Festering Lilies (5 page)

Willow quickened her pace and almost forgot the reason for her solitary ramble as she identified the soft slap of several pairs of trainers moving up behind her. Determined neither to look back nor to break into a run, she kept her own steps firm and her breathing as level as she could, but it did not help her. She became more and more afraid. The sound of the running feet was accompanied by hoarse, male panting, which made her think suddenly of all the rapes and cases of grievous bodily harm that the local free newspapers reported in such avid detail. The thought of all the young men she had seen hanging about the bandstand ceased to be curious and became rather threatening.

She fumbled in her handbag for the personal alarm she had carried unused for years. It had a tiny mirror in the top and she held it up, trying to see what was going on behind her. There was far too little light to see anything, even if the mirror had not been fogged with dust from the bottom of her bag. Letting her arm drop, she held her thumb over the cap, ready to press it down at the slightest need.

At last she could bear the suspense no longer and turned in her tracks to face whomever was behind her. The clouds blew away from the moon at that moment and Willow found herself face to face with three young men dressed in shorts and sweatshirts. Their faces contorted with effort, sweat dripping from their ears and noses, they ran past her into the night.

‘It is extraordinary how unpleasant even quite baseless fear can be,' Willow said aloud in an attempt to steady her wayward nerves.

‘Who's there?' An angry male voice demanded out of the darkness. Without a second's thought, quite instinctively, Willow pressed down her thumb. An eldritch shriek wailed out across the dark common, surprising Willow just as much as the man who had called out to her, and made her drop her handbag on to the soggy ground. The man who had shouted had a powerful torch and switched it on, dazzling Willow as she stood in the centre of its white beam.

‘Miss King, isn't it?' came a tantalisingly familiar voice, which she could not immediately identify. It sent an extraordinary shiver through her, partly pleasant but threatening too.

‘Who are you?' she asked, hating the almost hysterical note in her own voice. The torch was moved and in its light Willow recognised the inspector who had interviewed her that morning. Bitterly angry with herself for exposing her folly to him of all people, she fumbled with the red cap of her alarm to turn it off. At last the hideous noise was silenced. It seemed extraordinary that the policeman should have recognised her, given how many of her colleagues he must have interviewed. She wished very much that he had not. There was something about him that made her uncomfortable, and she felt horribly exposed by his identification of her.

‘And just what do you think you're doing? Revisiting the scene of the crime?' The inspector's hitherto colourless voice was tinged with sarcasm and that helped Willow to get a grip on herself.

‘Don't be ridiculous,' she answered, bending down to pick up her bag and pushing it shut with a decisive snap. ‘I was merely trying to get across the common to catch a bus to Sloane Square and I was disconcerted by a party of joggers running up behind me out of the dark.'

‘Well that's a damned silly thing to do,' he said, and she felt her blood beginning to beat faster again at his tone. ‘If women like you kept to well-frequented, well-lit streets and took ordinary precautions there would be far fewer…'

‘And if people with cars left them in garages all the time there would be far fewer road accidents,' retorted Willow, suffering both from reaction and the rage that indiscriminate woman-blaming always produced in her.

To her surprise, the inspector laughed.

‘True enough, and sometimes when I'm in a hurry, I wish to God they would. I apologise for swearing at you. And it is true that as a woman you are probably safer on this bit of the common than any other. But you startled me, appearing out of the night like that talking to yourself.'

‘Not half as much as the joggers frightened me,' she retorted, startled into a kind of friendliness. This she realised would be the ideal moment to explain to him about her alibi for the murder and her reasons for hiding it in front of the under secretary (estabs). She opened her mouth, but the policeman started to speak before she could get out any words at all.

‘Well and so they should have. They might not have been as innocent. Be a bit more careful in future and you won't get into trouble again,' he said and she stiffened at the patronage in his voice. ‘Ah, here come my men. Off with you.' He turned his broad back without waiting for her to say anything and retraced his steps.

