A handwritten letter had emerged from the fax machine in Willow’s writing room as she breakfasted and she tore off the paper as soon as she reached her desk.
‘Dear Miss W [she read]
There is nothing in the postmortem report to confirm or deny
your theory that the victim could have suffered from a Vitamin
K deficiency. Blood tests for it can be carried out only during
life. But the pathologist agrees that clotting time can’t be
specified as closely as the police have suggested. From the
physical signs in the body it is true that death could have
occurred some time before my client’s return to the office. I
can let you have a copy of the entire report if you would like
it.
Useful though the uncertainty may be in helping defence counsel
throw doubt on the prosecution case, it does not alter the fact
that my client was the only person alone with the victim that
evening, the only person whose fingerprints were on the weapon
and the only person who showed signs of bloodstains.
Equally the uncertainty in the time of death has no effect on
the time that the blood short-circuited the computer.
Yours,
Martin R.
Willow sat down at her desk with the fax in her hands. A mixture of anger and fear shook her as she reread it. At that moment her fear was no longer that Richard might have done the killing, but that she might never be able to prove otherwise. His counsel might get him off by weakening the prosecution’s case, but that would not be enough.
To calm herself. Willow leaned back in her chair, looking around the small book-lined room and remembering the satisfying days in which she had sat there writing the novels that had made her financially independent. They had been her passport to freedom not only from the civil service but also from the shibboleths of her upbringing. She knew perfectly well that she would never entirely rid herself of the legacy her well-meaning but destructive parents had left her, but, surrounded by a luxury they would have despised, she did not blame them for it.
Her admiring inspection of her own possessions did not provide the usual sedative and she turned instead to her alternative specific against emotion: work. Pulling the telephone towards her, Willow rang up Martin Roylandson, asked for a copy of the full report and arranged to visit Richard at half past two that afternoon.
The solicitor was his usual prissy self and she kept their conversation to a minimum, breaking it off on the excuse that someone had come to the door of the flat. That was true – Willow had heard the bell ringing as she dialled the solicitor’s office – but Mrs Rusham had already said that she was quite prepared to deal with any visitor, even the possibly violent man who had disturbed her employer’s sleep.
Hearing the sound of voices stop and the front door close, Willow emerged from her writing room to find out what had been going on. Mrs Rusham turned with an enormous, cellophane-wrapped bouquet in her arms. She stopped at the sound of Willow’s step and held out the flowers.
‘Aren’t they magnificent? Here’s the card.’
Reluctantly admiring the big fan-shaped bunch of apricot and cream-coloured roses, pinks and freesias, Willow took the small white rectangle and read:
My husband asked me to send you these in abject apology for his idiocy last night. He is very sorry to have disturbed you when he mistook your house for ours and to have behaved so badly. We both hope that you will be able to forgive him. Susan Callanture.
Willow closed her eyes and breathed deeply in both relief and sympathy for the unknown Mrs Callanture.
‘Poor woman,’ she said. ‘Yes, Mrs Rusham, they are lovely, aren’t they? Can you deal with them for me? You’re so good at flowers.’
‘Why, thank you,’ said the housekeeper, but she did not retreat. ‘I’ve been wondering: have you heard anything from Mr Crescent?’
Willow shook her head. ‘Not yet, but I’m going to see him today.’
‘Oh, I’m so glad. Miss Gnatche rang me at home yesterday to ask if I’d heard anything, because she hasn’t managed to speak to you for a while. May I telephone her to say there will be news later? She is most terribly anxious, you know.’
‘Yes, of course. Telephone whoever you like,’ said Willow, disliking the sharpness that had crept into her voice but unable to prevent it. Mrs Rusham’s adoration for Richard had always amused her, as had Emma’s hero-worship of him, but if they were to build some kind of alliance in which Willow figured as a harsh, unsympathetic witch who kept them both from their beloved, life in the flat would become intolerable.
Feeling unfriendly and at odds with herself, Willow went back to her office to wait for the pathologist’s report that Martin Roylandson had promised to send her through the fax machine. When the report came she read it slowly, checking the precise meaning of various technical terms in a medical dictionary. Apart from the encouraging comment that there was absolutely no evidence that could confine the time of death to the period between Richard’s arrival in the department and his call to the police, there seemed to be nothing in the report that could help her case.
Depressed, she changed into her noncommittal dark-blue suit, ate Mrs Rusham’s perfectly prepared watercress soup and a salad of artichoke bottoms, tiny broad beans and shreds of chicken, and left Belgravia for the prison.
She drove there in the new Metro she had recently bought in exchange for a ridiculously large Mercedes she had hardly ever used, parked just outside the plant nursery that sat with incongruous cheerfulness at the foot of the forbidding fortress, and, having exchanged her contact lenses for spectacles, went to present her credentials at the gate.
The uniformed warder looked her up and down, consulted a list pinned to his clipboard and eventually let her through. He escorted her down a long corridor smelling of drains and disinfectant to the green-painted interview room.
