Bitter Herbs

by Natasha Cooper

  Despite her early identification with Gloria, Willow was beginning to understand why Ann and Eve had received the news of her death so outrageously. If Willow herself had been in Marilyn’s position she might well have whacked Gloria over the head. Then she corrected herself: she would simply have told her employer exactly what she thought of her behaviour and left her house for ever.

  What kind of person would you have to be to put up with such humiliating treatment for so long? she asked herself. How much resentment would you have to bury and what might that lead you to do? Willow’s frivolous suspicion that Gloria might have been murdered returned once more and seemed rather less frivolous than it had done at first.

  Wondering about Marilyn’s motives for staying with her aunt for six years of bullied misery, Willow remembered what she had read in the letter Elsie Trouville had shown her, begging for parole from a life sentence. It was a phrase that had been echoed almost verbatim that afternoon when Marilyn said that there were times when she would have done almost anything to shut her aunt up.

  ‘Was her death a surprise, or had she always had heart trouble?’ Willow asked casually, hoping that the resentment was still clouding Marilyn’s judgement enough to conceal the real point of the question.

  ‘She’d had angina for years. I think she’d had a very minor stroke, too, about a year ago, but she always dismissed the idea and it hadn’t incapacitated her at all. The doctor thought it was possible she had had a stroke when I described what had happened. You see I found her on the bedroom floor one day. She said she’d just tripped, but there had obviously been a real time lag she wasn’t aware of.’

  ‘Did you tell her about it?’

  ‘She wouldn’t listen to me, and the doctor thought there wasn’t any point in pushing it. He was treating her for the angina and he wasn’t at all surprised when she died. He really wasn’t. He said nothing could have been done about it. If it was going to happen it would happen. We couldn’t have prevented it.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Willow as she absorbed Marilyn’s unnecessary reiteration of the doctor’s calmness. Did the lady protest too much? ‘Perhaps I ought to talk to him, too. He might be able to let me say something about how bravely she put up with the difficulties and pains of ill-health that I could write up.’

  ‘He might,’ said Marilyn doubtfully, but then she smiled with real brilliance, ‘but I doubt it. He’s a lovely man, very kind and very sensible. I don’t know what I’d have done if I hadn’t had him to help me when Aunt Ethel became too difficult.’

  ‘This is going to be a tricky assignment, I can see,’ said Willow. ‘I think I’ll have to read her books before I talk to anyone else. Do you like them?’

  ‘I haven’t read any for ages. I loved them when I was about fourteen, but I didn’t know her then. Somehow knowing her made it different. Do you want to borrow some? We have file copies of every single edition of every single book, even the big print and the braille.’

  ‘It’s all right, thank you. Her publishers are sending a full set round to my flat. Could I possibly see some of the rest of the house while I’m here? Your aunt obviously had marvellous taste, and I could write about that.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Marilyn got up and smoothed her pleated skirt down over her thighs. ‘She did do the house very well. She picked out all the furniture herself and chose all the colours and things. It is quite nice, I have to admit that.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Willow thought that anyone who used so colourless and unimaginative a description of the glory around them had little future as a writer.

  Marilyn escorted her around several of the other rooms, each of which was as perfect as the last. It was obviously a familiar tour, because Marilyn could describe the origins of each piece of furniture and each painting, citing its provenance and likely value. Most of it was of museum quality and yet oddly enough, despite the perfection of the rooms, their atmosphere was almost friendly. Willow’s doubts about Marilyn grew. It seemed impossible that anyone with such discernment could be as frightful a person as she had made her aunt out to be.

  As they stood in the main bedroom, admiring the view over the garden to the trees that bordered the river, Willow decided to risk pushing Marilyn a little further.

  ‘How did she actually die? I mean were you there? It must have been very difficult for you.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t there,’ said Marilyn so abruptly that Willow’s mildly suspicious mind began to click like a geiger counter near a lump of uranium. She moved away from the window and began to fiddle with the silver boxes and a lovely little enamelled étui on the bedside table.

