described by Ellie, unless he was wearing it inside out.
'Half the cliches in the language are Shakespeare and most of the rest Pope,' he said. 'Not a very valuable coincidence, is it?'
'That's what I've been saying about coincidences all along,' said Pascoe. 'Isn't it?'
As they drove along the road which was the quickest route to Pump Street, Pascoe said, 'Why aren't you coming all over indignant, Mr Wildgoose?'
'Why should I?'
'Well, for a start, you've obviously worked out I've been chatting to your family about you. That would annoy a lot of men. And there'd be very few men indeed who wouldn't get extremely indignant when they realized the police were trying to tie them in with the Choker killings.'
'Including the Choker?'
'Perhaps especially the Choker,' said Pascoe.
'Then perhaps I'm busy establishing my innocence, Inspector,' said Wildgoose calmly. 'If you turn down here, you'll cut off the traffic lights.'
Pump Street consisted mainly of two long rows of terraces opening on to the pavement. One side had been built for railway workers in the mid-nineteenth century, the other, still known as the New Side although identical in style, had been put up speculatively about ten years later as the demand for low-cost housing exploded in this area. What gave Pump Street some individual character and even beauty was the ground contour which had made it easier to build on a curve, and chance had produced an arc fit for a Nash crescent. The allotments were situated in a break in the New Side where a Dornier with its full load had come down one still-remembered night in '41 and reduced a hundred yards of terracing to rubble, and thirty-nine men, women and children to corpses. There was no time for rebuilding then, but gradually the site had been cleared, and eventually planted on, by the garden-less locals eager to plug some of the gaps in their diet. Eventually, after complaints of piracy and landgrabbing, the council stepped in and regularized matters, and so things continued for more than thirty years till the June morning when the death toll rose to forty.
There were two or three old men working on their allotments and they watched with open curiosity as Pascoe and Wildgoose picked their way across to the latter's strip. It was indeed sadly neglected though no more so than half a dozen others.
'Here we are,' said Wildgoose. 'If you seek my memorial, look around you.'
Pascoe bent and examined the furrowed ground. There were potatoes here still, some straggly carrot tops, something which could have been leaf spinach.
'What happened?' he asked.
'A couple of years ago it seemed a good idea. Self-sufficiency. Part of the male menopause.'
'You're a little young for that, surely?'
'Forty,' said Wildgoose. 'I just know a good couturier. And the male menopause has nothing to do with age or physical changes. It has to do with meanings.'
'And you found something more meaningful?'
'Still looking, Inspector.'
Pascoe too was looking. The rickety old shed in which June McCarthy's body had been found stood about twenty-five yards away. As he watched, the door opened and a man emerged. He had a bucket in one hand and a garden fork in the other. Carefully with the economic movements of age and experience he began to unearth some potatoes. This was Mr Ribble, the owner of the shed and the only one of the allotment holders that Pascoe had interviewed personally. A man in his late sixties, he had taken the discovery of the body with a phlegm which was to some extent explained when Pascoe found out that he had cancer of the bowel and had already outlived the surgeon's estimate by eighteen months.
Pascoe turned back to Wildgoose and coldly wondered how such a diagnosis would affect his search for meanings.
'I see you keep your greenhouse locked,' he said. 'Worried about your tomatoes?'
'I kept my tools in there,' said Wildgoose. ‘I didn't really grow much. It came with the allotment. The old boy who had it before me died and it seemed a kindness to pay his missus a couple of quid for the thing. Would you like a look?'
He searched in his pocket for a key while Pascoe examined the greenhouse from the outside. It was very much a homemade affair, more of a converted garden shed than a proper greenhouse. It was glazed with panels of translucent plastic which had the advantage of not being so fragile as glass. In one or two places kids had hurled stones without doing more damage than denting and cracking, easily repaired with transparent tape.
Wildgoose found the key and unlocked the padlock which fastened the door. Pascoe let him go in first. Mrs Wildgoose had been wrong. While you could not see clearly through the plastic, you could certainly distinguish shapes and it would take either irresistible passion or brazen exhibitionism to persuade a couple to fornicate in here. Pascoe did not dismiss the possibility. But it was unlikely that one of the elderly gardeners would not have passed on details of this shadowy entertainment to Sergeant Brady.
The interior of the greenhouse smelt hot and stuffy. There was a rusty spade in one corner, a broken hoe in another. A few earthenware plant pots were stacked along a sagging shelf. Nothing was growing in here, though the mummified remains of some unidentifiable plants crowded together sadly in a propagating tray. The floor was wooden, beginning to rot in places. A couple of sacks were draped across a particularly decayed section. An almost empty plastic bag of some proprietary fertilizer lay alongside them. Pascoe's memory was stirred. Among many other things, the laboratory examination of June McCarthy's clothes had revealed the presence of traces of peat and other fibrous organic material associated with gardening, precisely the kind of thing you'd expect to find in a garden shed.
He wondered whether anyone had bothered to make sure they were definitely present in Mr Ribble's shed.
For Wildgoose to kill her in his greenhouse and then lug the body twenty-five yards across the allotment didn't seem likely. It had been early in the morning, but broad daylight.
Still, when you had nothing, anything was something.
He stooped to pick up the bag.
And smiled with incredulous delight as he saw the small adhesive price tag still clinging to the grubby plastic. The name of the retailer was still on it.
The Linden Garden Centre.
He picked it up carefully.
'You use a lot of this stuff?' he asked.
'In the first flush of enthusiasm, I used everything,' said Wildgoose. 'Soot, blood, horse-shit, sea-weed. Why?'
'And where did you buy your garden stuff, Mr Wildgoose?'
'Where? Hell, wherever I was. Garden shops, market stalls, Woolworth's even. They're very good in Woolworth's these days.'
'Garden centres? This price tag says Linden Garden Centre.'
'I don't remember that. Is it important?'
'It's on the East Coast Road,' said Pascoe. 'Four, five miles.'
'Sorry. I don't recall, for all I know that stuff was here when I took the allotment on. Don't tell me it's a clue!'
For someone who had seemed so bright and alert to every innuendo, he was being very dim about this, thought Pascoe.
'I'd like to take this if I may.'
'I'll need a receipt,' mocked Wildgoose. 'What about a few old plant pots into the bargain?'
The plastic bag was leaking, Pascoe discovered, and the remaining fertilizer was spilling out of it. Picking up one of the old sacks from the floor, he thrust the bag inside.
'Let's go,' he said.
'Where?'
'Why, back to your flat, of course, Mr Wildgoose. Unless I can drop you anywhere else?'
'No, that'll be fine.'
