Poison Flowers

by Natasha Cooper

  Trying not to think of the damage an inquisitive, talkative housekeeper could do to her double life, Willow played the rest of her telephone messages, learning that Martin, her interior designer, had ordered the materials, agreed a schedule of work with Mrs Rusham, and was ringing to alert Willow to a wonderful bureau-bookcase in a shy little shop off Bond Street. Amused as always by Martin’s phraseology and pleased to be distracted from her personal relationships and her investigation alike, Willow wrote down details of the piece and the dealer and then continued playing the rest of the messages.

  There were only two more. One from her poor agent, who was still desperately trying to get Willow to disgorge a synopsis for the new novel, and the other from Tom, saying that he hoped her expedition had not worn her out, that she was feeling as well as possible and explaining that he had to go out on a case that afternoon but would call her at about eight to see how she was.

  Smiling a little, Willow went to have a bath before changing to go out to dinner with Andrew Salcott.

  It did not have the usual calming effect. As the scent from the bath oil filled the lovely yellow-and-white room, Willow was confronted once again with her mental picture of the murderer. She wondered, feeling slightly sick, how much she had already betrayed herself. Three times already she had been been afraid that the killer had found her and each occasion had been a false alarm, but at moments like this, when she had nothing else to occupy her mind, the murderer seemed to taunt her with the ability to lie in wait for the victims and poison them probably before they were even afraid.

  Willow managed to pull herself together, get out of the bath and dress in a tightly belted black skirt and a grass-green shirt made of heavy silk. She brushed out her damp hair and then took it back from her face in two wings, which she skewered with antique jet combs. With mascara brushed on her pale eyelashes, a little blusher on her cheeks and some pale apricot lipstick, she thought that her face would pass muster. A heavy gold bracelet round her right wrist and a jewelled pin instead of the top button of the shirt added the finishing touches.

  The dressing and painting had soothed her enough to appear calmly at the Chelsea restaurant Salcott had suggested. He looked very closely at her as they were sitting down at their table and she wondered whether he could diagnose her state of mind.

  ‘You look almost as though you’ve been ill,’ he said. Willow laughed in relief.

  ‘A bad oyster,’ she said simply. Salcott’s face cleared.

  ‘Poor you, that can be really unpleasant. What happened?’

  ‘Oh, I was disgustingly sick, passed out, was sick again and then got an ambulance. They took me to St Thomas’s,’ said Willow.

  ‘You were in good hands then,’ he said. ‘Well you’d better eat very simply tonight. Shall I choose for you?’

  Willow was about to inform him crisply that she was quite capable of selecting suitable food for herself when she remembered that she was going to pump him for information and so she smiled sweetly and waited while he ordered for both of them.

  ‘As a gastroenterologist, I am qualified,’ he said with a smile that suggested he understood her first unspoken protest.

  ‘I hadn’t realised that was your speciality,’ said Willow, interested. ‘Presumably if you’re doing it at Dowting’s you have to teach as well as practise?’

  ‘Actually I’m more involved in research than in teaching,’ he said. ‘Good, here’s your soup. Eat up.’

  Willow gave him a look from under her eyelashes that made him laugh.

  ‘I can tell that you must be a tyrannical father,’ she began, planning to move the conversation quickly on to questions about Jim Bruterley’s paternal capacities.

  ‘Not at all,’ Salcott protested and, forestalling her questions, asked one of his own: ‘Was yours? Is that why you so dislike authority?’

  ‘I hadn’t realised that I did,’ said Willow, laying down her spoon and looking across the table at the thick-skinned, square face of her host. ‘I dislike people who have none trying to exercise it, but I don’t think I resent the genuine article … much. Perhaps he was.’

  ‘Tell me about him,’ commanded Andrew Salcott, picking up the first of his langoustines.

