Festering Lilies (19 page)

On that Tuesday, 29 November, it was not relief from a fugitive muse that she sought, but answers to four questions, the most important being: who had searched her flat and why? Less upsetting but probably more useful to her investigation into the minister's murder was the likelihood or otherwise of her half-formed suspicion that Algy might have uncovered some corruption at DOAP. The last was the irritating question of how to find out about the conditions of Algernon Endelsham's will.

Willow was quite clear that there was nothing ‘Cressida Woodruffe' could do, short of persuading someone like Emma Gnatche to ring Algy's solicitors for her, and Willow knew too well that Emma would never do any such thing. There was nothing obvious she could do as Willow King, of course, but at least she would be within reach of Inspector Worth, who must already have the crucial information in his pocket.

She walked through Belgravia towards the bus stop, seeing nothing of the grand cream-coloured façades of the embassies and offices which she passed, but trying to think of ways in which she could get it from him without exposing her amateur investigation (which no doubt would merely make him laugh at her) or her real identity.

It seemed infinitely longer than four days since she had last been at DOAP, and she had almost forgotten that she had been arrogant enough to believe that she would have tracked down the murderer in that time, just as she had forgotten some of her first hostility to Inspector Worth. She was annoyed to discover that she badly wanted to see him, to tell him what little she had found out, to learn any useful facts he had accumulated, and to share with him all her wildest speculations.

Reminding herself, as she waited at the stop for a bus to take her across the river into Clapham, that she was Willow King who had brought the art of self-sufficiency to a pitch of perfection seldom achieved, she still found it hard to shake off the bundle of visceral emotions that were making her so uncharacteristically introspective and dependent. It was not until the tinny red bus was actually jerking and jolting its passengers across Vauxhall Bridge that she remembered how dangerous it would be to confide anything at all to Inspector Worth. Determined to regain her self-control, she reminded herself that she was in competition with him, and that it was still perfectly possible for her to find out who had done the murder without his help.

The proposition was a little hard for so rational a woman to believe, but by the time the bus had wandered all over the place and at last deposited her on the south side of Clapham Common, Willow thought that she had absorbed it and was once more recognisably the cool, unemotional star of the finance committee and terror of the fumbling and the foolish officers of DOAP.

She walked up Abbeville Road and let herself into her flat, dumping on the floor the small parachute bag she always took from one life to the other as camouflage in case she should meet any early-starting colleague before she was actually ready to face them.

An hour and a half later, changed into a suit and with a cup of instant coffee and a bowl of muesli and skimmed milk inside her, Willow walked out of the lift on the eighth floor of the DOAP tower. She was stopped at the door of her outer office by a uniformed constable, standing with his helmet in his hand.

‘Would it be Miss King?' he asked in a soft South-London accent.

‘It would,' she answered, smiling at his gentleness and extreme youth. ‘What can I do for you, Officer?'

‘The inspector would like a word, if you've a moment to spare, Miss King.'

‘Certainly,' she answered, hoping that her voice had not given the sudden lurch that her insides had suffered. ‘When?'

‘Well, now Miss, actually,' said the constable, looking and sounding rather less gentle.

‘Good heavens!' Willow said with entirely assumed cheerfulness. ‘The inspector starts work early.' For some reason he must have decided to test her alibi and discovered that Aunt Agatha had no existence outside Willow's imagination. She felt cold all over. Then she saw a sudden shaft of light. ‘I don't suppose poor Mr Englewood has been dragged this early from his home?'

‘Oh yes, Miss,' said the constable, opening the lift door for Willow and putting out the light in her mind. ‘He'll be there to see you're not pushed into saying anything you don't want or shouldn't say.'

