Fruiting Bodies

by Natasha Cooper

‘Oh, yes. And in spite of what she thinks she doesn’t know me very well either, so when she wanted an excuse to spy on you she can’t have realised how unlikely a lost-scarf story would be.’

  ‘And why should she have needed to spy on me?’ Willow thought that the answer was pretty obvious by then, but she wanted to hear it spoken.

  ‘Because she thinks I’m a witless child who will cause all sorts of trouble to George if she doesn’t check out what I’m doing. I loathe it, but she’s so useful to him that I try to put up with it. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that you came in for some of it.’

  ‘Why should she have thought I might be a source of trouble? After all, she can’t know anything about me.’

  ‘I’m afraid she does actually, and that really is my fault. God, I’m sorry, Willow,’ said Mary-Jane. ‘You see, when I got home after making that idiotic scene in your house I found an urgent message to ring George. He only wanted to tell me that he was going to have to cut our dinner that night, but he realised that I was in a state and asked why. I was so full of it all that I told him about you and how you knew such a lot about Alex and what had happened to him. She must have been listening in. She often does.’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ said Willow, wondering why Mary-Jane could not see the significance of what she had been saying. ‘What does she look like?’

  ‘Grey permed hair, plain. About five-foot six and pretty stocky. And huge hands. I’ve always wondered how she could fit them on the keyboard to type,’ said Mary-Jane, sounding bitchy for the first time.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mary-Jane. I’m going to have to go – the doctor’s just arrived,’ said Willow without waiting for anything more. ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Constable!’ she called. A moment later an unfamiliar figure looked round her door.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Worth. Can I help?’

  ‘You’re different,’ she said stupidly.

  ‘That’s right. I’ve just taken over. You seemed rather busy at the time or I’d have made myself known.’

  ‘I see. Right. Look, would it be possible for you to get hold of Inspector Boscombe for me? It’s very urgent.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  While she waited, Willow went over everything that had happened and everything she had learned so that she could present Inspector Boscombe with a carefully reasoned account of why it must have been Noel Wilmingson who had assaulted her in the lift.

  All sorts of things that had made no sense fell into place, not least the fake doctor’s habit of addressing her as ‘Mrs King’. The only person who had done that had indeed been Sir George Roguely’s snooping secretary and she had done it both the times Willow had spoken to her, the first in her search for information about the Friends of Dowting’s Hospital and the second when Willow had answered the telephone in Mary-Jane’s bedroom. That must have been quite a shock for Noel Wilmingson.

  Twenty minutes later Inspector Boscombe was sitting opposite Willow, listening to her story in silence and looking as though she did not believe a word of it.

  ‘I see,’ she said when Willow came to the end. ‘If I understand you correctly, you are telling me that Sir George Roguely’s secretary tried to kill you last night because she had murdered Mr Ringstead and thought you had tracked her down and were about to produce evidence of what she had done. Have I got that right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Willow. ‘I know it sounds ludicrous, but I’ve just been speaking to Lady Roguely and her description of Miss Wilmingson fits the woman who called herself Doctor Wilson.’

  ‘I see. And what evidence do you have for believing that she drowned Mr Ringstead?’

  ‘It’s all circumstantial so far, but I’m sure you’ll be able to get real evidence. You know that Ringstead was Lady Roguely’s lover?’

  ‘Yes, I did know that.’

  ‘Good. Now, you have to remember that Miss Wilmingson does everything for Sir George to make his life as easy as possible. I think she has sublimated all her own needs in the work she does for him and can’t bear it when the life she’s arranging for him is not perfect. It takes everything she has to make his path as smooth as it is, and yet there are still bumps and potholes to trip him up. She’s come to feel that she must make ever greater efforts to level them out because achieving perfection in his life is the only way she is going to be able to feel that hers has been worthwhile, and that’s the only way she can get her own needs met. I think she has gone way beyond the point where she can weigh up the magnitude of what she feels compelled to do for him against the triviality of the difficulties he might face.’

