“I’d like to have some details, a phone number, an address, for the care assistant called Karen who’s just left? … and details of the man who came in and did a sing-a-long on the Sunday after the fete … and I’d like to see the DBS of your gard—”
Mrs Coombes looked at him with barely disguised anger. “Yes, we can do all that, that’s all in the office, but I don’t see why. I thought you were good and done? So you said. Obviously not.”
“And I’d like to have a word with Alan, your gardener. Just a quick word if you—”
“Aland, his name is Aland with a d, not Alan,” she replied. “Although goodness knows what he has to do with anything. I have his papers in the office.”
She stopped as they entered the reception area and, with Gayther and Carrie behind her, she pointed towards the window that looked into the garden.
“That’s him there, Aland, the man doing the weeding. If one of you wants to go and speak to him, I’ll go to the office and we can also photocopy those details for Karen Williams and the singer who came in. Mr Elsworthy. Hopefully, we can then all get on with what we’re supposed to be doing. Our jobs. What we’re actually paid for.”
As she pointed, the man, the same man Gayther had seen gardening when they arrived, looked up. He glanced slowly and casually from Mrs Coombes to Gayther and on to Carrie. Then looked down, still crouched on his haunches, and continued weeding. Gayther sensed that the man was half-watching them from the corner of his eye.
“You go and get those details, Carrie. I’ll go and talk to the gardener … which is the quickest way to get into the garden?”
Mrs Coombes sighed, as if this was all too much trouble for her. She pointed to the doors to the left of reception. “Go through there,” she said, “you don’t need … go to the far end of the corridor and, just before you get to the kitchen, turn right into the residents’ lounge, straight through the doors into the garden and double back up to him.”
“Is there another way?” Gayther pressed.
Carrie looked at him, thinking that he maybe wanted her to go one way, him the other.
“No,” Mrs Coombes answered. “He’s in the corner. There’s a window there, but no door,” she added, a note of incredulity in her rising voice. “He’s not going anywhere. He’s weeding a flowerbed.”
Gayther nodded and stood there quietly, watching the man. He carried on digging slowly, as if he knew he was being observed.
“Oh, for goodness sake,” said Mrs Coombes, “we’ve all got work to do.” She turned and walked briskly towards the office. “Come with me,” she snapped at Carrie.
As Carrie followed her, Gayther just watched the man weeding. He was too precise, too mannered in what he was doing, thought Gayther. It just didn’t seem natural.
Look up, you bastard, thought Gayther.
Go on, look at me. Give yourself away.
But the man continued weeding, slowly and methodically, as if he were unaware that Gayther was standing there.
Gayther turned, moving towards the doors to the left of reception. As he put his hand to the door, he looked back through the window, expecting the man to be up and running. The man was still there, but standing now, his back to Gayther.
Turn round and look at me, thought Gayther.
Check I’m coming for you. Then run and give the game away. Show me you’re The Scribbler.
Gayther pushed through the doors, striding into the corridor. He saw the kitchen at the far end. To the right, just before it, doors into the residents’ lounge.
Ten, nine, eight strides away.
Had to stop himself breaking into a run.
Seven, six, five. Almost there.
An old lady came through the doors of the residents’ lounge. She walked unaided but was painfully slow.
She stopped in the middle of the doorway.
Gayther tried to pass on one side, then the other.
Stood in frustration and smiled at her.
“I’m not supposed to be here, you know,” she said, looking up at him.
“Can I just …”
“My son knows I am here and he is coming to get me,” she said firmly, and then added, “I have to meet him outside. Can you take me, please?”
“Wait here, my love,” he said, guiding her slowly by the arm into the corridor so that he could slip through the doorway. “Someone will come and help you in a minute.”
She turned to say something back, but Gayther was already moving quickly through the residents’ lounge. Four or five semi-conscious old ladies sat in a half-circle of armchairs in front of a quiz programme on the television. The care assistant there, a young girl of seventeen or eighteen, looked up and smiled vaguely at him as he rushed by.
He reached the doors to the garden, turned to the right and saw the gardener was no longer at the far end of the garden. His tools and equipment had gone too.
“Have you seen Aland?” Gayther said to the young care assistant as he turned around. “The gardener, Aland, he must have passed by these doors a moment ago.”
The care assistant smiled back and answered in fractured English, “I not know.”
“Oh for God’s …” Gayther turned and ran back outside. The garden was a long thin rectangle. The gardener could only have gone one of two ways. To the left, by the residents’ lounge, out and around into the staff car park. Or he could have gone through the window in the corner, into the main part of the building where the residents’ bedrooms were spread over two floors. Either way, he must have been fast, moving the moment Gayther was gone from sight.
Gayther thought for a second; he had only one chance.
Guessed the gardener would not have gone to the car park, as he’d risk coming face-to-face with Gayther by the doors to the residents’ lounge.
Through the window, then, somewhere inside the main building