With that exasperating reassurance echoing all round her, Willow found it hard to smile properly at Mr Englewood when he stood up to greet her. But she made herself do it, and began to feel as though she were looking at him for the first time. She wondered at the lines in the skin around his eyes and nose. Had it always been like that or was the strain of listening for any hidden brutalities in the inspector's interrogations beginning to exhaust him? Willow realised that her mind and feelings really were more disordered than she had believed when she found herself thinking that Englewood looked startlingly familiar to her and yet almost as though he were a complete stranger. The flesh that veiled his cheekbones seemed slacker than usual, and his grey eyes were dragged at the corners as though with anxiety.

‘Good morning, Miss King. I'm sorry to drag you away from all the urgent matters on your desk when you've only just got back to it.' The sound of the deep, noncommittal voice of the policeman brought Willow's contemplation of the establishments officer to an abrupt halt. She swung round and nodded with modified politeness to the inspector. The vitality of his expression and the extraordinarily healthy-looking whites of his eyes made the contrast between him and the establishments officer complete, and Willow rediscovered all the hostility she thought she had lost. She bitterly resented the policeman's power, of course, but there was more to her hostility than that, although she would have sacrificed a year's royalties before she would have admitted it. She did, however, admit to herself that it would have been comforting to have been able to tell him about the searching of her Belgravia flat. But she could not do that while Englewood was listening to her every word.

Inspector Worth smiled at her. He was standing at his desk, taller than Willow but dwarfed by his magnificent sergeant, and dressed in a plain suit of such conservative cut that its quality was hardly noticeable; but it did much to disguise the width of his shoulders and splendid bearing.

Pretending that she would have to make an inventory of his clothes as a way of controlling her feelings about him, Willow made a mental list of the grey worsted suit, plain white shirt, dull navy tie with some small unintelligible emblem woven into it. She could not see his shoes and socks, because of the desk, but as he gestured for her to sit down, his cuff rode up a little way and she saw his watch. For some reason it seemed incongruously personal. Willow would have expected some big, masculine-looking watch on a metal bracelet, but in fact it was an exceedingly old-fashioned rectangular gold watch on a worn, brown-leather strap. With her spectacles on she could see that the face of the watch was worn too, and its small black roman numerals badly rubbed.

‘Miss King?' he said and for once there was a hint of individuality in his voice; it had warmed up a fraction. Instinctively she looked at him and discovered that his mouth looked friendly and his dark eyes smiled. Only the broken nose and firm, rounded chin still looked formidable. She smiled back despite her antagonism.

‘That's quite all right,' she said, at last answering his first question. ‘It's obviously something urgent. What can I tell you?' she went on, sounding to her own ears at least quite calm.

‘Please sit down, Miss King. We've fixed up a coffee machine now: would you like a cup?'

Willow nodded, not trusting herself to speak any more than necessary as she took in the new courtesy and apparent concern for herself. The young constable poured coffee into a thick, ugly mug, offered milk and sugar and then handed it to her. Willow thanked him, glad to hear that her voice still did not shake. Gripping the mug and grateful for the warmth that was slowly reaching her hands through the thick earthenware, she faced the inspector.

‘Now, Miss King, you do understand that in a murder enquiry we have to fossick about in the private affairs of a great many people, ninety-nine per cent of which turn out to be entirely irrelevant to the enquiry, don't you?'

Now it's coming, said Willow to herself. Is there anything I can say to Englewood, anything I can offer him, to make him keep it to himself? And what of the constable? What if his mother or – worse – his girlfriend were soon to be seen reading the latest Cressida Woodruffe: would he ever be able to resist boasting of his discovery that the glamorous rich author is really the plain, feared spinster of this dullest of all government departments?

‘Yes, I quite understand that,' she said in a small, cold voice and waited.

‘Good. That being so, I have to ask you some questions about your relations with the deceased.' He paused, as though he expected her to protest. Willow, hardly understanding that she had been reprieved for the moment at least, said:

‘Naturally I shall answer any questions you feel that you have to ask, but might I perhaps speak to you alone? Presumably anything that I can tell you will remain confidential unless you find that you need it in some eventual prosecution.'