  ‘He was a scientist,’ said Willow thoughtlessly, ‘at Newcastle University …’

  ‘Really?’ said Salcott with a smile. ‘Perhaps I’ve met him. I go up there four times a year to lecture.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Willow, aware of several dangers all at once. ‘He died many years ago.’ She wanted to ask when Salcott was last in Newcastle, but did not dare. Instead, she wrenched the conversation clumsily round to the Bruterleys, hoping that he would accept that she did not want to talk of her father. For once she did not care at all whether he put that reluctance down to an Antigone complex, penis envy or any other Freudian fantasy.

  ‘Do you think,’ she asked slowly, ‘that poor Mrs Bruterley really knew nothing of her husband’s love affair? I gather that he was always rather a Don Juan.’

  ‘It’s extraordinary what women will believe if they want to,’ he said, as the waiter came to clear away their first-course plates. ‘She’s pretty stupid and so it is possible.’

  ‘You sounded far more sympathetic about her when we talked on the train,’ said Willow, really surprised by the venom in his voice. He shrugged his massive shoulders and she wondered whether he still played rugger.

  ‘I was in a pretty sentimental state then,’ he said mildly and then added with a burst of fierce feeling, ‘and I hadn’t then read a letter she’s written me.’ Willow raised her eyebrows instead of actually asking the question.

  ‘She said that Jim had left me all his books and any of his paintings that I wanted,’ he said. ‘That was fine. I was just thinking it was good of her to write instead of leaving it to the lawyers when I got to the next sentence.’ He paused as though to control his fury. ‘She said that since she couldn’t bear the idea of seeing me would I please arrange to have the books collected and write and tell her which pictures I didn’t want.’

  ‘That seems rather cruel,’ said Willow. ‘I thought you were old friends.’

  ‘So did I,’ he said. ‘But she obviously bears some kind of grudge that I knew nothing about. It’s an unpleasant feeling.’

  Or perhaps, thought Willow for the first time, she suspects you of killing her husband.

  The waiter put a plate of fish in front of her and when he had gone she started to chew the first mouthful. It seemed to turn to cottonwool in her mouth and she found it almost impossible to swallow. Forcing herself to recognise that no public restaurant would poison a client’s food even at the behest of someone like Salcott, she managed to swallow the chewed fish.

  She knew that she had a splendid opportunity to ask questions, but in her residual weakness, she found that she could not bear the idea of sitting eating opposite a man who might have poisoned at least four people. Laying down her knife and fork, Willow held her forehead in her right hand and murmured:

  ‘I feel most awfully sick. Do you think they could get me a taxi?’

  Salcott insisted on driving her home himself in his blue Citroen, leaving his own dinner unfinished. When they reached Chesham Place, he tried to escort her upstairs to her flat to make certain that she got into bed safely. Willow, still concealing her fears from him, managed to keep him outside her front door only by promising to telephone the following day to report on her health.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was only half-past nine when Willow shut the door behind Andrew Salcott and so she went straight to her answering machine. There was a message from Tom asking whether he could drop in and see her, and since it was still early she rang him to ask him to come there and then. While she waited for him she went into her pale-grey writing room to fetch pen and paper so that she could write an account of her inchoate suspicions and sort them into some kind of rational sequence.

  Tom’s first words when he arrived twenty minutes later were:

>   ‘You do look tired. Is it really all right for me to come in?’

  Willow smiled as she held the door open wide. Tom grinned and walked past her into the tiny, immaculate hall. Mrs Rusham had arranged a glass bowl of early roses on the little oak chest, the floor and furniture gleamed with beeswax and turpentine and the glass in front of the two paintings was pristine. Willow watched him as he looked appreciatively at it all. His dark eyes were soft and for once his mouth looked very gentle.

  ‘Come on in and help yourself to a drink,’ said Willow, leading the way into the drawing room.

  ‘May I pour you one?’ asked Tom. Willow thought for a moment and then asked for a white wine spritzer, explaining that there was a half bottle of hock in the fridge.

  ‘What my grandfather always called hock and seltzer,’ he said as he returned carrying two glasses. He handed her the taller of the two.

