Bloody Roses

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Sarah was jolly good at it. You know.’

  ‘Not really, but I can guess. Look, I oughtn’t to keep you now. You must be pining to get home.’

  Jeremy Stedington looked at Willow carefully before giving her a meaningless smile and standing up. He seemed oddly tense.

  ‘Will you be here tomorrow?’ he asked.

  ‘Definitely in the morning. I may have to pursue my investigations elsewhere in the afternoon. Good night, and Jeremy …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thank you – for myself and for what you’re doing for Richard.’

  His dark, good-looking face softened slightly.

  ‘We’re all relying on you, you know,’ he said as he held open the doors for her.

  Chapter Six

  Willow took the Circle Line back from Monument to Sloane Square and spent the twenty-minute journey jammed between sweating, angry bodies. The hard edges of her briefcase dug into her calves and the handle of someone else’s umbrella caught her just above the kidneys. She twisted her head to get a breath of relatively free air and looked at the faces all around her. Most of them expressed dogged endurance, but one or two were suffused with a hate she could well understand. The pressure on her body relaxed at Victoria when the commuters debouched in a hot rush.

  All she could think of as she waited for the next stop was ripping off her sticky clothes and getting into a deep cool bath scented with Chanel No. 19 oil. She walked as quickly as possible through the stuffy, dusty streets back to her flat and eagerly climbed the steep stairs.

  The moment she walked through the door she knew that she would have to postpone the bath.

  Emma Gnatche’s pink-and-blue basket lay on its side on the polished parquet of the hall floor. Willow stood quite still, looking at it for a moment and trying not to resent the girl’s intrusion. One of her greatest pleasures had always been solitude at the end of the day. Whether she had been writing or battling with her civil-service colleagues, she needed an hour or so of pottering about on her own before she could happily be with other people, even Tom whom she missed so badly.

  ‘Hello, Emma?’ Willow tried to make her voice sound welcoming.

  The drawing-room door opened and Emma stood there, her pink-and-white face as nearly angry as Willow had ever seen it. She dumped her briefcase beside the basket, thinking: Well, that makes two of us.

  ‘I hope Mrs Rusham gave you some tea or a drink or something,’ she said, smiling as she tried to defuse some of the double anger.

  ‘I didn’t want anything.’ Emma’s voice sounded even more patrician than usual and much older.

  Willow sighed. The prospect of a restorative bath seemed to recede even further.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Come and sit down. I need something to drink even if you don’t.’

  Willow walked straight to the drinks tray and poured herself out a long glass of Vichy water, adding two ice cubes from an insulated bucket that Mrs Rusham had filled earlier. Kicking off her shoes, Willow padded back to her favourite sofa and lay along it, sighing once again as her aching legs rested on the softness of the down-filled cushions.

  ‘Come on, Emma. You look as though I’ve done something dreadful, and I’m really not aware of anything.’

  ‘I just think you might have told me that you were going to get rid of James Montholme,’ said the girl, sounding more like herself and less like the chairwoman of a country Conservative association. ‘He was my only source of information about what might have happened that evening and now I can’t even –’

  ‘But Emma,’ Willow protested, swinging her feet to the floor so that she could sit up properly, ‘you yourself warned me about him. I’d never have thought of asking them to get rid of him if you hadn’t pointed out that he could recognize me. It was marvellous that you thought of it. I was really grateful.’

  ‘But now there’s nothing I can do for Richard. It’s too bad of you, hogging it all to yourself. I know that you’re older and cleverer than me, but I’m not a complete fool, whatever you think. You just went ahead and cut the ground from under my feet. I gave up my job to help and now … It isn’t fair.’

  ‘There’s plenty you can do,’ Willow said, and set herself to pacify Emma as patiently as possible.

  Recognizing that she had a genuine complaint helped Willow to keep herself from snapping, but it was still an effort.

