Festering Lilies (27 page)

Replacing Albert's file in the heap and pinning a note to the top file saying, ‘Barbara, please return these to the filing department', she went back to her desk and got down to work.

Almost everything had been dealt with by twenty-past two, and Willow put the few things that still needed work on one side for Barbara, before washing her hands and dragging a moth-eaten hairbrush through her tangled hair. She twisted it up into its French plait again and then she ran for the lifts, jabbing at the button angrily when there was no sign of either lift appearing. By the time she reached the hall, the PUS and Bob were irritably looking at their watches.

‘Two-thirty, I think you said, PUS,' said Willow, looking at her own.

‘Yes, come on now. The traffic's frightful,' he said, leading the way out to the large black car that stood outside. Willow saw that the driver standing with his cap under his arm was Albert. Her spirits rose and she forgot both her breathlessness and her bad temper.

There was no opportunity to talk to him on the journey to Westminster, because Bob (as the most junior) was sitting beside the driver while Willow on the back seat tried to persuade the PUS of her undeviating loyalty. The traffic was not in fact too bad and they were calmly walking up the stairs to Elsie Trouville's office at five to three.

Willow had neither met her nor seen any photographs and realised that she had allowed the PUS's prejudices to infect her own mind. She had been expecting a harridan. What she was faced with was a shortish, slim, fair-haired woman in her mid forties, dressed with considerable style and wearing both make-up and jewellery.

The new minister shook hands impartially with all her three officials and began to win Willow's admiration with her intelligent questions and clear grasp of the business of DOAP. It rather amused Willow to see the increasing sourness of the PUS's expression, and from a small, half-hidden smile on Ms Trouville's face it seemed that she also found his attitude funny.

When she had exhausted her questions, she courteously asked them if they had any for her. The PUS demonstrated his old-fashioned manners by offering Willow the chance to speak first.

‘None at all, Minister,' she said, smiling. ‘But may I say what a pleasure it will be to work with you?'

‘Thank you, Ms King,' she said without displaying either unseemly delight or arrogance at the prospect. She went up one more point in Willow's estimation.

‘May I have a word with you in private, Mrs Trouville? There is something ra-ather sensitive we need to discuss,' said the PUS at his most pompous. ‘Willow, do you mind?'

‘Not at all, PUS,' said Willow, just managing not to smile as she caught the minister's eye. I'll wait for you in the car. Bob?'

As they walked down the stairs, through the lobby full of milling Members of Parliament, journalists, visitors, tourists, constituents and researchers, Willow tried to flog her brain into thinking of some way to get rid of Bob for a moment. She was just turning to suggest feebly that he went to have a cup of tea somewhere, when she saw his face light up.

‘Charles!' he cried. ‘Friend of mine from the Treasury,' he added more quietly to Willow. ‘Will you excuse me for a moment? I ought to have a word with him.'

Willow merely nodded, and hurried out of the gloomy great building to talk to Albert.

He was leaning against the bonnet of the car, smoking and chatting to another uniformed driver. When he saw Willow, he straightened himself up with insulting slowness and eventually removed his cigarette.

‘Oh, don't bother with putting that out,' she said, trying not to sound too ingratiating. ‘You must need all the relaxing you can get with ghastly London traffic swilling all around you.'

‘Thanks, mate,' he said and Willow was hard put to it not to tell him just what she thought of his manners.

‘I hear you used to work in Fleet Street,' she said, smiling at him instead. ‘Don't you miss all that glamour?'

He looked at her as though she was mad and so she tried again.

‘You must have met so many interesting people. Doesn't DOAP seem very flat after that?'

‘Perhaps a little,' he said, grinding out the end of his cigarette with his shoe.

‘What made you join us?' asked Willow, shading her eyes against the sharp, low winter sun.

‘Nearer to where I live,' he said. Feeling as though she were trying to coax a very canny spider down to the bath plug in order to wash it away, Willow thought of another question.

‘Really? Are you a South Londoner, too? I've lived in Clapham for nearly twenty years.'

