The Rose That Remembered
The Thornfield Village Show was, in Agnes Pallister’s considered opinion, the single most revealing event in the social calendar. Not because of the Victoria sponges or the onion competition or the somewhat optimistic watercolours submitted by the art circle, but because it showed people at their most passionate and, consequently, their most foolish.
Agnes had lived in Thornfield for sixty-three of her seventy-one years. She had taught its children, attended its funerals, and remembered — with the precision that had made her an excellent schoolmistress — almost everything she had ever observed. This made her quietly invaluable to Sergeant Dooley, though he would never have admitted it aloud.
The trouble began on the Friday evening before the Saturday show.
Reginald Foss, who grew roses with a devotion some considered excessive, telephoned the village hall at half past seven to report that his exhibit — a magnificent climbing variety called Duchess of the Vale, entered in the Heritage Rose category — had vanished from the pre-staging area. The roots had been dug up cleanly, pot replaced, and the space left as neat as an empty cradle.
Agnes heard about it within twenty minutes, as one always heard about everything in Thornfield, via Constance Heap at the post office, who telephoned regardless of whether one wished to be informed.
By nine o’clock Agnes had visited the staging area herself, having offered Sergeant Dooley a flask of tea and the benefit of her company.
“It’s only a rose,” Dooley said, frowning at the empty spot.
“It is not only a rose,” Agnes corrected. “It is Reginald Foss’s entire sense of self-worth, and it is also, I think, a distraction.”
Dooley looked up. “From what?”
Agnes said nothing for a moment. She was looking at the trestle tables that lined the far wall — specifically at the preserves section, where seventeen jars of various jams, jellies, and chutneys sat in a neat row, their labels facing precisely forward.
“From those,” she said quietly.
She walked to the preserves table and examined each jar in turn, leaning close without touching. She had remarkable eyesight for her age and a memory for small domestic details that had proved useful on more than one occasion.
“Agnes,” Dooley said patiently, “whose jam are we looking at?”
“All of them,” she said. “But particularly these four.” She indicated four jars of damson preserve, each entered by a different competitor. “And specifically the one entered by Patricia Wendle.”
Patricia Wendle was sixty-two, widowed, and had won the damson preserve category for the past eleven consecutive years. She was also, Agnes knew, in some considerable financial difficulty following a roof repair that had turned out to be rather more structural than aesthetic.
“It looks perfectly ordinary to me,” Dooley said.
“Yes,” Agnes agreed. “That is precisely what struck me. Look at Mrs Wendle’s label. Her handwriting is usually somewhat flamboyant — she uses a particular looping style for her capital letters that she has employed consistently for as long as I can remember. She taught herself calligraphy in 1987. I recall because she practised on the envelopes of the school’s Christmas cards.”
Dooley squinted at the label.
“That label,” Agnes continued, “was not written by Patricia Wendle. The capitals are entirely conventional. Someone else made this label in imitation of her entry.”
“But why would anyone interfere with the preserves?”
“They wouldn’t,” Agnes said, “unless the jar contained something other than damson preserve.”
It did. Sergeant Dooley, now considerably less sceptical, arranged for the jar to be examined, and discovered that beneath the top layer of genuine preserve sat a tightly rolled document: a signed declaration of a private property transfer, witnessed and dated, relating to a parcel of land on the edge of the village. The land in question was adjacent to a proposed development site. The declaration, if genuine, would have been financially ruinous to its original signatory.
The signatory was Reginald Foss.
It emerged, over the following two days, that a gentleman named Howard Crale — recently arrived in the village under the guise of a semi-retired antiques dealer — had persuaded Reginald to sign what he had described as a letter of intent for a rose-breeding partnership. Reginald, whose understanding of legal documents was considerably inferior to his understanding of horticulture, had not read it carefully. Crale had then intended to retrieve the document from the jar — which Patricia Wendle knew nothing about, having handed Crale her spare key in good faith when he offered to transport her entry — before the judging concluded and the jar was opened by the competition stewards, who traditionally sampled the winning entries.
The rose, Agnes surmised, had been taken to occupy Reginald and the police entirely with a minor upset, ensuring no one examined anything else.
“He underestimated the village,” Agnes told Dooley afterwards, over tea in her sitting room.
“He underestimated you,” Dooley said.
Agnes accepted this with a modest nod. “He also underestimated Patricia Wendle’s calligraphy. People generally do underestimate handwriting. It is as individual as a fingerprint and considerably easier to observe.”
The rose, incidentally, was recovered from Crale’s hired cottage, quite unharmed, repotted with evident care. It went on to win the Heritage Rose category the following morning and Reginald Foss cried, briefly, behind his panama hat.
Agnes did not mention this to anyone. Some things, she had always believed, were more important than evidence.
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