Festering Lilies (21 page)

‘But Mr Englewood was not in this actual room, surely?' said Willow.

‘Oh no. I didn't realise you meant in here. I've been in – obviously – and Roger… oh, yes; yesterday I was just coming back from lunch when I found Albert emerging through your door. He'd been sent with a message, he said, and didn't like to leave it in the outer office where anyone might find it. The message was real – it was that confidential one from the PUS, which I didn't open. I didn't cross-examine Albert, I'm afraid. I was just relieved that he'd been while Roger was out,' Barbara said, puzzling Willow.

‘But why?'

‘Oh, he seems to terrify Roger… he's always even less able to work after Albert's been in,' she said, apparently not finding anything odd in the statement.

‘I see,' said Willow. ‘Thank you, Barbara.'

The administration trainee left and Willow found it quite hard to believe that it had been Albert of all people who had searched her office, let alone followed her or got into Chesham Place. He certainly disliked her, and she could well imagine him capable of breaking and entering; but he just did not seem intelligent enough to find out who she really was – or to have got into the flat without actually breaking in.

Having reached that conclusion, it was not hard for Willow to imagine circumstances in which Albert might be used by someone much cleverer. Remembering her speculations about a possible pensions fraud being run from the department, she thought that Albert might well have been retained for his muscle and aggression by someone more sophisticated or intelligent who had organised such a scheme.

Tapping her blotter with a piercingly sharp lead pencil, Willow was afraid that she could easily put a name to someone who might have done so: Michael Englewood.

His determination to sit in on all the police interviews with the staff had always struck her as a little excessive (as well as being highly inconvenient for her). Could it have been because he had been afraid someone might say something that would betray his fraud?

Ideas began to fall into place like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle: there was Michael Englewood's apparent satisfaction with his cul-de-sac of a job; his quick turnover of secretaries, which Willow had blamed on his self-confessed temper and inability to tolerate gossip and giggles, but which might have been designed to get rid of anyone bright enough to work out what he was up to; his determined solitariness; the feeling she was increasingly coming to trust that he had a great deal of anger tucked away somewhere behind his mild public persona. Did they all add up to the picture of an intelligent man who had somehow gone wrong and chosen to take his power and money from the perpetration of a widespread fraud instead of through ordinary career success? Or was she simply letting Cressida's imagination run away with her?

Could a man like that have decided that she herself was a threat to him, followed her, discovered the secret of her double-identity and ransacked her papers and possessions to find something he could use to stop her betraying him? Somehow the necessity of finding out who had murdered Algernon Endelsham was beginning to take second place in Willow's mind to her determination to find out who was trying to expose her, although they were likely to be the same person.

Knowing that there was little she could achieve by speculation while her imagination was running riot, Willow deliberately tried to sedate her teeming brain with work and turned to her in-tray. By the time she had dealt with her incoming letters, read the minutes that had accumulated on her desk since her departure the previous Thursday, corrected the drafts of answers to various parliamentary questions that concerned finance, and absorbed the agenda and papers for the weekly meeting of the finance committee, she had regained enough calm to get on with her double investigation. Summoning Roger, she first dictated the day's letters and minutes and then asked him whether he had yet been interviewed by the inspector.

‘Why yes, Miss King,' he said looking at her as though she were mad. After all, he had already told her about his interrogation in exhausting detail the previous week.

‘Oh yes, I'd forgotten,' she said carelessly. ‘And was someone from estabs sitting in on your interview as well?'

‘Yes indeed, the under secretary himself. To protect us all, I suppose, from Inspector Worth and his merry men. You'd never have thought he cared so much for us all, would you now?'

‘Mr Englewood? Why on earth not? I've always thought he was particularly concerned with the well-being of members of the department – or at least as far as it affected the performance of their duties,' said Willow, remembering Barbara's comments on the under secretary's visits to their office.

