Rotten Apples

by Natasha Cooper

  He brushed some stray blond hairs off his jacket Willow assumed that they were his own. From where she was sitting they looked the right length and texture. But they were enough to raise a new suspicion in her mind.

  What if George Profett had not only known Fiona Fydgett, but perhaps even been one of her lovers? What if his anxieties about her suicide were more personal than he had suggested? Regretfully Willow told herself that she was being absurd again.

  ‘No,’ she said aloud. ‘I want an end to this shiftiness. I want to know exactly what it was you thought I’d find in Scoffer’s office and how you thought I’d do it, working blind like that.’

  As she saw the obstinate look return to the minister’s thin face, Willow tried again. ‘Please don’t waste any more time. Yours or mine,’ she said. She thought that she saw a softening in his eyes, as though he had decided to co-operate.

  ‘Please,’ she said again to urge him on.

  ‘It’s all rather delicate in the circumstances,’ he said abruptly, swinging his chair round so that the only part of him Willow could see was an absurd little tuft of fair hair sticking out over the leather top.

  ‘So there is something else. I thought so. Nothing that leads to arson can be too delicate to explain,’ Willow said, holding on to her anger. ‘There will only be more trouble if it doesn’t get sorted out now.’

  The minister swung back again, more slowly. Willow was surprised to see that his face was flushed. She did not think that he was aware that he had stuck his tongue between his teeth and was biting it.

  ‘It is true that I had another motive in sending you there. It was of minor importance compared with the Fydgett case, but it is true that it existed. I had planned to keep it to myself, but I suppose you’d better hear it all now, if only to prevent you making unintentional mischief.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Some weeks ago, fairly soon after my appointment, I was contacted by Leonard Scoffer, who told me that he was worried about possible corruption in his office.’

  ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me that in the first place?’ Willow demanded, thinking immediately of Jason Tillter and his flashy suits and expensive silk ties. She also thought of the look of satisfaction he had been wearing when she first saw him after Len’s death.

  ‘Because everyone in authority agreed that there was no possibility that the allegation was justifiable. I merely wanted Scoffer to believe that I had sent someone to the office in order to stop him taking any more action.’

  ‘But whom did he suspect?’

  The minister looked even more uncomfortable and began to fiddle with the ornamental pen set at the further edge of his desk. It was a horrible contraption of vomit-green onyx and thin gold-coloured metal.

  ‘That’s what makes it all so delicate. He accused Kate Moughette of taking bribes in order to end investigations into taxpayers’affairs. I talked to Sir Roland Collins-Nestor, the Chairman, who had some extensive enquiries made and was able to assure me that there was no possibility of anything of the kind. Apparently the powers-that-be were well aware of Scoffer’s dislike of Moughette and of his ideas about her.’

  No wonder the atmosphere in the office was so full of aggression, thought Willow, wishing that she had brought a tape recorder with her. She did not want to miss—or forget—anything the minister might say.

  ‘He’d already been on to them with his delusions. And I must stress again that they are certain that Scoffer was deluded. He was due to retire at the end of this year and it was thought that the problem would simply disappear with him. He’d made Moughette’s job even more difficult than it would otherwise have been, and she’s thought to have handled him well.’

  ‘But you disagreed, didn’t you?’ suggested Willow, trying to keep all sounds of judgment out of her voice. ‘Why?’

  ‘It wasn’t that I disagreed with their conclusions about Moughette’s probity,’ he said stiffly. ‘I have no reason to doubt that at all. I simply thought they were over-confident about her containment of Scoffer. The very fact that he’d written to me suggested that he was not going to stop his campaign.’

  ‘I wish you’d told me.’

  ‘I couldn’t. Slander, for one thing,’ said the minister, looking at her with less defensiveness. ‘As I say, I thought that your presence there might in itself keep him quiet. We don’t want to rock any boats at the moment, and I was afraid that if he got no satisfaction from me he might go to the press.’

