Fruiting Bodies

by Natasha Cooper

  Feeling useless, Willow lay down again and tried to sleep. That did not work either. She was tempted to wake Lucinda so that she could feed her, which would at least have given her the illusion of doing something worthwhile, but she should not disturb her for such a selfish reason.

  Eventually Willow remembered the post that Mrs Rusham had brought her the previous evening. Leafing through the telephone messages, she found that there was one from Jane Cleverholme, which Mrs Rusham must have written down verbatim from the answering machine:

  Willow, you’ll never believe it, but I’ve got it. The job, I mean. Isn’t it amazing? Editor. I still can’t believe it myself. We must have lunch as soon as you’re up and about again. There’s lots I want to tell you and ask you, too. How are you getting on with the Roguelys? I’ve got lots of gossip. Ring me as soon as you can.

  PS Can’t resist telling you one bit: did you know that the Chief Executive of the Hospital Trust for Dowting’s once worked for George Roguely?

  Willow looked at the postscript for a long time, wondering whether it had any significance at all and eventually decided that it could not have. But it did remind her that she had meant to telephone Mary-Jane about her lost scarf. Checking the time, she saw that it was still far too early to telephone anyone.

  It was a blessed relief when Lucinda woke of her own accord wanting to be fed and then needing to be washed and changed. As they lay back in bed together, Willow searched her daughter’s apparently contented face, wondering how much she had heard or sensed of what had happened in the lift. Before she could worry too much, one of the nurses brought her a breakfast tray and put Lucinda back in the cot for her.

  Willow dawdled through the unappetising meal, trying to spin it out for as long as possible. Soft snuffling sounds from the cot told her that Lucinda was asleep again, and she had nothing else to do except telephone Mary-Jane in due course and wait for someone to bring her news.

  The first visitor knocked at her door a few minutes after half-past nine.

  ‘Come in,’ Willow called, glad that she was going to be told something at last. She pushed herself into a more dignified position.

  To her complete surprise, it was Mark Durdle’s well-kept face that peered round the door. Her palms began to sweat and her heart speeded up. She was extremely glad to remember that Inspector Boscombe had posted a constable outside the door.

  ‘May I come in?’ said Durdle, sounding meek and very far from dangerous.

  Willow saw the constable standing behind him, looking enquiringly at her. Believing that the officer’s ability to identify Durdle would be enough to keep her safe, whatever he might have tried to make someone else do to her or even want to do himself, she nodded.

  ‘Yes, do come in, Mr Durdle,’ she said, speaking his name with deliberate clarity. ‘What can I do for you?’

  He came in and shut the door behind him, but he did not approach the bed. Instead he stood with his back to the door, rubbing his hands over each other again and again as though he were trying to wash them.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I came,’ he said at last, shifting from one foot to the other, ‘to express my profound regret for what happened to you last night, and to … to apologise for it without of course in any way suggesting that the hospital could carry any kind of liability for it.’

  Watching the colour in his face fluctuating from a rich red to an interesting pale greyish-pink as he hopped and rubbed his hands, Willow could not help thinking that her first assessment of his character must have been the right one. Emma might have thought him a likely murderer, but she had never seen him.

  Even from where Willow was sitting she could see that his hands were trembling. He looked quite incapable of doing any physical harm to anyone. Her own fears began to seem almost silly.

  ‘I see,’ she said coldly because she had been so afraid. ‘You’re worried that I might sue the hospital over its rotten security, are you? Well, I can understand that. How would it be if I undertook not to sue in return for some information from you?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I want to know exactly what has been going on in this hospital, and I think you could tell me. I know that you’re in cahoots with WOMB – Ros let out that much. But I want to know just how far your involvement has gone.’

  Durdle looked at Willow as though she had just pulled off all his clothes and paraded him in some public place.

