Rotten Apples

by Natasha Cooper

  He was still pale and looked much thinner than he had ever been before. Small frustrations tired him out and he could not gauge when his energy was about to fail him. Food, even Mrs Rusham’s food gave him no pleasure, and he had to force himself to eat more than a mouthful at any meal. He slept badly at night, tormented by headaches. During the day he tended to become fretful if Willow was away for too long or if one of the neighbours started making a noise or a car backfired.

  Visitors were carefully screened and well briefed either by Mrs Rusham or Willow herself to stay no longer than half an hour. She longed for the time when Tom’s old easy, teasing tolerance would return and he would be himself again.

  That evening the air felt fresher than it had during the heatwave, and they had been sitting out in the little courtyard garden until Tom began to feel uncomfortable in his deck chair and they moved indoors. The French windows were still open and the late evening sun was flooding into the room, casting a warm light over the silver greys and calm pinks of the room. Tom seemed relatively relaxed.

  When Mrs Rusham brought in Chief Inspector Harness, Willow got up to greet him. He handed her a large bunch of red and white roses, wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbon.

  ‘You won’t mind if Tom doesn’t move, will you?’ said Willow, ushering the visitor towards Tom’s sofa. She gave his flowers to Mrs Rusham to put in water. It’s bad for him to keep popping up and down.’

  ‘She’s turning into a terrible tyrant, Steve. How are you?’ said Tom, holding out his right hand.

  ‘Pretty good,’ said Harness. ‘What about you? You look a lot better than reports that have filtered through to me suggested you would.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ said Willow, heading towards the door.

  ‘Why?’ demanded Tom. He sounded petulant, which was so unlike him that Willow stopped at once and smiled at him. ‘We’re not going to bore you with shop talk, you know.’

  ‘I’d be riveted with shop talk. You know that. I just don’t want to get in the way.’

  ‘Don’t be a clot. Drink, Steve? And do sit down.’

  ‘A drink would be very nice if you’re having something. But don’t trouble just for me.’

  ‘We will be. What have you got in the fridge, Evelyn?’

  Mrs Rusham smiled cosily at him. ‘There’s some champagne, of course, and a couple of bottles of that rather nice Alsace wine that Mrs Worth ordered last month. Or there are all the ordinary things.’

  ‘The wine’ll do fine.’ Tom stopped as though he had thought of something and deliberately smiled at Willow. ‘Unless you’d rather have champagne, Will? I’m sorry. I was being selfish and remembering the awful wind that last bottle we had gave me.’

  Mrs Rusham blushed and backed out of the room.

  ‘Now you’ve shocked her,’ said Willow, glad to see his smile.

  ‘Nothing I could do or say would shock her while I’m an invalid,’ he announced with all the satisfaction of a child who has got away with a piece of deliberate naughtiness. He added in more adult tones: ‘I’ll know I’m better when she starts to freeze me out again and demands that I call her Mrs Rusham.’

  ‘How did you know that she’s called Evelyn?’

  ‘Rob told me.’

  Willow smiled. She had packed off both Fydgetts to live in Fiona’s house as soon as the hospital told her that Tom was fit enough to go home, but Rob had been back several times and it bad begun to look as though he might become a fixture in their lives.

  Tom was nodding as Stephen Harness decided it was time he joined in the conversation.

  ‘How is young Fydgett?’

  ‘Getting on all right, I think, though no thanks to your lot. He and Tom are quite matey these days. They play chess together after school, but I don’t think they talk to each other at all.’

  ‘Talk?’ repeated Tom, laughing and looking much more familiar. ‘Certainly not You don’t think me and Rob have gone all girly, do you, Will? He does me good, you know, Steve. All these affectionate women keep wanting to know how I feel. Rob wouldn ‘t ask me anything so personal in a hundred years.’