  ‘There I think you underestimated his sense of duty,’ said Willow in a judicious tone. ‘He seemed to me to be devoted to the service. I don’t think he’d ever have done anything to bring it into disrepute. But you do see what this means, don’t you?’

  The minister shook his head.

  ‘You must tell the police. It widens their enquiries hugely. For one thing it puts Kate Moughette in the frame for the arson.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’ The tone in which the minister spoke was surprisingly tolerant. It was not that of a man being given orders by someone well below him in the chain of command. Willow wondered why.

  ‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘Apart from Scoffer and me, she was the last to leave the office. She did her best to get me to leave, too. She was virtually the only person who could have made him stay, and she could easily have stripped the wires that ran between their two rooms and put some accelerant down to catch the sparks.’

  ‘Is that how it was done?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Willow in frustration. ‘I assumed you would. They won’t tell me anything useful. And I know nothing whatsoever about electricity—or starting fires. Look, Minister, this is really serious. Will you ring Superintendent Blackled or shall I?’

  ‘I don’t know any Superintendent Blackled. I’ve been dealing with a man called Stephen Harness, who already knows everything that I know.’

  ‘You mean you’ve told him about Kate Moughette?’

  ‘Of course I have. What do you take me for?’ Profett sounded amused rather than angry. ‘Now, have you anything else to ask? If not, I really must be getting on.’

  Willow clamped her teeth together, still frustrated and wishing that she could get a proper grip on her mind again. She shook her head. ‘I’ll draft my report as soon as I can get my fingers accurately on to the keys,’ she said, looking at the bandages.

  ‘Thank you. And please believe me when I say again how sorry I am at what has happened to you.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ said Willow, hitching the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder. ‘I’ll leave you to it now. Goodbye, Minister.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  As she walked to the door of his office, she could not help wondering whether he had yet been completely frank about his motives for sending her to the tax office.

  George Profett might never have been anywhere near an image consultant, he might look unimpeachably honest, but he had fought his way into Parliament and on to the front bench, and to do that he must have made himself agreeable to voters, whips and colleagues. It was unlikely that all of them had shared all his views, and yet he had managed to persuade them that he was the best man for the job. Either he had fudged some of his beliefs or he was a super-salesman.

  A taxi was depositing a quartet of American tourists outside the Palace of Westminster as she emerged, and she took it over from them, asking the driver to get her home as fast as possible. Looking at her swollen face and bandaged hands, he obviously assumed that she was ill and roared off into the middle of the traffic, frantically signalling and flashing his headlights at anyone who got in the way. Willow, who had wanted to get home quickly, but not quite that quickly, had to hang on to the strap above the door during some of his more ferocious manoeuvres, and closed her eyes as the taxi almost crashed into the side of an enormous lorry.

  With her mind playing around Scoffer’s allegations of corruption, the first thing she did when she got back into the house was to search the Yellow Pages for a list of private detectives. Checking that t
here was still time before offices closed for the day, she tried one of the agencies in the list.

  The woman she spoke to sounded quite untroubled by the fact that Willow wanted private financial information about a group of individuals but the price she quoted for providing it was enormous. Willow thanked her and tried another agency.

  That turned out to be a one-man band, and the man in question, whose name was Brian Gaskarth, quoted her a much more reasonable fee. Willow accepted it at once.

  ‘It’s all rather urgent,’ she said when Gaskarth had repeated all the names she gave him, checking that he had got the spelling right. ‘How soon can you get it for me?’

  ‘Twenty-four hours probably,’ he said, making no comment on any of the names. ‘Perhaps less.’

  ‘Great. D’you have police sources as well?’

  ‘A few. Why?’

  ‘I’d like to find out what evidence they have on a suspect they’ve been interviewing about…’

  ‘That’s not the kind of information I can provide,’ said the man at once. His unaccented voice did not sound at all shocked or angry, merely firm. ‘Criminal records? Yes. Car ownership? Yes. But not ongoing investigations. I don’t say it’s impossible, but it’s not part of the service I offer.’