  ‘I suppose you don’t look too bad,’ he said when he had examined her face minutely, ‘considering.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Willow astringently. Thinking of the the terrors that had been tormenting her since she had insisted on involving herself in his investigation, it seemed a little unfair of him to damn her with such faint praise.

  ‘I meant in terms of your recent illness,’ said Tom, ‘as you very well know. But never mind the compliments now: do you want to tell me or shall I tell you first?’

  ‘You first,’ said Willow over the brim of her glass as she sipped the white wine and soda water. ‘Mmmm, this is just right. Your grandfather taught you well.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you that you really must be a witch. Claire Ullathorne did have an allotment. It’s the most unlikely thing I’ve ever come across, but it’s true. The whole place is smothered in weeds now, of course, but there are rows and rows of colchicums planted like vegetables, as well as a great variety of medicinal herbs. She must have grown them so that she could dose herself with her own concotions.’

  ‘It’s not proof that she overdosed herself, of course,’ said Willow.

  ‘No,’ agreed Tom, ‘but it’s highly suggestive.’ He looked at her as she lay back against the over-firm sofa cushions, her red hair curling about her perfectly painted face and her green eyes intent.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said slowly, ‘whether I’ve wasted all this time of yours and the whole thing was a wild goose chase after all.’

  Willow picked up her glass again and raised it as though she were toasting him. Then she drank and laid her head back to let the fizzy diluted wine trickle back down her throat. When she had swallowed it all, she said:

  ‘No, I don’t think you have. I am still not quite sure who the killer is, but I am certain that there is one.’ She laughed abruptly; there was no happiness in the sound. ‘All the people I’ve been talking to have secrets or discreditable pasts to hide, and lots of them seem quite capable …’ Her voice died as she asked herself whether any of the people she had met were really capable of killing another human being.

  ‘Who seems capable of murder?’ asked Tom. Willow thought of giving him the lists she had been compiling before his arrival, but decided to talk instead.

  ‘Well, if I had to choose from instinct alone, I’d give you a doctor called Mark Tothill,’ she said, thinking back to Caroline Titchmell’s dinner party. ‘There’s absolutely no evidence that he’s killed anyone and I haven’t turned up any motive for him, but he’s a vile man, extraordinarily resentful about perfectly ordinary people … and angry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone show anger quite so obviously before.’

  ‘Who is he?’ said Tom. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard the name before.’

  ‘The husband of a friend of Caroline Titchmell,’ said Willow. ‘But, as I said, I’ve only my dislike of him to go on and I’ve probably slandered him.’

  ‘All right. Ignore the unpleasant doctor. Who else?’

  ‘Consider Miranda Bruterley for a moment,’ said Willow. Ignoring Tom’s expression of half-contemptuous amusement, she went on: ‘You know that you told me Dr Bruterley’s senior partner had drunk some of his whisky after she had gone away with her children?’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Tom. ‘Therefore she could not have poisoned it.’

  ‘I take it that the partner is John Swaffield?’ said Willow. Tom merely nodded.

  ‘Well in that case, I do wonder whether he was lying,’ said Willow. ‘He’s definitely consoling the widow at the moment and it did occur to me as I was driving back to London that he might have been simply protecting her, which would mean …’

  ‘That, the breaking-and-entering could have been the occasion for the poisoning of the bottle after all. I’d better have a word with the Cheltenham boys. What’s the matter?’ Tom demanded as Willow’s face changed. She looked as nearly shifty as she ever looked, and very much younger than usual. ‘What have you done?’

  ‘I feel as though I’m blushing,’ announced Willow annoyed with herself, ‘and I don’t see why I should.’

  ‘Tell me,’ commanded Tom, but there was a note of such affection in his deep voice that Willow let herself smile reluctantly back at him.

  ‘I told Miranda Bruterley that I thought there might be a connection between the murder of her husband and Simon Titchmell,’ she said rather quickly. Tom’s face hardly changed, but Willow thought that if she were one of his suspects she would find his new expression quite frightening. There was no gentleness left in it at all. Willow turned away to drink a little more spritzer and then put the glass down on the small mahogany table beside her.