  Willow made an undignified face at her husband and stuck out her tongue for a moment, glorying in his mockery. Harness looked surprised and turned to Mrs Rusham in relief. She had come back without the roses and was offering him a glass of Hugel’s Gewurtztraminer and a plate of miniature pancakes rolled around a mixture of smoked salmon mousse and chips of cucumber.

  ‘Thank you very much. They look delicious.’

  Mrs Rusham let him have a pancake and then took her tray of goodies to Tom’s sofa.

  ‘Can’t I tempt you to a little food? It’s all fish—good for your brain cells.’

  Tom laughed and accepted one tiny stuffed pancake. When she had gone, leaving the plate of pancakes and the bottle on a table near Willow’s sofa. Harness turned to Willow.

  ‘You’ll be glad to hear that Hallten is standing by his confession and the CPS is going to run with it. The trial will go ahead as soon as possible. Probably next winter some time.’

  ‘Did he get bail?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Yes. The view was taken that he’s been so chastened by what happened that he’s hardly likely to be a danger to the public. And that sensible wife of his has got him in the hands of an excellent shrink, who seems to be sorting him out’

  ‘What about the money?’ asked Willow.

  Harness turned to smile at her. ‘It’s all on the National Health.’

  ‘I didn’t mean the shrink. I meant the tax he owes and the other debts. From what his wife told me, he hasn’t a hope of paying them.’

  ‘I understand that he’s filed for bankruptcy, which will clear all the debts, including the tax, and she’s working as a secretary again to bring in enough to feed them and pay the rent. He takes care of the child while she’s out. It all looks as though it’ll work out reasonably well.’

  ‘Until he’s sent down,’ said Willow.

  ‘As he must be, even if it is manslaughter and not murder,’ said Tom from the further sofa. ‘Willow tells me he has a record.’

  ‘That’s right He did some time in Wandsworth. Oh, by the way, Mrs Worth,’ Stephen said, feeling in his jacket pocket.

  ‘Do call me Willow,’ she said, ‘and take off that jacket. You look awfully hot.’

  Harness smiled and did as he was told, neatly folding his jacket and laying it across his knees. She was amused to see that over his pristine blue shirt he was wearing bright green braces decorated with pink hummingbirds, and she wondered if he indulged in such eccentricities of dress at work.

  ‘I forgot to let you know about those four lifers you warned us about.’

  Willow looked warily at Tom, who had heard the story of most of her activities during his time in hospital, but he had come to terms with it all by then and grinned at her. Much relieved, she turned back to Harness just as Tom was saying, ‘Don’t worry about it, Steve. Black Jack reported to her a while ago, thank God. The pair of you really put the wind up her, you know.’

  Thinking he heard anger behind the amusement in Tom’s tired voice, Harness looked from him to Willow and back again and then seemed to make a decision. ‘We were just shaking the tree really.’

  ‘You what?’ said Willow.

  ‘You had a better opportunity than anyone else for lighting that fire. Given that you escaped and the only other inhabitant of the office died, I had to find out if you were on the level. The superintendent insisted on chaperoning you and pretending we were worried that you had been targeted by Tom’s would-be assassins, so that you didn’t get upset by the thought that you were among my suspects. Given Blackled’s rank I couldn’t stop him coming with me without making more of a fuss than I wanted.’

  Thinking of the waking terrors and the nightmares she went through after the fire. Willow was furious. ‘I don’t know that I want you drinking my wine,’ she said, trying to make a joke of her dislike.

  Tom heaved his battered body off
the sofa and padded across the floor in his bare feet to stand beside her with his hand on her head.

  ‘He had to do his job. Will, you know that.’

  Harness’s delicate skin had flushed a vivid blood red. ‘All I can say is that I’m glad that you turned out to be as you are. Until I’d interviewed you, I knew nothing about you. You must understand that, Willow.’

  Tom raised his glass. ‘Now, we’ve had enough of all that. The case is over and done with and ought to be forgotten. Budge up,’ he said, sitting down beside Willow and taking hold of her right hand in both of his. ‘Tell me when you first knew that it was Hallten, Steve.’

