Walking with Ghosts

three high. The roof timbers were bare. There was an eerie feeling about it. As though the suffering it had contained had somehow pervaded the timbers. Geordie walked along the rough grass pathway and pushed open the door of the shed. There was a roll of scene-of-crime tape, left behind by the police. The shed floor had been taken up completely, and every inch of the earth underneath had been dug up and sifted. Geordie didn’t go inside. He thought it would have been like walking on India Blake’s grave.
    Next to the shed was something that looked as if it might have been a greenhouse. There was no glass left and the structure looked dangerous, as though it was about to fall in on itself. It was boarded up with rusty, pitted corrugated iron, wire mesh, and the base of it was formed from stone paving slabs. Alongside it were a couple of worn car tyres, different sizes.
    ‘You looking for something?’
    The man was stocky, sergeant-major build, with thinning hair and floppy ears. He had a bristly moustache and lived in his shoulders and upper chest. He was carrying a spade. Geordie showed him his ID. ‘We’re retained by the insurance company,’ he explained.
    ‘Nobody’ll take it,’ the man said, nodding towards the length of the garden. ‘There’s a waiting list for plots, but nobody wants this one. Not after...’
    ‘... the murder?’ Geordie prompted.
    The man nodded. ‘Makes me feel strange coming here now. After that. I used to enjoy coming before.’
    ‘Which is your plot?’
    ‘Right here,’ the man said. ‘Next door.’
    Geordie looked along the length of the plot. This man’s shed was completely different. One end of it was built out of corrugated perspex, the other end with boards encased in a bitumen sheath. Between the two sheds was a sheltered alcove with a corrugated iron roof and an open front. Along the back wall was a seat taken from the back of a car.
    ‘And you never heard anything?’ Geordie asked. ‘Saw anything?’
    The man shook his head, as though he couldn’t believe it himself. ‘Never dreamed,’ he said. ‘You don’t. It’s a garden. You plant seeds and watch the vegetables coming. Keep the Weeds down. I come here to get away from the telly. All that violence.’ He looked up at the sky, as though someone up there had played a dirty trick on him.
    ‘What about the other gardeners?’ Geordie asked. ‘Didn’t anyone see anything?’
    ‘We’ve talked about it,’ the man said. ‘And the police have been here. We had to give statements. They had a picture of her husband, and wanted to know if we’d seen him around. But he wasn’t the type you get round here. I don’t think anybody saw anything. Sometimes somebody will walk through, taking a short cut, or maybe looking to pinch some tomatoes or sprouts. We lose a lot of sprouts in the winter. People just come in and help themselves. Cheeky buggers. But that, what happened in that shed, that was something else.’
    ‘You think there’s any point in talking to the other gardeners?’
    The man shook his head. He stuck his spade in the earth and leaned on the handle, scratching at the growth of hair under his nose. ‘They’ll tell you the same as me. Whoever it was done her in was real quiet about it. While that woman was dying in there we didn’t have a clue about it. The police, their forensics people, they say she was there for weeks, and we can’t do anything but believe them. But gardeners on the allotment couldn’t hardly believe that. What we thought was, she’d been killed somewhere else, and the body dumped here. Maybe if someone brought it here one night and dumped it, that might explain it.’
    ‘Thanks, anyway,’ said Geordie. He left the man leaning on his spade and walked towards the gate of the allotment. All the other plots looked as though they were being used. There were stacks of timber, green and blue plastic water barrels, cloches, heaps of cow dung and horse manure. Some of the plots had their own lavatories, just big enough for one man and a newspaper. Each plot was defined by wonderfully inventive fencing, the intrepid gardeners seemingly ready to use whatever came to hand. Geordie identified asbestos sheeting, car doors, hardboard and cardboard, woven string and electrical flex, plywood, pallets, tree trunks, plastic sheeting, and even offcuts of carpet. Geordie stopped to admire one beauty of a shed, made up entirely of old window frames. Many of them had been relieved of their