Memorandum, Crisp to Lady Asher, Monday morning 9 April 1923
A single sheet, gardener's foolscap, folded and left under the morning-room paperweight before her Ladyship came down to breakfast.
My Lady, —
You have asked me to set out plainly what I know and what I do not. I shall try.
1. The plant in the press this morning is not the plant that was in the press on the Friday. The inflorescence count is one short. The cut, if it is a cut, has not been made at the joint where I should cut. The base of the pseudobulb is fresh-potted, not the compost it stood in last week, and the moss collar is not my moss; it is a Sphagnum I do not buy. The flowers are very near, but the labellum on the third raceme is, on a close eye, the lighter primrose; the lower sepal carries a freckle the asheri has never carried. I would not swear to it in a court. I would swear to it in this house.
2. The press door has not been forced. It has been opened with the key, or with the catch undone from the inside earlier in the day and pulled to. The boiler-room key on its hook in the boot-room is where it should be.
3. The temperature register has the half-hour open at fourteen minutes past two on the Sunday morning. I have set down what that means in the register and I shall not write it twice.
4. The iron prop-weight which I keep inside the press and which I had last used on the hot afternoon of the fourth was on Sunday morning in the gravel by the south outside wall. It is not a weight that goes there of itself.
5. The plant that was in the press on the Friday is, in my judgement, in the house. It has not been carried over open ground in the small hours of a chilly April night without showing it, and there has been no carrier nor any motor at the lower drive since Friday's grocery.
I tell your Ladyship the last because I do not believe a constable is the right answer to a thing that has not left the house. I should not, at all events, be the man who told one without your Ladyship's instruction.
Your obedient servant,
— A. Crisp, head gardener, Asher Hall, the 9th of April 1923.