Inspector Worth looked across her navy-blue shoulder at the establishments officer, who got out of his chair and came to stand in front of her. She concentrated on the details of his suit, which was made of hairy lovat tweed quite inappropriate for a London office, although it did go with his brown country brogues and the cravat he wore again at the neck of his thick checked shirt.

‘Miss King,' he said with unfamiliar formality, ‘surely you do not think that I would pass on anything that is said during interviews such as this?' His tone was of such personally injured honour that Willow smiled rather sickly and assured him that she had had no such doubts.

‘I can promise you that anything you say will remain confidential as far as I am concerned,' he said as he retreated to his chair. ‘I am here only for your protection.'

‘Thank you,' said Willow and looked back at the inspector, squaring her shoulders.

‘Very well,' he said. ‘I have heard from various sources that you were the object of the deceased's attentions – if I may call them that – and I wondered whether you could tell me the story from your own point of view.'

‘It is a very simple story, Inspector,' Willow said, her voice quite steady. ‘Mr Endelsham did indeed – what was your phrase? Ah yes, make me the object of his attentions. It started about two years ago, perhaps a little more, and I think that by the following May he had understood that I genuinely did not wish to be such an object and was not merely being coy and trying to inflame him. Having grasped that, he eventually ceased to single me out.'

‘Ah,' murmured the inspector, fiddling with the pencil in his hand. ‘May I ask why you did not want his “attentions”?'

‘Well really, Inspector!' snapped Willow, banging her thick mug down on the desk in front of her and spraying coffee over some papers that were lying there. ‘I fail to see what that has to do with your investigation. But perhaps you are at one with the entire population of this office in thinking that if a man as goodlooking, famous and well-off as Algernon Endelsham should start to pursue a middle-aged unattached woman like me, she should be so dumbfounded with gratitude that she would lie on the floor like a spaniel with all four legs in the air.'

Willow was yet more enraged when she looked furiously into his face and saw that he was laughing at her. He shook his head as he caught her eye.

‘No, Miss King, I do not think any such thing. I merely wanted to know what it was about him that did not attract you so that I can get some insight into the man he was. I did not know him and in order to find my way through this investigation I need to find out what he was like. All right?'

At that appeal to reason, Willow's flaming anger cooled a little. After all, the inspector was doing no more than she herself had tried to do in the five days since her last encounter with him. It was an unsettling realisation to make.

‘I beg your pardon. The reaction of my colleagues has caused me to be a little jumpy on the subject and would itself have constituted a perfectly good reason to avoid any close relationship with the minister.'

‘I can understand that,' said Inspector Worth seriously. ‘But the way you have said it suggests that you had other reasons as well.' Willow laughed a little and was glad to see him smile back at her.

‘I had indeed. There was the unsuitability of the whole idea. I cannot imagine anything more prejudicial to the smooth running of the department than any kind of romance between a minister and a relatively senior official. Had I wished to encourage the minister, I should have had to resign, I imagine, and quite frankly my career is a great deal more important to me than a few months of doubtful felicity as the mistress of such a man.'

‘Such a man,' repeated the Inspector. ‘What kind of man?' Forgetting that there were any other people in the room, Willow spoke to the inspector as to an equal, quite forgetting that she had had gentler thoughts about Algy and perhaps even mixing him up in her disordered mind with the character she had invented for Eustace Gripper.

‘The kind of man who knows who he is and where he is in the pecking order only by constantly reassuring himself of his sexual power over the women he meets,' she said. ‘Most of the women the minister encountered were only too obviously drawn to his looks, money and success and he therefore had no need to impress them. Unlike many of my sex I do not find such things aphrodisiac. On the other hand, I greatly enjoyed the minister's company and found his attitude to the work of the department and his incisive intelligence highly invigorating. I can only suppose that the combination of my sincere admiration for his mind and complete lack of interest in his perhaps more obvious attractions made him wish to see whether he could break down my resistance.' Willow knew that she had fallen into the style of some of the more pompous of her colleagues and almost expected the inspector to ask her to have her statement typed and signed in triplicate.