  ‘I see.’

  Marilyn looked up smiling apologetically, as though she were conscious of her own rudeness but not, Willow thought, of the oddness of the question.

  ‘It happened when she was asleep. She’d been very tired all day and a bit breathless, and she asked me to bring her supper up here on a tray. That had been happening more and more recently. I’d bring it up and wait downstairs in the kitchen until she rang for me to remove the tray. Well, the day before yesterday she never rang. I waited until half-past nine, because she hated me coming in if she hadn’t rung, and then I crept in to see if she was all right and she just seemed to be asleep. It did cross my mind that she might have got ill, but she seemed all right and I didn’t want to bother her.’

  ‘Was she in bed?’

  ‘Not really. She was lying under the eiderdown, but I could see she still had her clothes on. She used to rest like that in the afternoons, but I’d never seen her do it after dinner before.’

  ‘Didn’t you try to wake her?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ Marilyn’s protest was vibrant with horror. ‘She’d have hated that and been furious with me. No, I crept away, leaving the tray where it was on the table in the window so that I didn’t wake her with clinking china.’

  Willow looked round the room, which was large and had obviously once been two, and tried to imagine the scene. The bed was at the garden end, a vast four-poster hung with old flame-coloured brocade and flanked by plain mahogany tables carrying lamps, books, flowers, tissues, objets de vertu and a silver photograph frame surrounding the portrait of a remarkably handsome man with the hairstyle and pose of forty years earlier.

  ‘Were the lights on?’ she asked.

  ‘Just the one to the right of the bed,’ said Marilyn.

  Willow imagined the grey-haired woman, who must have been dwarfed by the great bed, lying with her eyes shut in the pool of light.

  ‘She must have felt ill enough to turn off the rest of the lights and get under the covers and yet not ill enough to ring for me …’ Marilyn looked anxious, as well she might, thought Willow, considering she had at the very least left her elderly relative to die alone and without help.

  There were other possibilities, too, but Willow’s experience of genuine murder enquiries suggested that Marilyn probably would not have been quite so loquacious if she had had any real guilt to hide. She would have had to be a great deal more intelligent than she seemed, and subtler too, to take that route away from discovery.

  ‘I don’t really understand it,’ Marilyn went on, gabbling again, ‘but the doctor said she might merely have felt very tired and then, once she was already in bed, away from the bell, felt the pain and died.’

  Marilyn looked self-conscious as she rattled off her explanation, both the secret satisfaction and the bitterness gone from her eyes.

  ‘It is really awful,’ she went on. ‘Whatever I thought about her, she oughtn’t to have died on her own up here in pain.’

  Willow watched in silence, hoping for more, as Marilyn walked the whole length of the room to stare out of the other window, overlooking Kew Green.

  ‘I feel dreadful about it,’ she said. ‘And I was so impatient, too, as I sat there in the basement and then so cross when I did go back across to the cottage. And all the time she was dead.’

  Willow waited again, her eyes cold and her mind analysing
all the excuses, the apparent guilt, and the renewed volubility.

  ‘The doctor says he doesn’t blame me,’ added Marilyn again, sighing. She rubbed her eyes like a child.

  ‘I can’t see why on earth he should,’ said Willow, hoping that sympathy might lead Marilyn to say more. ‘It’s none of my business and completely irrelevant, but what did her supper consist of?’

  Marilyn turned and Willow saw that at last there was suspicion in her reddened eyes, but she answered the question, once again with unnecessary elaboration.

  ‘Fish. She always had fish at night. Sole colbert and Kenya beans and a few potatoes, sautéd. Oh, and half a bottle of champagne. She always had that, too. Doctor Trenor said that moderate drinking would be positively good for her heart, which pleased her. I brought it up and put it on this table, here.’