Roger wriggled a little and then admitted that Mr Englewood was indeed concerned about the health of his staff and their ability to work.

‘But,' he went on, his voice changing from that of misunderstood subordinate to privileged gossip, ‘I'd have thought he'd run a mile rather than get really involved with any one of us. He's a very solitary sort of man, wouldn't you say?'

‘I've never given it a thought,' answered Willow, trying not to show her amusement at Roger's frank relish for tittle-tattle.

‘Well he is – ever since his wife ran off with that man to America.' Roger looked expectantly across the desk, clearly hoping for some questions about the wife and her mysterious American, but Willow was too experienced to allow herself to be sidetracked and so Roger had to go on without encouragement. ‘So now he lives alone. And he's only interested in chess and crime novels – oh and fishing on his holidays.'

‘He can't be that solitary if he plays chess,' Willow protested.

‘Oh yes, poor man, he plays it on a pocket computer, you see. Takes it everywhere with him, so that he can play on the train and places and never have to talk to anyone else.'

‘Oh.… Poor man indeed. But he must have some friends whom even the department doesn't know about.'

‘Quite likely, Miss King. After all, he's not nearly as old as he looks. I've often wondered why he wanted to dress and present himself as though he were in his late fifties. But in fact he's even younger than me.'

‘Really,' said Willow, genuinely startled. ‘How old is he?'

‘Forty-two,' said Roger shortly and Willow could not think why he should be irritable until she realised that he liked to think no one knew his own age.

‘Good heavens! Well he's very self-contained, so I suppose even if he is lonely he can deal with it,' she said, hoping for some more of Roger's inexhaustible supply of gossip.

‘He's quite a good hater,' said Roger slyly looking at her as though wondering how far he could go. ‘He hated the poor minister at any rate.'

‘You are a proper fountain of information, aren't you, Roger. How on earth did you discover that?' said Willow, finding the possible confirmation of her wild theories seriously disturbing. ‘I thought it was only the PUS who really loathed him.' Roger wriggled in self-conscious pleasure and leaned a little closer to the desk.

‘I've never told anyone else this, Miss King. But I know I'm right. The establishments officer hated him even more than the permanent secretary; I could swear to that in a court of law.'

‘You might have to,' said Willow drily and then cursed herself silently as she thought she might have frightened him off. But Roger's interest in other people was far too intense to be daunted by a little thing like that. ‘Go on, tell me. I dare you. How did you discover the dark secrets of his soul, poor man? And why, come to think of it, have you kept that very juicy secret from everyone else?'

Roger's entire face and scalp suddenly blushed vividly again under his thinning grey-blond hair. He shifted in his chair, picked up his shorthand notebook, fiddled with the pages and then put it down again.

‘Well,' he began in a slightly weedling tone. ‘Do you remember that evening when I had to retype that fantastically wordy finance report – the one that was seventy-five pages long, full of figures and statistics and had to be done in two days flat along with all the ordinary work of the office? With all that tabulating?'

‘Yes,' answered Willow, pretending not to notice the still-warm resentment in his voice. ‘About a month ago, wasn't it? I remember.'

‘Well obviously I had to stay late to get it done.' He paused, but yet again she let go the opportunity of sympathising with him for the way she had been overworking him. ‘And, well… You see…'

‘Come on Roger, out with it. What happened?' Willow asked, really curious by then.

‘Well I didn't have enough of the right paper. I ran out on about page ten.' He blushed again and Willow, understanding his embarrassment, refrained from reminding him of how often she had begged him to check his stationery cupboard regularly and restock it in good time. The number of productive hours wasted in his hunts for last-minute supplies of paper, ink, carbons, ribbons and so on had often driven her to say things that made him waste even more time in self-justification, recrimination and moaning about his status.

‘And I knew that I'd never get any from normal channels at that time – I mean, it was after six… well after. So, I'd been down in the establishments office earlier in the day and I'd seen a whole stack of boxes of just the right kind of paper next to Valerie's desk.' He broke off, still blushing, and Willow decided to help him out.

