Caroline managed to laugh.
‘Yes, when I was in my rebellious teens I minded very much indeed,’ she said, ‘although oddly enough it didn’t change any of my affection for Si.’
‘In your school holidays, I suppose,’ said Willow, dragging the conversation back to her suspicions rather clumsily. ‘Talking of school, I’ve been meaning to ask whether you or Simon ever knew Claire Ullathorne.’
‘Who?’ said Caroline, looking and sounding genuinely puzzled. ‘Ullathorne? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of her. Why?’
‘I just wondered,’ said Willow lamely. ‘She was at Hampshire Place and became an actress. But she must have left some years before you got there.’
‘No,’ said Caroline. ‘I’ve never come across her and I can’t imagine how Simon would have, unless of course she was one of that beastly set. I suppose she could have been. Is …?’ But before she could finish her question; Willow forestalled her.
‘Did you like his girlfriends?’ Willow asked. ‘Or did you share your mother’s views?’
‘I loathed the druggy ones, but I thought Annabel was sweet,’ said Caroline, rather repressively, Willow thought. Caroline turned away and said in a voice that sounded as though someone was throttling her: ‘That’s another thing that makes their deaths so bloody unfair: at last he’d found someone to love who was really worth it and worth him and now … they’re both dead. I’m sorry, Cressida.’
Willow saw that she was in tears again and thought that once more she had misjudged Caroline. Willow asked no more except about the flowers and trees they saw, but her mind was full of questions. Would it be too far fetched to think that a woman who was besotted with her own son might decide to murder him and his latest mistress because she hated her? Yes, Willow decided a little regretfully, it would.
‘Did your brother always eat healthy things like muesli?’ she asked suddenly, unable to suppress a question that did not seem at all dangerous. Caroline looked startled as well she might, but she answered straightforwardly enough.
‘No. He’d always rather despised that sort of thing, but Annabel was a real health-freak and insisted that he have a proper breakfast full of grains. She even bought it for him, I think.’
Willow drove them both back to Belgravia with plenty on her mind. When she had parked the Mercedes outside her flat she remembered that Ben had brought Caroline there and asked whether she would like a lift home.
‘Actually, Ben said he would pick me up at half-past four,’ said Caroline with a slight smile. ‘I warned him that we might be later than that but he swore that he didn’t mind waiting. He’s parked over there,’ she added, waving towards a large dark-blue BMW on the opposite side of the road.
Through the windscreen Willow could see a figure reading a newspaper. Quite involuntarily she said:
‘Doesn’t it drive you mad to have him hanging about for you?’
‘No,’ said Caroline, looking surprised. ‘No one has ever looked after me like this before … it’s a wonderful feeling being collected from stations or airports after exhausting meetings with inventors or lawyers, and parties are infinitely better when you don’t have to worry about taxis or parking. And besides, he likes doing it and my miseries have been getting him down, so … But he’s begun to cheer up again in the last few days.’
‘I think you’re very kind to put up with it. It would make me terribly twitchy to know that there was someone else who knew exactly where I was and what I was doing all the time,’ said Willow, quite unable to imagine giving anyone else so much control over her. Caroline laughed.
‘I don’t mind that much, although I would have in the past,’ she said. ‘It must be love softening my brain – or at least my independence. I do sometimes feel as though I’ve succumbed to some peculiarly beguiling temptation that will lead to all sorts of trouble in the future, but it’s all right at the moment.’
‘I’m glad,’ said Willow. It was all she could bring herself to say in the face of something that would be anathema to herself. ‘And do you reciprocate?’
‘You mean, do I collect him from things? Not really. His working hours are so much more flexible than mine. I’m nearly always stuck in my office when he gets back to London. He … he’s much kinder to me than I am to him,’ said Caroline with a rather wistful smile.
‘Well, I think he’s lucky,’ said Willow politely.
