2. The Garden Waste

The agent wants to see his author

WORDS MEAN DEATH

2. The Garden Waste

Mike Copperly was annoyed. More annoyed than he’d been for some time

Dorian Hemsworth was on his books as a writer of mediocre cosy crime fiction and yet it was an age since he’d produced anything worth reading, and now, having sent him a promising manuscript online, he wasn’t answering any calls and his phone was obviously switched off. It wasn’t as if he was a big earner, Mike had much more lucrative authors on his books but the piece that the silly man had sent was obviously something special. For starters, his villain was a clergyman, and Mike rather enjoyed reading about naughty clergymen. And somehow Dorian had managed to capture his own feelings towards men of the cloth.

But Dorian wasn’t answering his phone and messages sent via various channels of the Internet were going unanswered. Maybe, he thought, the man had found a publisher all on his own, ignoring the valuable work that agencies like his own could do for their authors. The idea ate into him and he decided to investigate.

And so he had decided to use the personal touch and he had sent at least half a dozen messages and told the man that he, Mike Copperly, was putting himself out and actually making the journey to Brumpton to visit a treasured author.

Treasured? Well, thee was always the promise if he placed the man’s work with a decent publisher and it hit the shops in time for the lucrative Christmas market.

Having arrived there, a journey of some seventy miles in his smart German vehicle, the man he wanted was clearly out. No matter how hard he knocked on the door and rang the rather ostentatious doorbell there was no reply. And wasting his time like this when he could be casting secretive glances at the splendid legs of Christine Plumb, his secretary (though secretary was a misnomer, surely? She couldn’t type to save her life and if it wasn’t for those legs then her services would have been dispensed with months ago.)

Someone ought to write a book explaining how come shapely legs trumped secretarial skills any day of the week...

He hammered on the door again, but there was no hint that anyone had heard him. At least, nobody inside the house had. There is, he told himself, something about the silence of anempty house...

Just a minute, the priest or vicar or whatever rank of clergyman that he happened to be who had just shut the door of the cottage next door and was walking rather slowly to the street might have some idea. It struck Mike as a little odd that the occupant of the house next door to where the wretched Hemsworth lived looked as if it was an elderly and probably retired clergyman, and the manuscript described this man to a tee..

A coincidence? Probably.

“Excuse me,” he called out using his most authoritarian voice, hoping that his very tone would impress an elderly vicar who might conceivably mistake him for an important local official, “the man who lives here, Mr Hemsworth, have you seen anything of him recently?

“The writer? At least, that’s what we round here reckon he does for a living? No, not today, my friend,” replied the elderly clergyman in the kind of voice that reminded Mike Copperly of every pulpit he’d ever found him self sadly in the vicinity of. How did they do it? he asked himself. All sound like that, like greasy fat men crawling towards their Heaven with smiles behind their words?

“Oh, so you know him? ventured Mike

“Not really,” boomed the other, “now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a service to conduct…” and he accelerated his slow pace until it was almost fast enough to be called normal.

“Fancy that,” mused Mike Copperly, “a service at his age… still, it takes all sorts…” and he decided to check the rear of the house in the hope that the man he needed to see would be weeding his garden or pruning his fruit trees or even admiring his roses.

Round the back there were no fruit trees or rose bushes, but the large lawn that stretched all the way to the fence that bordered what looked like a public but largely disused footpath marked by that fence. There was a heap of what looked like garden refuse in one corner and not much else. Certainly not much in the way of weeds.

Two schoolgirls in their school uniforms were giggling as they walked along that path. It took him back to happier times before Christine’s legs had become a huge part of his imagination to when he’d been as carefree and happy as they seemed to be. And his uniform had been maroon like the blazers they were wearing.

Then he paused everything, his thinking, his slow steps onto the lawn, his near examination of the windows of the home of Dorian Hemsworth, because the shrill scream from one of the schoolgirls made him give a second look at the pile of garden refuse.

Because it was nothing of the sort.

It was the body of a man who was too still to be anything but dead, and somebody had piled grass cuttings over him, probably as a kind of disguise.

“Help!” shouted one of the girls, looking straight at him in such a way that made him reluctant to ignore either her or the macabre scene in the corner of the garden.

“What is it?” he shouted back, though his eyes told him that no pile of garden waste had legs with shoes on their feet sticking out of it. And something inside his head associated the sad remains of a half-buried man with the writer he was looking for.

So plucking up as much courage as he could he walked (rather steadily) towards the object that was still causing two schoolgirls to scream as if there was going to be no tomorrow.

Which there wasn’t, for the object of their terror.

© Peter Rogerson 03.01.24

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