Bloody Roses

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘In what circumstances?’ Willow was battling hard to keep in her mind the picture of Richard as she had always known him.

  ‘On the rugby pitch,’ said Chief Inspector Moreby a little reluctantly. It was her first sign of weakness and it galvanized Willow.

  ‘In that case, I suspect it’s wholly understandable. Isn’t rugby the game where hordes of muddy men fling themselves on each other and kick and bring their opponents crashing down on the field? Don’t the players wear special headbands so that their ears are not torn off?’

  Willow knew that she sounded like the pompous judges who ask in court for information about modern celebrities of whom they have never heard, but it was the only way in which she could express her complete refusal to accept the policewoman’s thesis.

  Chief Inspector Moreby shrugged and laid her hands in her lap. Willow noticed that her neat fingers were slightly stained with nicotine and felt another moment’s superiority.

  ‘Perhaps if you really do have some questions you could ask them now,’ Willow said.

  Jane Moreby frowned, asked her for a few innocuous details about Richard’s life during the years she had known him and then stood up. Willow sat still, looking up in what she hoped was disdain.

  ‘It is watertight, you know,’ said the policewoman with a certain reluctant pity in her eyes. ‘Quite apart from all the forensic evidence, the supporting facts of his character and the way he behaved in the previous week’s meeting, there simply was no one else who could have done it. You do realize that he laid violent hands on the victim and shook her only a week before the murder?’

  ‘I’ve heard all about that, but it’s irrelevant. Surely there could have been someone else in Corporate Finance when Richard was in the washroom, someone who hid in the bank until it was possible to leave unsuspected?’

  Thinking of the mysterious Mrs Biggleigh-Clart, Willow made a mental note to find out whether the chauffeur had actually seen his boss’s wife when he was told about her migraine.

  ‘Did you search the whole building?’ Willow went on. ‘The bank’s staff were all accounted for at the dance, but what about a stranger? It’s perfectly possible that someone concealed him- or herself until the place was milling with police, doctors, pathologists, photographers and soon and then walked out with the crowd.’

  ‘We had a man on the only unlocked door in the place. Everyone had to identify themselves as they left the building. It is impossible for a stranger to have got through.’

  ‘Perhaps the person was equipped with food and water and camped for the whole weekend.’

  ‘A million-to-one chance.’ Chief Inspector Moreby slung her bag over her shoulder. ‘And Mr Crescent was not out of the department for long enough for anyone to have got in, killed the victim and concealed himself. Clearly I shouldn’t have come.’

  She did not apologize and Willow had no trouble understanding the subtext of what she had said: I have wasted my time coming to you out of my friendship for your lover. I came to warn you and you have rejected me. I don’t care: you can take the consequences.

  Remembering the things Tom had said about Jane Moreby, Willow managed a small smile.

  ‘I do recognize that you meant to help,’ she said, but then her pent-up feelings burst into speech: ‘But why on earth do you think a man like Richard would have bothered to kill Mrs Allfarthing, even if you’ve convinced yourself that he’s capable of it? He would never be so stupid. He wouldn’t have changed into his dinner jacket if he was about to slaughter her, and if he were the sort of man capable of such a killing, he would have found a way to do it that did not leave him covered with blood and holding a knife. He’s not a fool, you know.’

  ‘No. He’s not a fool. I don’t suppose for one moment that he’d planned to kill her. I believe him when he says he had no idea she would be there when he arrived from Tokyo.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘He’s told us that he changed into his dinner suit at his desk and then went to wash his hands. I suspect that something she said when he came back from the toilet caught him on the raw. He was tired and anxious. His career had reached a plateau: he’s probably unlikely to be made a director of the bank and he sees this woman, the first in the department, becoming increasingly successful. Clients are beginning to ask for her to be assigned to the team for their deal. She’s getting a big reputation, not just in the bank but in the City, too. You’ve recently left him. No one has taken your place. He feels a failure. And he can’t take it. All his troubles have been caused by powerful women and he’s determined to show that he can beat them.’

