Fruiting Bodies

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Poor you.’

  ‘Not really.’ Mary-Jane gave Willow a dazzling smile. ‘Now, your baby. That’s much more important than my husband’s secretary. You’d better ring home straight away. I’ll see you downstairs later.’

  When Willow reached Mrs Rusham, she sounded uncharacteristically harassed and admitted that Lucinda was awake and crying much more than usual. She had also refused the formula milk and was probably hungry. Willow promised to come straight home, put the telephone down and ran downstairs.

  ‘There’s trouble at home. I’ll have to go back,’ she said as soon as she saw Mary-Jane. ‘Will you …? I’m sorry. It’ll ruin the numbers and Jinx and Co. won’t be able to play.’

  ‘Don’t you worry. We can shuffle the tables about and always get other tables’dummies to bid your hand if necessary. You go on. Don’t worry about us. I hope your baby’ll be all right.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sure she will be. Thank you for today. I’ve enjoyed it.’

  ‘Me, too. I hope you’ll come to another of our lunches.’

  ‘Yes, I’d love to.’ Willow could not think of anything except Lucinda and did not want to waste any more time in politeness, but she did say as she hurried towards the front door: ‘Would you say goodbye to Jinx, Pippa and Susie for me? I liked them all so much.’

  ‘Good. Did you come by car?’

  ‘No, but I’ll get a taxi in no time.’

  ‘You might not at this time of day. They can be infuriatingly scarce. I’ll get Jinx to drive you. Hang on.’

  Before Willow could protest, Mary-Jane had disappeared and when she came back with the unfortunate Jinx neither of them would listen to Willow’s protests. They escorted her down the steps to where Jinx’s gleaming Volvo was parked in the forecourt and eased her into the front passenger seat.

  ‘I really am sorry to be dragging you away like this,’ said Willow. ‘I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking for a lift. I could easily …’

  ‘It’s fine. Honestly.’

  Willow shut her eyes and lay back in her seat, trying not to think of all the things that might be wrong with Lucinda. The car stopped at traffic lights every now and then, but Jinx had her home in fifteen minutes.

  ‘Would you like to come in?’ said Willow, hanging on to her manners with difficulty. Jinx seemed to understand. She shook her head.

  ‘You don’t want visitors at a time like this and I’d better go back and rescue the others. I’ll ring you later, if I may.’

  ‘You’re so kind,’ said Willow. ‘But, really, there’s no need for that.’

  She heard the front door opening behind her and whirled round to see Mrs Rusham with the howling baby in her arms.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I can’t quiet her and I don’t think it’s good for her to cry like this.’

  Willow flung herself down on the drawing-room sofa, wrenching off her jacket and unbuttoning her shirt. Lucinda arched her little back and screamed even more loudly as Willow took her from Mrs Rusham.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Mrs Rusham. ‘She’ll recognise the scent of your milk in a moment.’

  Miraculously she was proved right and in a very little time Lucinda was pulling at Willow’s nipple. Her breathing caught heartrendingly every so often and twice she choked, but she grew progressively calmer and was eventually relaxed enough to fall asleep against Willow’s breast. Willow leaned back against the sofa and let the waves of panic die down.

  Chapter Ten

  When Lucinda was properly asleep, with the turquoise necklace hanging at the end of her cot, Willow changed out of her clothes into a thin, yellow kimono and lay down to recover her composure. But she was too restless and worried to sleep. Eventually she got up, took another look at Lucinda, made sure that the baby alarm was switched on and went down the passage to her writing-room.

  The typescripts of her earlier novels neatly arranged on the shelves above her computer ought to have reassured her. But they did not. They just sat there confirming her fears that her old life had gone for ever. She opened the bottom drawer of the filing-cabinet to pull out a folder of her reviews. Rereading them was usually a good specific against looming depression.

  That did not work either. The tagged pages seemed to fall apart naturally at the bad reviews, the ones where her intentions had been misunderstood or the piece written by someone who sounded like either a disappointed novelist or a person with a bad attack of indigestion.

