The Plumley Inheritance: A Ludovic Travers Mystery by Christopher Bush

Author:Christopher Bush [Bush, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2017-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVII

Reading Between the Lines

THE morning produced a letter from Ludo, announcing briefly his intention of coming down on the Monday. If everything was satisfactory that is to say; if not, a telegram would meet the case. Otherwise he would arrive on the tea train. Any news could wait until then.

So off Wrentham went to give the glad news to Emma, so that the spare room might be got ready, and to tell his father. That done, and the morning being outrageously fine, he took his file of papers and the gardening book under the elm tree, being minded, from the depths of a deck chair and over a pipe or two, to get really down to an examination of the collected data of the previous afternoon. He had meant to put in the evening at it, but Wallace had come along to bowl and his son to field, and altogether it must have been well past the usual hour for dinner when they knocked off cricket. Then two or three village stalwarts had turned up for billiards, and not being able to resist the click of the balls he had joined them; and it was nearly half-past ten before the house was cleared. Then that walk in the morning and the rest of the day in the air had made him so amazingly sleepy that he had simply crawled off to bed and slept like a top.

It was therefore a very serious and tenacious investigator who set to work, making up for what was really lost time. Where to start he had not the foggiest notion. Perhaps it would be as well to make an inked copy of the half of the border so as to be able to scribble notes on it and then rub them out. He found the top of a cardboard box and copied out his plan, with the cardboard cut roughly to shape. That looked more like business.

What about putting down the rows in order? Or would it be better to check up some of the rows? He decided on the latter and hunted up the herbaceous border in the gardening book. To his astonishment he found that out of a book of two hundred pages a scant two and a half were allotted to that section. Then, too, many of the flowers were not mentioned at all, and as for those named varieties on the importance of which Tait had so much insisted, they didn’t exist. He looked at the front for the date of publication—1892. Phew! There was only one thing to do, therefore—to get a book that did have them in. Off therefore in search of Wallace.

Wallace hadn’t a book. He took a weekly gardening paper, and that, together with experience, sufficed for all his needs. Wrentham took advantage of the opportunity to explain about the scheme for a new border at the vicarage and expected the gardener to be far from enthusiastic, especially about consulting with Tait. To his surprise Wallace showed considerable enthusiasm.

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