  ‘Pity. Never mind. Get me the financial stuff and I’ll be happy. D’you need paying in advance?’

  ‘Cash when I bring the reports would be fine.’

  ‘Cash?’ repeated Willow, thinking of his tax position.

  ‘It’s simpler,’ he said, ‘than waiting for cheques to clear. Not all my clients are exactly…good risks.’

  Deciding that she could hardly be committing an offence by paying in cash since it was up to him to account for everything he earned and pay the tax on it, Willow agreed. Then she suddenly remembered the minister’s watch and his shiftiness, and added his name to the list Brian Gaskarth accepted it without a murmur.

  Willow thanked him again, cut the connection, rang the temporary tax office and asked for Cara Saks.

  ‘Cara, it’s Willow here. I’m not sure if I’m going to be up to getting to Croydon for the funeral on Thursday. Could you give me the Scoffers’address so that I can send some flowers?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Cara at once, making Willow fear for her future. The mixture of naivety, indiscretion and fear seemed to make her a most unsuitable candidate for senior management, even though they all made her an appealing human being in an office inhabited by the likes of Jason Tillter and Len Scoffer. Cara dictated the address.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Willow. ‘How’s it going with the reconstruction of the files?’

  ‘Not too badly. And we have had some luck. A whole heap of files has just been sent over by the police. Some of them are fairly hard to read because they got quite wet, but they’re not bad enough to go to the conservators. We’re working on them now. And the conservation people are… Oh, here’s Kate. I’d better go.’

  ‘Sure. Good luck. I’ll see you in due course.’

  Willow rang Directory Enquiries and got the telephone number for Len Scoffer’s house without difficulty. When she dialled it, she was answered by a quiet female voice.

  ‘I wondered if I could speak to Mrs Scoffer? I worked with her husband. My name’s Willow King.’

  ‘I’ll see. Please wait.’

  ‘How dare you?’ said an angry voice a moment later. Willow held the receiver a little further from her ear.

  ‘Is that Mrs Scoffer?’ she asked, trying to make herself sound timid. She was surprised that Len should have told his wife anything about her.

  ‘How dare you ring me?’ she said before Willow could even begin to offer condolences. ‘If it hadn’t been for you, he’d never have been there at that time of night’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Well, you ought to. If you hadn’t been poking about, causing trouble, stirring up his staff against him, ransacking his office after he’d left the building, he’d never have had to make sure you weren’t alone in it again. He’d have been home long before the fire even started. It’s your fault.’

  ‘But I wasn’t stirring anybody up,’ said Willow, shaken out of her own anger. ‘And I never went near his office when he wasn’t there.’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for you he wouldn’t have died. You got out all right Oh, yes, I read all about that You’re fine. But Len’s dead. I hope you remember that for the rest of your life.’

  The protests did not ring altogether true, but Willow told herself that lots of people found it hard to express strong emotion convincingly, and that Mrs Scoffer might well be parroting something she had read or heard because she could not find words of her own.

  ‘It’s you who should have burned to death,’ she went on very quietly just before she rang off, and that sounded much more convincing.

  Sickened by the injustice of the accusations, Willow sat back in her chair as she painfully put down the telephone receiver. She found herself thinking up excuses for Mrs Scoffer, who, after all, knew her only through Len’s exaggerated diatribes, but no rationalisation could remove the nausea she felt. Memories of the fire welled up in her mind and it seemed vile that anyone, however unhappy, could wish her dead in it. She felt like ringing Mrs Scoffer again to describe just what it had been like and how much responsibility Len had borne for her presence in the building in the first place. But she knew it would not help. And whatever Len might have done, he had not deserved his death.

