Festering Lilies (29 page)

She was physically terrified, and when she caught a whiff of cold tobacco smoke, sweat and cheap aftershave she nearly vomited.

Trying to control herself, Willow listed the various feelings that were churning around her: she was afraid of what might be done to her if the burglars were still inside her home; she was sickened by the thoughts of the damage and filth she might find inside her door; she was outraged by the invasion; she was desperate at the knowledge that what had seemed to be her sanctuary was safe no longer. She was also ashamed of the naivety that had allowed her to believe that one locked door would keep her safe from marauders.

Dizziness threatened to overcome her; tears rose in her eyes. She stood alone, shaking like a piece of wastepaper blown on to barbed wire in a storm.

But Willow did not faint, or cry, or throw up. She put her finger on the bell and kept it there until any burglars would have thrown themselves out of the window or at least come thundering through the front door. Then she gathered herself together, pushed the door wide open and walked into what had once been her home.

The tiny square hall was just as it had always been; even the blue-and-white bowl of pot-pourri on the little oak chest was untouched. Wondering whether to feel relieved or not, she went on and walked into the drawing room. There she saw what the invaders had done.

Her once-glorious Turner was a mess of ripped coloured paper, gilt wood and glass, all lying in a heap on the floor. At the opposite side of the room the Chippendale looking-glass was a pile of glittering shards, pointed up by the glossy black pieces of the Ming vases. They were smashed beyond repair, and the flowers and water they had held had been flung against the pannelling, staining the pale greenish-blue paint. Someone had obviously tried his knife on the silk rug, but it must have been too tough to cut, for only one edge had any marks.

Perhaps because he had failed there, he had taken his knife to the walnut bureau-bookcase and scored the veneer in a dozen places. Someone had kicked over the mahogany Pembroke table and stamped on the telephone answering machine, too. Its entrails and highly coloured wires were spread around, mixed with the brass feet of the table and the smashed and splintered wood. The sofa cushions had been slashed and over everything lay the white feathers that had escaped.

Willow stood just inside the doorway, feeling utterly bereft. Never had she been so alone; never had she minded solitude so much. Her handbag dropped to the floor and she brought both hands up to her eyes as though to contain the tears that started to spurt out of her eyes. The room she had loved so much more than any person in her life lay ravaged before her; none of its pretty things had escaped. The cruel malice that had driven the burglars in their orgy of wreckage seemed to have infected the very air. Willow gagged suddenly and stumbled across the ruins of her dream to fling open the windows.

Breathing in the icy wind, she felt her teeth aching and her throat cringing, but at least the cold seemed to dry up her tears and give her back some power of thought. Once again she looked around the lost treasures of her kingdom, but this time with more objectivity, and she saw a letter addressed in competent typing to ‘Cressida Woodruffe'. Picking her way more delicately across the ruins, she went to fetch it and, using only her fingertips as though she was afraid of picking up some infection from the paper, she opened the envelope. The note inside was roughly typed on completely plain paper. It read:

Keep your trap shut and your long nose out of other people's business. Curiosity killed the cat. If I were you I wouldn't want to find out what it would do to a bitch – or her friends.

The risible, television-gangster wording did not dilute the violent menace of the warning.

Then the feebleness and misery alike were drummed out of her mind by rage at what had been done to her flat – and by the penetration of her disguise. She slammed her fists against the panelling again and again until she raised such bruises on her hands that she had to stop. Then she stood, looking down at her hands, the fingers slightly curled upwards as though in supplication, wondering what on earth to do.

‘Police, obviously,' she said to herself. But there would be little any policeman could do: she had no evidence as to the identity of the men or women she had so frightened by her ‘curiosity'; they had certainly worn gloves and so there would be no fingerprints amid the viciously destroyed furniture and pictures.

‘But I must tell someone,' she said aloud, feeling slow and somehow stupid, almost as though she were coming round after a general anaesthetic or a blow to her head.

She knew that at some time when she was feeling stronger, she would have to tackle her insurance company and she would need a police reference number for any claim; and, of course, there was her civic duty to consider no crime ought to go unreported, particularly no violent crime and there had been violence in that room, even if there were no human victim.

Suddenly as though a missing piece of her brain had slotted back into place, she thought of what the knife-wielding invaders had written. She could not understand why she had not worked it out before. This wreckage of all the things she had most cared about was the result of her investigation into Algy's murder. Pushing the hair out of her eyes, she knew then whom she had to telephone.

With shaking hands and trembling knees, she walked out into the small hall where she thought she must have dropped her handbag. It was still there. She opened it, saw her wallet with all its credit cards and money intact, and rifled through its contents until she found his card. Then she went back into the devastated room to telephone. At the sight of the heap of crunched black plastic and multi-coloured wires, she swore in a torrent of wild, furious words.

It was a good ten minutes before she could regain enough control to force herself away from the scene of destruction and find one of the other telephones. Then, sitting bolt upright on the edge of her bed, she tapped in his number. The telephone rang five, six times and she was about to replace the receiver in despair when he answered.

‘Worth,' he said and for once his voice carried with it the possibility of comfort.

‘It's Will…, no Cressida Woodruffe here. You know. Sorry, Willow King,' she blurted out, not knowing where to begin, what to say or whether he, too, regretted their encounter and wanted to avoid speaking to her ever again.

‘Sh, sh, sh, sh,' he said, as though calming a panicking child. ‘Take a deep breath. I'm here. Now, tell me.'

Gathering up all her scattered self-discipline and gripping the telephone receiver as though it were the only lifeline in a tempestuous sea, she tried.

‘My flat's been broken into; they've wrecked it…the drawing room. With a knife, I think, and boots. They've left a letter, telling me to stop interfering – no, nosing around.… Something like that.'