  ‘Balderdash!’ Willow surprised even herself with the old-fashioned expletive. ‘That’s complete nonsense: more of a fantasy than anything I’ve ever written. I can see how you’ve arrived at it,’ she went on more quietly as she remembered the poisoner she had identified for Tom only a few months earlier, ‘but it does not fit Richard. You’ve just seized on the most likely suspect – and they’re never the actual criminals.’

  ‘Only in novels,’ said Jane Moreby drily. ‘In real life the obvious suspect is usually the villain. The only difficulty sometimes is proving what we know to be true. In this case all the forensic evidence anyone could want exists. He did it.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. And neither does her husband. Doesn’t that give you any doubts?’ said Willow.

  When the chief inspector said nothing, Willow added crossly: ‘Haven’t recent appeals taught you anything? You may think that your suspects are guilty; you may even doctor evidence to prove it, but –’

  ‘That’s outrageous,’ said Chief Inspector Moreby in a voice that ripped through the pleasant atmosphere of Willow’s drawing room. After a moment the policewoman recovered her temper and in a voice of such patronage that it set Willow seething, she went on:

  ‘Miss Woodruffe, listen to me. Working on your books, away from the rat race, you may not have come across the real terror that a great many men feel when they are confronted with tough, successful women, particularly men who have been educated at all-male boarding schools and colleges.’

  Willow laughed and tossed her hair away from her face. She suddenly felt at much less of a disadvantage.

  ‘Of course I have. My good woman, it is not only in the police force that men feel threatened. I think,’ she said, remembering what Tom had said to her at the edge of the Tuscan swimming pool, ‘that you are allowing your own prejudices to overrun your judgement.’

  Willow wished that she had had a bell system installed in the flat so that she could have rung for Mrs Rusham to escort her visitor to the door.

  ‘I appreciate your motives in coming here,’ she said graciously, standing up, ‘and I look forward to the day when you have to charge the real killer.’

  Jane Moreby shrugged and allowed Willow to lead her to the front door. She stopped on the threshold.

  ‘On the other hand,’ she said coldly, ‘if he’s as clever and sophisticated as you believe, perhaps he gambled on our assuming that no one would have been so stupid as to be found as he was with the body in his arms. Had you thought of that?’

  Silenced and in acute if hidden distress, Willow merely shook her head. The policewoman crossed the threshold. As Willow shut the door behind her, both Mrs Rusham and Emma Gnatche looked anxiously out of the kitchen.

  ‘Has she gone?’ asked Emma, her large blue eyes looking uncharacteristically malevolent. The contrast between the strength of her dislike and her completely conventional pink-and-white prettiness was surprising.

  ‘Yes. Thank God,’ said Willow.

  ‘Does she really believe that Richard did it?’ asked Emma.

  Willow simply nodded, her face bleak and angry.

  ‘Then she’s mad. Mrs Rusham and I have been working out all sorts of reasons for her lunacy.’

  Willow looked at her housekeeper and saw in her eyes a shadow of the devotion with which they looked on Richard. Clearly Emma’s championship of him had attracted Mrs Rusham even
more than her sweetness and her intelligence had always done.

  ‘Come on, Cressida,’ said Emma, ‘let’s get down to it. We can’t leave him in there any longer than we have to. Don’t worry, Mrs R., he’ll be back here eating one of your amazing meals any day now.’ Emma laid a small hand on Mrs Rusham’s arm.

  She flushed unbecomingly and said something inaudible before turning back to the privacy of the kitchen.

  ‘Emma,’ said Willow as they watched her go, ‘did you know that Richard was adopted as a baby?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Everyone knows. It’s no secret. Didn’t you?’

  Willow shook her head. She felt as though mental rats were gnawing at her remaining trust in Richard.

  ‘P’raps,’ said Emma, scooping back her hair with both hands, ‘he never said anything about it just because it’s never been a secret. He prob’ly thought you knew – or that it was too unimportant to talk about.’

  ‘You could be right.’ Willow led the way back to the drawing room and went to open one of the windows, as though to let out of the room all memory of Chief Inspector Moreby’s certainty of Richard’s guilt.

