‘I’ll take it.’
He placed the axe on the counter and took a wad of crumpled banknotes from his back pocket.
Mr Padmore grinned companionably. ‘Shall I wrap it? You might get arrested carrying it through the street.’
‘No need. I live just around the corner.’
‘Really?’ said Mr Padmore as he checked the money. ‘I ought to know you, then.’
‘You wouldn’t. I haven’t been in here before.’ He gave Mr Padmore a steady look with his pale blue eyes. ‘I’m not interested in gardening. I hate it.’
Mr Padmore was so anxious not to provoke a scene in his shop that he practically agreed that he, too, hated gardening. ‘It’s a heavy commitment. No end of work. No joy in it unless you’re dedicated.’ He added knowingly, ‘Nothing like a good, old-fashioned log fire to get you through the winter.’
The man who needed an axe stared back at him.
Mr Padmore explained, ‘I thought you wanted it for chopping firewood.’
‘No.’ The man picked the axe off the counter and walked out of the shop.
When the door closed, Mr Padmore said, to break the tension, ‘What else could he want it for, except to chop his neighbours into little pieces?’ He turned to his next customer, who was wearing tweeds, and wanted hyacinth bulbs.
On the far side of the display of garden furniture in the centre of the shop, one of Mr Padmore’s regular customers was in a state of shock. Gilbert Crawshaw happened to be the next-door neighbour of the man who had bought the axe. He had twitched with horror at Mr Padmore’s last remark.
Crawshaw was tall, which was an asset, with a narrow build, which was not. He had grey hair and black-framed bifocals. He was fifty-one, and he worked in the treasurer’s department at County Hall, where his status was senior clerical officer. But if his career had not been notably successful, he had the consolation of a marriage which was in every way satisfactory to him. Joan understood him, cared for his house, cooked well and was ten years younger than he, which was good for his self-esteem.
Theirs was a council house in Jubilee Road, a pleasant street in a good locality, close to the shops and surrounded by a private housing development that the estate agents described as exclusive and sought after. Crawshaw had qualified for a council house because of his job at County Hall, and he had made sure that the house he got was in Jubilee Road. He liked to think that he had helped to set the standard that made it harmonise with the gracious streets of private housing.
His fastidiously tidy garden typified his life. There was a square lawn surrounded with herbaceous border plants that he bought each spring at Mr Padmore’s and planted in the same regularly spaced arrangement. No weeds grew there. No slugs skulked under leaves. The garden was sprayed and fed with recommended products from the shop.
It had been a shock for Crawshaw eight months earlier when the new people had moved in next door. The old couple they replaced had lived there over thirty years — quiet, decent people who minded their own business and didn’t keep animals. Towards the end they had tended to let the garden go and turn up the volume on the television, but you had to make allowances for old age.
These new ones — their name was Stock, or his was, at any rate — were disquieting in quite another respect. They had arrived in a Transit van one Sunday morning with several friends, similarly long-haired and sandalled. Crawshaw had been trimming the privet in the front. He had gone inside to watch from behind the net curtains in the spare bedroom. His first suspicion was that they were squatters. All the furniture they possessed had travelled in the back of that small van. It included two mattresses and several cushions, but no bed. There were also a number of indoor plants of a type he had never seen in the garden shop.
The next day, Crawshaw had called into the housing department across the corridor from his office to check whether the house had yet been allocated. That was how he had learned that the man’s name was Stock. He was now the lawful occupant. He had been given the house because he was homeless and unemployed and his wife was six months pregnant.
‘His wife?’ Crawshaw had repeated. ‘I may be mistaken, but I don’t think she wears a wedding ring.’
‘Wife, common law wife, we make no distinction these days,’ the woman in housing had explained. ‘You and I may not approve, Mr Crawshaw, but those are our instructions.’
That evening, Crawshaw told his wife Joan what he had learned.
‘I know,’ she told him. ‘I met them this afternoon.’
Joan had a quiet style of speech that Crawshaw usually found congenial, but occasionally she shocked him. He was never certain from her mild expression whether she meant to shock.
‘Met them?’
‘I baked some cakes and took them round. You have to be neighbourly, Gilbert. They invited me in for a coffee.’
‘You went in?’
‘Yes,’ Joan answered matter-of-factly. ‘Poor dears, they haven’t any chairs yet, so I sat on a cushion on the floor. They’re really quite sweet.’
‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ Crawshaw told her. ‘Sometimes I despair of you, Joan. We don’t know what sort of people they are.’
‘We never will, if you have your way,’ she pointed out.
Crawshaw’s usually pale face turned purple. ‘Joan, I forbid you, I absolutely forbid you to make any more overtures to Stock and his woman.’
He had never spoken to her like that in their fifteen years of married life, and it stunned her into silence.
In the months since then, Crawshaw had noticed other disturbing developments. There had been parties. He had counted as many as fifty-six guests on one occasion and some of them had stayed all night. He knew because he had counted everyone who had left. About one-thirty, the music had stopped and there were still at least a dozen in the house. He was sure that if there was no music, sinister things were going on. Joan told him to be grateful for the chance to get some sleep, but he was quite unable to relax.
One evening in the summer, Crawshaw had decided to walk home through the park instead of taking his customary route down Mason’s Lane and along the High Street. It had meant using the subway to cross the railway. Halfway through the tunnel, his thoughts had been disturbed by the sound of a woman singing. Her voice had a clear tone that Crawshaw found quite pleasant until he noticed who she was and who was the person accompanying her on a guitar.
They were the people from next door.
She had the baby slung in front of her on a harness and was standing beside Stock, who was sitting on the stone floor with a wooden bowl between his feet to collect coins thrown by passers-by. Stock actually nodded to Crawshaw as he moved stiffly past them without putting his hand anywhere near his pocket.
‘Can you imagine how I felt?’ he asked Joan when he got home. ‘Our neighbours, for heaven’s sake, begging for money in a public thoroughfare.’
‘It’s not really begging,’ Joan commented.
‘That’s what it amounts to.’
‘Well, at least it’s not dishonest.’
‘It’s degrading. How would you feel if I stood in the subway strumming a guitar?’
‘Certainly surprised and probably elated, if you really want to know,’ Joan answered, more to herself than her husband.
It didn’t matter, because Crawshaw wasn’t listening. He said, ‘I think the social security people ought to be told. Stock has no right to public hand-outs if he has an income of his own.’
‘Gilbert, let it rest,’ Joan urged.