Bloody Roses

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘That sounds as though you think he’s innocent.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ said Jeremy Stedington, apparently outraged. Willow, feeling slightly cheered, had not quite decided what to say when Stedington went on: ‘You can’t believe he’d slit a woman’s throat, any woman’s?’

  ‘I don’t, in fact. But that sounds as though you think he would be capable of killing a man.’

  ‘Slightly more capable of it, I suppose. But I’d take a lot of persuading even of that,’ said Stedington, drinking some of his wine as though it were cider.

  ‘But he did shake her,’ said Willow, frowning, ‘and I’d have thought that in itself completely foreign to the Richard I thought I knew.’

  Stedington nodded. ‘He did, but I don’t think it’s particularly significant. He’d been on the go for thirty hours without a break, and so had she. She was so tired that she made a stupid mistake that could have jeopardized a huge deal and a relationship Richard has spent years building with one of our most important American clients. In those exceptional circumstances, he did grab her shoulders. But whatever you may have heard, it was over in a few seconds. He did no damage, and she got over it pretty quickly. She was fond of him.’

  Willow drank some of the dry, biscuity champagne, letting the sharp little bubbles burst against her palate.

  ‘He’d been working very hard in Japan, too,’ she said, thinking back to Richard’s ravaged face and damp eyes. ‘What if he came back, found her alone, and she annoyed him again? What if she taunted him about something, or told him she’d stolen one of his British clients? Wouldn’t that have made him angry?’

  ‘Possibly. But not enough to make him any angrier than I am at this moment and, tempted though I might be, I’m not about to clock you over the head with this bottle.’

  Looking into his dark face, Willow realized that, however jocular Stedington’s words, he was speaking the basic truth. She had made him very angry indeed. While she was choosing what to say next, he went on:

  ‘From all that Richard has told me I thought you were a friend of his. Still,’ The last word seemed to express a horribly cynical acceptance of treachery, which surprised Willow.

  ‘I am,’ she said, a little shaken by his bitterness. ‘And I’m glad to find that you are too – and unmoved by my devil’s advocacy. I’m here because I want to prove who did it, knowing that it couldn’t have been Richard. Will you help?’

  The taut shoulders in their dark pinstripes relaxed slightly and a faint smile turned the thin, straight lips into a curly smile of some charm. But Willow got the distinct impression that the banker was reserving judgement about her.

  ‘What is it that you think you could do?’

  Reminding herself that Stedington knew her only as a romantic novelist, Willow tried to think how to persuade him of her credentials without taking him further into her confidence than he had any right to be.

  ‘It’s not something I want talked about,’ she said slowly, ‘but before I wrote novels I built up a career in administration and I have had a certain amount of experience in investigating things. I am quite capable of uncovering anything there is to find that will exonerate Richard.’

  ‘I see,’ said Stedington, with amusement overtaking his reservation. ‘And what do you want from me?’

  ‘An excuse to be in the bank for a few days asking questions of all and sundry. Richard always talked about you as though you were completely trustworthy and so I thought you’d be the best person to approach.’

  Stedington turned his champagne flute round and round between his well-manicured fingers.

  ‘Thank you. It’s a good idea, but a bit tricky,’ he said, looking down at the golden dregs in the glass, ‘because so much of what we do has to be secret.’

  ‘I’m actually pretty discreet,’ said Willow. It seemed ironic that the only way to convince him of that might be to betray her own secrets.

  Jeremy Stedington looked up, his dark eyes reflecting pinpoints of glitter from the spotlights over the long brass-and-mahogany bar.

  ‘There is one possibility. Did your administrative career teach you anything about management training, or could you mug it up in time?’

  ‘I do know a bit.’ Willow thought of the innumerable civil-service courses she had attended and taught. ‘Why?’

  ‘We, that is the directors, have been talking for some time about training needs and since Richard’s outburst the pace of talks has speeded up. It’s become very clear that we need to do something about stress management at least, and most people in the bank know we’re planning to call in advisers.’