‘Lived in Putney all me life, haven't I?' he said, and once again Willow wondered why on earth the elegant Algy should have wanted this truculent oaf as his personal driver. Perhaps Albert was one of those men who can behave politely only to other men.

‘How nice,' she said. ‘And what do you do to liven up the dullness of DOAP, Albert? Presumably you and the other drivers have ways of passing all the hanging-about time profitably.'

At that question, the only one so far to which she particularly wanted an answer, Albert narrowed his piggy eyes. His full mouth seemed to tighten and Willow noticed that his hands were twitching. His exaggerated reaction suggested that he definitely had something to hide. Willow was about to push him so that she could get nearer the confirmation of his guilt that she wanted when they both heard the peevish tones of the permanent secretary behind them:

‘Where on earth is Bob?'

‘He found a friend, PUS, in the lobby.'

‘Fetch him, will you, Albert?' he said before turning to Willow to spit out imprecations on the prime minister for saddling him with Elsie Trouville as his minister.

Willow switched off, knowing that he would keep himself happily complaining without any intervention from her, and thought about Albert and who it might be who had enlisted him in a conspiracy – and how she could set about getting any proof.

When she got back to her office, she looked speculatively at Roger, virtuously typing at his desk.

‘Roger, I want you for a moment. Come in, will you?' she said, smiling at him.

‘What can I do for you, Miss King?' he said, as soon as he had shut the door behind them both.

‘It's just an idle thought, Roger, but I'm a little curious. We've just been driven to the House by Albert – do you know him?'

‘Faintly,' said Roger, looking put out.

‘He was quite extraordinarily rude, and I wondered why. You know most things that go on in this office: do you know if he particularly dislikes me?'

‘Oh I shouldn't think so, Miss King. He's got rather old fashioned views about women: perhaps it was just that.'

‘Then he must get on well with the PUS,' said Willow laughing, and Roger joined in, but Willow thought that there was something strained – artificial almost – about his mirth. ‘He told me that he lives in Putney. You do, too, don't you, Roger? D'you ever come across him there?'

‘No,' said Roger very quickly. ‘Can I go now?' Willow was astonished at the request and even more surprised to see that he was looking positively pale.

‘Roger, what on earth is the matter?' she said. ‘Have I upset you?'

‘No,' he said, and his face seemed to crumple up. For one appalling moment, Willow thought he might be going to burst into tears. Making what was obviously a supreme effort, he said: ‘I did once sort of meet him in a pub I sometimes go to. He was with some horribly rough friends and… and…'

‘I'm very sorry, Roger,' said Willow gently, remembering both the vigilante incident she had read about and the various occasions when Roger had turned up in the office with a black eye or worse. ‘Did they give you a bad time?'

‘Well they did have a rather violent sense of what is funny,' he said, putting on his most camp voice. Willow rather admired his courage and let him go.

Just before he opened the door, she suddenly asked him:

‘Whereabouts in Putney does he live?'

‘Nanking Road, I think someone told me,' he said and then looked absolutely terrified again. ‘But I'm probably wrong,' he added quickly as he escaped. Willow went back to work, trying quite hard not to look at the implications of Roger's oddity.

An hour-and-a-half later, irritable and hungry, she was fighting her

way on to the Northern Line tube at Clapham Common and

thinking that it really was time for Willow King to invest in a modest car. For once, she wondered whether Richard was right and she was mad to persist in Willow's old life for half of every week. If only she had stuck to Cressida's she would never have been involved in the investigation into Algy's murder, never be stuck in the foul, hot, crowded, dirty tube, and – most of all – she would never have met Inspector Worth or, forgetting all her principles, leaped into bed with him. Despite the heat and the bodies pressed all around her she shivered.

When she finally walked out into the fresh air again at Sloane Square with her hair and nails newly arranged, she took great gulping breaths of air to clean her lungs of the scented stuffiness of Gino's salon and her mind of the accumulated stresses and emotions. A peaceful bath, a cup of green tea, and a leisurely half-hour of dressing and make-up completed the cure, and by the time she got into the taxi to go to Walton Street, she was Cressida again, happy, self-indulgent, and without serious fears.

