Beatrice by Rebecca King Page A

dryly.
    “Let’s
go to the sitting room,” Ben suggested, and smiled when everyone
sighed with relief and hurried out of the room.
    Mark put
the packaging paper back onto the table and looked at them. “Right,
well, until ownership can be established, given what is written on
the packaging, I consider that the plant is yours Beatrice. You
should not hand it over to anyone.”
    Ben took
that moment to hand Mark the piece of paper he had prised out of
the dead man’s hand. He put it beside the single line of writing on
the packaging paper, and was unsurprised to find the writing was
identical.
    “So the
dead man is the person who delivered the plant,” Mark murmured
thoughtfully.
    “Beatrice also saw him outside the window during the worst of
the storm, when it was really black outside.”
    Isaac
frowned. “He didn’t try to get in?”
    Beatrice
shivered and drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders. “Nobody
knocked on the door, so he didn’t want to get in. He was just
looking through the window at us. One minute he was there, the next
minute he had gone.”
    Mark
nodded although couldn’t exactly recall how bad the weather had
gotten outside yesterday. He hadn’t gone to church because he had
been called to investigate a burglary in Great Tipton, and Harriett
hadn’t gone because she had been feeling a little unwell. They had
spent their free hours enjoying the delights of matrimony and, as a
result, he had been too engrossed in his wife to care about what
was going on outside. Still, he could vaguely recall that it had
grown dark for a while, and had lain with his wife in his arms
listening to the rain for quite some time. He carefully tucked
those tender memories aside and turned his attention back to
Beatrice and Ben’s afternoon which, by all accounts, had been
completely different.
    “I can
only assume that he may have been checking to see if you received
the plant. If he went to the woods, he may either have been
sheltering from the rain, or intended to make his way home once it
had been delivered,” Mark reasoned. “I think that the plant is
yours. The label certainly seems to suggest it. However, for now,
you should keep it in the study with the curtains drawn so that
anybody who looks into the house won’t see it. Also, keep Hargraves
– if that is his name – out of the house.” He picked up the list of
names they had found, and shook his head in disbelief. He thought
that the village would be able to enjoy a period of peace and calm
after the Psychic Circle debacle. Heavens, how wrong he had
been.
    Beatrice
tapped the sheet that contained the diagrams and Latin names. “I
think that these are cultivation notes. We had planned to go to see
the people on the list this morning to see if the plant we have is
something my uncle had worked on.”
    “Does
this look like his writing?”
    “I am
not sure. My uncle used to write in spidery scrawl. It was highly
unusual for him to write in block capitals like this. I have tried
to compare the handwriting on these notes to his writing, but it is
really difficult to tell for certain if they are one and the
same.”
    Mark
compared the writing, and knew what she meant. However, the more he
studied them, the more he suspected that the notes had been written
by a third person.
    “Where
did you find them?” He placed both pieces of paper back onto the
table with a sigh.
    “They
were tucked away in this book on Rare and Tropical plants. We know
from this that the plant we have is definitely an orchid, however
we cannot find our particular variety. There is nothing even
remotely similar to it in there.”
    “It is
most probably rare,” Mark conceded thoughtfully.
    “We
think that the notes we have relate to the cultivation of the rare
variety that arrived yesterday,” Beatrice sighed.
    “I think
you need to be very careful, Beatrice. Leave the investigation to
us,” Mark said quietly. “It may be that this man had the plant and
was killed over it.