Bloody Roses

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘She telephoned me, you see, and I don’t think that suicide could have been further from her mind. I’m sorry.’

  ‘When did she telephone?’ Willow let the urgency out in her voice.

  ‘At about half past six, I suppose.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  The car swung round into Sloane Square and Willow, who had been paying no attention to the route, overbalanced and had to cling to the strap above the window to prevent herself from falling on the fragile figure beside her.

  ‘She wanted, or so she said,’ said Clara with contempt, ‘to ask me what I would be wearing that evening.’

  ‘But how extraordinary!’

  ‘Wasn’t it? I think her exact words were: “It suddenly occurred to me that we might have chosen the same designer and I wanted to make sure that you wouldn’t object to my wearing yellow.” I think she must have got the idea from that television advertisement.’

  Willow was puzzled and said so. Clara laughed once more.

  ‘I suspect that the message she was really trying to pass was that she knew she was more beautiful than I am and that she would do her best not to upstage me.’

  ‘She sounds thoroughly unattractive,’ said Willow, wondering what to believe. Nothing – even Emma’s report of Jeanine’s adolescent outpouring – she had heard from anyone else suggested that the dead woman would have stooped to such childish gamesmanship.

  ‘Oh, she was attractive all right.’ There was bitterness in the cool voice. ‘Nearly everyone except me thought – or pretended to think – that she was just wonderful.’ She stopped and looked away from Willow.

  ‘Did you decide straight away that you wouldn’t go to the dance?’

  ‘What? Oh, no. I went to have a bath and change, planning to wear something she could never have afforded and to get all my diamonds out of the safe, but then I thought that was rather petty. To dignify her by joining in with her games was not something I wanted to do.’

  ‘And so you told your chauffeur about the migraine.’

  ‘That’s right. I didn’t tell him myself, of course. I simply asked the housekeeper to let him know and then I went out to a small restaurant with a friend and home to bed at half past ten.’

  Willow was silent, wishing that Tom Worth were in charge of the police investigation. If he had been, she could have told him what she had learned and persuaded him to question Mrs Biggleigh-Clart and find witnesses to her alibi. But Chief Inspector Moreby would never do it. Willow looked down at Clara’s hands. Could they have driven a knife far enough into Sarah Allfarthing’s throat to cut the blood vessels and so kill her?

  ‘I didn’t do it, you know.’ The soft voice broke into Willow’s thoughts. She managed to laugh.

  ‘I don’t see how you could have done,’ she said. ‘She was a lot bigger than you and could have fought back.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’ The car turned into left into Lyall Street. ‘If I had stood behind her and suddenly grabbed that long hair she always flaunted, twisted it and dragged her head back. With my other hand I could have picked up the knife very quickly and cut her throat. It would have been easy if the knife had been sharp enough.’

  ‘But your fingerprints would have been on the knife and there would have been blood all over you. And you would have found it hard to get out of the building.’

  ‘Perhaps I hid until the next day and bathed in Robert’s bathroom.’

  ‘But he met you at breakfast the next morning.’

  ‘Ah yes, so he did.’ There was a slight chuckle in the dark beside Willow. ‘I’m sorry: it’s not fair to make fun of you when you’re trying so hard to help poor Richard Crescent.’

  The car stopped in Chesham Place. Willow decided that she did not like Clara Biggleigh-Clart at all.

  ‘You’ve a fine imagination,’ said Willow with an unfair sneer. ‘Can you use it to tell me who might have wanted her dead?’

  ‘Almost anyone,’ said Clara with a readiness that suggested she did not care what Willow thought of her.

  ‘Her poor embarrassed husband; my poor husband whose pride would not let him sack her; Jeremy, whose life she probably made into a misery with her teasing. Any of them might have wanted her dead, but even my imagination cannot make me believe that any of them killed her.’

  ‘Even Richard?’

  ‘I would never have thought him capable of it, but life is full of surprises. I rather wish I’d known him better. You see, I’m afraid that he must have done it and when I had the chance to know him I never realized what depths he had. Good night, Miss Woodruffe.’