  ‘Bad mother; bad novelist,’ she said to herself. ‘Bad wife. Useless investigator. Damn it! I must find out who killed Alex Ringstead.’

  Reaching for a lump of discarded typescript, which she used as scribbling paper, she upset her box of paperclips and silently cursed her own clumsiness. She could not remember what she had done with the list of questions she had written in hospital and realised she would have to start the whole process over again. The idea that she had once been a competent, indeed high-flying, civil servant seemed ludicrous. Reminding herself that she had drafted White Papers, influenced important legislation, had innumerable private meetings with ministers, even prime ministers, that she had organised large groups of distinguished, acrimonious men and women, and kept a sizeable staff in order, she picked up a felt-tipped pen and tried to make herself think usefully.

  ‘That’s the pool,’ she muttered, having drawn a circle in the middle of the paper and tried to remember the layout of the obstetrics unit.

  Eventually she had completed what looked like a reasonable plan of the whole area and realised that the killer had not been taking too much of a risk in luring Alex Ringstead to his death. Only if someone had happened to be going in or out of one of the other delivery suites along the corridor at the exact moment when Ringstead was persuaded into the birthing-pool room could there have been a witness to what had happened.

  Willow herself had been delivered in the last room of the row, overlooking the front of the hospital; there had been four between her and the one with the pool and then two on the far side of that. The police must already have established that no one had heard or seen anything that would give a clue to the identity of the killer or they would already have made an arrest.

  Setting her imagination to work, Willow recreated the scene in her mind. Whoever the murderer was, he had had to get from the lifts to the birthing-pool room without arousing suspicion and then somehow persuade Ringstead to join him there. Once the door was shut on them both, the killer had persuaded Ringstead to bend over the pool and then pushed his head down into the water and held it there until he was dead. Six minutes.

  There must have been a great deal of splashing, and possibly some shouting, but even that did not help. Willow sighed. On that floor splashings and shoutings were not at all unknown. And with porters, doctors in white coats and doctors not in white coats, nurses, friends and attending fathers wearing everything from torn jeans to city suits, not to speak of demonstrating feminists from WOMB, almost no one would have looked out of place.

  The only way to get anywhere, Willow decided, would be to approach the problem from the other side and concentrate on the people who might have had reason to want Ringstead dead. She wrote them all down, however silly their motives seemed, and then immediately put a line through the parents of the brain-damaged baby (because the police had already released the father) and Sir George Roguely (because he had been the United States). She was left with: Durdle or another manager; the suspect ambulance crews; the nurse who had been Ringstead’s girlfriend before Mary-Jane; Mary-Jane herself; and Doctor Kimmeridge. It seemed a pathetic list.

  After a moment she put a line through Mary-Jane’s name as well. When she had shaken hands with Willow in the hall of her house she had had long, impeccably manicured nails. Anyone whose neck she had gripped would have had marks from those nails; and some of them would undoubtedly have broken.

  ‘Haven’t you ever heard of false nails?’ said Willow crossly putting a dotted line under Mary-Jane’s name and writing ‘stet’beside it. Then
she concentrated hard and was almost certain that the varnish on Mary-Jane’s nails had been clear. No false nails could be convincing without a thick layer of coloured varnish over them. And in any case, would she have been strong enough to force Alex Ringstead’s head under the water, even if he had allowed her to entice him into an empty delivery room? Reaching for the Tippex, Willow blotted out her dotted line.

  Before she could do anything else, she heard a sound from the baby alarm beside her and dropped everything before running along the passage to the nursery. Lucinda’s eyes were open and she was coughing. When she saw Willow’s face, hanging down over the edge of the cot, she started licking her lower lip and then almost smiled. It was not a proper smile, Willow admitted to herself as she smiled back, but it was a definite movement of the lips and it seemed to express pleasure. Lucinda raised her arms and waved her fists about like a conductor bringing in sections of her orchestra. In her neat blue-and-white baby-gro, she looked very appealing, especially now that her face was skin-coloured rather than red.