  Nearly an hour later she had succeeded well enough to say: ‘I’m so hot and so revolting that I really must have a bath.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Cressida. You were tired and I lost my temper,’ said Emma, standing up at once. She looked younger than she had in the throes of her rage, but calmer too. ‘It’s just that I’m so worried about Richard. But it wasn’t fair of me. I’ll get out of your way.’

  ‘Why?’ said Willow, suffering from a bad conscience herself. ‘Mrs Rusham’s bound to have left enough supper for both of us.’

  ‘No, thank you. Really, I must go. I am sorry,’ said Emma. ‘Will you promise to ring me up when you’ve something for me to do?’

  ‘Yes, I will.’ Willow was so grateful at the prospect of being left alone that she would have promised a lot more than that. ‘Goodbye, Emma.’

  As soon as she had achieved the solitude she craved. Willow went off for her long-delayed bath. She ran it very deep and hotter than she had originally planned, allowing the scented oil to fill the pretty yellow-and-white room with thick, fragrant steam. Stripping off her clothes and letting them lie where they fell, she got into the bath and reached out one hand for the book that Mrs Rusham had put ready on the table beside her. Also on the table were a small plain glass vase of yellow roses, a blanc de chine plate of Cox’s orange pippins and an antique tea caddy filled with small, savoury biscuits.

  An hour, two apples and three anchovy biscuits later. Willow felt clean and relaxed enough to contemplate the investigation again. Wrapping herself in a huge, soft, yellow bath towel, she walked into her bedroom and chose a loose, cool linen dress the colour of young lettuces. Unable to bear the thought of tights or even stockings, she stuffed her narrow feet into a pair of cream leather espadrilles and went back to her briefcase to collect the list that Jeremy Stedington had given her.

  Taking it with her to the kitchen, Willow opened the fridge to see what Mrs Rusham had left for her dinner. It turned out to be a fish terrine with layers of steamed halibut interleaved with salmon mousse accompanied by a sharp, cool sauce that seemed to be made of pulverized watercress, cucumber and fromage frais. There was a salad of various sorts of lettuce and a plate of radishes, all neatly covered with clingfilm. Willow took a half-bottle of non-vintage champagne from the fridge door and carried everything to the dining room.

  As she ate, she read down the list to discover that Robert Biggleigh Clart himself had been one of the last to leave the bank on the evening of Sarah Allfarthing’s death, and the only one on his own. Willow remembered hearing from someone that the chief executive’s suite included a bathroom.

  ‘So that he could have washed any blood off himself and changed his clothes,’ she said aloud as she cut herself a second slice of the fish terrine.

  She looked back at the list and saw that the chief executive had left at five to eight, only just after a group made up of Jeremy Stedington, William Beeking, James Certes from the solicitors Blenkort & Wilson, and an unnamed client.

  Wishing that she had known about the solicitor before she met him outside the lift, Willow pushed aside her plate and poured out the last glassful of champagne. She took it with her to the drawing room, where she remembered to listen to the messages on her answering machine.

  There were two from her agent, the first merely asking her to call, the second less temperate.

  ‘Cressida, I know you hate beginning a new book, and that each one is getting more difficult, but they’re screaming for something on both sides of the Atlantic. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get over the horrible bit.’

  There was
a short pause and then the smoky, acerbic voice added: ‘Don’t forget, you have signed contracts with them and the delivery date is only four months away. Ninety thousand words minimum in four months. That’s quite a lot, Cressida. Get going!’

  Willow made a face at the machine and put her finger on the ‘stop’ button. Eve Greville was right as usual, both about the delivery date for the next book and about Willow’s reluctance to get it started. Her first few books had unrolled from her mind with ease, slipping from her fingers to the keys of her word processor as easily as cooked spaghetti falling through the holes in a colander. But recently, since the books had started to command really huge advances – and earn them, too – they seemed far more difficult to write. Willow told herself that as soon as Richard was out of prison she would have to dedicate her time fully to the new novel.