  Willow laughed. ‘Yes, I’ve heard from Richard that none of you are taught anything. You just appear from university and, being good chaps, pick up the job as you do it. Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Not quite. Most of the Corporate Financiers are lawyers or accountants first. But I suppose it’s pretty much like that.’

  He refilled their glasses and looked across the small round mahogany table with a rueful smile.

  ‘We burned our fingers a bit a year or two ago with a training course, and so …’

  ‘What happened?’ Seeing reluctance in his face, Willow added in a reasonable voice: ‘If I’m to be a convincing training assessor, I’ll need to know all the background.’

  ‘I suppose so. We rather fell for a bit of slick salesmanship and brought in a couple of men who persuaded us they could sort out all our management problems and teach the boys to be better negotiators and better users of human resources by sorting out their own problems.’

  ‘Sounds excellent,’ said Willow when she had swallowed another mouthful of champagne.

  ‘What we hadn’t grasped was that during the course the boys had to lie about on the floor with blankets and piles of cushions and pretend to be born again.’

  Stedington spoke with such embarrassment and outrage that Willow put back her head and laughed. She could not help it.

  ‘That sounds like a version of rebirthing. I don’t know that I approve of it myself, but lots of people think it solves all psychological and emotional difficulties.’

  ‘But what in God’s name has it got to do with being a good negotiator?’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I’m a bad advocate for any of those psycho-circuses, because I cannot make myself believe that efficiency at work is affected by birth traumas or the tentacles of childhood emotions. But I do believe in the benefits of more straightforward training. It saves such a lot of time and wear and tear if people are taught instead of having to learn by making mistakes.’

  ‘It really does sound as though you could pass yourself off as the right sort of person,’ said Stedington, looking hard at Willow as she sat, faintly smiling at him. ‘Will you let me talk to the chief executive? He’s unshakable on Richard’s innocence, too.’

  ‘Excellent. Will you ring me when you’ve done it?’ The sound of self-satisfied, rollicking voices at the door made Willow look up.

  ‘It seems that your boys are arriving; we’d better depart.’

  Stedington looked at the new arrivals.

  ‘None of that lot are ours, but you’re right. They won’t be long,’ He poured the last of the wine into their glasses and raised his own. ‘To Richard!’

  Willow echoed his toast and they downed their wine. At the street door, Jeremy Stedington half turned and looked her up and down.

  ‘There is only one snag.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You can’t possibly persuade anyone you’re from a training consultancy if you appear like that and call yourself Cressida Woodruffe. Even if the boys don’t read your books, they’ll all have heard of you. And the secretaries would pretty soon tell them if they hadn’t.’

  ‘I’m quite good at disguise,’ said Willow, lifting the wavy mass of thick red hair in both hands and twisting it into her civil service pleat. ‘A pair of spectacles, different make-up and a suit and I’d convince anyone.’

  ‘What will we call you?’

&
nbsp; Willow pretended to think and did her best to ignore the increasing absurdity of her disguises.

  ‘How about King? Willow King?’

  Stedington pushed open the door, laughing.

  ‘King’s all right, but no one would ever believe Willow. It’s the most ridiculous name I’ve ever heard.’

  Taken aback, because no one had ever said that to her before, Willow said rather sharply that they could either call her Ann (which was her middle name) or simply Miss King.

  ‘Very well, Miss King,’ said Stedington, holding out his hand. ‘I’ll telephone you when I’ve some news. What’s your number?’

  She dictated her telephone number and then spent the journey back to Belgravia trying not to think of what might be going through Richard’s mind as he waited in his cell. Only the prospect of talking to Tom helped to suppress her anxiety, but when she tried to reach him the telephone let her down. At first she got nothing but a recorded message telling her that all lines from London were busy, and later nothing but a busy signal.