  ‘You didn’t really think no one would find out, did you?’ she said, feeling amusement for the first time since she had been assaulted. ‘If so you were incredibly naive. And what on earth were you doing taking Ros out to lunch in the smartest restaurant in the area? You must have been mad if you wanted to keep your conspiracy secret.’

  ‘There was no conspiracy,’ he said quickly. ‘I can assure you that my interest in her group is wholly above board and solely to do with my wish to ensure the wellbeing of women who come here to this hospital to give birth.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Willow, copying Rob Fydgett’s favourite expression of disbelief.

  Durdle flushed deeply, his skin taking on the rich, bluish pink of cochineal-coloured icing.

  ‘And I would like … You are making this very difficult for me, Mrs Worth.’

  ‘Oh, I am so sorry about that,’ she said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Did you set up WOMB yourself?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Then at what point did you become involved?’

  When he looked as though he were going to deny any involvement, Willow pretended to lose her temper.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ she said furiously. ‘I saw you outside the hospital on the night of the riot, the night when Mr Ringstead was murdered. I know you’ve been feeding WOMB information so that they could cause trouble for him. What I’m not sure is why you wanted them to produce such a brouhaha on that particular night and how much you knew about the plans to kill him.’

  ‘Nothing. What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re in a very difficult position even if you are innocent of that,’ said Willow implacably. ‘If I go to the police with what I know – or even to the chairman of your trust – you’ll have to answer a lot of difficult questions and quite possibly find yourself without a job.’

  Durdle looked so appalled that Willow thought that she must be getting somewhere at last.

  ‘When exactly did you become involved with them?’ she asked again.

  ‘Once it became clear that Mr Ringstead was going to do everything he could to prevent all the actions we had to take to ensure the profitability and hence viability of this directorate,’ Durdle said, speaking very fast as though that might make his admission less damaging.

  ‘I see,’ said Willow, not sure whether she could believe him. ‘And what were you trying to do? Get him sacked?’

  ‘Good heavens, no. Anyway it’s almost impossible to dismiss a consultant,’ said Durdle, betraying exasperation rather than fear or embarrassment for once. ‘But there are plenty of them suspended on full pay from other hospitals. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t do the same.’

  Willow said nothing, but her feelings must have been clear in her face, for Durdle rushed into another gabbling explanation.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been bad for him and it would have allowed us to get on with shovelling this hospital into the modern world. There was no malice in it. I didn’t want to do him any harm; I just wanted him out of the way. It was for the good of the hospital and all our patients. Something had to be done. He was blocking all the modernising we had to do, defying and humiliating everyone who tried to control him, and spending far too much time and money on babies who should have been dead anyway.’

  Willow could not say anything.

  ‘You don’t have to look at me like that,’ he burst out. ‘All I wanted was to get him suspended. He’d have been paid his full NHS salary and he could have gone on taking private patients. He wouldn’t have lost by it. And we’d have been able to get on
with our work. It would have suited everyone.’

  ‘You really are a despicable little worm, you know,’ said Willow, finding her voice at last. ‘You didn’t even have the guts to challenge him directly.’

  ‘You may think he was a saint,’ said Durdle nastily. He suddenly looked less wormlike and she had a moment’s doubt about his weakness. ‘Lots of people did, but they none of them knew him. He was a shit, an arrogant, selfish, self-regarding shit.’

  ‘What can you mean?’

  ‘I don’t have time to go into it all. And you probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. But I’ll give you just one of the myriad examples: there was a woman who worked here, a nurse, one of the best.’ For a moment he looked and sounded as though he might burst into tears but then he controlled himself. ‘And he wrecked her life for a selfish whim. That’s the sort of man he was.’

  He turned and without another word left her room, banging the door against the wall, leaving her to think hard about Marigold Corfe and to wonder whether she knew just how many champions she had left behind her in Dowting’s.

  ‘Are you all right, Mrs Worth?’ asked the constable, who had got to his feet as Durdle stormed past him.