  She returned to the bed end of the room and laid one ringless hand on the mellow mahogany of a square Regency breakfast table that stood a foot or so away from the window. It was quite out of period, Willow saw, but a beautiful piece with its tripod legs and golden satinwood cross-banding, and in wonderful condition.

  ‘Had she eaten – or drunk – any of it?’ she asked, willing to arouse yet more suspicion because it seemed unlikely that she would ever get another chance to ask such questions, and increasingly she felt that she needed the answers.

  ‘Most of it. Well, only about half the fish, but everything else. She was greedy, you know, and overweight.’

  ‘Oh. Well, it’s miserable for you, and most unfair of me to make you come up here and remember it all. Let’s go down.’

  Willow left the house at last, perplexed, suspicious and thoroughly determined to find out exactly how her subject had died. It was a bore that she would probably not be able to explore her ideas with Tom. Almost more than anything she missed the easy friendliness of the discussions they used to have.

  When she got back to Chesham Place Willow found fires burning in every room, new flowers casually arranged in her bedroom and in the drawing room in a matching pair of black Ming vases she had recently bought at Spink’s. She took off her boots and overcoat and slipped her cold feet into a pair of sable-lined velvet slippers that Tom had given her.

  She had always disapproved of bedroom slippers on the basis that they looked sloppy, were generally dirty and gave an impression of slovenliness that she hated. Tom had first reminded her that she suffered from poor circulation in winter and that her feet were nearly always cold and then found the most absurdly luxurious slippers available to give her for Christmas.

  Willow, who had never seen anything like them in any shop, occasionally wondered whether he had had them made for her and if so how he had managed to afford them even on a chief inspector’s salary. The possible reasons for his unusually lavish generosity worried her as she battled with the phantoms of her dissatisfaction.

  The slippers might even have been a guilt present, she thought, a wordless apology for some infidelity. If so, she needed to know more. The whole problem would be solved at once if she knew that he wanted to call a halt to their love affair. But, since he would never answer her questions, he made it impossible for her to decide what to do. He also confused her by alternating between the unpleasant moodiness and demands, usually unspoken, for greater intimacy.

  Remembering the occasionally bleak but at least simple days when she had cared for nobody, Willow decided to return to the emotional safety of her researches into Gloria’s world. She went into her writing room in search of the article that Eve had promised to fax that morning.

  As Willow started to read the article, she wondered why anyone should have even bothered to sue its author, but when she had finished she was no longer at all surprised. Posy Hacket’s conclusion read:

  With ideas like these being thrust at the unformed and the vulnerable, it is no wonder that young women still put themselves in situations where they are at risk of violence or that some men find pleasure – or an easing of their own uncertainties – in physically tormenting the women who live with them. Gloria Grainger’s sentimental, cliché-ridden and apparently innocuous books are in fact highly dangerous. Censorship is anathema to most thinking people, but books like these can be quite as dangerous as hard-core pornography and tales of sadistic violence, and they can make the idea of at least informal censorship positively attractive.

  ‘Whew,’ said Willow aloud, forgetting that she was not still alone at the mill. ‘Isn’t she using an atom bomb to break a butterfly?’

  When she had recovered from her immediate shock, she looked up Posy Hacket’s telephone number and rang it.

  ‘Hello, this is Willow King,’ she said clearly when the telephone was answered. ‘We haven’t met, but …’

  ‘But I’ve written about you,’ said Posy Hacket in a harsh voice, removing Willow’s faint hope that she might get away unidentified as Cressida Woodruffe. ‘Are you inviting me to a duel at dawn? Or perhaps another outing in the courts?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ Willow quite liked the angrily ironic tone of the questions and warmed to the woman a little in spite of her own anger. ‘This isn’t about me at all. I’m writing a memoir of Gloria Grainger for our mutual publishers and I’m puzzled about her. I wondered if I could come and talk to you. You must have known her work better than most, and you could probably help me clear my brain a bit.’

