The Case of the Mystery Gardener

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The Case of the Mystery Gardener

A short story by Ryan Cartwright - CC:By-SA

By Ryan Cartwright

Roboteers

Published: Oct 2021

Publisher: Crimperbooks (crimperbooks.co.uk)

Categories: Roboteers, Short-stories, Ages-6-and-up

Original URL: https://www.crimperbooks.co.uk/roboteers/the-case-of-the-mystery-gardener/

License: Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA 4.0).

You are free to share, copy, distribute and adapt this material under the same license terms.

1. The Case of the Mystery Gardener

This short story is one of the adventures of the Roboteers. It is written in the style of a blog post by one of the gang. You can read more of their adventures on the Roboteers page.

One of the strangest cases the Roboteers had to solve recently wasn’t even a real case. What I mean is that nobody asked us to help out and nobody had anything for us to do. The main reason for that is because it involved nothing wrong at all. No missing cat, no problem computers and to be honest no inconvenience for anyone. In fact it all started with what seemed like somebody doing their neighbours a favour.

We were sitting in our headquarters - which you may remember is half of Martin’s shed - and doing a bit of robotics and building. We had no homework, for a change, and because we had no cases we were taking the time to do a bit of our other hobby - building cool robots.

I was doing a bit of research and opened the web browser on my laptop. It opened to a local news page I had been looking at a few days before and one of the new items caught my eye.

“Hey, look at this.” I said to the others, “Someone has been doing other people’s gardening for them - in the middle of the night.”

The others didn’t even look up so I continued.

“People go to bed and wake up to find their flower beds have been weeded and new plants put in. Listen:” I started to read from the article “‘Mrs Kettlepit was actually very pleased with the result of the mystery gardener. Her rose bush was pruned and replanted better than before.’ One of the people even found their wobbly paving was relaid.”

The others still didn’t look up.

“Isn’t that weird?” I asked

“What do you mean?” Tim muttered without stopping the wiring he was doing.

“Well, it’s weird that people’s gardens are being made better without them knowing.”

“So, somebody is doing other people a favour? It’s rare but it’s not that odd. People can be kind to each other.” Martin said.

“Yes, they can Martin.” I was getting a little impatient now, “but usually those favours are reasonably small: buying some flowers, walking a dog, picking up a bit of shopping. The larger stuff is usually done with both sides knowing about. It’s like me painting the shed without asking your Dad.”

“He’d probably thank you – as long as it wasn’t in a colour he didn’t like.” Martin scoffed.

“But he would expect to know about it before hand!” I was getting nowhere so I changed the focus. “The other thing I found interesting is that not all of the garden is done. It’s just one part of each garden.”

Tim finally looked up and said “That is a bit weird. A bit like painting only half the shed. Maybe the mystery gardener is only doing part of each garden so they can get to more gardens?”

“Maybe,” I said, still reading, “but I find it a bit of a mystery really… what?” the two boys had both stopped what they were doing and were staring at each other with a roll of the eyes.

“Oh dear.” Martin sighed with a smile.

“What?!” I repeated.

“You’ve found a mystery.” He said.

“So?”

“You tell her,” Martin looked at Tim, chuckling.

“Priya,” Tim said, carefully putting down his screwdriver, “you know that you love a mystery. You love solving them, you seem to get a kick out of them.”

“Well I like helping people, if that’s what you mean?”

“Yep and that’s great,” Tim continued and I waited for the ‘but’, “but,” there it was, “you can get a little, well focussed on them.”

“Obsessed.” Martin chipped in. I think he was trying to be helpful. He failed.

“Maybe not quite that much,” Tim shot Martin a glance, “but they do take up a lot of your energy when you get one.”

“And our energy too.” sighed Martin, smirking.

“Hello? “ I threw open my arms and gestured around the headquarters, “We’re a detective agency. Solving mysteries is what we do.”

“Yeah, we know and we love it.” Martin smiled, “I just think you enjoy it a little bit more than we do.” At this they both laughed. I didn’t see what was funny and I think it showed.

“Relax Priya.” Tim smiled, “We’re fine with a mystery and we do enjoy it. We just noticed that when you get your teeth into one, it creates a lot more trouble for us than you think it will. But, really it’s fine, it can be quite interesting.”

“So you’re saying we shouldn’t be involved in this mystery?”, I asked.

“Hang on, I didn’t think this was leading to us getting involved!”, Martin replied.

“Well why not? It’s interesting. Why are these gardens being improved? Why is it happening in secret? How is it happening in secret? Who is doing it?”

“Why should it be us who finds out?” Tim asked, going back to his project.

“Well, nobody else is going to.” I retorted. I couldn’t see why they had a problem with this. I gave up and asked them outright. “Why do you two have a problem with us looking into this?”

“Well, nobody seems to be very upset about it.” Tim said. ”It’s not like anyone is going to be very grateful if we find out who is doing this and stop them.”

“We don’t have to stop them, we just need to find out who is doing it and why.” I said.

“I think there’s a reason they are doing it in secret!” Martin said, “They clearly don’t want anyone to know who they are. I don’t know why that would be but they might not be happy if we reveal them to the world.”