‘She and many others,’ he said. ‘It’s one of those stories that accountants and tax consultants tell to amuse each other. I’ve no idea if it has any basis in fact. I rather suspect that it was made up by a bored accountant one wet afternoon before the budget deluged him with work.’
Willow noticed with interest that his typical accountant was male and wondered what he had really thought about his wife’s success.
‘How is this helping you?’ he asked suddenly. His eyes looked coldly at her.
Disconcerted, Willow drank some more of her coffee and put down the cup.
‘I’m not sure yet,’ she said. ‘I’m still feeling my way through a fog. The one solid fact is Richard’s innocence and I’m simply looking for others – however small – to support it. Did your wife have any enemies?’
Allfarthing shrugged and for the first time Willow noticed that he was dressed like a schoolboy in grey flannel trousers, white shirt and navy blazer. His tie was black.
‘We once had a dishonest cleaning lady who behaved very badly to Sarah when she sacked her, and there are one or two wives around here who were jealous of her success, but I can’t imagine any of them…’ His voice died and Willow nodded.
‘It seems unlikely that it could have been anyone round here. I really meant to ask about enemies in the City.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said, shrugging once again. ‘She occasionally burst out about someone who had annoyed her, but it was rarely the same person. She talked more about her friends.’
‘Tell me about them,’ said Willow, pushing her hair away from her face. The new cut was proving to be less easy to wear than her customary long curls.
‘Richard, principally; and one of the lawyers: chap called Certes, James Certes.’
‘I think I’ve met him. He was at the meeting when Richard forgot himself, wasn’t he?’
‘That’s right. He was very good to her when she started at the bank. They met on one of her first deals, a little one, and got on well. He helped her a lot after that.’ One more real smile lit his sad face. ‘In point of fact he’s given our daughter a temporary job until she goes up to university.’
‘Is she enjoying it?’
‘As much as anyone that age enjoys filing and photocopying, but it’ll look good on her c.v. when she starts to look for articles in three years’time.’
Knowing that most murders are domestic, Willow wanted to ask what the Allfarthings’marriage had been like, but she found she could not. With the evidence of Mr Allfarthing’s tears, the things he had said about his wife, and all the photographs of her with which he had surrounded himself, it looked as though he had genuinely loved her. She had told him all about the men who had propositioned her, which suggested that she had loved him, too, or at least trusted in his feelings for her.
‘Did your daughter get on well with her mother? She must have been very grateful for the job.’
‘As well as most mothers and daughters, I suppose,’ he said, looking troubled. ‘There were occasional fights during Jeanine’s adolescence, when she said some things to her mother that I suspect are tormenting her now, poor child.’
He shot his wrist forward so that he could look at his watch, but he did not say anything.
‘I mustn’t keep you,’ said Willow, ‘but there is one more thing I need to ask. You said a moment ago that your wife used to tell you about people who had made her angry and that they were often different. That sounds as though there were some who were constant.’
‘Only one. A young man called Beeking. He made her really seriously angry recently, and she told me that she had decided to stop talking to him, but he’d always irritated her. He decided to be in love with her almost as soon as he started work at the bank and thought that that gave him rights over her. He used to hack into her electronic mail, look through her wastepaper basket, look in her diary, and even once went through her handbag, looking for evidence that she was having a love affair.’
‘I can see that that must have made her furious,’ said Willow with considerable sincerity. It would have driven her mad with rage if anyone had done that to her. Her sympathy for Sarah increased. ‘He sounds almost unstable. What did you think of him?’
‘Beeking? I’ve hardly ever met him and so it isn’t quite fair to say. In fact, I don’t think I’d exchanged more than two words with him until I found myself at the same table as him at the bank’s dance. He was perfectly civil then, although he grew more and more restive as we waited for Sarah.’
‘Didn’t you?’
The brown eyes filled with unmistakable pain. He shook his head.
‘She worked so hard,’ he said, his voice breaking, ‘that I thought she’d got stuck in some meeting. I was used to it: the late-night sessions, the limited holidays she could take. I learned never to question her timetable or ask when she’d be home. It fretted her so badly, because she knew how much I minded not seeing her and yet she had to work those kind of hours. I never asked anything, and she always told me what had been going on when she could: when the deal was over or public. That night I just assumed she’d get there eventually. I didn’t know…’
He buried his face in his clasped hands. Willow, exquisitely uncomfortable, got out of her chair. ‘I …’ she said. ‘Is there anything I can get for you?’
‘There’s nothing anyone can do. Please go,’ he said, his voice still muffled by his hands. ‘Please leave me alone.’
There was enough suppressed hysteria in his voice to drive Willow out of his house. Standing with her back against the front door, breathing in the warm, spicy scent of some wallflowers in the borders, she realized just how oppressed she had been feeling. It was not only Thomas Allfarthing’s grief, which she could do nothing to assuage, but the house itself and its stultifying cleanliness that had made her feel so uncomfortable.
