Festering Lilies (24 page)

‘I imagine so. As far as I can remember, Albert told his interview panel that he was sick of hanging about for hours on end for a man he disliked and despised and would rather work regular hours even if it meant sacrificing a few pounds a week. We were rather relieved that he so obviously disliked his previous employer.'

‘Really?' said Willow. ‘Why on earth? As a justification for his wanting to come to a dreary place like DOAP?'

At that Englewood gave her another rueful smile as though to say that he too found the place deadly dull.

‘Not entirely. I can't see why you shouldn't know if you really want to – there's no particular secret about it. Albert used to drive for one of the worst gossip-columnists in Fleet Street – we had been a little worried that he might be a plant. But good drivers are hard to find.'

‘A plant? In DOAP?' Willow protested, genuinely astonished and wondering whether the coincidence that was suggesting itself to her so powerfully could really be true. ‘I really can't imagine a gossip column being remotely interested in our doings.'

‘With a man like Algernon Endelsham at the helm, so to speak?'

‘No, you're right, of course. I can think of lots of journalists who'd have been pleased to know about his goings on. But go on, do tell me who it was.'

Englewood shook his head and so Willow, putting on one of Cressida's smiles, said:

‘You're not going to tell me it was that frightful man Gripper are you?' The establishments officer, used though he was to keeping secrets, was not at all used to keeping them in the face of determined enquiry. No one had ever been interested enough in anything he knew to try to winkle it out of him before, and his face gave Willow all the answer she needed and set her thinking furiously. Not the least of the ideas skimming through her brain was that her investigation had thrown up more peculiar coincidences than she would have believed possible.

‘Never mind,' she said at last. ‘It was only shameless curiosity. But it's odd; Albert has always looked more like a boxer than a smooth private chauffeur.'

‘Well he was, originally. That was another reason why we liked the look of him. Security and all that,' said Englewood, obviously happy to talk about something that was not classified.

‘I wonder what he made of the minister. If he hated his previous employer, I mean,' said Willow, trying to wrench the conversation back to the real subject of her enquiry.

‘I don't imagine he thought much either way. Even Endelsham wouldn't have wasted his time proving his superiority to a chauffeur; he was nearly always polite to what he called servants.'

‘Unlike the rest of us,' said Willow, ‘who were all treated to one or other of his techniques.' Englewood said nothing, but took another gulp of wine. Willow refilled his glass and signalled the waitress for a second jug. After nearly five minutes'silence, he said morosely:

‘He even thought – or pretended to think – that I had a passion for that miserable emotional cripple who works in your office.'

‘Roger, you mean,' said Willow carefully, wondering what on earth she was going to hear next.

‘Yes. You know how work shy he is unless there's a drama on or someone's breathing down his neck?' Englewood paused for so long that Willow eventually nodded encouragingly. ‘Well, I've always liked you, Willow, and you work a damn sight harder than some of the full-time assistant secretaries and so I was determined that when you weren't around to check up on him I'd try to keep him up to the mark for you.'

‘That was good of you,' said Willow, touching his arm gently. ‘I often wondered why he managed to work so much better when I wasn't around. Thank you.'

Englewood acknowledged her gratitude with a funny, formal bow and carried on with his story.

‘I used to drop in really whenever I was up on the eighth floor, just to keep him on his toes, and for two or three days in a row I happened to be going in or coming out just as the minister was passing the door. Seeing me there so often, he invented this ludicrous fantasy and started working on the deluded Roger, exercising his famous fatal charm. The poor man can't have had so many compliments paid to him since his mother died. He pretty soon became completely enslaved, and to keep him in that condition, Algy used to drop in for a cup of tea almost every day when you were out of the office. All simply to torment me, you see.'

‘Only this time,' said Willow with considerable vicarious satisfaction, ‘you weren't tormented.'

‘No,' he agreed, but there was in his voice a sound so expressive of pain that Willow nearly gasped. ‘Oh God,' he went on, taking another mouthful of wine, ‘I can't think why I'm confessing this to you, but I'll go mad if I don't tell anyone.'