  As she gave up trying to talk to him, Willow told herself how much she wanted Tom’s advice. Only when she went to bed alone did she admit that it was the man himself she missed so badly.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning Willow woke at six o’clock, her normal Tuesday time, and got straight out of bed. It was not until she had reached automatically for her noncommittal jeans and sweater that her mind sharpened enough to remember her sabbatical from the civil service. She had no need to go to Clapham.

  There seemed little point in returning to bed so she put away the jeans, bathed and dressed in a pair of comfortable Issey Miyake trousers and a loose grey-and-cream silk shirt. As she sat brushing her hair, she thought of trying once more to ring Tom in Italy, but the unfairness of waking him so early stopped her.

  It was not until she was making herself a pot of coffee that she realized her subconscious had been working better than the upper layer of her mind. If she were to impersonate Miss King the training consultant, she would need some of her civil-service suits and they were all hanging in the painted whitewood wardrobe in her Clapham flat.

  Three-quarters of an hour later she was unlocking the door of the first-floor flat off Abbeville Road. Assaulted by a smell of damp and dust as she opened the door, she felt depressed and rather silly. Her well-established charade seemed grossly inappropriate when she thought of the horrible reality of Richard’s predicament. Reminding herself that she had successfully identified two murderers while frolicking from one life to another, and that there was nothing inherently wicked about the way she lived out her fantasies, Willow stalked into her bedroom and flung open the window. Even street dust, petrol fumes and carbon monoxide would be preferable to the damp, foetid stuffiness of the flat.

  Then she laid out on the bed the suits and blouses she had worn as Willow King. Made of mixed wool and polyester or linen and viscose in various shades of grey and beige, they had been bought in chain stores over the years and they looked skimpy and bedraggled. Staring down at them, Willow looked back at the loneliness and emotional poverty of the life that they represented.

  That life had led directly to her meeting Richard. Although she had moved on, he had been the first person to whom she had been at all close. For a long time he had been the only one to whom she had revealed anything of herself beyond the brains, coldness and reserve that had made her both so successful and so unpopular at DOAP. Willow had always denied that she had loved Richard in anything but the most straightforward physical sense, but in that moment she acknowledged that there had been a different kind of love as well.

  In what she now realized had been a real struggle to free herself from a life she had hated and become the person she had been meant to be, Richard had played an important part and played it with great tact and discretion. Without him and the bridge he had offered her between the two lives, she might never have been able to let herself love Tom Worth and, as she was beginning to understand if not to acknowledge, that ability to love was of immense importance.

  ‘I must get him out of there,’ she said aloud, thinking that it was simply not possible for Richard to have done what the police believed.

  The doubts of the previous day seemed absurd when she thought of the times she had spent with Richard. She tried to pull herself together and concentrate on collecting enough evidence to prove that he was the man she had always thought him.

  The clothes laid out like corpses on her bed looked useless after all. Anyone retained as a consultant by a successful merchant bank would need much – better and more expensive – suits than those. She picked up all the skirts and jackets and returned them to the wardrobe.

  Something in her shouted that she ought to be piling them into black dustbin bags and throwing them away, but the habits of her northern childhood had been too strongly inculcated in her to allow such waste. And she was still not certain whether or not she would return to DOAP at the end of her six months. When she had decided that, she could deal with the clothes. Skimpy and ill-made though they were, someone might have a use for them, even if it were only the local primary school wanting jumble or dressing-up clothes.

  In a mood of unusual humility Willow shut the windows, locked up the flat again and took a bus back to Cressida’s side of the river, where she set about buying enough clothes suitable to a successful training consultant to see her through the next week.

  When she had hung up the resulting suits, better made and more flamboyant than Willow’s though more Thatcherite than Cressida’s, and put away the appropriate shirts, tights and shoes, she made an appointment with a Sloane Street hairdresser whom she had never patronized.

  As she shut her bedroom door behind her, she found herself face to face with Mrs Rusham. The housekeeper’s face had lost all the vulnerability of the previous day and had hardened into its customary expression of disapproval.