  ‘I know I am. Come on, what do you want me to do? I must do something.’

  ‘Would you talk to Jeanine Allfarthing for me?’

  ‘The daughter? Cressida, I … D’you think it’s fair to worry her now?’

  ‘No. But nothing about this investigation can be fair. You’ll get much more out of her than I could. You belong to her generation, whereas I’m the age her mother was. I’ve seen her father and he was very frank. He doesn’t think Richard did it, but he won’t have the same perspective on his wife as Jeanine will. You could learn an awful lot.’

  ‘How would I go about it?’ Emma looked daunted but at the same time determined to do her bit.

  ‘I’ll ring him and ask if he minds. There won’t be anything covert about it. You can listen in.’

  Willow telephoned Thomas Allfarthing, apologized for troubling him again, and asked whether ‘a young associate’ of hers could interview his daughter. He temporized but after some light pressure went to ask her. Four minutes later a meeting had been arranged at a café in Covent Garden.

  ‘What do I ask her?’ said Emma when Willow had said goodbye to Allfarthing.

  ‘Anything that seems useful. We need to find out all we can about Mrs Allfarthing. There are only two possibilities for getting Richard out: finding someone else who could have killed her or proving that she did it herself. Roylandson thinks that’s unlikely, but I still believe it’s just possible,’ said Willow, thinking that the hair torn from Sarah’s scalp could have been ripped out by a clumsy comb rather than a murderer’s hand. ‘Jeanine will probably know more about her mother than almost anyone else.’

  ‘I’ll try. Thank you for letting me help.’

  ‘Now, have you got any ideas at all about who else it could have been?’ Willow hoped that she did not sound patronizing. In all her years in the civil service she had never had an assistant as young as Emma – or as socially confident – and found it hard to know how to manage her.

  ‘The only likely ones seem to be the men who were in love with her and they were all at the dance,’ said Emma, shaking her head.

  They talked until Mrs Rusham called them to lunch, by which time they had reached no conclusions. Willow was still left with suicide, which seemed unlikely despite what she had said to Emma; the possibility that Robert Biggleigh-Clart had somehow altered the apparently inescapable constraints of time; or the fantastic possibility that there was a previously unknown strain of haemophilia that affected women. When she laughed at herself, Emma asked what had amused her.

  Willow explained as they walked together to the dining room.

  ‘Couldn’t there be?’

  ‘No. Haemophilia is the result in a male child of a mutation in the mother, but women themselves never suffer from it.’

  ‘There might be something else. Have you asked a doctor?’

  Willow stopped and looked down at Emma’s stubborn face. ‘No, I haven’t,’ she said slowly. ‘I suppose that arrogantly I assumed that I knew everything about it, which of course I don’t.’

  ‘Well, do you know any doctors?’

  ‘Yes. There’s one at Dowting’s Hospital who’s a friend of Caroline Titchmell. I’ve kept in touch with him. But, Emma, if there were any female equivalent of haemophilia, the police would have thought of it.’

  ‘Why? You know quite well that they’re not infallible. And they must have wanted a convincing suspect. Why should they have tried to find out about something that could have proved Richard innocent? It would have to be a rare thing, wouldn’t it? Otherwise, you would have known about it.’

  The mixture of common sense and blind faith in Willow’s abilities forced her to take up Emma’s suggestion.

  ‘All right, you go on in and start lunch. I’ll join you in a second.’

  Willow put through a call to Dowting’s Hospital on the South Bank and asked for Dr Andrew Salcott. She had met him at the funeral of a murder victim several months earlier, suspected him for a time and then used his friendship for the dead man in her search for his killer. She would probably have lost touch with the doctor if she had not come round after a car crash in which her legs had been broken and found herself in his hospital. As a patient, she had discovered that behind his rollicking, insensitive façade was a man of warmth and experience, and some charm.

  ‘I’m sorry, Dr Salcott won’t be here again until Monday.’

