Chapter 15 #2
Puckle provided directions to the Hammett and Stebbins residences.
Leaving Mallow to organize their makeshift headquarters and the evidence so far gathered, to await the arrival of supplies, and to start the search for the unknown sports-car, Alec set off to find the jobbing gardener.
He had seen and heard enough of Tom Stebbins to know the interview was going to be anything but easy.
“But it looks like rain.” Daisy spread marmalade lavishly on her toast.
“Oh, Mummy, what does it matter? We’ll prob’ly get wet anyway.”
“I asked Anstruther,” said Baskin, “and he says it won’t rain before afternoon. A sailor is never wrong about the weather.”
“Why not?” Deva wanted to know.
Baskin explained the importance of the weather to a ship at sea, keeping Deva’s interest by using the monsoons and typhoons of the Indian Ocean as an example.
Daisy thought he must be an excellent teacher.
His pupils would miss him if he were arrested for the murder of George Enderby.
She wished she knew the reason for his interest in the philandering landlord.
No doubt Alec knew by now or would find out soon.
Surely she could persuade him to tell her, since
he would be unaware of Baskin’s possible connection with the case if she had not alerted him.
After breakfast, they all set out. The cloudy day was cool and Daisy’s path was a gentle slope requiring no great exertion, little more than a rutted farm track, with grass growing down the centre.
Except for occasional gates and stiles, high hedges hid the view, but the dullness was relieved by foxgloves, white campion, ragged robin and festoons of fragrant honeysuckle.
Armed with Baskin’s Ordnance Survey map, she managed without great difficulty to find the bridge and two fords where she was to meet them, well before they arrived.
At the final rendezvous, Bel and Deva were wet, muddy and happy. Baskin was damp, cheerful and quite willing to take them back the same way, as that was what they wanted.
“There’s a fallen tree-trunk right across the stream, Mummy,” Belinda explained. “Mr. Baskin wouldn’t let us walk on it in case we fell in and got completely soaked, instead of just splashed, but he said we could on the way home if you say so because we can go straight home and change.”
“It’s such fun, Mrs. Fletcher! My ayah would never let me do anything like this.”
“Nor would my gran,” Bel agreed.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Fletcher, they won’t come to any harm. The tree-bridge isn’t high, the water isn’t deep, and they’d be in the sea if they weren’t in the stream.”
“True. Right-oh, girls, but if you get any wetter, change and dry off as soon as you get back. I’m going to take a different way back so you may get there first.” Daisy had decided to walk back by the lane Inspector Mallow had suggested Peter Anstruther could have taken, the one that allowed easy access to the cliff.
At least it looked easy on the map. She wanted to see for herself.
Before seeking out Tom Stebbins, Alec paid a call on the gardener’s wife. The Stebbinses lived in the end cottage of a row on the edge of
the village, with nothing but fields beyond. The small front garden was a riot of roses: bushes, standards, and a glorious pink climber beside the door. Alec, who enjoyed gardening but rarely found time for it, noted and admired the luxuriant foliage and the absence of green-fly and black spot.
As he walked up the short, paved path, he saw that the garden at the side of the house was equally well cared for.
Scarlet runner beans climbed to the eaves, and neat, weedless beds nourished a variety of other vegetables.
A huge marrow peeked coyly through its screen of leaves.
Apparently gardening was Stebbins’s hobby as well as his job.
The house, what could be seen of it between the roses, was another matter, with peeling paint, cracked windowsills, and a couple of missing slates on the roof.
Those were probably the landlord’s responsibility, but the other cottages in the row looked to be in good condition, so Alec inferred that the Stebbinses didn’t care enough to request repairs.
He knocked on the door.
The woman who opened it wasn’t quite what he expected of “a common little piece.” Her figure was trim, her bobbed hair naturally corn-gold, and though she had darkened her eyelashes, the bloom in her cheeks owed nothing to rouge.
Her flowered frock was up-to-date in style but shoddy as to material.
Bright, curious eyes studied him briefly. She sighed.
“A rozzer,” she said resignedly. “Blimey, I didn’t think you’d get here so quick.” Her voice was pure Cockney.
“You’re a long way from home, Mrs. Stebbins.”
“Too true, ducks. You better come on in.”
“Thank you. I’m Detective Chief Inspector Fletcher.”
“Pleased to meecher, I don’t think.”
He followed her into a narrow, dark passage.
A door on his left was probably the front parlour, but apparently rozzers didn’t rate the front parlour.
The doorless wall on the right was the party wall, shared with the next cottage.
They passed a staircase and emerged into the brick-floored and very untidy kitchen. Breakfast dishes were
stacked in dirty water in the stone sink, which had a single tap and no hot-water geyser. On top of the small coal-fired range was a frying-pan with congealing grease.
“Bloody mediaeval, innit? Give me a nice gas cooker any day. Take a seat, do.” They sat at the crumby, sticky table. “Got a fag?”
“Sorry, I smoke a pipe. What brought you to Devon, Mrs. Stebbins?” Alec asked with real interest.
“One port and lemon too many, that’s what.
Me and a couple of friends thought it’d be a giggle to enlist in the Land Army, get away from the bloody Zeppelins.
Gawd, Jerry gave us ‘ell in the East End! They sent me to a farm ’ereabouts, and that was anuwer kind of ’ell.
No shops for miles, and the clothes we had to wear!
It got so bad it made Westcombe look good, and besides, getting married got me out of the muck.
And Tom brought me flowers, roses and carnations and that. ”
“Your husband wasn’t in the services?”