Chapter Ten
Much as she had enjoyed the expedition to Ham and much as she had liked Caroline Titchmell, Willow could not let herself ignore the links she had discovered between Caroline and three of the four victims. Caroline had a reason at least to resent both her brother and Miss Femside. On the other hand, Willow still could not fit Caroline into the murderer’s space in her mind. And unless she were mad, Willow told herself again, Caroline had had no reason to kill anyone, least of all her brother, even if he or his friends had once played a cruel and dangerous trick on her.
Reminding herself that for other people at least ‘the heart hath reasons reason knows not of,’ Willow went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. Feeling momentarily tired from the expedition, she took the tea to her bedroom and drank it propped up against a bank of down-filled pillows. As she put the empty cup down on her bedside table she heard in her mind an echo of Caroline’s cultivated, sensible, well-articulated voice saying, ‘I don’t think I shall ever forget the sensation of complete powerlessness …’
The telephone buzzed in Willow’s left ear, making her start. She put out a hand to pick up the receiver, but the small shock had made her clumsy and she pushed the telephone off the bedside table on to the floor. Reaching over the side of the bed to pick it up off the grey-green carpet, she felt the blood thumping unpleasantly in her head and when she straightened up again with the telephone securely held between both hands, she was slightly breathless.
‘Willow?’ came Tom Worth’s voice, vibrating with energy and strength, ‘what’s the matter? Did I get you out of your bath?’
‘No,’ she answered shortly as she regained her self-control. ‘I have a telephone in the bathroom.’
‘So you do; how absurd of me to imagine the greater spotted Woodruffe flying to answer a bell,’ said Tom. Willow thought irrelevantly that only Tom Worth would be able to tease her without either hurting or annoying her.
‘I was asleep,’ she said, smiling to herself. ‘How was your lunch?’
‘Pleasant but not frightfully instructive. And yours?’
‘It wasn’t lunch,’ she answered literally, ‘but …’
‘You actually sound worried, Willow,’ he said. ‘I wish I could see that face of yours. Are you all right?’
‘Yes. But I am a little concerned. Can you tell me whether the Fulham investigation went into the question of who might or might not have had expectations under Titchmell’s will?’
‘He hadn’t all that much to leave,’ said Tom readily. ‘A mortgaged house, a life-insurance policy that paid off the mortgage, the proceeds of a self-employed pension policy, and about ten thousand pounds.’
‘The house must have been worth a bit,’ said Willow, ‘if the life insurance paid off the mortgage.’
‘A fair bit,’ agreed Tom. ‘As to who might have had expectations: we didn’t get very far, because he left no will. No one was admitting any private expectations and there was no reason to suppose anyone had any.’
‘So who did inherit?’
‘His parents – which is what happens if you die intestate unless you have a spouse or children,’ said Tom.
Willow thought that of all people Caroline Titchmell would have known the intestacy rules; after all, she had qualified as a solicitor before becoming a patent agent. And if it was improbable that she would have killed her brother for revenge for the drugging, it was even less likely that she would have killed him for the price of a house in Fulham.
‘Willow?’ said Tom into the silence.
‘Yes?’ she said, thinking of all the other peopl
e whose miseries and motives she had yet to explore.
‘I wish you’d tell me what it is that’s bothering you so much,’ he said.
‘There isn’t really anything to tell,’ she said. ‘Just a feeling: and I’m damned if I’m going to be accused of relying on female intuition even if that happened to you. Did you really discover nothing about Hampshire Place at your sister’s?’
‘Nothing. She’s almost as neurotically conscientious as you are when it comes to her children, and she made stringent enquiries before she chose the school for her precious daughter,’ said Tom. ‘It’s stricter than most under this headmistress, having been relatively liberal under the one before.’
‘In what way?’ asked Willow, remembering Emma Gnatche’s announcement that her friends thought it horribly strict.