  ‘I see. Thank you,’ said Willow and then punched in his home telephone number. She had forgotten that it was already the weekend. There was no answer and reluctantly she followed Emma to the sunny dining room, promising to ring him up again.

  They settled down to a particularly lavish lunch of artichoke bottoms stuffed with lobster, covered with smoked salmon and glazed with golden aspic, followed by champagne sorbet served in spun-sugar baskets. Emma ate as hungrily as though she had not seen food for several days, but Willow picked. She knew that the unnecessary elaboration of the food was a symptom of Mrs Rusham’s distress and could not forget it herself.

  Before they had finished, Tom Worth appeared and was shown into the dining room by a tight-lipped Mrs Rusham. Emma had never met him before and looked him up and down with such transparent curiosity that both he and Willow laughed. Their amusement did much to break her constraint and she cheerfully told Tom of Mrs Rusham’s wish to send good food into Richard’s prison cell.

  ‘Good idea,’ he said, grinning. ‘Remand prisoners are allowed their own food – and drink. I can’t quite remember the quantity of alcohol that’s permitted, but I can easily find out.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mrs Rusham, smiling at him with real approval for once. She suggested to Willow that she should bring another plate so that the chief inspector could join the others for cheese.

  ‘What a good idea,’ said Willow at once. ‘Tom?’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said, pulling out a chair opposite Willow’s. He nodded kindly to Mrs Rusham when she brought him a plate and a glass and unhurriedly helped himself to claret, a good wedge of Saint Agur cheese and a small pile of digestive biscuits.

  Emma watched him while she quickly finished her own plate of cheese. Then she stood up, saying that she had to go home to Kensington before meeting Jeanine Allfarthing and promising to return later to report on her discoveries.

  ‘Don’t worry about coming here,’ said Willow quickly. ‘Just telephone and if I’m not in leave a message. We can talk later.’

  Emma looked from Willow to Tom and then smiled self-consciously before going into the kitchen to thank Mrs Rusham for lunch.

  ‘I think,’ said Tom when she had gone, ‘that she expects me to behave like a caveman and whisk you off for a spot of Stone Age nooky. Pity your housekeeper works on Saturday afternoons.’

  Willow frowned at him. Then, remembering how much she had missed him and the hot, slow days and nig
hts they had spent together in Tuscany, she relaxed and held out a hand in wordless apology. Tom gripped it for a moment and then let it go.

  ‘We’ll be all right,’ he said lightly.

  Chapter Ten

  For the first time since they had met, Willow could not concentrate on making love with Tom. When it became clear that her recalcitrant body was not going to obey her increasingly frenzied instructions to it, she disengaged from his embrace and pushed herself up against the bedhead.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, meaning it.

  ‘It happens, Will.’ Tom took a long look at her face. ‘Don’t be so upset. It’s not important. It may just be that we’ve always been in your bed before and you feel strange in my flat – or that you’re too preoccupied with the case.’

  Willow shook her head and brushed the hair out of her eyes. ‘Short hair is far more trouble than long,’ she said irritably.

  Tom held both her hands. ‘It suits you. What’s the trouble? Really?’

  Knowing that she owed him the truth, she tried to work out what it might be.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said at last, ‘that I feel as though I’m betraying both you and Richard.’

  Tom’s broad, attractive face contracted as though in a spasm of pain. Willow remembered her vision of them growing into snappishness and mutual dislike and closed her eyes. In that moment she felt as though she hated herself and Tom and Richard, and most of all Sarah Allfarthing’s murderer, whoever he was.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.

  Tom stroked her white face. ‘No need. The difficulty is probably as much mine as yours. I wanted to … distract you, and that in itself may have made it impossible. Shall we get up and go for a walk?’

  ‘Would you mind?’ Willow opened her eyes and he was both touched and saddened to see the eagerness in them. He shook his head and got unhurriedly out of bed.

  ‘You’re going to be awfully hot in that sweater,’ he said as she picked up the cashmere tunic. ‘Now the sun’s out it’ll be boiling out there. Would you like to borrow a shirt?’