  Her insides lurched suddenly as she thought of his freedom and she stood with her finger on the answering machine, staring at the pretty chintz curtains. She remained confident of her ability to analyse all the evidence and make correct deductions from it, but she could not quite hold on to her certainty of Richard’s innocence. The thought that her investigation might do no more than turn up corroboration of the police case made her feel seasick. For a moment she was tempted to drop the entire investigation and trust to the barristers that Martin Roylandson would brief for Richard’s trial.

  Exercising all her tremendous self-discipline. Willow forced the doubts out of her mind, wrote a note on the pad beside the telephone with her right hand and pressed the ‘start’button of the answering machine with her left.

  ‘Miss Woodruffe? Martin Roylandson here. I have those photographs we mentioned. Would you like to collect them or shall I have them sent round to you? I shall be here in my office until seven o’clock this evening and from about half past eight tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Damn!’ said Willow, thinking of the unproductive time she had spent drinking wine with Jeremy Stedington, the infuriating journey home and her pacification of Emma, all of which could have been spent doing some useful work on the case.

  There were no more new messages and Willow rewound the tape on her machine for the following day, carried her dirty plates to the kitchen for Mrs Rusham to wash up, and took her book to bed. Lying back on the soft pillows, she felt the doubts begin to fight back and reached for the telephone to ring Tom Worth. She hoped that his unfailing common sense might help to clear her mind and she knew that his affection would comfort her.

  For once she heard the number ring at the first attempt but no one answered. She hung on for nearly ten minutes in case he was still sitting in the garden, but in the end she had to give up. It had been three and a half days since they had talked and she was horrified to find how much she minded being cut off from him.

  Sleep eluded her for a long time after she had replaced the telephone, and she woke early. Lying and thinking round and round the apparently insoluble problem of how someone could have got into the Corporate Finance Department, killed Sarah and got out again while Richard was washing his hands seemed unbearable. Since Willow could think of nothing else, it seemed better to get up.

  Dressed in the second of her new suits, a discreet navy-and-white spongebag check with plain navy braided edges, she breakfasted quickly on nothing but toast and coffee, and left the flat for Martin Roylandson’s office. She got there at twenty past eight and had to wait for quarter of an hour until he arrived.

  ‘Thank goodness!’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘I’ve a meeting in the City at quarter past nine, but I couldn’t wait for the photographs.’

  ‘Good morning, Miss Woodruffe,’ he said pedantically. ‘If you will come to the office I shall fetch them for you.’

  Willow felt half ashamed of her own bad manners and half irritated by the solicitor’s prissiness, but when he handed her a thick manila envelope she smiled.

  ‘Thank you. I must run, but I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘I shall await that with interest,’ said Roylandson, picking his gold half-hunter out of his waistcoat pocket. ‘You should have plenty of time to reach the City. May I compliment you on your new coiffure?’

  ‘What? Oh, I see. Thank you. Goodbye.’

  ‘By the way, our autopsy will be carried out on Monday.’

  ‘“Our”?’ Willow stopped with one long leg on each side of the threshold to Roylandson’s office.

  ‘For the defence. It’s often done once someone has been charged with murder, even though the pathologist selected by the police is there to serve the prosecution and the defence equally. We have an excellent pathologist coming from Surrey.’

  ‘Good,’ said Willow, prompted by his self-congratulatory tone. ‘Will you send me a copy of the report?’

  ‘Very well, but you may not enjoy it.’

  ‘Enjoyment is hardly the point, is it? Goodbye.’

  Willow left the building and hailed a passing taxi, which got her to the doors of the bank with four minutes to spare. Flashing her visitor’s pass at the security men, she said:

  ‘Which one of you is Bert?’

  ‘He is,’ said the man at the door, jerking his thumb towards a colleague who was helping a postman load two enormous mail bags on to a trolley. ‘They ought to know this isn’t the entrance for the post, but he’s a new boy. Bert!’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘The lady wants a word.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Bert, leaving the postman to manhandle his own mistake.