Willow was left to pick her way across the cold boggy ground to the well-lit firmness of the path. As she walked she thought about what might have happened to her and its bearing on Algy's death. Could he have been molested by a bunch of mindless louts on the scrounge for easy money? Had it been simply chance that he had walked into trouble? If that were the case, then she would have no chance of discovering what had happened to him. Shaking a little in reaction to the shock of her unwonted terror, she tried to apply her mind to the problem and decided that she could not leave her investigation there.

Under the orange lights of one of the main paths, she stood still, looking all round her in an attempt to imagine why anyone should want to walk across the common. The traffic still roared by on all sides; a dog barked, rather a large dog by the sound of it, and its owner shouted. A train hooted in the distance, like some strange mechanical animal howling at the moon.

Trains! Willow thought at last of one reasonable excuse for crossing the common. It would be the most sensible way of getting from the DOAP tower to Clapham Junction railway station – if one had the time. Not that Algy himself would have been aiming for the Junction; it must have been several years since he had had to rely on public transport. But it might well have been the destination of his murderer. No longer feeling the humiliation of her encounter with the policeman or the icy dampness of her feet, she tightened the belt of her mackintosh once again and set off towards the station.

Willow took her time about the trek, using the back streets, and was surprised about how few people she passed. The walk took her nearly twenty minutes and when she reached the station she found herself at a loss. She could hardly cross-examine the station staff about whether they had found bloodstains on any of the platforms or any object that might have served as a weapon dumped in a dustbin or unfrequented corner; still less could she search for any physical evidence herself.

Nevertheless, she thought, having made the effort to get there, she was going to look around. Buying herself the cheapest ticket as a passport into the station, she went down into its depths. The place was quite unfamiliar to her and she was surprised by how busy it was. If the murderer had wanted to be somewhere where he could not be seen, this would not have been his choice. On the other hand, there were so many people – and some of them looked quite mad and violent enough to have done something pretty frightful – that he might not have stood out at all.

Walking along the sunken corridor beneath the platforms, trying to absorb some atmosphere or reach some useful conclusion about the place, Willow arrived outside the public lavatories, where she was accosted by a very dirty man in an old blue overcoat, tied at the waist with string.

‘Give us the price of a cup of tea?' he asked. Trying not to turn her head away from the extraordinarily feral aroma that rose from his clothes and beard and hair, Willow fumbled in her bag for change. Even in the days of her early career, she had often given money to beggars, as a kind of prophylactic gesture. Her elderly parents had always been afraid of what might happen to their unplanned child if they died before she attained financial security. Throughout her childhood they had issued dire warnings of the consequences of failure, which had given her an unassuageable fear of ending up pensionless, destitute and sleeping rough in old age.

‘God bless you,' said the tramp, pushing his face towards her. She caught the smell of alcohol on his breath and only just stopped herself from recoiling. In trying to atone for her disgust, she looked at the man directly and saw in his eyes a wholly unexpected flash of intelligence and sympathy. Grubbing in her bag for a fistful of pound coins, she handed them over, asking:

‘Are you often here?'

‘Always, lady,' he answered, but his eyes had dulled again.

‘Last Monday night,' she was beginning when a member of the station staff came over to them and put a hand on the man's filthy coat.

‘Come on, Dad, stop annoying the lady,' he said gently enough. The tramp turned and shuffled off in his cracked and string-tied shoes.

‘I'm sorry, Miss,' said the uniformed man. ‘He means no harm, but he gets a bit carried away at times. There's no need to be afraid.'

‘Thank you,' she said. ‘I wasn't really frightened. But, thank you. You let him sleep here, do you?'

‘Not always. Sometimes he gets drunk and abusive; sometimes we get complaints. But if he's quiet and makes no trouble, most of the lads let him lay. And he has a wash sometimes in the gents'. Seems a bit hard if a bloke wants to wash and gets chased away.'