  There was a short pause before Posy said:

  ‘I don’t see why not, if you really want to. I can’t say I knew her personally, although I did the interview, but I have some quite strong views about her work. Do you want to come tomorrow? Half-past eleven. I shan’t be working then.’

  ‘That sounds convenient,’ said Willow coolly, noticing the unspoken command to take it or leave it. She was surprised that her approach had been accepted so easily. Why should a journalist who had savaged a novelist welcome the victim into her own home?

  ‘Where do you live?’

  Posy gave the address in North London and assured Willow that there would be plenty of parking spaces around the flat.

  When she returned to the drawing room with her notes of the meeting with Marilyn Posselthwate, Willow found that Mrs Rusham had brought in a tea tray. There was thin, crisp toast spread with anchovy paste, a single crumpet keeping hot over a tiny, silver spirit lamp beside dishes of butter and honey, and part of a ginger cake that had gone marvellously sticky over the weeks since Mrs Rusham had baked it.

  At that moment it was sheer heaven to be presented with meals once again. Willow poured the tea and began to eat the anchovy toast in a ferment of gratitude. It was only when she had finished her tea that she let herself compare her domestic arrangements with Gloria Grainger’s and tried to imagine what Mrs Rusham might have said about her to an inquisitive interviewer.

  Robustly comforting herself with the knowledge that Mrs Rusham was neither her relative nor underpaid, Willow got back to work, filling out her notes of what Marilyn had told her and listing questions she still wanted to have answered, the most difficult of which was:

  ‘Could someone really have hated Gloria Grainger enough to kill her?’

  The door opened and Mrs Rusham appeared. Willow hoped she had not heard the question.

  ‘May I take the tray?’ she asked, showing no sign of interest or condemnation.

  ‘Yes, of course. It was a good tea. Thank you.’

  ‘I’m glad. And you asked me to remind you that you’re meeting Detective Chief Inspector Worth at the Partridge tonight.’

  ‘Oh, good heavens! So I am. Seven-thirty.’ Willow looked at her watch and saw she had only three-quarters of an hour. ‘I’d better go and change. Thank you, Mrs R. You’re very late today. You know, you really mustn’t work too hard.’

  Mrs Rusham looked so surprised that for a moment Willow wondered whether she normally seemed like an ogre, but then she banished the thought. Her housekeeper was quite tough enough to fight back.

  Chapter Four

  ‘And so you see, Tom, I’
m beginning to wonder whether she might not actually have been murdered,’ Willow went on as they waited for their food.

  Tom glared at her, looking almost as though he hated her. Angry but undaunted, Willow explained.

  ‘The niece, who strikes me as being a rather unpleasant piece of work, has been released from what she considers to be intolerable servitude, and she probably stands to inherit a fortune.’

  ‘Don’t be so damned irresponsible.’ Tom looked as though he had only just started to listen properly to what Willow had been saying.

  She stiffened and made up her mind. She had tried to meet him half-way and he had balked again. If he could not be bothered even to try to be pleasant to her any longer, she was going to have to force him to come out with whatever it was that had been making him so difficult. They had to sort it out before they made each other really miserable.

  Before she could say anything, a waiter brought their crab bisque. As soon as he had gone, Willow asked even less gently than she had the day before:

  ‘What is the matter with you, Tom?’

  He stared at her across the prettily laid table, oblivious of the eating, smoking, chattering crowd around them, his dark eyes angry and his usually wide mouth pinched and obstinate. Willow pushed him.

  ‘It can’t just be your new case. Is it something I have done? Or not done? What?’

  He rubbed his hands through his hair and she noticed that there were a few white wires in the darkness.

  ‘The case colours everything else,’ he said ambiguously.

  ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

  He looked round the restaurant, no longer unaware of the other people, and then back at Willow.

  ‘How can I?’ he snapped. She shrugged.

  ‘They all seem far too absorbed in themselves to eavesdrop,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t matter. Then what would you like to talk about? The ballet?’