The Dahlia That Didn’t Belong
The Barrow Fen Horticultural Show had been running for forty-three years without incident. Maud Pelstone knew this because she had attended every single one, first as a child in white ankle socks clutching her mother’s hand, and then as a judge, a steward, a committee member, and eventually as the sort of woman whose opinion on a dahlia carried real weight in the village.
She was deadheading her roses the morning after when she saw it.
There, in the front border of Clive Ashworth’s terraced cottage, stood a dahlia of quite extraordinary size. Dinner-plate variety. Deep plum-purple, with petals folded in perfect spirals. It had not been there yesterday morning. Maud was certain of this in the way she was certain of the times of the church bells or the smell of rain before it arrived.
She set down her trug and looked at it properly.
It was the Beaumont dahlia. Or one very like it. Arthur Beaumont’s prized specimen had been cut from its pot and taken from the exhibition tent sometime during the evening’s social, while the village hall rang with fiddle music and chatter and the smell of warm pasties. Arthur had reported it missing to the committee just before nine. The pot itself had been left behind, the soil still damp and indented where the root ball had sat.
Maud went inside and put the kettle on.
She was on her second cup when her neighbour Dorothy Fenn knocked at the back door, already breathless.
“Did you see it?” Dorothy said. She had her cardigan buttoned incorrectly, which told Maud she had left the house in a hurry.
“Clive’s border. Yes.”
“Arthur’s beside himself. He’s phoned the parish council, apparently. And young PC Hartley came by at eight.” Dorothy sat down without being asked and wrapped both hands around the mug Maud placed in front of her. “Clive says he hasn’t the faintest idea how it got there.”
“Does he.”
“He says he was at the social all evening and didn’t go near the tent.”
Maud turned to look out of the kitchen window. From this angle she could just see the corner of Clive’s border, the purple dahlia catching the low morning sun.
“Has anyone looked at the pot?” she asked.
“The empty one? I suppose PC Hartley did.”
“No. Clive’s pots. Along his front path.”
Dorothy blinked. “I hadn’t thought.”
Maud had. She had noticed, three weeks earlier, that Clive Ashworth had begun growing dahlias himself for the first time. He had made rather a business of mentioning it at the July committee meeting, the varieties he’d chosen, the feeding schedule, his hopes for next year’s competition. He had also, she recalled, stood for quite some time beside Arthur Beaumont’s exhibit the previous afternoon, his hands clasped behind his back, his jaw set in that particular way of a man who has decided something.
She put on her light jacket and walked the thirty yards to Clive’s front path.
The terracotta pots were there, four of them, spaced along the brick edging. Three held dahlias in various stages of growth, smaller varieties, unremarkable. The fourth held nothing but bare compost. Fresh compost. The surface was smooth except for a circular impression near the centre, the ghost of a root ball pressed in overnight.
Maud crouched down. The pot’s rim was damp on the inside, as if something had been recently removed and re-homed. There was a smear of the same dark soil on the brick edging beside it, and one dahlia leaf, not belonging to any of the remaining plants, caught in the lavender bush to the left.
PC Hartley was young and obliging and arrived within the quarter hour. He listened to Maud without interrupting, which she appreciated.
“So your thinking,” he said carefully, “is that Ashworth took the dahlia last night, brought it home in that pot, and then, what, had second thoughts?”
“I think he intended to grow it on and claim the tuber as his own next season. A plant like that produces offsets. You divide it in spring. By next year’s show, the provenance becomes much harder to establish.” She straightened up and brushed the soil from her fingers. “But somewhere between last night and this morning he thought better of it. Perhaps he worried someone had seen him near the tent. He moved it into the border to make it look as though it had simply appeared. As if someone else had left it there.”
“Hoping to muddy things.”
“Hoping no one would look at his pots.”
Clive Ashworth answered the door in his dressing gown and went a very particular shade when PC Hartley mentioned the empty pot. He said nothing for a long moment. Then he went to put shoes on.
Arthur Beaumont came to collect his dahlia that afternoon. He stood in Clive’s border and looked at it for some time without speaking, running one thumb very gently along the outer edge of a petal.
“Forty-seven days from pinching to bloom,” he said finally. “You can’t rush them.”
Maud, standing at the garden gate, agreed that you could not.
She walked home along the lane, past the hedgerows beginning to turn at their tips, past the smell of cut grass from the cricket ground, and let herself back in through the front door. She picked up her trug from where she had left it.
The roses needed finishing.
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