‘Yes indeed. Thank you again,' said Willow, wishing that he would leave her alone so that she could go and question the tramp about what he might have seen on the night of Algy's death. But, kindly and helpful, the ticket collector (or whatever he was) stayed put and she had no alternative but to leave.

When she got out of the station she was faced with the prospect of getting home and realised that walking really would be the easiest way. There was no tube and to go by bus would entail several changes. A taxi passed by with his orange light shining in welcome and she succumbed to temptation.

By the time she was back in her flat and running herself a therapeutic hot bath, she had decided that she would have to go back to the Junction sooner or later. There was really nothing to suggest that the murderer had been there before her, but she could not get rid of a nagging suspicion that he might have been. Lying in the hot water, ignoring the chipped and stained enamel that made the old bath so unattractive, she decided that it was highly unlikely that the minister's murder was accidental or random, however comforting that would have been. If that were true, it would follow that whoever had done it had been on the common for that purpose alone and would have planned a safe retreat. If the retreat had been by car Willow knew that she would have no hope of finding it, but if not, then Clapham Junction – the busiest of all Britain's railway junctions – was the likeliest possibility.

The immensity of the task she had taken on suddenly seemed daunting in her tiredness. How could she possibly ask the questions that needed to be asked, find the people who could bear witness to what might have happened? Reminding herself that she had long ago learned that the best way to tackle an apparently impossible task was to take it step by step and refuse to let anxiety sap her valuable energy, she put the mystery out of her mind, ate a frugal supper, did some work and went to bed. But she was neither happy nor confident, and she slept badly.

By the end of the following day, Willow had had a superfluity of DOAP. She had heard at least four new versions of the enmities aroused by Algernon Endelsham, each one exaggerated by the sourness or jealousy of its inventor; she had a nagging headache and a tightness at the back of her throat, which suggested that she had caught the latest DOAP virus; she had nearly lost her temper with one of the senior members of the finance committee, who seemed to her to be deliberately misunderstanding the monetary implications of the new policy paper; and she had snapped unnecessarily at Barbara, who had made the mistake of assuming that she was now on a new and matier footing with her assistant secretary.

Willow found it a tremendous relief to know that she could leave the whole lot of them behind. She said good bye to her staff, accepted their good wishes for her dutiful stint with ‘Aunt Agatha', took her usual route back to Abbeville Road, and changed her clothes. The noncommittal jeans and black crew-necked sweater she put on would have told no one anything. Only her shoes might have betrayed her to anyone who bothered to look at them, for they were handmade of the softest black leather, and superlatively comfortable. But Willow was confident that no one in Clapham would bother to look at her feet. She removed her glasses, put in contact lenses, blackened her eye lashes and found the plain-glass spectacles that provided the necessary camouflage.

Taking a small red nylon parachute bag from her wardrobe, she hastily packed night things and her sponge-bag, just in case she met any colleagues on the tube, and then walked to Clapham Common station. There she bought a ticket from the machine and proceeded by Northern and Victoria and Circle lines to Sloane Square. Standing on the escalator in amongst the crowd she removed the hairpins and rubber band that kept her hair off her face and took off the plain-glass spectacles. Having pushed her ticket through the automatic gate, she found a corner out of the crowd, where she applied lipstick and blusher to her pale face.

Suddenly she looked up, certain that someone was watching her. It was a most unpleasant sensation, and one she had never noticed before. Ignoring the small mirror in her left hand and the lipstick in her right, Willow searched the bustling, angry scene in front of her. The crowd was the usual mixture of the hurrying and loitering, but no one caught her eye or gave any sign of interest in her. Unconvinced by that, she shivered in her black crew-necked sweater and jacket, but there was nothing she could do and so she finished making up her face and went on her way.

Leaving the station, she crossed Sloane Square and entered the expensive portals of Gino's hairdressing salon. The warm, lush scentedness of the shop welcomed her back into her other life and provided instant gratification in its total contrast to the bleak ugliness of the DOAP tower and the mothball-and-damp smell of her flat.