  ‘I was not certain whether you would be requiring breakfast, Miss Woodruffe, since it’s a Tuesday,’ she said.

  ‘Life is not as simple as it once was, Mrs Rusham,’ said Willow. ‘I shall be here full-time from now until we get Mr Crescent out of prison.’

  ‘May I say how very pleased I am to hear it?’ A slight relaxation loosened Mrs Rusham’s tight mouth. ‘I shall bring your coffee to the dining room.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit late for breakfast?’ asked Willow, feeling as though she had been up and busy for most of the morning. She looked down at her watch and saw that it was still only half past ten. ‘Well, perhaps not.’

  Obediently she walked through to the small, sunny room beside the kitchen and sat down at the oval table. A few minutes later Mrs Rusham carried in a tray with Willow’s customary large cup of cappuccino. There were also some prettily arranged slices of sweet melon interspersed with iced mint leaves and a rack of hot, thin toast.

  ‘Would you like a baked egg? I have no fish or bacon prepared.’

  ‘This looks wonderful. I don’t think I’ll need an egg.’

  The doorbell rang before Mrs Rusham could say any more and she left the room to answer it. Willow leaned back in her chair, with a newspaper in one hand and her coffee in the other.

  ‘Is it all right if I come in?’

  At the sound of Emma Gnatche’s voice Willow put down her newspaper and made herself smile. The knowledge that she had brought the invasion on herself by involving Emma in Richard’s predicament did not make it feel any less intrusive. No one, not even Tom, appeared in Willow’s flat without at least a telephoned warning, and she disliked Emma’s dropping-in intensely.

  ‘Yes, but do ask Mrs Rusham for another cup of coffee.’

  ‘She said she’d bring one, actually,’ said Emma, coming to sit down at the table and dumping her multicoloured basket at her feet. She took out a ring-bound shorthand notebook and flipped back the cover in a businesslike manner.

  ‘They’re a funny lot at that bank,’ Emma said, looking up.

  ‘Really?’ Willow
knew that she sounded abrupt, but she could not help it.

  ‘Yes,’ said Emma just as Mrs Rusham brought in her coffee and another plate of fanned melon slices.

  When she had gone, Emma stirred a teaspoonful of sugar into her coffee and drank some.

  ‘I wonder if I’ll ever make enough to live like this,’ she said, gazing round the room, which Willow had turned into an octagon with open-fronted cupboards built across each corner to hold her glorious collections of glass, china and Georgian silver.

  A window filled the space between two of the angled cupboards, the door another, the original white marble fireplace a third and an unusually delicate Chippendale sideboard the last. The walls and insides of the cupboards had been painted with a subtle rosy-lavender colour dragged over a cream ground and the curtains were of billowing taffeta that gleamed in the sunlight and looked as though it were made of finely beaten silver. The whole effect was quite unlike the stuffy, portrait-filled, roast-meat-scented dining rooms of Emma’s youth, and belonged to a different world from the austerely ugly Newcastle house in which Willow had spent her hard-working, emotionless childhood.

  ‘It is fun,’ Willow admitted. ‘But you sound as though you’ve discovered something about Richard’s bank. How?’

  Emma pushed her blond hair behind her ears with both hands, showing off the pearl earrings she never seemed to remove. ‘One of Richard’s chaps occasionally takes me out to dinner and so I rang him up yesterday and suggested it myself,’ she said, looking a trifle shocked at herself.

  ‘Good for you!’ Willow felt the first stirrings of amusement and waited to hear what Emma had come to tell her.

  ‘Well, anyway, we went out and he didn’t need much urging to talk about poor Richard.’ Emma ate a piece of melon, almost driving Willow to snap out her impatience.

  ‘Does he believe that Richard could have killed her?’

  ‘He didn’t say,’ said Emma, adding after a moment’s thought: ‘But I suspect he thinks it is possible. He seemed to find Richard quite frightening.’