  ‘I don’t know of any reason to refute any of that, but there’s no evidence to suggest that you’re right.’

  ‘No. But there’s a lot of highly suggestive hearsay. Listen: for a start there’s what I heard from Lady Roguely on the telephone this morning about Miss Wilmingson’s opinion of her and attempts to spy on her. There’s also what I saw in, and heard from, Petra Cunningon when I met her at the Roguelys’house.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that Ms Cunningon is also potentially murderous in the cause of Sir George Roguely’s happiness?’

  ‘No, of course I’m not,’ said Willow, determined not to lose her temper and to wipe the contemptuous expression off the inspector’s face. ‘I told you about her because she’s such a good example of the way that I think Roguely used Miss Wilmingson. Petra is just tougher and didn’t get sucked in quite as far.’

  ‘What exactly are you saying he did to them?’

  ‘He absorbed their lives,’ said Willow, wondering whether the inspector was really as obtuse as she seemed to be pretending to be. ‘I’m sure he had no idea of the ways in which Miss Wilmingson persuaded herself that what she was doing for him was both right and necessary, but I do believe that he made it happen. It is clear that he expects his staff – his female staff anyway – to be completely loyal to him and his company and to put everything they have into their work. Petra has retired and yet clearly has so few friends of her own that she has to rely on his wife, whom she both dislikes and despises, for her social life. She made it clear to me – a total stranger – that she thinks that Sir George is wonderful and has suffered in being married to Lady Roguely.’ Willow sighed. ‘Do you really not see what I’m getting at?’

  ‘Not altogether.’

  ‘I rather think that he’d discovered some time ago that one of the easiest ways to get female staff adequately devoted to him was to hint – if not actually say – that his wife made him unhappy because she wasn’t good enough for him or aware enough of his needs. The suggestion, always unspoken, must have been that the employee in question would have been quite different, but that he could not do anything about it. A man as honourable as he would remain loyal to his wife, however unsatisfactory or difficult she might be, and however great the temptation of turning to someone more sympathetic, more loving, more in tune with him.’

  ‘But perhaps she did make him miserable,’ said Inspector Boscombe in a voice of cool amusement. ‘That does happen, after all.’

  ‘Of course it does,’ agreed Willow. ‘And his is a technique that hundreds of people use for lots of different kinds of seduction. “My wife doesn’t understand me.” We all know that. He didn’t want them to sleep with him, but he did want them to pour their all into his business. He can’t have had any idea that Noel Wilmingson’s boundaries were so weak that she would progress from thinking that she had to tell his wife how to behave to him – and she did do that – to believing that it was up to her to stop the affair with Ringstead. Presumably the only way in which she could make absolutely certain of that was to remove him from the earth.’

  The inspector said nothing.

  ‘And that’s what she did with all her customary efficiency. Oh, come on, Inspector Boscombe, it fits everything that’s happened. You must see that. And you haven’t managed to come up with any likelier suspects, have you?’

  The inspector looked as though she had just trodden
on some disgusting insect from a heap of putrid rubbish. Willow smiled in unfair satisfaction.

  ‘All you’ve got to do now is pick Miss Wilmingson up. That shouldn’t be too difficult because she can’t run away and cut herself off from Sir George for ever. She’d be nothing then; I don’t suppose it has even crossed her mind. I suspect if you go to his office you’ll find her there. Then once you’ve got her, you can have her identified by any of the hospital staff who found us in the lift this morning. You’ll be able to charge her with the assault on me and take it from there. If you can’t get anything out of her, try involving Sir George. When she was planning the murder she made sure that she chose a time when he was known to be out of the country. If she thought there were something that might connect him to it, I bet she’d cough.’

  ‘Say you’re not wrong,’ said Inspector Boscombe with the first glimmer of cooperation Willow had divined in her, ‘about her determination to break up the relationship between Ringstead and Lady Roguely, how do you think she managed the killing?’