  ‘Damn you, Willow,’ said Tom after a moment of grappling with his temper.

  ‘It was the only way I could ask her anything useful at all,’ said Willow. ‘I don’t actually think I need to excuse myself, but I made absolutely no suggestion that I had any contact with the police and I impressed on her that it was entirely my own idea and that Caroline Titchmell did not know what I was doing.’

  Tom said nothing. Willow thought of asking him how on earth he expected her to solve his problems if he hobbled her ankles and put a blindfold over her eyes.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, struggling to be fair to him, ‘you thought that I could sit here and spin fantasies that might have some bearing on your crimes. But there just wasn’t enough information to do that.’ Tom stood up. Looking down at her, he seemed enormously tall and powerful.

  ‘Would you believe me if I told you that the only reason I didn’t want you to go involving yourself physically in these cases was because I didn’t want you to risk yourself?’ he asked. ‘Or is that worse? Patronising?’

  Suddenly feeling weak and almost tearful – shamingly like the heroine of her last book – Willow shook her head. Her fears were too vivid for her to object to anything Tom might do to try to ensure her physical safety. But she knew that there was really nothing he could do to guarantee it, which is why she never told him how bad the terrors were. Despite her determination to keep them hidden, she shivered.

  Tom leaned forward to look at her more closely.

  ‘You’d better tell me now,’ he said at last.

  ‘Tell you what?’ asked Willow, wondering whether it was her imagination or her reason that had created the fear. She had made a fool of herself over the suspect bomb already, and built up the Clapham burglary into far more than it might have been, but at least she had done that in private.

  ‘Something you learned in Cheltenham is upsetting you,’ said Tom, looking closely at her. He seemed to have mastered his anger completely. ‘Is there another connection with Caroline Titchmell?’

  Realising that he did not yet know quite how afraid she was, Willow became determined to behave as though the fear did not exist.

  ‘In fact there is, although it’s not enough to explain murder.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Tom.

  ‘It seems that when they were all at school, Caroline Titchmell was in love with James Bruterley and he spurned her rather cruelly. But, Tom, that must have been sixteen
years ago at least. She’s found all kinds of satisfactions for herself since then and so why would she need to kill …?’

  ‘Perhaps having found the satisfactions she has become confident enough to take revenge?’ he suggested, playing devil’s advocate. He had never believed in Caroline as a possible killer.

  ‘These murders started very recently …’ he began. Willow interrupted.

  ‘As far as you know, but you did say that a lot of poisoning must go undetected. I cannot believe that a woman like Caroline … it would be easier to believe that Miranda did it, with or without the help of John Swaffield. Miranda is a highly suitable name for her, now I come to think of it.’

  ‘“Fit to be admired”’ said Tom, surprising Willow, who had assumed that he knew no Latin. She made a face at him, which he did not see, because he had got up off the sofa and was walking slowly around the room.

  ‘Why should she have killed her husband? Miranda, I mean?’ asked Tom, puffing aside one of the heavily lined curtains and peering out into the street.

  ‘Having discovered about Sarah Rowfant, perhaps,’ said Willow, remembering that Miranda had appeared to be more upset about her husband’s mistress than about his death. ‘Or perhaps she just couldn’t stand him any longer. He sounds the most appalling tyrant: not allowing the children to make any noise or bother him; locking up his decent whisky and making his wife drink something less good; being vilely unpleasant about the burglary even though it was hardly her fault.’

  ‘But she knew nothing about Rowfant until after the murder,’ protested Tom, ignoring the question of blame for the burglary. Willow shook her head.

  ‘She could easily have been lying,’ she said. Her eyes narrowed to glistening green lines between her darkened lashes as she developed the story. ‘John Swaffield is being “absolutely sweet” to her; it is quite possible that he lied about drinking the whisky to protect her; it is more than probable that he has been coaching her in what to say to the police and warned her not to admit to knowing about the mistress because that would have given her a motive. How I wish I could interview them all face to face!’