Poison Flowers

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• Natasha Cooper
  
• Dedication
  
• Epigraph
  
• Chapter One
  
• Chapter Two
  
• Chapter Three
  
• Chapter Four
  
• Chapter Five
  
• Chapter Six
  
• Chapter Seven
  
• Chapter Eight
  
• Chapter Nine
  
• Chapter Ten
  
• Chapter Eleven
  
• Chapter Twelve
  
• Chapter Thirteen
  
• Chapter Fourteen
  
• Chapter Fifteen
  
• Chapter Sixteen
  
• Chapter Seventeen
  
• Chapter Eighteen
  

To follow!!!!!!!

For Octavia, Roland and Claudia, and for the slug, without which this book would never have been written
.

And most of all I would flee from the cruel madness of
love –
The honey of poison-flowers, and all the measureless ill
.
Maud
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

‘A cereal killer,' repeated Willow as she sat opposite Tom Worth in the restaurant in Pimlico. Her green eyes had an uncharacteristic expression of doubtful amusement in them and her normally controlled voice quivered slightly. If Tom had not seemed so serious she might have allowed some of the laughter out. ‘What, poison in the muesli?'

Worth's dark eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared. The pale-yellow candlelight lit the engaging bump of his broken nose and the lines of his well-shaped mouth, which usually smiled but was now tucked into a frown. For once the power of his character was undisguised. He looked almost dangerous.

‘My God! You are chilling sometimes, Willow. How did you know?'

About to say that she could not think of any other way to kill someone with cereal short of stuffing their mouths and nostrils with it and so suffocating them, Willow suddenly realised what Worth had actually said. Altering her expression from amused doubt to carefully understated confidence, she shrugged and smiled.

‘Just a guess, Tom,' she said. ‘But I don't think I've ever heard of a serial murderer who used poison.'

‘There have been one or two; but it's true that most serial killers use more directly violent means. That's one of the reasons why my superiors take such a dim view of my hypothesis that these deaths are in any way connected,' said Tom, absent-mindedly pouring himself another glass of wine. He put the bottle back on the table and looked across the candle flame to Willow's shadowed face.

‘But I'm sure that they are and that we must stop him, whoever he is.'

‘What makes you think it's a “he”?' asked Willow, reaching for the bottle and pouring some claret into her glass. She was amused to find part of her mind surprised that Tom Worth had ignored her empty glass when refilling his own. The other man in her life, Richard Lawrence-Crescent, would no more have done that than he would have stripped naked and turned cartwheels in Piccadilly.

‘Manner of speaking, really,' said Tom. ‘But apart from two isolated American cases, the only genuine serial killers I've ever heard of have been men.'

Willow watched him as he spoke and realised that he was really troubled. Suppressing her lingering amusement over the original misunderstanding, she asked him what made him think that the killings were connected.

Tom looked past her as though she did not exist, as though she were a figment of her own imagination, which in a way she was.

Born the only child of middle-aged, academic parents, Willow had been brought up to be clever, efficient, prudent and perfectly self-sufficient. They had suppressed every sign of emotional dependence in their unexpected child only out of a desire to protect her from crippling distress if they should die before she reached safe adulthood, but they had been so successful that her self-containment became a kind of mental and emotional straight jacket.

For many years she lived reasonably contented in it, having no idea of what she was really like and hardly noticing her own inability to achieve intimacy with anyone. In her early thirties the chilly self-sufficient personality had threatened to extinguish her altogether, and some dormant sense of identity had forced her to take drastic action.

Exchanging her successful full-time Civil Service career for a part-time version, Willow had started to write romantic novels under a pseudonym. In the novels and in the luxurious part-time life they ultimately financed for her, she let all her hitherto suppressed fantasies run free. But even in that life she had still not conquered her fear of letting anyone come close to her.

‘Apart from the fact that they're all poisonings?' said Tom, still looking past Willow into the distance. ‘It's the way they were done, I think. Listen …'

‘Start at the beginning,' said Willow, her mind beginning to operate at its professional rather than its social level. They had spent a pleasant couple of hours in the small, informal restaurant, eating an undistinguished but decently cooked meal and chatting inconsequentially of books and films and holiday plans. She was touched – and surprised – that Tom had repressed what was obviously an urgent anxiety in order to entertain her.