‘And so you thought you'd go and borrow some. Very sensible.' The flush died and he smiled brilliantly at her.

‘Just so. It was the only sensible thing to do.'

The next part of his narrative – or confession – became sticky and Willow had to squeeze it out of him like the last bits of toothpaste from the very bottom of the tube, but in the end he told her that just as he was purloining a box of paper from the top of the stack, he heard angry voices from the under secretary's office. Being Roger, of course, he simply could not leave without discovering what was going on.

‘Yes, Roger, I can quite understand that,' said Willow, desperately trying to keep all irony and even amusement out of her voice. She knew that she had failed as she watched Roger's face close up. Saying nothing, she waited for his need to talk to assert itself. In the end, amid many conscious looks and evasions, he told her that the two men were having the most vicious-sounding argument about betrayal.

‘Betrayal?' repeated Willow, wondering whether she really had stumbled on proof of some scandal of corruption and blackmail. ‘What was being betrayed? No, wait. Who were they?'

‘Why the minister and Mr Englewood, of course,' he answered, wide eyed.

‘There's no “of course” about it, Roger. I'm not a mind-reader. All right, so now tell me: who and what were being betrayed?'

‘I'm not totally sure,' confessed Roger. ‘Sometimes one of them must have turned away from the door or something because they kept becoming hard to hear.'

Willow suppressed the comment that rose to her mind and merely smiled, she hoped sympathetically. ‘But you must have heard some of it,' she said at last.

‘Well yes. One of them kind of hissed, with the most appalling savagery, “If you think that I'm going to throw away everything I've ever worked for just to allow you the comfort of security in your fraudulent character, you've another thing coming.” I was that frightened, Miss King, I call tell you.'

‘Golly,' said Willow, taking refuge in the kind of schoolgirl slang in which she had never indulged at school.

‘Exactly,' said Roger with heavy emphasis on the second syllable. ‘Wasn't it frightful?'

‘But which of them was it who said it?'

‘The tricky thing is, Miss King, that I don't know,' said Roger putting his notebook down on her desk as he leaned confidingly towards her. Willow had to suppress her own impulse to lean forward too.

‘Come on, Roger, you're holding out on me. You must have known which of them was talking,' she said, regaining a little of her traditional crispness.

‘Honestly I don't. I suppose it was because whoever he was, he was half-whispering – and in that very vicious tone of voice which we've none of us actually heard from either of them. At least I had never heard it.'

‘No, I suppose not.' Willow glanced down at her watch just then and was horrified to see the time. ‘We really can't sit here all morning like this, Roger. I've a mass of things to do and you've the report for the PUS, which I don't suppose is finished.' Her voice lifted at the end of the sentence, turning her statement into a question, and Roger gave the persecuted little sigh he always delivered when she chased him for work.

‘Actually no, Miss King, not quite. But it won't take long now. Would you like a cup of tea?'

‘That would be excellent,' she said and turned in her chair to pick up a file lying at the edge of her desk. Roger accepted his dismissal and went off to make a pot of tea.

Willow was left to face the fact that she had enough support for her suspicions to justify some real investigation into Michael Englewood. Reminding herself that she already had more than enough to do and that it was far more important to discover who had murdered the minister than whether the establishments officer was making money from some fraud, she seized the opportunity of Roger's absence to do the one thing she still wanted to do for the original investigation. It was important, she still considered, to establish the identity of Endelsham's heirs.

She reached for her telephone and dialled the number of Emma Gnatche's flat.

‘Hello?' came a voice, which might have belonged to anyone of Emma's background and education.

‘Is that you, Emma?' she asked brightly and then blessed the powers that be for her soundproofed office as she announced herself. ‘It's Cressida here.'

‘How are you?' said Emma, and Willow wondered whether there was really some constraint in Emma's voice or whether she had imagined it.