“Nah, too busy turning the nobs’s flower gardens over to veg, not that there’s any what I’d call real nobs ’ereabouts, not like the West End. He’s ten years older’n me, too, and I’m pushing thirty, I kid you not.”
“You don’t look a day over twenty.”
“Garn!” she said, but she looked pleased.
“I got to admit it’s good for a girl’s complexion, living out here in the middle of nowhere, but when you said that, you said it all.
I did ‘ope he’d go back ’ome wiv me after the Armistice, but nuffing doing.
Won’t leave his bloody gardens. If you want to know, that’s why I took up with Georgie.
The lousy bastard promised he’d take me back to the Smoke, and next fing I know he’s having a bit off wiv some farmer’s little girl wiv mud under her fingernails. ”
“Do you happen to know her name?”
“Nah. Who cares?”
“Does your husband know about your relationship with George Enderby?”
She shrugged and said again, “Who cares? He can divorce me if
he wants. Only it costs money to get a divorce, dunnit? Fat chance.”
“He hasn’t spoken to you about it?”
“Not that I ’eard, but I don’t always listen. He’s always got somefing to grouse about.”
“Where were you yesterday afternoon?”
“Me? I didn’t push Georgie off the cliff!” she declared indignantly.
“It’s just a matter of routine, Mrs. Stebbins. We have to check everyone in any way associated with the victim.”
As usual, the invaluable formula worked.
“Oh, well, if you want to know, I took the ferry to Abbotsford to see a friend.”
“Her name and address, please?”
“I don’t see why you need to know that.” Rita Stebbins didn’t blush—she probably wasn’t capable of it—but she did look more than a touch self-conscious.
“A gentleman friend,” Alec guessed dryly.
“’S matter of fact, it was, then. And I don’t know his address.
He’s a commercial I met in the village Friday.
He’s got a friend in London that might give me a job and he asked me to go and have a …
a cuppa at his hotel and talk abaht it. Gawd, I’d do anyfing to get out of this dead-alive ’ole! I’ve had enough, I have.”
Alec persuaded her to part with the commercial’s name—at least the name he had given her—and the name of the hotel. In return, he agreed not to let her husband know that the friend she had spent the afternoon with was male.
“If I can possibly avoid it,” he qualified. “What was he doing while you were out and about?”
“Gardening!” she snorted. “’S all he ever does on his day off.”
“Your garden, I take it?”
“His garden.”
“His garden.” That should be easy enough to check with the neighbours, a job for a constable. “Whose garden is he working in this morning?”
“Dunno. Don’t care.”
Alec took his leave. Portrait of a disastrous marriage, he reflected, breathing in the rich scent of roses.
Ten years was no great difference, but the gulf between a stolid country gardener and a flighty East Ender seemed to be far wider and deeper than that between a middle-class copper and the daughter of a viscount.
No wonder Thomas Stebbins was a morose, deeply disgruntled man.
But was that sufficient reason for him to have broken the news of Cecily Anstruther’s affair to her husband?
The cause was more likely an existing grudge against Peter Anstruther added to a desire to know someone else was suffering as he had suffered from his wife’s unfaithfulness. Misery loves company.
From what Alec had seen of Stebbins, he was not likely to have brooded over his grievance in silence, but no doubt Rita had turned a deaf ear to his reproaches.
Alec could imagine her indifference goading the man to violence.
After killing Enderby, he would have had plenty of time to get back from the cliff to his cottage before the exploding maroon’s flare and boom summoned the lifeboatmen.
On the other hand, could he possibly be a good enough actor to have looked so surprised when he joined his mates on the beach and saw Enderby’s body?
Alec turned towards the Hammett residence.
He wanted to know whether Stebbins would claim to have been in the garden all yesterday afternoon, until the maroon’s summons, or would produce some other alibi.
With any luck, his response to being questioned would reveal whether he had known of his wife’s affair.
The Hammetts’ substantial house was halfway up the hill, with a steeply terraced front garden. Climbing the stone steps, Alec saw in the flourishing flowerbeds and wall-growing plants the evidence of Stebbins’s care, but the man himself was nowhere to be seen.
Alec rang the bell. Waiting, he heard a shout within. After a lengthy silence, the door was opened by a breathless house parlour-maid.
“Sorry, sir, I were doing the upstairs. The master’s at work, sir, and the mistress went out.”
“It’s the gardener I want to see, miss. Thomas Stebbins.”
“Tom Stebbins?” she asked in surprise. “He’ll be out there. Didn’t you see him as you came up?” Coming out onto the front step she looked around, then shook her head. “Well, sir, I dunno where he’s got to, that’s for sure.”
“The back garden, perhaps.”
“There isn’t no back garden, sir. The house is right onto the street. The upstairs, ‘tis. And round the one side ’tis the dustbins by the kitchen and the other side’s the carriage-house. I wonder where Tom’s got to?”
So did Alec. “He wouldn’t be taking a cup of tea in the kitchen?”
“Mrs. Beecher, the cook-housekeeper, she’s gone down to do the shopping. There’s only me and the daily here, and Mrs. Watson wouldn’t dare mess about in Mrs. Beecher’s kitchen. I’ll go look, though.”
“Thank you.”
The girl came back shaking her head over the mysterious disappearance of Stebbins. “I’ll say this for him, he’s reg’lar as clockwork and a hard worker. I can’t think where he’s got to!”
Alec had no more notion than she as to the gardener’s whereabouts, but he could make a good guess as to the reason for his absence. It looked very much as if Thomas Stebbins had done a bunk.