  ‘Easily enough,’ said Willow. ‘Anyone can get hold of a white coat and a stethoscope and wander about the hospital looking as though she belongs. Wilmingson certainly convinced me last night until I noticed that she had no name badge. I suspect she rang the bleep exchange from one of the public telephones by the lifts and had Ringstead called to the birthing pool. We know that he was bleeped just before it happened. When he got there she must have asked him to investigate something she had already put in the pool. Once he was on his knees, reaching into the water, she will have put her right hand on his neck and forced his head down. I imagine that she must have straddled his back, too; otherwise he probably would have been able to throw her off because she’s much shorter than he was and weaker too. Perhaps she even sat on him. That might not have made any marks on his skin through his clothes. He had a suit on, didn’t he, as well as the white coat?’

  ‘Yes. And,’ said Boscombe reluctantly smiling at Willow, ‘some rather odd bruises on either side of his ribs.’

  I wonder if Tom knew about them, Willow asked herself grimly. Aloud she said: ‘Once you start interviewing her you’ll probably be able to shock her into an admission. And in any case you’ll be able to get evidence easily enough if she doesn’t. Presumably you can match the bruises to her measurements after all.’

  ‘I think you can safely leave all that to us,’ said Boscombe, beginning to look quite friendly. ‘It is what we do, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know it is,’ said Willow, laughing. ‘I wonder what she did with the coat? It must have been very wet. Not that it matters much. If it were me, I think I’d have just rolled it into a supermarket bag I’d brought with me and walked out, pretending to be a concerned relative taking a patient’s dirty nightdress home to wash.’

  Inspector Boscombe’s mobile telephone started to ring. She got to her feet, saying: ‘I’ll be back.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Willow had been home for two days by the time Noel Wilmingson at last made a full confession to the police. At first she had refused to admit anything, even the assault on Willow, although there was plenty of evidence for that, not least the identification independently made by several different members of Dowting’s staff. The breakthrough came when Inspector Boscombe confronted her with the evidence that the marks left on Alex Ringstead’s neck corresponded exactly with the size and shape of the fingers of her right hand. Boscombe warned her, too, that the forensic scientists would be carrying out DNA matching to prove that the samples taken from the splashes of blood on Willow’s hands and clothes belonged to her.

  Willow was deeply relieved when she heard the news, but her prime concern was for Lucinda. She showed no signs of trauma or distress, but Willow could not forget what had happened only a few feet away from her cot. She could not possibly have understood what was happening, but the noise must have been frightening in itself and Willow could not help thinking that some intimation of violence must have reached Lucinda.

  Once they were back at home in the mews, Willow got hold of every book she could find about infantile memory, birth traumas, and the psychological development of very young children. Tom tried to stop her reading them, assuring her that what would matter to Lucinda was the way she was treated in the years to come. Even if some of what had happened in the lift had registered in her developing brain, which was by no means certain, he believed that she was most unlikely to be affected by it, provided both her parents behaved to her with intelligent, gentle kindness as she grew.

  Knowing that he had not convinced Willow, Tom eventually asked Doctor Kimmeridge to come and see her to support his conviction. She tried to believe them both, but for several days she could not be comforted, although she tried to hide her doubts from everyone.

  Rob Fydgett seemed quite unaware of her fears when he came every day to make sure that she and Lucinda were all right. He appeared to have forgiven Willow for shutting him out of the investigation and soon began to talk admiringly about the brilliant way she had trapped Noel Wilmingson into betraying herself.

  Willow was not sure that Tom had absolved her so easily, but he said nothing about it. He continued to listen to her fears with as much patience as he could muster, and told her over and over again that Lucinda was physically thriving and that that would hardly be the case if she had been traumatised. He reminded Willow that the baby was putting on weight, that she was no trouble when feeding and that for the few hours she slept, she appeared to sleep well.

  ‘And,’ he added one night as a clincher, ‘she shows absolutely no sign of fear of you at all. I’ve seen her when she hears your voice or when you pick her up. She finds you reassuring, Will. Try to relax, or you’ll make yourself ill and that won’t help her at all.’