Willow put her briefcase on the floor beside her hard plastic chair and waited for Richard. When he was brought in by another warder, she was relieved to see that some of his desperation seemed to have gone. He still looked tired and unhappy, but there was no longer a hunted expression in his eyes; he had straightened his back and shoulders and was walking with much of his old arrogance. His hair was much cleaner than it had been the last time they had met, and his nails had been neatly cut.
The warder left them alone and Willow reached out to touch one of Richard’s hands.
‘You look better,’ she said, pleased.
‘I suppose one becomes accustomed to almost anything, and Mrs Rusham’s pies and pâtés are making a big difference, not to speak of those wonderful half-bottles of fizz. Thank you for them, Willow,’ said Richard, adding with a hint of a smile: ‘They’re doing almost as much for my morale as my infinite faith in you. How are you getting on?’
‘I’m not sure yet,’ she said, wondering whether to tell him about the uncertainty over the time of death or not. In some ways it seemed cruel to keep it from him, but Willow decided that a continuing anxiety was likely to be less damaging than the sort of violent swings between hope and despair that she had been feeling. If he was innocent, as she was determined to believe, then she wanted to save him from those.
‘I have collected an enormous amount of information,’ she went on, ‘and I’ve reached the stage where I need to talk to someone I can trust about various people at the bank before I start to interview them.’
A curious smile twisted Richard’s lips. It seemed to mock Willow and yet demand something from her. She had never seen Richard smile like that before and it disturbed her.
‘You still trust me then?’ he said. ‘After everything you’ve learned? I’d say that was quite remarkable for a woman with all your experience.’
Willow felt as though she had trodden on a live electric wire, jolted, breathless and tingling with fear.
‘Shouldn’t I trust
you?’
The mocking smile left Richard’s face and a hardness appeared in his blue-grey eyes.
‘Only you can decide that,’ he said in a voice of such cold anger that Willow began to sweat. Annoyed with herself, determined to believe in all she had known of him and felt about him, she put the sensation down to her disturbed night and said as coolly as she could:
‘Richard, what are you doing? Are you trying to make me doubt you?’
He shrugged and then brushed his hands over his face and through his hair again. Willow waited as he sat staring at her. He opened his mouth as though to speak and then shut it again. At last his face relaxed into its more familiar self-deprecating smile.
‘I suppose that the very idea of a friend who has unquestioning faith in me is such a lifeline in this nightmare world that I’m trying to push you and push you so that when you don’t crack I can be sure of you,’ he said, sounding more like himself.
Willow still did not speak. She wanted to reassure him, but he had shaken her badly and she needed time to assess what had happened.
‘Christ!’ he burst out into the silence. ‘You of all people ought to know that I’m not capable of slitting someone’s throat. You know more about me than anyone. We were lovers for three years. Willow.’
He spread his hands palm upwards on the table. They both looked at his hands and remembered the nights they had spent during those years. Willow shivered and then tried to force herself back into rationality.
‘Yes, I do know you’re not capable of murder,’ she said when she could speak again, ‘despite what various people have told me.’
‘Well, thank God for that. You were beginning to worry me.’
‘That makes two of us then,’ said Willow more lightly. ‘By the way, why did you never tell me that you were adopted?’
Richard put his hands in his lap again as he stared across the plastic-covered table at her, obviously puzzled by her question.
‘Didn’t I? It wasn’t particularly secret. If I didn’t, I suppose I thought you wouldn’t be interested.’ He looked carefully at her as though trying to understand her. After a while he murmured: ‘I see. You think that because I never told you that the parents who brought me up had not actually bred me I might have lied to you about other things, and that I might be not only a liar but also a murderer?’
‘No; no, of course not. Put like that it sounds absurd,’ said Willow. She took off her spectacles and rubbed the space between her eyes.
‘You’ve had your hair cut,’ he said suddenly.
Willow laughed and felt better. ‘Yes. I’m sorry to have sounded wobbly. I suppose the strain of it all must have been been getting to me. I didn’t sleep much last night and I’ve lost a lot of my various sorts of armour recently.’
‘I had noticed that,’ said Richard more gently.
‘And that policewoman came to see me and tried to show me how little I know you.’
‘What? That’s outrageous! Have you told Roylandson?’
Willow shook her head. ‘She came out of the best motives, I think, and at some risk to herself. Look, Richard, we ought both to calm down and start work.
All this emotion is misleading and –’
‘Dangerous?’ There was a light back in Richard’s eyes and a tenderness she had not seen for some time.
‘You always did hate messy feelings. All right: what do you want to ask me?’
Gripping the handle of her briefcase as though it were a piece of that discarded armour, Willow hauled the case up in front of her and got out her notes and the small dictating machine.
‘D’you mind this?’
Richard shook his head. She switched on the machine.
‘Right. Now on the basis that we know you did not kill Sarah Allfarthing and assuming that it is mad to suggest a wandering vagrant did it, the most likely possibilities are limited to the security men, Robert Biggleigh-Clart, Bill Beeking and James Stedington. There are also Mrs Biggleigh-Clart; the client who was at the meeting that night, whose name I don’t know; and the lawyer, who was James Certes of Blenkort & Wilson.’