Willow, who had nothing against cleanliness in itself and positively revelled in the way Mrs Rusham kept the Chesham Place flat, could not understand why she had hated the Allfarthings’so much. Walking down the path, she decided that it was the deadness of the room, rather than its lack of dust, that was so depressing. It was like a waiting room for something expensive but unpleasant: dentistry or something legal.
She wondered how Sarah Allfarthing had felt about it and whether she might have chosen her demanding career as an excuse to be away from it or from the possibly oppressive devotion of her husband. Then Willow reminded herself that just because she found other people’s emotions difficult to handle, it did not follow that every woman was like her.
Turning back at the gate for one more look at the unexpected house, she thought of the man inside. It seemed irresponsible to leave him alone and desperate. She considered asking one of his neighbours for help. He must have a doctor, she thought, who could be summoned to give him at least chemical consolation.
Just as she was dithering, the front door opened and Allfarthing called from the front door:
‘Miss Woodruffe! Do please forgive me. I can’t think what came over me. You’re stuck here with no transport. I won’t be a moment. Just hold on and I’ll get the car out.’
‘Oh,’ said Willow idiotically. ‘I mean, that’s extremely good of you, but I could easily telephone for a taxi.’
‘No, no. Don’t worry,’ he said, disappearing only to re-emerge with a bunch of keys in his right hand.
He shut the door behind him, double-locked it and then led the way round to the left of the cottage, where a modern garage was screened by a row of Leyland Cyprus trees. Inside was a Jaguar, as impeccably kept as the house.
Allfarthing backed out of the garage with considerable panache, which interested Willow, who had a theory about the way people used their cars. There were some who were afraid of them; others who hated them; many who used cars only for convenience; several for whom they offered vicarious power; and a few who loved them and enjoyed the partnership they offered. It surprised her that Mr Allfarthing should be one of the last class.
‘Di
d your wife drive?’ she asked into the silence.
‘Only to the station and back. She didn’t enjoy it.’
‘What did she enjoy?’
Allfarthing turned his head to look at Willow for a moment and she thought that once more she caught a glimpse of a real smile.
‘Apart from work, she loved exercise: really loved it. She played squash well and ran miles on those machines. Occasionally I’d join her in London at her health club and row weedily while she ran. She looked magnificent then, her hair flying and her long, straight body moving perfectly in tune with itself. Neither Jeanine nor I could hope to keep up.’
He must have loved her, Willow thought. No one could talk like that who was concealing boredom or disenchantment.
‘What about holidays?’ she asked, wondering whether she might like exercise herself. Before her sabbatical, she had only ever had enough time to do things she knew that she enjoyed. When she had time she might try some experiments. Once the case was over one way or the other, perhaps. The thought of the ways in which the case might go as much as the sound of Allfarthing’s voice stopped her idle ruminations.
‘I’m sorry?’ she said.
‘I was just saying that Sarah didn’t like holidays much unless there was plenty of sport. We used to go to those Club Mediterrané places, where she could take as much exercise and watersports as she liked. It suited us both that way and did her good.’
‘Do you ski?’
Allfarthing bit his lower lip hard. ‘I do, but that was the one sport she didn’t like, and since she could rarely take that much time out of the office, I used to go with Jeanine.’
‘What about clothes? Did she take much interest in them?’ asked Willow, who had been told by everyone else she had talked to about Sarah’s wonderful glamour. It was hard to square with the house they had just left. There was something else too that did not fit with what she had heard at the bank, but irritatingly she could not remember what it was.
‘I don’t really know,’ he said, his eyes firmly directed to the road again. ‘She had a great many clothes, of course, and since she started to command a big salary she spent a lot on them too, but she didn’t ever…’ He stopped, as though searching for the right word. ‘She never preened, if you know what I mean.’
‘I know exactly. From all I’ve heard she sounds a remarkably well-integrated woman,’ said Willow, wanting to pay some kind of tribute. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Allfarthing’s shoulders sag.
‘She was. I’d never…’ He took a deep breath and struggled on. ‘People used to say when I was young that men grow up as they grew older but women always stay the same, as though they were perennially eighteen, and I believed them. But Sarah was different. She grew noticeably all the time, better and better – and I think happier and happier.’ He smiled, a tender, nostalgic smile that surprised Willow.
‘The only thing that never changed was her nails,’ he said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘She bit them,’ he said, his voice very gentle. ‘She hated it, but for some reason could not stop. It always touched me to see her fingers…’
The car slowed down as the traffic lights ahead turned red. Allfarthing drew in breath so suddenly that it sounded harsh.
‘It’s so unspeakably unfair,’ he burst out. ‘There was so much more for her and –’
‘I’ll do my best to find out who did it,’ said Willow gently, her mind ticking over at speed as she thought of the implications of the bitten nails. ‘And they’ll put him away for life.’
The car moved again and a little later stopped outside the tube station. Allfarthing switched off the engine and turned to face Willow.
‘I don’t know that I care that much,’ he said drearily. ‘She’s dead. It’s all over. Revenge is not… not something I want.’
‘No. I see that. I am really sorry. Thank you for talking to me so frankly.’
Willow saw that he was holding out his right hand and so, in the confined space of the car, she shook it awkwardly before getting out.