‘All right,' he said in an especially calm voice. ‘All right. They've gone, have they?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are the locks on the front door still intact?'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘Go and check them. I'll hold on. Then come back. All right, Will?'

‘All right,' she said and did as she was told. When she came back, she noticed that the receiver of her telephone was covered in sweat. She wiped her hand on her skirt and then picked up the receiver again.

‘There's only the bolts, which we hardly ever used to use. They're okay. The locks are smashed now,' she said, not wanting to name him for some reason.

‘All right. Now, I'm going to ring off and come straight round. I want you to make yourself something hot to drink and if possible eat something sweet. Don't have anything alcoholic; don't answer the door to anyone except me; and don't be afraid. I'll arrange to get new locks put on. All right?'

‘Yes,' she said, breathing deeply and deliberately. Then she spoilt the effect for herself, by adding like a six-year-old, ‘Will you be long?'

‘No, not long. I'll be as quick as I can. I'm not far from Abbeville Road,' he said and Willow only just managed to make her mind work enough to say:

‘No. No, I'm at home. In Chesham Place.'

‘Ah,' he said. ‘Good thing you told me. What's the number?' Willow gave it, and Tom's last words before he put down his telephone were: ‘Keep warm, Willow.'

She did as he said, and his intervention had been so successful in dealing with the effects of shock that she even managed to be amused at her own lack of resentment at his orders. It was a very long time since anyone had given orders to her, and she was surprised to feel the comfort that obeying them gave her.

By the time he arrived she was enough in command of herself to greet him politely and thank him for coming out so late. He looked at her in silence for a moment or two and she could not understand the weird mixture of expressions that crossed his rugged face. She had forgotten that he had known her only as Willow. Just as the silence was beginning to frighten her, Tom Worth took two steps towards her and enfolded her in his arms. At first she stiffened; it felt almost insulting that he should have seen through her façade. But then as the strength of his body made itself felt, and the warmth of his affection and care, she relaxed against him. Still he did not speak, but she felt one of his large hands gently stroking her hair, again and again.

‘Now, Will, do you feel strong enough to show me? Or would you rather go and lie down while I look?' he asked at last. She pulled herself out of his arms, braced to deal with whatever had to be done.

‘No,' she said. ‘I'll show you. I have to look at it again some time, and it'll probably help if I have you there while I do it.'

‘
En avant
, then,' he said, and together they walked into her drawing room.

Despite her bracing up, she still stopped on the threshold and gagged at the sight in front of her. Each treasure that the man with the knife had scored or smashed had represented a bulwark against the real world that she had inhabited for so long in such cold, grey lack of happiness. After the first couple of years as Cressida Woodruffe, Willow had felt untouchable and safe, surrounded by the material comforts that her dreams had won for her. After that evening she would never be able to feel the same, even if the insurance company came up trumps and she managed to replace each ruined picture and piece of furniture.

Longing for comfort, she yet hoped that Tom Worth would not touch her again. When he had made love to her, he had smashed the last illusions of Willow's self-sufficiency just as surely as the knifeman had broken her pretty toys. Either Tom Worth understood her unexpressed shrinking or he had had no intention of touching her again, because he left her in the doorway and picked his way through the mess with extraordinary delicacy for so large a man. She watched him peer and examine and note. When he had searched his way across the room to the two big windows, he turned and smiled at her.

‘Well, it could have been a lot worse,' he said.

‘Thanks a bunch,' she said, regaining some of her normal astringency. ‘How?'

‘They could have had a go at you.' In the split second it took for his tone to get through to her brain she thought of a scene in
Gaudy Night
and a most inappropriate smile flashed across her pale face.

‘What's so funny?' Tom asked, justifiably annoyed both with himself for allowing some of his feelings to show and with her for laughing at them.

‘I was just remembering when Harriet Vane's Chinese chess set had been smashed with a poker and for the first time in their lives she wept over Peter Wimsey,' she said, assuming that he would know precisely what she was talking about. When she saw that he did not, she tried to explain. ‘It's in a detective story by Dorothy L. Sayers. I find that it helps to tie vile things in one's own life to books, but you probably find that irresponsible. I'm sorry.'

She did not even notice that she had broken her rule about never apologising; all she knew was that she had to take the hurt look out of his dark eyes. In that she succeeded. He did not even laugh at her. Instead he said quite gently:

‘If it helps, there's nothing irresponsible about it. But I seem to remember your saying that using your analytical talents helped too. So, what do you make of all this?'

‘Well,' she said, taking a deep breath and standing up straighter, ‘it must have been caused by questions I've been asking. I should have told you sooner, but last week I was afraid that someone had got into the flat and searched it.'

‘My God, Willow,' said Tom, clearly furious. ‘Why didn't you tell me? Or at least your local CID?'

‘Well I wasn't certain,' she said. ‘Nothing had been broken; nothing stolen. No locks had been broken. Mrs Rusham – my housekeeper – must have let them in, thinking they were bona fide inspectors of some kind. I haven't seen her yet to ask about it. And, besides, I felt a fool.'

‘At least you needn't feel that any more,' he said, and there was something in his comforting voice which told her that he understood precisely how much she hated being thought foolish.

She watched him pick his way back to her and then felt one of his hands under her elbow.

‘Come on; I've seen enough for the moment. Let's go and sit somewhere else and thrash it out.'

‘Is the kitchen all right for you?' Willow asked a little anxiously; she very much did not want him in her bedroom. ‘It's warm there by the Aga.'

‘The kitchen's fine,' he answered, ushering her out of the door. She looked back and up into his face to see whether he had understood, but there was no expression in his eyes to bother her. She was too accustomed to knowing more about everyone else than they knew about her to feel completely comfortable with the idea that he understood her.

‘You must have had fun,' he said looking round her kitchen.