  Willow laughed and put her hand down. Lucinda grabbed one of her fingers and held tight.

  ‘Oh, Lucinda, you darling.’

  The baby gurgled and Willow forgave her everything. She put her other hand out to make Rob’s mobile move and watched her daughter’s eyes catch the movement and look towards it.

  When Tom got home he found Willow asleep on the floor beside the cot with one hand pushed through the bars and resting on the mattress. Lucinda was asleep, too, flat on her back with her thumb in her mouth. Feeling horribly excluded, Tom backed out of the room as quietly as possible, and went downstairs to the kitchen to find out from Mrs Rusham what had been happening during the day.

  Later, when he discovered that Willow was still asleep, he fetched a rug to lay over her and went exploring. He never usually entered her writing-room without an invitation, but he felt the need to be connected to one part of her life at least. Besides, the door was wide open and he knew that she was not in the middle of a book. He told himself that she could not possibly object and went in.

  The first thing he saw was the scribbled plan on top of the neat heaps of paper on her desk with the circle labelled ‘POOL’in the middle of it.

  ‘Oh, Willow,’ he said, sighing, and reached for the telephone.

  Five minutes later he had reached the incident room for the Ringstead murder and asked to speak to Superintendent Darnley, who was in charge of the investigation. When the man came on the line, Tom identified himself and explained his interest in the case.

  ‘I can’t tell you much,’ said Darnley, but he said it quite pleasantly.

  ‘Pity. Are you close to an arrest?’

  ‘I can’t say yet. But don’t let your wife worry. According to the interview reports, she neither heard nor saw anything at all. Even the most paranoid scrote isn’t going to think she can identify him. She’s not at risk.’

  ‘No,’ said Tom, not wanting to explain that it was not Willow’s fear of the murderer’s trying to silence her that was worrying him but her apparent determination to pre-empt the enquiry. ‘Is there really nothing I can tell her?’

  ‘Fraid not. Sorry. Between you and me, it’s a bugger of a case. No useful evidence from the forensic scientists. No eyewitness statements of any use at all. People milling around in and out of all those rooms all the time. Lots of them know each other, but lots don’t. No one can remember seeing anyone particularly out of place. But then they were all busy or terrified. There was another, worse, emergency than your wife’s haemorrhage, and they were all rushing about like blue-arsed flies. The last identified sighting of the victim was in the delivery room next to your wife’s, switching off his bleeper.’

  ‘D’you know who called him?’ said Tom at once.

  ‘Unfortunately no. There’s no record. The switchboard operators answer calls all the time and bleep whichever doctor’s needed. They can’t remember this particular call and they don’t tape them, so we’ve no idea whether it was a man or a woman, an internal caller or an external. We’re stuffed as far as that goes.’

  ‘Lines of enquiry?’

  ‘Several,’ said Darnley, sounding irritable for the first time. ‘Look, I can appreciate your interest, Worth, but there is nothing I can tell you.’

  Admitting to himself that he, too, would have been reluctant to tell any of his colleagues about the progress of one of his enquiries, particularly if it had not been going well, Tom thanked Darnley and put down the telephone. He wanted to tear up the notes Willow had made, but he knew she would hate that and feel, if not say, that he was trying to confine her into some fantasy of his own of what his wife ought to do.

  She still seemed unable to grasp that his only concern was for her safety. She was not equipped to chase murderers; the police were. Tom could not understand her dangerous and infuriating obsession with tracking down violent criminals. He had hoped that their increasingly serene life together and the appearance of Lucinda might change her, but it looked as though she were hanging on to her old ways.

  ‘What does she want?’ he muttered aloud in desperation and then flinched as he felt her hands on his back.

  ‘Only peace, Tom,’ she said from behind him. He turned in her chair and laid his head against her still-swollen abdomen. She hugged him and stroked his hair. ‘I can’t help it. I just panic at the thought that I’m losing myself. Thinking about who killed Ringstead is holding me together.’