  Willow made herself smile into Clara’s sparkling black eyes and thank her for the lift, although her heart was banging away inside her ribcage and her hands were sweating badly.

  As she walked up the stairs to her flat, she wondered whom she could ask for a realistic assessment of Clara’s character, which might help to remove the sting of what she had said. Jeremy Stedington had sounded too partisan to be useful and it seemed hardly fair to badger Mr Allfarthing. It was not until her key was turning in one of the locks of her front door that she thought of the perfect source. Without calling out to Mrs Rusham or even waiting to see whether Emma Gnatche was still using the word processor. Willow went into the drawing room and picked up the telephone receiver.

  She punched in the number of the Daily Mercury and asked to speak to Jane Cleverholme.

  ‘I don’t know if she’s still there, but I’ll try for you,’ said the switchboard operator. Willow waited impatiently, thinking that gossip columnists really ought to work longer hours.

  ‘Diary.’

  ‘Jane? Is that you? It’s Cressida Woodruffe here.’

  ‘Cressida! How good to hear from you. How are you?’ The cheerful voice banished Willow’s impatience but as she forced herself to chat it was quickly followed by a slightly colder version.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ Jane said after a few minutes, ‘you want some more information from me.’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so, Jane. Your job just makes you the perfect source of the kind of gossip I need now.’

  ‘Well, since you did let me into a lot of dirt about that multiple murderer, I suppose I’ll have to admit that I owe you.’

  ‘Terrific,’ said Willow, deliberately ignoring the coldness. ‘Tell me about a woman called Biggleigh-Clart.’

  ‘The charity queen? Wife of Mr Beautiful the Banker?’

  ‘The very same,’ said Willow, her face relaxing. ‘I don’t need to know that she’s glamorous and spends a fortune on her clothes and is a wonderful fund-raiser. I’ve already heard all that.’

  ‘You want the dirt, in other words. There isn’t a lot.

  We did a piece about her recently and dug away like anything without much result. She really does do good work for her charities. She’s said to be faithful to Mr B. the Banker. The only slightly unkind thing we could get anyone to say is that she does love a drama. The charities aren’t quite enough to keep her amused during her gorgeous husband’s long hours of work and it’s been suggested that she tends to stir up lovely emotional crises in people so that she can soothe them down and enjoy herself.’

  ‘Doesn’t she have any emotional crises of her own?’

  ‘Apparently not.’

  ‘How dull for you!’

  ‘That was caustic.’

  ‘I know,’ said Willow, smiling at the absent Jane.

  ‘You’re just so very good at what you do that it’s hard not to take the mickey a bit.’

  ‘I’m going to take that at face value instead of looking for the sneer. And now I must run. There’s a big do on tonight and I’m on call.’

  ‘Just like a doctor. Thanks, Jane. You’ve been helpful even if you didn’t produce the answer I wanted.’

  ‘Good luck!’

  Jane put the telephone down before Willow could ask her what she meant. Hearing the empty buzz in her ear, Willow put down her own receiver and went to find out whether she had the flat to herself.


  To her delight she found that Mrs Rusham had already gone, leaving her a chilled millefeuille of seafood with a jug of avocado sauce in the fridge. Willow left the kitchen, calling Emma’s name, and was answered only by silence. Putting her head round the door of her writing room, she saw that the only evidence of Emma’s visit was a neat pile of typescript in the middle of the desk.

  Willow started to unbutton the jacket of her suit as she went to run herself a bath. To be alone again seemed the height of luxury. As she undressed and soaked herself in the warm, scented bathwater, she thought about the cottage of her recent fantasies and began to consider the practicality of them. Selling the Clapham flat would probably raise about half the price of a comfortable, weather-proof cottage with enough land for her orchard-garden. She started to plan, trying to decide whether to have the flat decorated before she put it on the market or whether that would be merely a waste of money. In its present condition it might depress any potential buyer and yet Willow hated it so much that she just wanted to be rid of it.