‘Quite a long list,’ said Richard with audible self-control.
‘I know, and I’ve no basis for including any of the people from the meeting, because I don’t see how any of them – even if he left the meeting room for long enough to kill Mrs Allfarthing – could have cleaned himself of all her blood.’
Richard shuddered and Willow leaned across the hard table to touch his hand.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But we’ve got to hang on to every possibility, however absurd.’
‘All right. What can I do?’
‘Tell me things. What is the relationship between the Biggleigh-Clarts like?’
Richard pushed his chair back and crossed his legs, laying one ankle across the other knee.
‘I suspect it’s like most City marriages that have survived a quarter of a century. He has always worked bloody hard and she’s had to build her own life around that. They don’t see an enormous amount of each other, but from all I’ve heard when they do meet they’re perfectly civilized.’
‘It sounds rather bleak. D’you think that there is any foundation to the rumours of Biggles’s infatuation with Sarah Allfarthing?’
Richard put his hands in his pockets and pushed his chair on to its back legs.
‘You’ll break your coccyx if you tip the chair right over,’ said Willow, sounding like a nanny.
Richard grinned briefly. For once he looked as though he might be thinking of Sarah without seeing her mutilated body.
‘He thought she was gorgeous and interesting – and funny, too. And so she was.’ There was nostalgic sadness in Richard’s eyes and in his voice. ‘She was utterly different from Clara, and interested in the things that interest Biggles. Yes, I suspect he did think she was marvellous. Whether they had actually had an affair, I don’t know. I think it’s unlikely that she’d have wanted it even if he did, but …’
‘Did they have any opportunities for making love?’ asked Willow when it became clear that Richard was not going to finish his sentence.
‘I’d have thought they had plenty. He sometimes whisked her off for expensive lunches from which they did not re-emerge until late afternoon. And occasionally they would be visiting the same clients in Europe or America at the same time. Hotel rooms and all that. But, you know, the more I think about it, the less I can see Sarah sneaking off for an illicit bonk with anyone, let alone Biggies.’
‘Some people are rather less complimentary about her than you,’ said Willow slowly.
‘Does that make you suspicious of me or her?’
Willow shook her head and shrugged. After what they had just been through she was determined to keep any remaining doubts to herself.
‘I liked her,’ said Richard, sounding helpless. ‘But it’s true that there were people who didn’t find her spell as compelling as I did. Stedington was one. He thought she was pushy and he found her jokes tiresome. Or perhaps Clara persuaded him into saying so. She has a lot of influence over him.’
‘What sort of jokes? Practical? Smutty?’
‘Don’t be idiotic’
Willow was glad to see that Richard was fast regaining his normal confidence and the automatic rejection of her suggestion, which would once have infuriated her, made her smile.
‘Neither of those. She just added a spice of fun to the most ordinary transactions. If she wanted to twist someone’s arm for a favour she’d pretend she knew something discreditable, and –’
‘That doesn’t sound particularly charming,’ said Willow, remembering that Jeremy Stedington had said much the same.
‘Don’t be sour. Willow. You’re deliberately misunderstanding. It was a joke.’
‘Sophisticated stuff!’ said Willow in derision.
‘You wouldn’t understand unless you’d been there: It was the kind of banter that makes people grin and stops the working day seem too long and boring. Most successful people
have their own technique: that was hers.’
‘I see. Richard?’
‘Yes,’ he said, letting his chair settle back on all four legs. The sound of them hitting the hard floor echoed round the room and reminded Willow of her fading headache.
‘The police are of the opinion that you were jealous of Sarah’s success and afraid that she would soon, overtake you.’
Richard laughed. ‘Come on, Willow. You know better than that. She was a good two years older than I am. She had only recently got her first foot on the ladder and I’ve been an assistant director for years. I have faithful clients in all sorts of worlds; she was always terrified of being marginalized and relied pretty heavily on James Certes’s recommendations.’
‘Well, that’s something, then. Good. I’ll tell Roylandson.’
While she made a note, Richard asked her what else she wanted to know.
‘Who do you think might have done it?’ she asked for the second time and watched Richard’s face whiten.
‘That’s an impossible question.’
‘Difficult but not impossible. You know all these people. You must have thought about which of them could have done it.’
‘I suppose …’ His voice faltered. ‘No, it’s unlikely to have been the client, whoever he was. I suppose …’
‘Come on, Richard. Loyalty and finer feelings are all very well, but if we’re to get you out of here, I need to know everything you can tell me.’
‘I suppose,’ said Richard with reluctance, as though the words were being dragged out of him, ‘that the most likely, or rather the least unlikely, is Beeking. You’re right. I have been thinking about it, over and over again. He’s the only one who‘s ever seemed at all weird, and there’s no doubt that his feelings for Sarah were intense – and exceedingly possessive.’
His skin took on a grey tinge.
‘It’s a detestable thought and you mustn’t … don’t go accusing him.’
‘I’m not that foolish. But I must talk to him and find out if he could have left the meeting for any reason and if he kept a change of clothes in the office.’
Bloody Roses Page 21