said. 'Then I see you moving about upstairs.'
'Upsetting,' I agreed.
He gestured to Malcolm's things. 'You'd better pack them again.'
I began to do so under his still watchful eye.
'It was brave of you to come in here,' I said, 'if you thought I was a burglar.'
He braced his shoulders in an old automatic movement. 'I was in the army once.' He relaxed and shrugged. 'Tell you the truth, I was coming in quietly-like to phone the police, then you started down the stairs.' 'And… the gun?'
'Brought it with me just in case. I go after rabbits… I keep the gun handy.'
I nodded. It was the gardener's own gun, I thought. Malcolm had never owned one, as far as I knew.
'Has my father paid you for the week?' I said.
His eyes at once brightened hopefully. 'He paid me last Friday, same as usual. Then Saturday morning he phoned my house to tell me to come round here to see to the dogs. Take them home with me, same as I always do when he's away. So I did. But he was gone off the line before I could ask him how long he'd be wanting me to have them.'
I pulled out my cheque-book and wrote him a cheque for the amount he specified. Arthur Bellbrook, he said his name was. I tore out the cheque and gave it to him and asked him if there was anyone else who needed wages.
He shook his head. 'The cleaner left when Mrs Pembroke was done in… er… murdered. Said she didn't fancy the place any more.'
'Where exactly was Mrs Pembroke… er… murdered?'
'I'll show you if you like.' He stored the cheque away in a pocket. 'Outside in the greenhouse.'
He took me, however, not as I'd imagined to the rickety old familiar -greenhouse sagging against a mellowed wall in the kitchen garden, but to a bright white octagonal wrought-iron construction like a fancy bird-cage set as a summer-house on a secluded patch of lawn. From far outside, one could clearly see the flourishing geraniums within.
'Well, well,' I said.
Arthur Bellbrook uttered 'Huh' as expressing his disapproval and opened the metal-and-glass door.
'Cost a fortune to heat, will this place, 'he observed. 'And it got too hot in the summer. The only thing as will survive in it is geraniums. Mrs Pembroke's passion, geraniums.'
An almost full sack of potting compost lay along one of the work surfaces, the top side of it slit from end to end to make the soil mixture easy to reach. A box of small pots stood nearby, some of them occupied by cuttings.
I looked at the compost with revulsion. 'Is that where…?' I began.
'Yes,' he said. 'Poor lady. There's no one ought to die like that, however difficult they could be.'
'No,' I agreed. A thought struck me. 'it was you who found her, wasn't it?'
'I went home like always at four o'clock, but I was out for a stroll about seven, and I thought I would just come in to see what state she'd left the place in. See, she played at gardening. Never cleaned the tools, things like that.' He looked at the boarded floor as if still seeing her there. 'She was lying face down, and I turned her over. She was dead all right. She was white like always but she had these little pink dots in her skin. They say you get those dots from asphyxiation. They found potting compost in her lungs, poor lady.' He had undoubtedly been shocked and moved at the time, but there was an echo of countless repetitions in his voice now and precious little feeling. 'Thank you for showing me,' I said.
He nodded and we both went out, shutting the door behind US.
'I don't think Mr Pembroke liked this place much,' he said unexpectedly. 'Last spring, when she chose it, he said she could have it only if he couldn't see it from the house. Otherwise he wouldn't pay the bill. I wasn't supposed to hear, of course, but there you are, I did. They'd got to shouting, you see.'
'Yes,' I said, 'I do see.' Shouting, slammed doors, the lot.
'They were all lovey-dovey when I first came here,' he said, 'but then I reckon her little ways got to him, like, and you could see it all going downhill like a runaway train. I'm here all day long, see, and in and out of the house, and you couldn't miss it.'
'What little ways?' I asked casually.
He glanced at me sideways with reawakening suspicions. 'I thought you were his son. You must have known her.'
'I didn't come here. I didn't like her.'
He seemed to find that easily believable.
'She could be as sweet as sugar…' He paused, remembering. 'I don't know what you'd call it, really, what she was. But for instance, last year, as well as the ordinary vegetables for the house, I grew a special little patch separately… fed them, and so on… to enter in the local show. just runner beans, carrots and onions, for one of the produce classes. I'm good at that, see? Well, Mrs Pembroke happened to spot them a day or two before I was ready to harvest. On the Thursday, with the show on the Saturday. What huge vegetables,' she says, and I tell her I'm going to exhibit them on Saturday. And she looks at me sweet as syrup and says, Oh no, Arthur. Mr Pembroke and I both like vegetables, as you know. We'll have some of these for dinner tomorrow and I'll freeze the rest. They are our vegetables, aren't they, Arthur? If you want to grow vegetables to show, you must do it in your own garden in your own time.' And blow me, when I came to work the next morning, the whole little patch had been picked over, beans, carrots, onions, the lot. She'd taken them, right enough. Pounds and pounds of them, all the best ones. Maybe they ate some, but she never did bother with the freezing. On the Monday, I found a load of the beans in the dustbin.'
'Charming,' I said.
He shrugged. 'That was her sort of way. Mean, but within her rights.'
'I wonder you stayed,' I said.
'It's a nice garden, and I get on all right with Mr Pembroke.'
'But after he left?'
'He asked me to stay on to keep the place decent. He paid me extra, so I did.'
Walking slowly, we arrived back at the kitchen door. He smelled faintly of compost and old leaves and the warm fertility of loam, like the gardener who'd reigned in this place in my childhood.
'I grew up here,' I said, feeling nostalgia.
He gave me a considering stare. 'Are you the one who built the secret room?'
Startled, I said, 'It's not really a room. just a sort of triangular-shaped space.'
'How do you open it?'
'You don't.'
'I could use it,' he said obstinately, 'for an apple store.'
I shook my head. 'It's too small. It's not ventilated. It's useless, really. How do you know of it?'
He pursed his lips and looked knowing. 'I could see the kitchen garden wall looked far too thick from the back down at the bottom corner and I asked old Fred about it, who used to be gardener here before he retired. He said Mr Pembroke's son once built a sort of shed there. But there's no door, I told him. He said it was the son's business, he didn't know anything about it himself, except that he thought it had been bricked up years ago. So if it was you who built it, how do you get in?'
'You can't now,' I said. 'I did brick it up soon after I built it to stop one of my half-brothers going in there and leaving dead rats for me to find.'
'Oh.' He looked disappointed. 'I've often wondered what was in there.'
'Dead rats, dead spiders, a lot of muck.'
He shrugged. 'Oh well, then.'
'You've been very helpful,' I said. 'I'll tell my father.'
His lined face showed satisfaction. 'You tell him I'll keep the dogs, and everything in good nick until he comes back.'
'He'll be grateful.'
I picked up the suitcase from inside the kitchen door, gave a last look at Moira's brilliant geraniums, vibrantly alive, shook the grubby hand of Arthur Bellbrook, and (in the car hired that morning in London) drove away
