes, too, was in hospital, the media interest in the affair having pushed him to the front of the queue for his operation. Even Rosemary had suffered mild attacks of anxiety following the abrupt collapse of the system which had ruled their lives for so long. The day the plastic sheeting covering the windows had been torn down had been particularly fraught, with both Grace Lebon and Samuel Rossiter requiring sedation. But by far the worst affected had been Belinda Scott, who tried to get the others to join her in a campaign of passive resistance to the changes. When that failed, she had gone on hunger strike, accusing everyone else of betraying the rightful authority of Mr Anderson and Miss Davis and threatening to exact a terrible retribution when they returned.
However, the chances of that happening were remote indeed. The charges of wilful cruelty and gross neglect on which the siblings had been arrested the previous week had been substantiated beyond a vestige of doubt both by the residents’ statements and by the evidence of the medical examinations they had all undergone. The discovery that a resident of the Lodge named Hilary Bryant, who had since died, had been persuaded to alter her will in the Andersons’ favour, and that pressure had been put on others to do the same, had sealed their fate. Even if by some miracle they escaped a prison sentence, their careers in residential care for the aged were quite clearly over.
Pending further developments, Eventide Lodge had been placed in the care of the Local Health Authority, who had staffed it with personnel recently been made redundant owing to the closure of the geriatric wing of a hospital in another part of the county. Their cheerful attentions had done wonders to awaken the residents from the catatonic stupor and paranoid delusions into which most of them had retreated, but an equally important factor had been the letters, phone calls and visits from friends and relatives horrified to learn what had been going on behind the genteel facade which the Andersons had maintained-and ashamed that they had not made it their business to find out earlier.
In the attic of the Lodge, the new staff had found over twenty dustbin liners crammed with post which the Andersons had deliberately withheld to increase the residents’ sense of isolation and dependence. All outgoing letters were read by Anderson or Miss Davis, and any reference to conditions at the Lodge censored. The resulting anodyne communications served to persuade the recipients-not that they usually needed much persuasion-that their nominally beloved but in practice rather tiresome old relatives were as well as could be expected, and that phone calls and visits were pointlessly upsetting for everyone concerned. On the rare occasions when family members did insist on paying their respects in person, the residents were reduced to incoherent passivity by dosing their food with drugs prescribed by the compliant Dr Morel.
Rosemary made her way across the lawn to the garden seat which stood on the path at the foot of the rockery. She sat down and felt in her pocket for the letter she had received that morning. But it was another piece of paper that emerged, crumpled and soiled, with her name written on one side in shaky capitals. Hastily replacing it, Rosemary located the air-mail envelope with its large, colourful stamps in an unfamiliar currency.
She read the enclosure from beginning to end several times, then lay back on the slats of teak weathered to a silvery sheen, basking in the weak autumnal sunshine. A council employee was at work mowing the lawn at the other side of the house. Rosemary gazed up at the sky of hazy blue seamed with strata of diffuse cloud. The throaty purring of the motor-mower reminded her of the flimsy biplanes of her youth, when flying was still an adventure. She dosed her eyes…
A shadow fell between her and the sun. Rosemary looked up to find Stanley Jarvis standing in front of her. His expression was unsympathetic.
‘Have you been winding me up?’ he said.
Rosemary peered at him, pondering the meaning of these words. She thought of the tin soldiers her brother had used to play with before a real war killed him, and was on the point of making a joke about clockwork toys when Jarvis went on.
‘Mrs Hargreaves now refuses to confirm her earlier testimony about the cocoa.’
Rosemary brushed some grass clippings off her dress.
‘How very tiresome of her,’ she murmured.
‘Don’t give me that!’ Jarvis snarled.
He fixed her with a stare.
‘Perhaps you don’t appreciate what’s at stake here, Miss Travis. When I came here last week, Mrs