As she opened the restaurant door, she realised that Ms Cleverholme was before her. Sitting alone at a table on the left-hand side of the room was a young woman with wild orange hair, wearing an astonishing loose shirt apparently made of silk patches in dashing purples and greens like a moulting macaw, thought Willow disdainfully, before she remembered that she was Cressida once again and noticed the spectacular flamboyance of the colours and the glamorous droopiness of the shirt's lines.

‘Jane Cleverholme?' Willow said civilly as she walked towards the table.

‘Yes,' answered the apparition, holding out a well-shaped hand tipped with scarlet fingernails. ‘And you must be the amazingly successful Cressida Woodruffe.'

‘Well, Cressida Woodruffe, yes,' answered Willow, shaking the hand and then turning to give her coat to a hovering waiter. ‘But I think amazingly lucky would be nearer the mark,' she went on, with an unmistakable laugh in her voice. Jane Cleverholme's face relaxed.

‘You can't think what a relief you are,' she said in a lazy drawl. ‘What shall we have to drink?'

‘Anything you like. This dinner is on me. But why a relief?'

‘I thought you were going to be one of those ultra-rich female novelists who take their “work” with the utmost seriousness.'

‘Good God no!' said Willow, laughing aloud. ‘It's not work at all, really. My life actually consists of other people paying me to sit and spin daydreams. Bliss!'

‘Except that it must be work – at least sometimes. Or don't you suffer at all from the “Oh-God-I-can't-bear-the-thought-of-writinganother-word” syndrome?' Jane said with enormous emphasis.

‘Oh that,' said Willow, theatrically casual. ‘Yes, that has a slightly familiar sound. Actually, to be quite truthful, I find it gets worse with each book. But never mind now. What will you have to drink?'

‘Whisky please,' said Jane, briskly. ‘And how can I help? Sing for my supper? Nan said you were thinking of setting the next book in a gossip column like ours. It can be a pretty sleazy world, you know.'

‘Well,' said Willow as soon as she had ordered the drinks, ‘I thought I could have a sweet innocent getting somehow embroiled – a gentle English graduate perhaps…'

‘The late twentieth-century equivalent of the nineteenth-century country virgin being picked up by a white slaver and tricked into the international brothel circuit?' Jane suggested sipping her whisky and water.

‘That sort of thing, though perhaps not quite so dramatic. But what I really wanted from you was a sort of overview (vile word) to give me some idea of whether my vague plans for characters and emotions would fit. If you were to describe your office and the people in it from top to bottom as it were, that would be very helpful,' answered Willow, ignoring her glass of dry white wine.

‘In fact you're inviting me to talk about myself. Dangerous! But irresistible. Do you think we ought to choose what we're going to eat before I start? Otherwise, you might not get any food until midnight.'

As they sat opposite each other, reading the tantalising menu, Willow thought to herself that despite looking like a moulting macaw, Jane Cleverholme was her sort of woman. She was about as far as possible from the sweet, gentle, over-privileged Emma Gnatche, and Willow thought that, whether or not the evening provided any insights into Algy's murderer, it would certainly be entertaining.

She was right. Jane had a caustic tone and an eye for the absurd, and her account of her own rise from provincial journalism to the semi-heights of ‘Gripper's Gripes' was exceedingly amusing. She seemed to have no pretensions whatever and very few illusions, and she was the best company Willow had found in a long long time. In laughing at Jane's stories and listening for any hints about Gripper himself, Willow forgot both the horror of Algy's blood-splattered body and the terrifying abysses of emotion that Tom Worth had revealed to her.

As they were licking the last of the
crème brûlée
out of their teaspoons, as frankly greedy as a pair of schoolgirls, Willow said with what she hoped was the right degree of casual interest:

‘Someone, I can't remember who, said they'd seen your Mr Gripper behaving in a most peculiar way at a private party last Monday week. It sounded weird when I first heard it, but from your description of him, I don't think it can possibly be true.'

‘Oh, do tell me what it was. I love stories about the pig. But come to think of it, it can't be true, because last Monday week, he and the very beautiful Mrs Gripper were in a conspicuous box at Covent Garden pretending to enjoy
Don Carlos
,' said Jane.