  ‘It all makes sense, Tom,’ she said, lying in bed, holding his hand, ‘but I can’t …’

  ‘You can’t stop worrying about whether you’ve damaged her and whether you will be able to love her more than your mother loved you. I know all that. But you do love her. That’s very clear and her response to it is just as clear.’

  Willow looked at him in dumb gratitude. She, whose job was words, could not think of any to use.

  ‘Now,’ Tom went on more briskly, ‘that’s enough of all this for tonight. You must sleep. D’you want a pill? Kimmeridge said it was more important for you to sleep at the moment than to avoid them.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But if I do, you must wake me if she cries.’

  ‘I will,’ he said, handing her the bottle of ten sleeping-pills that Doctor Kimmeridge had prescribed.

  Whether it was the pill or Tom’s reassurance, Willow never knew, but she slept better that night. He was able to go off to Scotland Yard the following morning in the knowledge that she was at last beginning to contain her fears. She went back to bed after he had gone and ate another of Mrs Rusham’s delectable breakfasts there before taking Lucinda into the bath with her.

  They got on beautifully and Lucinda seemed perfectly happy. When she was dry and back in her cot in the nursery, Willow slowly dressed herself in her sunny bedroom. She could hear Mrs Rusham moving about downstairs and the sound of Lucinda’s soft, regular breathing came comfortingly through the baby alarm. She heard the front doorbell ring and Mrs Rusham’s footsteps on the polished parquet floor of the hall.

  Two minutes later, by which time Willow had brushed her newly cut hair and even stroked some mascara on to her pale-red eyelashes, Mrs Rusham appeared in the doorway with a great sheaf of lilies in her hands.

  ‘Heavens! Those look extravagant,’ said Willow, swinging round on the stool in front of her dressing-table. ‘Who are they from?’

  Mrs Rusham carefully closed the bedroom door behind her and moved closer to Willow to say quietly: ‘Sir George Roguely. He’s downstairs and he wonders whether he might have a word with you. He says that he will quite understand if you don’t feel well enough or if you’d rather not see him.’

  Willow mad
e a face but then she shrugged. After all, Lucinda was asleep and did not need her for the moment.

  ‘Poor man. It must be awful for him; and to have been stuck in New York when it was all happening. I’d better see him. Is he in the drawing-room?’

  A mocking expression flashed over Mrs Rusham’s normally impassive face. Willow felt an instant’s outrage until she understood. Then she even managed to laugh.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘You’re hardly likely to have put him in the coal hole even if that’s where you usually put visitors.’

  ‘I do beg your pardon, Mrs Worth.’

  ‘No, don’t do that. It was a wholly reasonable reaction, and I was being silly.’ She felt that she must make some kind of gesture and added deliberately: ‘I’m sorry, Evelyn.’

  At Willow’s unprecedented use of her Christian name, Mrs Rusham smiled. As she left the room, Willow turned back to the mirror to finish dealing with her face. She put on a pair of tights, too, as though they would help her to cope with the coming encounter.

  When she opened the drawing-room door, she saw a big, dark-haired man sitting slumped at the end of the pale-grey sofa, staring into the fireplace. It was empty but for a large jar of pink and white peonies.

  He was dressed in a dark-blue, faintly pin-striped suit. His shirt was striped, too, and hand-made from thick poplin, and his cufflinks were smooth-edged ovals of plain but heavy gold.

  ‘Hello,’ said Willow.

  Roguely’s head jerked as he looked round and then he pulled himself to his feet and stood as though at attention.

  ‘Mrs Worth, I had to come to offer you my deepest apologies for what has happened,’ he began, sounding as though he were reading from an Autocue. ‘I need hardly say that I had no idea that Miss Wilmingson was in any way disturbed, let alone to the extent that has been suggested. If I had, naturally I should never have employed her. On the other hand, her behaviour …’

  He frowned and licked his lips. It was as though he had lost his place on his script and could not begin again. Willow moved forwards and put her left hand on his arm. She noticed that the small cuts she had inflicted in her own skin as she brought the sharp-edged ashtray down on Noel Wilmingson’s head had almost healed.