‘How many murders are you talking about, where did they happen, what are the connecting links, what is the evidence, what …?'

‘Stop!' Tom said, interrupting her as she had interrupted him. ‘I'll give you a brief resumé of what I know. I was called to the scene of a double death in Fulham earlier this year.'

‘When? Why haven't you said anything before?'

Tom Worth merely raised his straight, dark eyebrows. Willow came closer to blushing than usual. They had met a few months earlier when he was in charge of an investigation into the murder of the Minister of her department, and an extraordinary moment of passion had flared between them. After the case had ended they had managed to become friends, dining together at about fortnightly intervals, but there was nothing in their relationship to give her any right to expect confidences from him.

‘I know, I know,' she said, fighting the small constraint, ‘you never discuss your cases. It's just that “earlier this year” sounded as though it must have happened very soon after we first met.'

‘Yes, it was a couple of weeks after that,' said Tom, respecting her wish to avoid talking about the murder that had introduced them.

‘But there was no reason to tell you anything about it,' he went on. ‘The two Fulham victims were an architect called Simon Titchmell and his girlfriend, Annabel Wilna. You may have read about it in the newspapers.'

‘I do remember something,' said Willow, frowning in an attempt to reconstruct the newspaper reports, ‘but few details. Didn't they think it was suicide?'

‘That is the most widely accepted conclusion, although the case hasn't been closed yet. The two of them died after eating muesli that had been contaminated with aconite,' said Tom.

‘What, those little yellow flowers?' said Willow, just as the young waiter came to clear away their plates. He asked whether their food had been ‘all right'and Worth assured him that it had and ordered coffee.

‘I like this place,' said Willow as they waited for it. She looked with approval at the pale beech tables, the plain candle holders, the dark-red felt walls and the unpretentious pictures that hung against them. There were eight other tables, but only two of them in use.

‘I'm glad,' said Tom simply, ignoring what he had been about to say when the waiter interrupted them. ‘It's nothing particularly special, but I have always felt comfortable here.'

‘It was kind of you to bring me,' said Willow. Then, as though determined to make up for her earlier ignorance of his problems, she repeated: ‘Aconite. Those little yellow flowers?'

‘That, my dear Miss King, is a remark worthy of your idiotic
alter ego
,' said Worth caustically. ‘I had been going to let it go, but since you've repeated it …' Willow's elegantly dressed red head had lifted at his first words and before he could finish what he had been going to say, she delivered her protest.

‘There's absolutely nothing idiotic about “Cressida Woodruffe”,' she said, trying not to sound defensive. ‘You may not be a consumer of romantic fiction, but there's no need to sneer at it. It gives a great many people a lot of innocent pleasure.'

There were very few people in the world who knew that the austere Willow King, the Assistant Secretary (Finance) of the Department of Old Age Pensions, was the same woman as the glamorous, sybaritic Cressida Woodruffe, but Chief Inspector Worth was one of the few. He had hardly ever spoken about her novels and Willow, who both liked and respected him, did not enjoy having to defend them against his criticism. The fact that she half despised them herself did not give him the right to judge her.

‘You're right,' said Tom at once. His smile was mocking, but she had the comforting feeling that it was himself he mocked. ‘I've never read any Cressida Woodruffes and it is unfair of me to prejudge them. But, to revert to what we are really discussing, the poisonous aconite has nothing whatever to do with those little yellow flowers. It's astonishing how many educated people get that wrong.'

‘Oh really?' said Willow with illusory meekness. ‘I never did any biology or botany even at school. But never mind now – tell me more about the murders.'

‘My superiors have taken the view that the aconite root, which had been carefully dried and powdered before being added to the cereal, was not properly understood by Titchmell or the girl and was deliberately put into the muesli by one or other of them.'

‘Why?' said Willow. ‘Why should anyone go to the trouble of drying and grinding up wild flower roots to improve their breakfast?'

‘In much smaller doses aconite has been used as a traditional narcotic,' said Tom. ‘And it is assumed that they took it as a home-made substitute for marijuana or cocaine.'

‘But that's ludicrous!' protested Willow. Tom shrugged. For the first time that evening he looked tired as well as anxious.