The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring

“The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring” is the song Wield sings as he rides from Enscombe toward the Golden Fleece Hotel on a bright spring day. Its verses change with his surroundings and his proximity to the investigation: first celebrating the season, then welcoming summer, and finally declaring that the flowers have nothing to do with the case. The refrain turns a cheerful ride into a dry, indirect comment on the business that has brought him near the hotel.

The song on Wield’s ride

Wield’s singing begins after a morning in which his pensive mood had been prompted by local-radio news of Palinurus Maciver’s death at Moscow House the previous night. By midday, however, the fog and cold had vanished, and he rides his Thunderbird at a more sedate pace through a landscape newly bright with spring. The first verse gives voice to that change: “The flowers that bloom in the spring, Tra la, Breathe promise of merry sunshine.” The scene’s renewed weather and greenery make the song sound, for the moment, like uncomplicated seasonal pleasure.

As Wield leaves the steep-sided valley for a more pastoral stretch of road, he turns away from the fastest route into town. His route takes him instead along an old road that had lost its former importance after road improvements redirected the main east–west traffic. The song continues as he approaches the Golden Fleece Hotel, now a refurbished country-house hotel and conference centre reached by a sweeping drive through parkland. Wield adapts the lyric to the setting, carolling, “We welcome the hope that they bring, Tra-la, Of a summer of roses and wine …” The movement from spring sunshine to anticipated summer gives the ride a buoyant surface, while the nearby hotel is already connected to the investigation by the people gathered there.

The refrain meets the case

In the hotel car park, Wield recognizes the familiar disorder inside a long-unwashed station wagon: clothing, maps, takeaway cartons, a Spanish onion and a half-full bottle of Highland Park. He looks toward the conservatory, where a woman speaks and a large grey head begins to turn. Wield steps back, then rides to a space farther from Dalziel’s car and nearer the path to the hotel’s front, keeping himself out of view of the conservatory.

The song continues, but its mood has shifted with Wield’s actions. Instead of the earlier promise of sunshine or summer, he sings the second verse: “The flowers that bloom in the spring, Tra la, Have nothing to do with the case …” The line is a comic counterpoint to his careful retreat from the people inside. The seasonal refrain has become attached to the investigation precisely when Wield is maneuvering around its immediate scene.

Function and effect

The expression’s recurrence links a change in the weather to a change in Wield’s attention. At first, the song accompanies his slower ride and the landscape’s recovery from winter; at the hotel, its altered words accompany his awareness of the case and his effort to stay unseen. The cheerful tune does not resolve the tension between those moments. Instead, the final verse makes that tension audible, setting an insistently bright spring song against Wield’s wary conduct and the death that has shadowed the day.