‘Oh they used to be allowed to wear their own clothes at weekends and even have contact with carefully chosen neighbouring boys’ schools,’ said Tom. ‘Dances and shared debating societies, and so on. But the dragon in charge now considers that too many girls wasted time and energy on premature romantic entanglements and stopped all that. She had a lot of support from parents when she let it be known that one of the girls had got pregnant after an encounter in the bushes with a sixth-former from Michaelson’s.’
‘Good Lord! I wonder,’ said Willow, remembering that Andrew Salcott had said that he and Bruterley had been at Michaelson’s. Salcott had definitely given her the impression that his friend had been given to accepting the eager pursuit of beautiful women.
‘Wonder what?’ asked Tom.
‘I haven’t worked out the idea enough to talk about it yet,’ she said quickly and was relieved when he did not press her. She seemed to be floundering in a welter of disjointed, irrational, unsustainable suspicions of probably wholly innocent people and she had enough respect for Tom’s brains not to want to display her muddled thoughts. Thank you, Tom. I’ll let you know if I get any further. ‘Thank you for ringing. No, before you go, there is one thing: you must have come across Titchmell’s sister when you were dealing with the case …’
‘Yes, I had quite a lot of time with her. Why?’
‘What did you make of her?’ asked Willow. She trusted Tom’s judgment and thought that his verdict might help to clear her brain of suspicion of Caroline.
‘I liked her,’ he said slowly, ‘although I never felt that I’d quite got to the bottom of her.’
‘Did you ever suspect her?’ Willow asked quite sharply. There was a pause.
‘Not of murder,’ said Tom with ease. ‘But there was something she was holding on to … something she was ashamed of. But that’s a reaction we often get. The most innocent people often find that the presence of police officers makes them remember some peccadillo or other and act guilty. Did you like her?’
‘Yes I did,’ said Willow, ‘although there are reasons for her to have resented both her brother and Fernside. Perhaps that was what you sensed. But I mustn’t hold you up. Thank you for ringing. Good night, Tom.’
‘Willow …’ he was beginning when she cut the connection.
She took herself off to the kitchen to see what Mrs Rusham had left in the fridge. Finding a fresh loaf of granary bread, half a cooked lobster, some Little Gem lettuces and a bowl of mayonnaise, she made herself a sandwich and sat at the kitchen table eating it. The sandwich was so deep that pieces of lobster and blobs of mayonnaise kept escaping as Willow bit into it. As she wiped some mayonnaise off her chin, she thought how easy it was to live alone, and how luxurious.
Even through her satisfaction, she could not forget the person who hid his or her murderous character from the world, carefully plotting to wipe out people who had frustrated him – or her. Willow wondered rather unhappily whether it would be possible to sense the evil in a murderer she met unawares. Regretfully she decided that it probably would not. And yet whenever she thought of the person who had gone to such trouble to poison other people’s food and drink she felt an echo of vicious malice.
Suddenly she pushed away the bowl of mayonnaise and got up to fling the rest of the sandwich in the rubbish bin. If she had already met and alerted the murderer by her questions, then her own food might not be safe. Trying to control the first sensations of incipient hysteria, Willow made herself list the various anti-burglar devices she had had installed in the flat. She told herself that she had no need to fear contamination of any food she ate there unless there had been a burglary, but she could not quite get rid of her fear. Eventually she went angrily to bed, determined to stop herself speculating until she had some more solid evidence on which to base her suspicions. She took Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations to bed with her in the hope that their calm good sense would soothe her.
Having slept badly and dreamed wild dreams of pursuit and flight, Willow woke the following morning in an odd mood of uncharacteristically low self-esteem. Her lack of progress in unmasking the killer was upsetting her. She could not help thinking of the violence she had unleashed against her possessions during her last investigation and the risks she had so lightheartedly accepted when she had involved herself in this one.
Telling herself that the only way to ensure that she was not at risk would be to unmask the murderer for the police, Willow went to bathe and dress. By the time Mrs Rusham let herself in through the front door to start her week’s work, Willow was almost too distracted to enjoy her breakfast. But when Mrs Rusham took away the melon skin and substituted a plate of perfectly cooked fishcakes, Willow managed to ignore the notebook of questions that she had put beside her coffee cup.