Willow gripped her hands together beneath the ugly wrought-iron table, terrified that Englewood was about to admit to the murder. She suddenly felt desperately guilty for making him tight, pushing him and pushing him until he dropped his defences. Her detecting had long-since ceased to be the lighthearted game she had planned, but now it seemed despicable and she felt an unwonted hatred of herself and her irresponsibility. Forcing herself to look at her companion, she was relieved to see that he was slowly pulling himself together. He picked up his knife and fork again and ate the last corner of his
páté en croute.

‘I'm ashamed to say that I did nothing to disabuse Algy of his ludicrous fantasy. It seemed that if he thought he was successfully tormenting me about Roger, then he might have laid off all the other things that could really have hurt. Absurd, isn't it, Willow, that a grown man should behave so like a terrified schoolboy?'

‘But understandable,' said Willow gently, remembering the tales of the schoolboys the minister had actually terrorised. Englewood suddenly gripped her wrist and she was surprised at the steel-like strength of his fingers, surprised and a little frightened. In her fear she wondered whether her certainty of his inability to kill was an error.

‘Yes, but don't you see what terrifies me?' he said urgently. ‘Mightn't Roger, inflamed by Algy's foul charade, have thought it was real and propositioned him or in some way approached him? Then Algy, with his inimitable cruelty, might have explained to the poor man precisely what was what. And then, Roger…'

‘Might have killed him, you mean? Oh surely not. Really, I don't think you need worry about that. Roger is the least violent of men; don't you remember that time a year or so ago when he was set on by a gang of “gay-bashing” youths on the tube and he told us all he thought they'd hurt him less if he just sat there and didn't even try to hit back?' Willow said, remembering the scars once again, but also asking herself whether Englewood's ‘confession'put him in the clear or whether it might merely be a bluff. If she could prove it to have been a bluff then she would have a little more evidence to back up her wild ideas about conspiracy.

‘Have you told any of this to Inspector Worth?' she asked.

‘Oh God,' was all the answer Englewood made, and he dropped his face in his hands. ‘No, of course not. You're probably right that it's impossible and so I couldn't tell anyone official, but whoever did the murder must have been driven to it by that bloody man's cruelty – and if so he deserved it.' He raised his head again so quickly that Willow had no time to wipe the expression off her face. ‘Does that shock you?'

‘Yes,' she said honestly, ‘but I can understand it; if he was as horrible to you as … as he obviously was.'

‘You sound doubtful,' he said quite quietly, apparently calm again. ‘Quite apart from humiliating me almost daily in the office, it was he who seduced my wife. After that I knew that I should never have married – that it would never be safe for me to let anyone know that I cared for anyone else, or he'd do it again. But I mustn't maunder on about all that now. I'm sorry to have bored you.' Willow, her mind suddenly blank with the shock of what she had heard, could think of nothing to say that might comfort him and simply sat with her mouth open, looking at him.

When she had recovered from the shock, she said:

‘But that means you must have known him before he ever came to the department.' He nodded.

‘Yes. She was a television researcher and she met him when he appeared on one of her programmes. He wasn't nearly so famous in those days and must have thought that even she could be useful to him. When she invited him to our home he came.' Englewood broke off.

Willow looked at him curiously and saw that his face had taken on the angry tension she had first seen that morning during her interview with the inspector.

‘I had to watch it, you see,' he said, regaining a little calm: ‘the whole process of seduction. It didn't take very long and then she went off with him. As soon as he'd got her, he dropped her of course. And then she went to America. She told me that she couldn't bear the thought of living with me who had witnessed every stage of her humiliation. And I couldn't persuade her that I loved her enough to make humiliation in either of us an irrelevance.'

‘I am so sorry,' said Willow inadequately. Englewood shook his prematurely greying head.

‘It's long over now,' he said. ‘But you see, that was why I was so afraid for you when he started on you.'