  The skin of her toes and fingers had begun to pucker and blanch before Willow reluctantly dragged herself out of both bath and fantasy. She felt guilty of wasting time and mental capacity on her own daydreams when there was Richard’s horrible reality to consider. By way of compensation, she took Emma’s notes into the kitchen with her when she went to eat the millefeuille, and sat reading them.

  After a few mouthfuls she decided to let herself concentrate on eating until she had finished the millefeuille. The combination of crisply flaky pastry and the firm, sweet flesh of lobster, scallop and prawn demanded her full attention, and the cool, herb-scented sauce tended to drip over her lap and the notes if she tried to eat and read at the same time.

  Later, when she had brushed the crumbs from her lips, eaten a lusciously ripe peach and piled her plates in the sink for Mrs Rusham, Willow poured herself a glass of a wonderful Trockenbeerenauslese wine she had bought in half-bottles as an experiment. She took it through to the drawing room and began to work in earnest.

  Two hours and another glass of wine later, she knew that she needed to talk once more to Richard. The thought of facing him before she was certain of his innocence was horrible, but she would have to do it. If Martin Roylandson’s pathologist could prove that Sarah could have died before Richard reached the bank, Willow knew that she would be able to relax. If the pathologist could not help, she would have to find a convincing alternative theory and to do that she had to talk to Richard.

  When she was lying in bed, feeling slightly more confident and happy, Willow reached for the telephone and called Tom Worth. They talked for a few minutes before he said:

  ‘How are you getting on?’

  ‘A few ideas are beginning to crystallize out of the mush of information I’ve been collecting, but I’m nowhere near a solution.’

  ‘You sound happier. I’ve noticed you don’t mix metaphors when you’re upset.’

  Willow laughed, for once actually enjoying a piece of criticism.

  ‘I do like you, Tom,’ she said. ‘And it’s true, I am feeling more chirpy. For a time I even began to doubt Richard’s innocence, but I’ve found that there are things about Sarah Allfarthing that just don’t add up. She wasn’t perfect and there are gaps in her life story that I can’t fill. Somewhere, somebody knows what she was really like – and really up to. And there are plenty of other people who have motives just as strong – or weak – as Richard’s for wanting her out of the way. I’m going after them.’

  There was a pause before Tom, with uncharacteristic tentativeness, said: ‘Please be careful. Remember what you promised after you were half strangled by Ben Jonson.’

  ‘That sounds as though you think it might not be Richard either.’

  ‘I have a great respect for Jane Moreby,’ said Tom slowly.

  Willow waited, not certain whether he had anything more to say.

  ‘But perhaps not quite as much respect as I have for you,’ he finished.

  ‘Thank you for that, Tom,’ said Willow, surprised and touched. ‘I’ll do my best to keep the promise I made you then. I won’t act as a tethered goat unless I absolutely have to.’

  As she spoke, Willow had a sudden vision of the police photographs of Sarah’s body and felt the first disgusting symptoms of fear for her own safety. In spite of her earlier experiences of murder, she had not thought of the savagery of Sarah’s death in connection with herself until that moment. Willow quickly said good night to Tom, ignored his protests and got out of bed to check the locks on all her windows before bolting the front door.

  She went back to bed and lay cursing the vivid imagination that was the source of all her comforts as she tried to banish the pictures of knives and blood and severed heads that blocked the sleep she badly wanted.

  It came at last, but soon her mind was tormenting itself with a dream in which she was trying to reach the back of a butcher’s shop where a woman’s naked body was hanging from a bloody hook. The body swung, as though in a fierce draught, and Willow could see the long dark hair blowing away from a face that seemed to have no features. Every time she took a step towards the woman, Willow was forcibly held back by hard hands belonging to some man she could not see. The long hair seemed to change colour from Sarah’s dark brown to a more familiar dark red as Willow struggled to move forwards.

  Half aware that she was dreaming, Willow tried to wake herself out of the nightmare, but it was not until a bell shrilled through her silent flat that she was released.