  Willow moved further away from the security post so that Bert had to follow her out of earshot of his colleague.

  ‘Mr Stedington gave me this list,’ she said, waving it at him, ‘and I see that the chief executive left only just after the others last Friday. I wondered, could he have seen them? Was he that close?’

  ‘No,’ said Bert definitely, exhibiting no surprise at the question. ‘They’d have been gone a good two or three minutes before he appeared. And even if they’d been standing in his way, he’d never have noticed them.’

  ‘Oh, really? Why’s that?’ Willow risked being late for ‘Mr Big’ in the interests of encouraging a cooperative witness.

  ‘Well, he was in a rage, wasn’t he? I’ve never seen him look so angry. Livid. And in a hurry.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘I’m sure I couldn’t say, ma’am,’ he said, making Willow think that he must have been watching too many cop shows on television. She had never been called ‘ma’am’in her life.

  ‘I see. Thank you very much, Bert.’

  She left him standing by the door and hurried over to the uniformed receptionists, who asked her to wait while they telephoned the chief executive’s secretary. She must have given the all-clear, because Willow was invited to take the lift up to the eleventh floor.

  Biggleigh-Clart met Willow at the lift door, which she took to be a mark of signal distinction. He looked quite as smooth as he had done when they had first met, although there were dark shadows under his eyes and faint lines running from his nose to his lips.

  That morning he was wearing highly polished black brogues in place of the previous day’s loafers, and as she was shaking his right hand, Willow saw that he was wearing a heavy gold signet ring on his left, which she had not noticed before.

  ‘Good morning, Miss King. How are you getting on?’

  ‘Slowly,’ said Willow. She followed him into his office, declined both tea and coffee, and went on: ‘It’s always so difficult at the beginning, rather like setting out on a book. One collects an immense amount of information, but none of it means very much until the story itself becomes clear. Then the details one hardly noticed at the beginning all slot into place.’

  ‘Presumably if there were anything obviously connecting the crime to someone other than poor Richard, the police would have found it,’ he said as he walked towards the chamois-coloured sofa by the astral globe.

  Willow hoped that she had not flinched visibly as he reminded her of the doubts that had deprived her of
sleep.

  ‘Why don’t we sit here? It’ll be more comfortable.’

  ‘I imagine they would have,’ said Willow carefully as she followed him. ‘But there must be something we can find to clear him. There must be.’ Hearing her voice rising, she stopped talking, took a deep breath and then tried again. ‘Can you tell me why you believe him to be innocent, Mr Biggleigh-Clart?’

  ‘He had no need to kill her.’ The banker looked frankly at Willow. ‘What could he possibly have gained?’

  Willow’s darkened eyebrows flattened as she frowned. ‘That sounds as though you think he might be capable of murder.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Biggleigh-Clart, crossing his legs carefully so that he did not disarrange the creases. ‘I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely, although he can, of course, be ruthless. He’d never have succeeded here if he couldn’t. But I don’t know that I could categorically say of anyone that he was incapable of murder. Could you?’

  Willow sat and thought.

  ‘Don’t you think that almost everyone would be capable of killing under the right form of provocation?’ he asked when she showed no sign of answering.

  She remembered a play she had once seen in which a group of pacifists had been verbally tormented into showing potential for extreme violence. It had been horribly convincing, but it had been fiction.

  ‘You may be right,’ she said, looking directly at the banker, ‘but I cannot imagine the provocation that would make Richard kill except in defence of someone else. That at least can’t have applied in this case.’

  ‘No. And besides, irrespective of his capability of violence, which is not something I am qualified to assess, I’d have thought that Richard is too sensible to have killed Sarah Allfarthing. It would be such a stupid thing to do. Are you quite sure you won’t have coffee? Annabel will be making it anyway.’