As he said that, he grasped Willow's wrist again. The sweatiness of his hand disgusted her, but she could not pull away. At last he released her and she resisted the temptation to wipe her arm with a napkin.

‘All Endelsham's moves were the same,' he said. ‘It was as if he was so full of contempt that he didn't even bother to change his technique – at first. I was certain that if you did let go to him, he would drop you too and then you would suffer terribly.'

‘But I didn't succumb,' said Willow brightly, trying hard to reduce the emotional charge of their horrible conversation.

‘No, I know. And I have never respected anyone more than I did you when I realised that,' he said. Highly embarrassed, Willow waited in silence.

‘I'd have done anything for you then,' he said very quietly. ‘Chasing your pathetic clerk to make sure he worked decently when you weren't there was all I could think of.'

He turned his face away from her as though he had embarrassed himself as much as he had her. At last he stood up, swaying slightly against the black iron table.

‘I'll see to the bill and then leave you in peace. Will you be all right getting home, Willow?' he asked, still not looking at her.

‘Lord yes,' said Willow, really concerned for him. ‘I only live about two minutes from here, but what about you?'

‘I'll be fine. Take a taxi to the station. Catch the train. No problem.' He signalled for the bill and when it came put down a bundle of five pound notes. Before Willow could thank him, he said: ‘Thank you for listening. I can't tell you how good it is to talk to a woman like you. I'd never have said it while Algy was alive. But I can now. Thank you.'

Her heart squeezed with pity and her mind recoiling almost in disgust, Willow could only smile and watch him blunder up the steps out of the wine bar. When she was certain he had gone, she collected her coat and bag and followed him out, trying not to think of any of the implications of his various bombshells.

But it did seem quite obvious to her at last that whatever else he had done – and for whatever reason – Michael Englewood had not been running any conspiracy to defraud the department. The raw unhappiness he had revealed to her made her rather ashamed to have invented such an idea and also produced an innocent explanation for all the suspicious facts she had collected to bolster it.

The cold outside bit into her cheeks and she put her head down against the wind-born sleet so that she had reached the front door of her flat before she saw the man standing there in the shadows like a figure in a Thirties'black-and-white film. For a sickening moment, her heart seemed to stop altogether and then to resume beating, but hard and noisily in her chest.

‘I haven't a warrant, Miss King, but I want to talk to you,' said a familiar, classless voice, and Willow's heart went on banging against her ribs. It was unfortunately not only the shock of his unexpected presence that disturbed her so much. She took a full minute to control the shaking in her knees and voice, but by telling herself savagely to brace up, she managed. Her toes and the top joint of each finger still tingled with the receding adrenalin fear had driven through her.

‘But of course, Inspector. Have you been waiting long? You must be very cold,' she said breathlessly as she unlocked the door and held it open for him. ‘Come on up. Search the flat. Search my life. I have nothing to hide.'

In the ugly yellow light of the streetlamps she saw a derisive smile flash across his craggy face and wondered how many of her innumerable secrets he had managed to discover. As they climbed the gritty stairs, she thought how refreshing it would be to talk to someone as strong and secure in his own esteem as the inspector after the revelation of Michael Englewood's bitter unhappiness and almost unhinged devotion to herself.

‘May I make you some coffee?' she said, wondering whether the policeman seriously suspected her of murdering the minister. ‘It might warm you up.'

‘Yes indeed,' he answered cheerfully. ‘As you correctly divined, I am frozen stiff. A cup of coffee would go down a treat.'

‘Good,' she answered, letting him into the flat and going straight to the kitchen. As she put on the kettle she thought to herself that if he truly believed that she was a killer, he would never accept hospitality from her. Then, laughing at herself, she decided that she was allowing Cressida's romanticism to infect her proper cynicism. There was nothing in the world to stop a tough man like the inspector from eating and drinking his fill with a suspect. It was not, after all, as though Algy's killer had been a poisoner.