  ‘Yes. But I was jolly glad you were out there while he was ranting and raving at me. Look, do you know whether the woman who assaulted me last night has been identified yet?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ he said, looking stupid. Willow was not entirely convinced by his expression.

  The sound of hurrying footsteps echoed along the passage, distracting them both. The constable looked to his left and all traces of stupidity vanished from his face as he straightened up. He looked both alert and intelligent.

  Tom appeared in the doorway a second later, panting heavily. ‘God, am I glad to see you,’ he said, leaning against the door frame. ‘Oh, Will.’

  ‘What’s happened? Come in and sit down, Tom.’

  ‘That woman’s disappeared.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I know. I looked in to find out whether they’d identified her yet. To everyone’s embarrassment, she’s gone. Boscombe’s got people trying to track her down now.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a guard on her?’ asked Willow in outrage. ‘I had one.’

  ‘Yes, there was, but he left her for a few minutes soon after five this morning. I know, of course he shouldn’t have done it, but he looked through the glass door, saw her sleeping “like a baby” and nipped away for, he says, three minutes at the most. When he got back, she’d gone. He raised the alarm at once, but they haven’t found her yet. How she did it, I can’t imagine, and she can’t have gone far. I legged it up here as fast as I could.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have worried, Tom.’ Willow smiled at him and held out a hand. ‘I was quite safe with my constable.’

  He took her hand and clung to it. She could not decide whether the unmistakable anger in him was directed at the police for not hanging on to the woman or at Willow herself for having provoked her. After a moment he let her hand go and said more lightly: ‘Anyway there is one good thing about her disappearance.’

  Willow raised her eyebrows in a silent question and was surprised to see Tom’s lean cheeks flushing.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to tell me that you thought I might have been the one who launched the attack, are you?’

  ‘No,’ he said at once. ‘But there’s no doubt Boscombe had it in mind. Look, Will, I know you, and I know that you wouldn’t do something like that in a million years, but if it had come to it there’d have been nothing to prove it one way or the other. It would have been the woman’s word against yours, and before she ran away like this there was very little to suggest that her word might not have been believed.’

  ‘You must have had a bad night worrying about it,’ said Willow coolly, not sure that she believed him or that she could forgive him for the doubt, however slight, that seemed to have been in his mind. Then she decided to let him off for a while and asked whether anyone knew when the woman had regained consciousness.

  ‘For a minute or two when they were treating her cuts and bruises last night. She only surfaced briefly, and she was so confused that the doctors didn’t think she should be questioned. They had her wheeled into a room, checked at intervals, and otherwise left alone. The nurse who saw her last thought she was sleeping normally.’

  ‘She’d probably been faking for hours and nipped down to the basement as soon as she saw her chance,’ Willow said.

  ‘Why the basement?’

  ‘Because that’s where she was trying to take us last night and she must have had an escape route planned so that she could make an exit as slick and unobtrusive as the one she achieved after she’d drowned Ringstead.’

  Tom shook his head.

  ‘She must have been his killer,’ said Willow impatiently. ‘It’s ludicrous to think there could be two …’

  ‘I know,’ he said, gripping her hands again. ‘I wasn’t contradicting you. I just can’t bear the thought of the danger you were in.’

  ‘Hello,’ said a young voice, making them both turn towards the door.

  Rob was standing there with a huge bunch of red and white roses in his hand and an expression of serious disapproval on his face.

  ‘Hello.’ said Willow. ‘Look, Tom, here’s Rob.’

  ‘So I see.’ he said, getting up off Willow’s bed and rubbing his hands over his eyes. ‘You look very cross, old boy.’

  ‘I brought Willow these.’ he said gruffly, laying the roses on the bed.

  ‘They’re lovely, Rob. It’s very generous of you. Come and sit down and tell us what the matter is.’

  He grasped the rail at the foot of her bed and shook his head as though he did not know how to say whatever it was he wanted to tell them. Willow waited patiently. Tom had turned away to pull up the blinds so that he could look out of the window.