When she had finished, Willow laid down her knife and fork with a small sigh, and when Mrs Rusham reappeared with a new cup of cappuccino, Willow complimented her with real fervour. Mrs Rusham’s usual coolness warmed a fraction.
‘Mr Lawrence-Crescent mentioned last week that you liked fishcakes, Miss Woodruffe,’ she said, leaving Willow amazed that her predilection for the humble frozen fish-finger had been so oddly translated, and rather touched at Mrs Rusham’s efforts to accommodate her tastes.
When she had got over the unusual sensations and finished her coffee, Willow retreated to the drawing room and sat in one of the French chairs beside the telephone, trying to think of a way to exonerate Caroline completely so that she could be dismissed and Willow could concentrate on her other suspects. The obvious way would be to find out whether she had any cause to resent the doctor who had been killed in Cheltenham, but she could hardly ring up his widow and ask such a question directly.
After some thought, Willow decided to try to kill two birds with one stone and looked up the number for Dr Andrew Salcott’s house. Apart from Emma Gnatche, whom she did not want to involve, Salcott was the only person Willow knew who had known Dr Bruterley. Having spoken to Salcott’s wife, Willow eventually tracked him down to Dowting’s, the big teaching hospital where he worked for part of each week. Reluctant to disturb him in the middle of a ward round or some urgent case, Willow refused the telephonist’s offer to ‘bleep him’and left a message asking him to telephone her when he had time.
Almost as soon as she had put the telephone down, the bell rang and she picked up the receiver again, expecting to hear his voice. Instead she heard Caroline’s pleasantly deep one inviting her to supper on Thursday.
‘Richard is coming, and Ben and I would both be so pleased if you could come too. Not a formal party like Richard’s, but just us and perhaps one other couple for supper in the kitchen.’
‘I’d love to,’ said Willow, not sure she liked the implication that she and Richard were ‘a couple’. Caroline gave her address and asked Willow to come as soon after eight as she could manage.
Writing the appointment in her diary, Willow was struck by the fact that Mrs Rusham had never once asked her any questions about the days her employer spent away from the flat. It was partly for the housekeeper’s lack of curiosity that Willow so greatly prized her, but it seemed odd all the same.
There was not much that W
illow could do to take the investigation any further until she had talked to Andrew Salcott. She had no reason to suspect him, beyond the fact that he knew Jim Bruterley, had had at least tenuous connections with Hampshire Place, was probably neat-fingered (most doctors were) and had access to such things as surgical gloves and the high-precision tools that might help him to adulterate boxes and bottles without leaving a mark. He had also given her the impression that he was an angry man, but that did not add up to much. She decided to ignore the investigation for the moment and go into her writing room and start playing with ideas for her next novel.
The early stages of producing a synopsis for her publishers usually pleased her: it was the last moment of perfect freedom, in which she could invent whatever characters she liked, give them whatever names, disasters, happiness and fulfilment she wanted. Later, once part of the book was written, she became its prisoner, struggling to make what she was writing work consistently within its own limits and often hating it before she was done with it.
On that particular morning, though, the usual light-hearted planning seemed less fun than usual. Whenever she started scribbling notes on a character’s appearance or predilections, she found herself thinking of the murderer she was seeking.
The post arrived before Willow could become too bogged down in fruitless speculation and anger with herself. Among the bills and fan letters was a post-card from the London Library, informing Willow that the modern book on poisons that she had reserved had been returned to the library and could be collected at any time within the next fortnight. Unable to sit still any longer, Willow went through to the kitchen, where Mrs Rusham was cooking something that smelled wonderfully of new olive oil and sweet onions, to say:
‘I have to go out for about half an hour. If a Dr Andrew Salcott telephones, could you ask him for a telephone number where I can reach him and the most convenient time for me to ring?’
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