  As Stephen Harness began to explain the course of his investigation, Willow lost some of her anger and listened in growing interest as he laid bare the ideas that had been running in parallel with her own. In the end she laughed. Tom leaned his shoulder against her in a gesture of pleasure and perhaps of gratitude, too.

  ‘We ought to have shared our information right at the beginning,’ she said. ‘We’d both have got on to Hallten a lot faster if we’d done that, eh, Steve? And I wouldn’t have had a bruised throat.’

  He looked at her for a moment and then bowed his good-looking head. ‘That’s pretty generous, if I may say so. I’d better be off. Tom. I’m sure I’ll see you when you’re back at work. Willow, I hope that our paths will cross again, although perhaps not in the way of business.’

  Tom got up to shake hands with him and was all for escorting him to the front door, but Willow sternly sent him to lie on his sofa while she herself saw Harness out. At the front door, he apologised for upsetting her.

  ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘But if you feel you owe me anything, you could pay with a scrap of information.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ he said, looking at her warily.

  ‘Who was Serena Fydgett’s alibi?’

  The guarded look, in his eyes was transformed into a smile. ‘I can’t tell you that, you know perfectly well.’

  ‘Yes, but I am terribly curious. I’m also completely discreet. I’d ask her myself except that we’ve become friends and I don’t want to risk that—or Rob’s trust in Tom, which is good for both of them.’

  Harness waited for a moment and then nodded. ‘I shouldn’t tell you, but for some reason I’m going to. I only hope my trust isn’t misplaced. It was Malcolm Penholt, the MP.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Willow as several other pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. Penholt’s relationship with Serena would easily explain why he had been prepared to give George Profett time to make his enquiries before raising a fuss in the House of Commons. Any publicity he gave Fiona Fydgett’s case could have backfired if his relationship with her sister had been exposed, which it probably would have been.

  Their intimacy was obviously the reason why Serena had been less surprised to hear from Willow than might have been expected, and it could also explain what had made Serena so angry with her sister a short while before she had killed herself. From what Willow had learned of them both, it did not seem to be beyond the bounds of possibility that Fiona might have had a go at seducing her elder sister’s lover.

  When she got back to the drawing room, Tom smiled up at her.

  ‘Steve’s not such a bad egg, you know, Will.’

  ‘No, I know. But I feel a bit… Oh, I don’t know, used, I suppose. He charmed me into thinking how civilised he was beside Black Jack. I despise myself for having succumbed to his charm and believed his stories. It was plain old “good cop, bad cop” stuff and I fell for it.’

  ‘We all have our ways of getting people to talk. He couldn’t have known that you are as unlikely to set fire to a building as Rob Fydgett is to swap intimacies with me. Although…’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Rob did tell me one thing, which I think I ought to pass on to you. I know you’ll never let the boy know I told you.’

  ‘What is it?’ Willow said again in a different voice.

  ‘He did go into his mother’s room that day she killed herself.’

  ‘I thought he must have. Didn’t he guess what she’d done?’

  ‘No. He said she was lying in bed looking incredibly beautiful and he suddenly needed to talk to her, to tell her things he felt and find out what she felt about him. You see, sometimes she was full of affection and a kind of dependence, and at others he says she seemed to loathe and despise him. She’d tell him he was tiresome and clumsy and stupid and that if he’d never been born she’d have been fine and never had any of her depressions or tried to kill herself. He said it just washed over him then that he needed to know which was right and so he tried to wake her up. He called her name a couple of times, but she didn’t stir.’

  Willow remembered the way Rob had whispered her name on the night he had been burning paper in the drawing room fireplace and she wished passionately that she had given him what he needed. She nodded to make Tom go on.

  ‘He said that he needed her so much that he bent down and kissed her forehead. When she still didn’t move he kissed her on the lips. At that she sort of grunted, he said, and pushed his face away. He said he felt sick and desperate and he shook her, but she still didn’t wake. Miserable, rejected as he saw it, and frightened by everything he felt, he just ran out of the room. He didn’t notice the pill bottle or the whisky glass. He said that at that moment he hated her. But he had no idea she was dying.’