  ‘They said you nearly got yourself killed,’ he said at last. ‘And Lucinda too.’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘Everyone. I was buying you flowers downstairs and the two women in the shop were talking about it. And people waiting for the lift did as well. One of them isn’t working and everyone seems to know why. You wouldn’t let me help you and now look what’s happened. It’s not fair. You could have died.’

  For a moment Willow did not know what to do or say. She sat with her left hand over her mouth, looking at Rob’s furiously unhappy face. Then she saw Tom turn and come to put his hands over Rob’s as they clung to the rail.

  ‘Rob,’ he said gently. ‘We’re all shocked by what’s happened and very worried. But it’s not Willow’s fault and she has even more reason to be shocked and upset by it all than anyone else. The last thing she needs now is either of us ranting at her. I think we ought to let her rest. Will you come with me now and have a late breakfast?’

  ‘You should have let me help. Both of you.’

  ‘Come on, Rob.’ Tom was beginning to sound firm. Willow relaxed in the knowledge that she could leave this one to him. ‘We must leave her in peace. She’s got a copper of her own just outside the door now, so she’ll be safe. She and Lucinda.’

  Tom looked at Willow and she nodded, blowing him a kiss to show how thankful she was, He mouthed at her: ‘I’ll be back.’

  ‘Good. I’m sorry, Rob. When I’m up and about again I’ll explain it all. Thank you for the flowers.’

  It was a relief when Tom eventually managed to get Rob out of the room and Willow lay back with her eyes closed, smelling the gentle scent of his roses, trying not to feel guilty about the danger into which she had put Lucinda.

  Some time later she remembered that she was supposed to be ringing Mary-Jane and sat up to dial the number.

  ‘Willow,’ said Mary-Jane when she had got through. ‘How nice! I am glad you’ve rung because I wanted to say how sorry I am to have been so silly and emotional when I came to see you. You and your housekeeper were so kind to me. It was really miles beyond t
he call of duty. I’d like to make it up to you somehow, take you out to lunch perhaps. Would you come?’

  ‘There’s nothing for you to make up,’ said Willow, realising that Mary-Jane could have no idea what had happened to her. She tried to make her voice sound normally light and cheerful. ‘But I’d love to have lunch with you in due course. I’m back in Dowting’s at the moment, and I’m not absolutely certain when I’ll be out. That’s really why I’m ringing.’

  ‘How awful! I’m so sorry. Are you ill? Or is it little Lucinda?’

  ‘It was me. I’m much better now. There was a bit of a drama, but it turned out to be a lot less awful than I’d thought it was going to be. But that’s why I wasn’t at home when Miss Wilmingson came round for your scarf.’

  ‘Miss Wilmingson? D’you mean my husband’s secretary? What on earth was she doing bothering you?’

  ‘Well, according to Mrs Rusham, she called to collect the Hermes scarf your husband gave you. Not something you’d want to lose, I can quite see that. The only trouble is that it’s not at the mews. Mrs Rusham made a thorough search for it, but in fact, I don’t think you were wearing a scarf when you arrived.’

  ‘I never wear scarves, Hermès or otherwise.’

  ‘That sounded very determined.’

  There was a short laugh from Mary-Jane.

  ‘Did it? Sorry. It’s just that they’re like scent. I gave up wearing both when I discovered they were what my husband hands out to loyal employees.’

  ‘What?’ Willow said even before Mary-Jane had finished talking. ‘Sorry to make such a noise. I stubbed my toe. What employees?’

  ‘Any of them he wants that little bit extra from. Women, I mean. He doesn’t give men anything. Didn’t you notice Petra Cunningon wearing an expensive scarf and heavy, heavy scent when she came to the bridge lunch? She always does. Unlike me, she hasn’t noticed that they’re badges of servitude.’

  An explanation of what had been happening began to build in Willow’s mind.

  ‘As does Miss Wilmingson?’ she suggested.