  Shaking from remembered terror, grateful for the summons, she slid out from under her linen-covered duvet and reached for her dressing gown. The bell rang again and she went to the intercom beside the front door.

  ‘Yes?’ she said into it, wondering why Tom should need her so late.

  ‘Thank God you’re awake. Let me in, there’s a darling,’ asked a deep masculine voice that sounded thickened by drink or injury. It did not sound at all like Tom’s. Willow said nothing as her suddenly sweaty hand slid on the hard plastic of the receiver.

  ‘What’re you playing at? Let me in.’ The voice was louder in her ear and her knees began to shake.

  ‘Who are you?’ Willow asked, trying not to sound either pathetic or frightened. She felt both to a shocking degree.

  ‘If you don’t bloody let me in, I’ll break the door down. You know perfectly well who I am, and we’ve lots to talk about,’ said the voice, sharpening with every word. ‘Stop playing games and let me in. I’m fed up with all this pussyfooting you’ve been doing. I want you to face me and tell me what it is you think I’ve done. There isn’t any proof, you know.’

  The sound of two fists pounding on the street door came unmistakably through the intercom. Anger came to Willow’s rescue at last, bringing with it both warmth and a certain confidence.

  ‘If you do not stop making that noise I’ll send for the police,’ she said, banging down the receiver.

  Ignoring the bell that continued to shrill as her unwanted visitor put his finger on the button and kept it there. Willow walked to her drawing room to look down into the street. Her tormentor was invisible, hidden from her by the roof of the stucco porch. The cars that were parked along the gutter seemed familiar, but she could not have sworn that there was not a strange one among them. Still looking down, she reached for the telephone and tapped in 999.

  ‘Emergency,’ said an efficient voice. ‘Which service do you require?’

  ‘Police,’ said Willow and then gave her name, address and telephone number. When the police answered, she explained what had happened. A soothing man at the other end of the telephone took down the details.

  ‘Is he still banging, miss?’ he asked at the end of her account.

  ‘Yes. And he’s still pressing the bell. It’s making an awful noise. It’ll wake all the neighbours.’

  ‘That’s probably no bad thing. Don’t worry. We’ll send someone as soon as we can.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Willow. ‘I’d be gr
ateful.’ She replaced the telephone receiver and went into the kitchen to make herself a hot drink. It was a long time since she had wanted cocoa, but it seemed an appropriate comforter in the circumstances.

  After a very long, very noisy eight minutes, the sound of banging and bell-ringing stopped abruptly. Willow waited, with her hands wrapped around the warm mug, for the police to ring her bell and tell her what had happened, but no one did.

  Taking her mug to the drawing room she went back to her chair by the window and watched the apparently empty street, wondering what had happened. She was about to go back to bed when a small police car drove slowly along the road, parked opposite her front door and waited. After a while a uniformed officer got out and eventually disappeared under the porch, only to emerge a moment later, simultaneously shaking her head and talking into her radio.

  Willow went back to bed at last, half reassured, wholly embarrassed and wondering whether the police would ignore any further calls from her flat after the false alarm. Still unable to sleep, at half past two she took a pill.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Waking with a heavy head and hallucinatory memories of yet more nightmares. Willow made herself get out of bed soon after seven so that she could unbolt the front door before Mrs Rusham tried to get in. Feeling too sick to want coffee and too shaken even to try to talk to Tom, Willow made herself some China tea, which she took into the bathroom.

  After several cups of tea and three-quarters of an hour soaking in hot water, she felt less ill and considerably less pathetic. Her head still ached but her eyes no longer smarted and the nausea had subsided. She put on a simple but comfortable linen skirt and a loose shirt and went to see what Mrs Rusham had produced for her breakfast.

  Relieved to see a mixture of soft fruit around a small mound of fromage frais instead of the cooked fish or bacon she had feared, she told her housekeeper what had happened during the night and settled down to eat. Coffee began to seem less daunting once she had finished the fruit and after drinking two cups of fragrant cappuccino she felt much more herself. Her confidence had returned and with it her fierce determination to prove Richard innocent of the murder of Sarah Allfarthing.