  Willow said nothing but her face was quite expressive enough.

  ‘I know,’ said Tom. ‘He told me that he felt utterly disgusted with himself for kissing her and bolted back to school. It wasn’t until much later, when he’d read her letter, that he understood and realised that he could have saved her life. I’ve tried to explain to him that he didn’t kill her and that it wasn’t his fault, but it’s going to take him a long time to come to terms with it all.’

  ‘Poor boy. No wonder he always seemed so guilty. I can’t have helped, asking my questions, and the police interview must have made him feel even worse than he already did.’

  ‘Yes, I think that’s probably right. But it had to be done. I know Harness hurt the boy, but you can’t blame him. Rob just got caught in the crossfire.’ Tom looked profoundly sad. ‘That’s what crime does: its ripples affect huge numbers of innocent people who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

  Willow said nothing, feeling obstructive. Tom tried again.

  ‘Look, you can’t blame the police if, faced with a dead body, they trample over the sensibilities of the innocent in their search for the guilty.’

  ‘I suspect that that’s pretty much what Len Scoffer thought about his job of hunting down tax dodgers, but I don’t know that I can accept it. I don’t think he ever actually broke a rule, let alone a law in his life, but he harmed people … innocent people.’

  Tom sat up in defiance of her orders and patted the cushion beside him. ‘Come and sit down, and stop looking like an avenging angel, Will. Rob’s going to recover. He’ll find a way to tell himself the story that makes it all less awful. We can’t help him by agonising over his feelings, just as we can’t help Scoffer’s victims by blaming him for the things they did in response to his bullying.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Willow. ‘I’ve done my bit on that score by laying out for the minister exactly how Scoffer operated. If there’s anything that can be done to prevent it happening again in the future with another cast, he’ll do it. It’s his pigeon now.’

  Willow made herself smile. Tom took her hand.

  ‘One thing you haven’t told me is who Miss Andrea Salderton turned out to be,’ he said in a lighter tone.

  ‘Ah, now she is interesting,’ said Willow following his lead away from the thought of Rob Fydgett and what he had had to face.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She’s a protege of the minister’s from his days with Amnesty. Some years ago she was a political prisoner of one of those awful South American regimes. I’m not sure which one. But she was tortured, repeatedly over several mo
nths. Someone got her out in the end and George Profett has been paying her an allowance ever since. She’s getting better and doing bits and pieces of translation work, but she’ll probably need his help for years yet.’

  ‘Good for him,’ said Tom seriously. ‘Really good.’

  ‘I know. You can see why he got so angry when Gaskarth and I started truffling about trying to find out about her. As you can imagine, her hurts aren’t only physical and the last thing she needs is any kind of publicity. But I think he was a bit naive not to realise that someone might notice he was subsidising her and start asking questions. Quite frankly, he’s lucky that no one’s tried to expose her as his mistress.’

  ‘You mean the tabloids haven’t got on to her at all?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ said Willow, thinking of the SCDD classification Jane’s paper had given him. ‘Perhaps they don’t bother with bank accounts unless there’re some other clues to a good story, or perhaps the editors have a pact with him to keep off it.’ Willow took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. They had almost recovered from the effects of the fire, but she was still reluctant to wear her lenses again.

  ‘Is he in love with her?’

  ‘I think he probably is, from what Gaskarth gathered from someone who knows them both; but she can’t bring herself to trust anyone and needs to live alone. You can understand it.’

  ‘Yes, I think you can. And perhaps his fear of officials misusing their power comes from the same thing. From what you’ve said it does sound a trifle exaggerated, if not actually neurotic.’

  ‘Perhaps a bit. And not knowing any of the background, I just assumed he’d invented it to cover something else up. It kept me from seeing what was really going on for days.’ Willow paused to rub her head against his shoulder. ‘That and my terror for you.’