  Much later in the evening, when Willow recovered some of her equilibrium, she went into the pristine kitchen and found the gazpacho and cold veal that Mrs Rusham had left for her. The sauce that accompanied the veal was a kind of mayonnaise, flavoured with capers and the wine and herbs she had smelled in the kitchen that morning, and it was delicious. Even so, she could not eat much of it and eventually put the remains in the bin and returned to the drawing room, switching on the television.

  For nearly an hour she pretended to be absorbed in a documentary about the health service, and then watched the news, hoping that there might be something about the police investigation of Scoffer’s death. There was not, but she was able to watch a short clip of George Profett speaking on human rights abuses during a debate that had taken place in the House of Commons that afternoon. He came over quite well, she thought, and looked good, too: earnest and well-meaning and thoroughly intelligent.

  ‘Perhaps he really is honest,’ she said aloud.

  The thought of lying sleepless in bed throughout another long sultry night filled her with horror, and so she went to the hospital, where she sat at Tom’s side until after one o’clock.

  Chapter Twelve

  The next morning’s post brought Willow a collection of bills and more letters of sympathy over Tom’s condition and her own experiences in the fire. There was nothing from the private detective, which disappointed her until she remembered that he had had only about thirteen of the twenty-four hours he had said he would need, most of them at dead of night.

  Reading the letters, she drank the superb coffee Mrs Rusham had made and ate a little of the grilled bacon. They had nothing to say to each other that could be safely said, and so they kept their own counsel.

  As soon as she had finished breakfast, Willow retreated into her lettuce-green writing room to work. She tried to ring Serena Fydgett but was told that she was not in chambers.

  ‘Are you expecting her?’ Willow asked the clerk.

  ‘Not today,’ he said politely enough.

  ‘I’m anxious to get in touch with her. She came to see me yesterday and there’s more we have to discuss. I never asked her for her home telephone number and now I find it’s exdirectory.’

  ‘I…’ began the clerk, but Willow hurried on.

  ‘I’m not asking you to give it to me, but I’d be grateful if you would ring her and tell her that I need to speak to her. I shall be on this number for the rest of the day.’ When the clerk agreed to do as she asked, she dictated her number and said goodby
e.

  Brian Gaskarth telephoned soon after that and asked when it would be convenient for him to bring round his report. Delighted with his quickness, Willow invited him to come straight away and waited in some curiosity to see what he would be like.

  When he came he was a surprise—tall and grey-haired, looking more like an experienced salesman than anything else. As he opened his Samsonite briefcase, Willow almost expected him to get out a bunch of glossy brochures and explain to her how he could get her huge discounts on a fitted kitchen or some double-glazing. Instead he took out a transparent plastic folder, from which he offered her several sheets of paper, neatly typed.

  Glancing through them as quickly as she could, Willow discovered that he had provided her with precise details of the income, debts and credit references of Kate Moughette, Jason Tillter, Len Scoffer, and the minister, together with opinions about their honesty from their respective banks.

  ‘That’s remarkably impressive,’ she said, glad of the information but uncomfortable, too. She wondered how many people had the same kind of data about her and almost laughed at the naivety that had once led her to believe that she could keep her identity as Cressida Woodruffe secret from all those who had known her as Willow King.

  ‘How did you get it all so quickly?’

  Gaskarth shrugged and then murmured something indistinct about fax machines, modems and new technology, adding more clearly: ‘You’ll find details of their standing orders, direct debits, and major spends attached to the covering sheets.’ He seemed quite unaware of the turmoil of feelings he had aroused in his newest client.

  ‘Then I think that’s it then, for the moment Perhaps I can call on you if I need anything else?’

  ‘Delighted. Here’s my account.’

  The bill seemed surprisingly modest. Remembering that he wanted cash, Willow frowned.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘No. It’s just that you’ve been so astonishingly quick that I haven’t got any cash out of the bank yet. I know it’s just what we agreed, but I haven’t got anything like enough on me. Is a cheque any good to you, or would you rather come with me to the bank while I get cash?’