Chapter Eight
All the way back to London Willow thought about what she had learned, building up her picture of the murdered woman and trying to see where in her hard-working, sensible, admired life she could have annoyed someone so much that he – or she – killed her. There were one or two things that did not fit in with the picture, but Willow could not see how they might help her.
There was the evidence of the house, which still troubled her whenever she tried to tie it up with the elegant, grown-up, successful woman everyone described. There was also the unlikeliness of the survival of Sarah’s marriage. Willow knew that as someone who had avoided marriage she was peculiarly cynical about its advertised advantages, but everything she had seen and heard about married couples – both as Willow King and as Cressida Woodruffe – suggested that there must have been at least some friction between the Allfarthings.
For a moment she was distracted from her investigation by a sudden picture of herself and Tom in ten years’time snapping at each other over trivialities as she had seen so many couples do. A cold determination entered her mind. It drove out the voice that suggested that both she and Tom might be sophisticated enough to avoid such self-destructive silliness.
Willow straightened her shoulders, ignored her own emotional life and went back to her analysis of Sarah Allfarthing’s death.
It was dear that, as her husband had said, Sarah had changed as she grew up, and she might well have grown out of the life they had built together before she had discovered who and what she really was. Perhaps Thomas had not been able to bear to acknowledge that and killed her.
On the other hand, he would hardly have talked so warmly of her development if he had hated it. Besides, Willow thought in frustration, he had an alibi. Suspicious though she was of tales of lifelong marital felicity, she could not see how he could possibly have killed his wife and been sitting at a table at the bank’s dance, dressed in an unbloodied dinner jacket, at the same time.
The only people who had shown strong enough feelings for Sarah to make them suspects had all been at the dance when she had been killed. William Beeking and Thomas Allfarthing had sat at the same table. Tracy Blank and her boyfriend had arrived early. The chief executive had been late, but Willow did not see how he could have committed the murder unless he had bribed the security men to say that he had left before Richard discovered the body. That seemed most unlikely, and would have laid him open to appalling possibilities of blackmail.
At Liverpool Street Willow had to change trains and, as she was walking up the escalator, she considered the next person on her list. As a client, Ronald Hopecastle would not have been invited to the dance and Sarah must have irritated him badly. It was impossible to see how he could have got into the bank, let alone the Corporate Finance Department, without being seen and identified, but Willow was prepared to let that aspect of the investigation wait until after she had discovered what he had to say.
She telephoned him and introduced herself as a friend of Richard Crescent’s.
‘Good Lord,’ said the rich voice at the other end of the telephone. ‘Brave of you to say so, my dear.’
A moment’s silence helped Willow to suppress the rage she felt at being addressed as any stranger’s ‘dear’.
‘And. I am trying to find out anything I can that might help him. I wondered if I might come and see you.’
‘There’s nothing I can do for him, I’m afraid, but come by all means. Now the business is off my hands I’ve time to spare, what? For the moment at least. What did you say your name was?’
‘Cressida Woodruffe,’ she said, wondering whether he could possibly be a fan.
‘Girl who writes the books?’
‘That’s me,’ she said, still suppressing rage.
‘Come by all means. I’m only sorry m’wife and daughter won’t be here. They spend a fortune on your books, what?’
Willow thanked him and walked o
ut of the station to hail a taxi. The journey across London to the Hopecastles’Knightsbridge house took forty minutes, during which she sifted all the information she had already collected so that she could ask the most useful questions.
The taxi dropped her outside a neat white house that was protected from the street by a row of well-painted black iron railings. Bay trees in stone pots stood at either side of the chaste black door and the knocker that Willow used was of highly polished brass.
The door was opened a few minutes later by the master of the house. When she saw how he was dressed, Willow contemplated pointing out to him that for the price of one of his French silk ties his wife could have bought at least four hard-backed books. Discretion stopped her and instead she smiled at him as though she were one of her own beleaguered heroines. He escorted her into a drawing room filled with antique furniture and fluttery double tablecloths and ruched blinds printed with a pattern of bamboo and birds of paradise.
‘Can I offer you a drink?’ he asked hospitably, waving towards a tray loaded with bottles and square cut-glass decanters. ‘I’m having one.’
Willow looked at the squat tumbler that sat on a side table and saw not only that the whisky and soda in it looked dark with lack of water, but also that there were enough sticky finger marks on the glass to suggest that it was not his first drink of the day. In the interest of encouraging him to talk, she accepted a glass of sherry.
‘Rare to find a girl who drinks that nowadays,’ he said with a beam of exaggerated approval. Willow tried to think what could be the matter with him. She could not believe that he was in the habit of inviting strangers to drink with him in the early afternoon or that he had taken to drink as a way of coping with the boredom of his new freedom from work. He showed enough signs of intoxication to assure her that he was not accustomed to the quantity he had consumed.
‘I love it,’ she said truthfully and when she had sipped and tasted the sherry, she added: ‘Particularly when it is a Palo Cortado like this. Is this the Wine Society’s? I think I recognize it.’
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