  He kept his face pressed against her kimono, wanting to say all kinds of completely unsayable things like, ‘Aren’t I enough for you? What more do you want? And when am I going to get you back anyway? You’ve been off limits for months. I hate it. It’s not fair.’

  ‘I don’t do it to torment you,’ she said at last. He looked up at her and was half resentful and half relieved that she had no idea what he wanted.

  ‘I just wish I could understand why you take such risks,’ he said after a while.

  She pulled away.

  ‘Tom, scribbling down ideas about who might have hated Ringstead enough to drown him is hardly taking risks.’

  ‘But it isn’t only that, is it?’ Tom was quite pleased to have something to which he could legitimately object and said angrily: ‘You’ve been after his mistress today.’

  ‘How the hell do you know that?’ she asked, moving backwards. ‘Have you been spying on me?’

  ‘No, of course I haven’t been spying on you,’ Tom said, feeling ashamed of himself and sounding tired. ‘I just asked Mrs Rusham how you’d been today. She told me you’d been out to play bridge – and then she told me where. Willow, it’s dangerous.’

  ‘Why? Do you think Mary-Jane Roguely drowned her lover? Have you seen her? Relatively small, slight, and with impeccable, long-nailed hands.’

  Tom covered his face with his hands for a moment.

  ‘No, I don’t suspect her. Not least because, like you, I have no evidence of who killed him and no way of getting any. I have no part in this enquiry. The woman you saw today probably had nothing to do with it. But if you go around asking questions of people involved with any murder victim you risk stumbling on someone who knows something and needs to protect himself.’

  Tom waited for Willow to give in, trying to pull himself together and forget that part of him wanted her to prove he was more important to her than anything else at all – even their daughter.

  ‘I’m not trying to be a tyrant. I’m just begging you to take care.’

  ‘For Lucinda’s sake.’ Willow was horrified to hear a bitter edge to her voice and hastily covered it with a question about Tom’s early meeting, adding: ‘You must be fearfully tired after last night. I’ve had a sleep, after all, and I still feel pretty weedy.’

  ‘So I saw,’ he said, also making an effort to sound unemotional. Then he smiled. ‘You looked very sweet curled up on the floor. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Not too bad. Weaker than I expected. I think going out today was a mistake for all sorts of reasons.
’

  Tom leaned forwards again and laid his face against her, no longer exuding anger and despair. They stayed together until they heard Mrs Rusham’s tread on the stairs. Tom went out to ask what she wanted. When he came back it was to say that she had asked whether Willow would like dinner in bed or laid in the dining-room as usual.

  ‘In bed would be bliss,’ she said, ‘unless you loathe the idea?’

  And so they dined on crab soufflés, salad and cheese, with Willow lying in bed and Tom sitting at the table in the window. She gave Lucinda a final feed, changed her and settled her for the night, before retreating to bed with her nearest rival’s new novel. Tom joined her at ten and they switched off their lights half an hour later.

  That night there were four interruptions from Lucinda. In the morning Willow woke even before the first cries came through the alarm and felt very much stronger than she had the previous day. Full of confidence that she would be able to find out who had killed Alex Ringstead in spite of Tom’s disapproval, she slipped out of bed to get her maternal duties over as quickly as possible.

  Lucinda accepted her feed serenely and allowed herself to be laid back in her cot without any fuss at all, leaving Willow and Tom to eat their breakfast in peace. Mrs Rusham surpassed herself, providing them with sliced mangoes, small freshly made brioches filled with wild mushrooms and topped with bacon crisped in the oven, and perfect coffee.

  Willow even had time to drink a second cup of coffee before the baby alarm disturbed them. She stood up when she heard the first gulping cries and brushed Tom’s head as she passed his chair. He reached up to touch her hand and smiled at her. Neither of them said anything about what she might be planning to do that day.

  By the time she had quietened Lucinda once more, Tom had had to leave for work. Willow took a third cup of coffee into her writing-room and set about deciding how best to find out what she needed to know to identify Alex Ringstead’s murderer.