Poison Flowers (36 page)

It was impossible not to think of the time it could take the over-burdened nurses to answer a patient's bell.

There was the sound of footsteps beyond her curtains. She quickly checked her watch. It was exactly half-past five. Willow gripped her upper lip between her teeth. The blue-and-green curtains parted and Ben Jonson stood there, looking just as friendly, untidy and unthreatening as he had always done. Willow undamped her lip and smiled at him.

‘You found me,' she said pleasantly. ‘I am glad. It's very good of you to come.'

‘Not at all,' he answered in the same, courteous social tones as she had used. ‘Had I known you were here, I'd have come days ago. I wanted to see you.'

‘Really? How kind. I had the stupidest accident, but I'm getting on all right now.'

‘What happened?' asked Ben, pulling up the chair and sitting down so close to Willow that she almost flinched.

‘Oh it was too silly. I was exhausted after a long and infuriating train journey and on my way home simply didn't look where I was going and walked straight into the path of a car. God knows why I wasn't killed!'

‘Did the driver bring you in?' Ben asked, giving Willow hope.

‘No,' she said, looking at him as directly as she could from her supine position on the bed. ‘Apparently it was a real hit-and-run. No one saw the accident and no one really knows what happened.'

‘You look as though you're listening for something,' Ben said, sounding less gentle than before. ‘Are you expecting someone?'

‘No,' said Willow. ‘But I want to make sure of privacy for what I'm about to say to you.' She checked her watch. If Tom were really coming, he ought to be on his way up to the ward.

‘Ah,' said Ben with a smile that would have looked charming in any other circumstances. ‘Now we come to it.'

‘Yes,' agreed Willow, edging her finger nearer to the bell. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that the police might think it was Caroline?'

Ben said nothing, and he did not move. Willow slightly relaxed her finger and took another deep breath.

‘They do, you see. They've worked out why all those people died, and they think that Caroline has been taking revenge. They are getting a warrant out for her arrest. You know what will happen then, don't you?'

There was still silence. Ben's eyes looked as though he were doing complicated sums in his head. Suddenly they focused on Willow's pale face and she knew that none of the fear she had felt in her life had been the real thing.

‘They'll put her in a cell in a police station,' she said quickly, ‘and leave her there. One telephone call – that's all. She'll have a bucket as a lavatory and a cement bench as a bed.'

Willow had never seen a police station cell and had no idea whether her description was accurate.

‘She'll be strip-searched and humiliated; terrified; and quite, quite powerless.'

Ben said nothing. His eyes were still staring at her face and his hands were taut and shaking. They looked almost like claws. Willow knew that she had to precipitate whatever was going to happen. Saying a quick prayer to a god in whom she did not believe, she did it.

‘And you will have put her there. Is that what you wanted to do all the time? All that love was really hate, wasn't it? She had everything you had ever wanted, and you couldn't bear it. She was everything you had ever wanted to be and you had to humiliate her. That was it, wasn't it? You wanted to make her suffer, and …'

Before Willow could finish, the claw-like hands had lifted from the grey-flannel-covered knees and were on her throat. Strung up on the pulleys, unable to move, Willow was completely defenceless. Choking against the grip on her neck, with her head boiling and a fog clouding her sight, she heard:

‘You bitch! You fucking bitch! You have no idea. I love her. I love her. I love her. You bitch. You sodding, fucking, bitch. You c…'

‘Enough!'

The single word ripped through the stream of insult and Willow felt the clutching hands pulled from her throat. Opening her tear-drenched eyes she saw Tom. Choking, gagging, she tried to breathe.

‘Tom,' she said. But no sound emerged. She brushed the tears away and saw that he had Ben Jonson in a ferocious arm lock and gave up the struggle to do anything but breathe.

Twenty minutes later, uniformed officers had Jonson in handcuffs and Tom was sitting by Willow's bed, stroking her red head over and over again.

‘You fool,' he said gently. ‘You idiotic, dangerous, brilliant fool. Oh, God, Willow, don't ever do that again. Promise you won't ever to that again? Darling fool, you must promise.'

‘All right,' she said painfully. She could not imagine letting herself go through any such thing again and could not understand how she had done it even once. Only the sensation of Tom's hand on her head was stopping her from screaming out her terror and her relief that she was not dead.

Four days later her throat felt better, although swallowing was still painful. Tom was sitting at her side once again and Willow was slowly drinking the peach nectar he had brought her.

‘Has Ben confessed yet?' she asked.

‘To the murders? Not to us. We had hopes that he would have admitted something in a letter he wrote to Miss Titchmell, but he didn't.'

‘You mean you read it?' asked Willow, sounding absurdly shocked. ‘Could I have a glass of that water? This stuff is delicious but a mite sickly.'

Tom stood up and poured some water out of a plastic jug into a tumbler and handed it to her. Willow drank some, but it was warm and tasted slightly stale although one of the nurses had refilled the jug earlier that morning.

‘Why are you so shocked? We asked her first,' said Tom. Willow's face cleared.

‘I thought you'd been intercepting his mail,' she said drily.

‘All letters to and from remand prisoners are private, Willow. You know that,' he answered. ‘But one of my men went to see her to ask if he could read it.'

‘And what was in it?' she asked with half-reluctant curiosity, handing him the glass to put down for her.

‘A Shakespeare sonnet – number 50, I think,' Tom answered.

‘I don't know that one,' said Willow. ‘Can you remember it?'

‘I never saw it,' said Tom, ‘and I don't know the sonnets by heart. If you like I'll bring you a Shakespeare next time I come in.'

They were silent for a moment, listening to the faint sussurus from the day room, where
Neighbours
was feeding the other patients' starved fantasies, and the efficient sounds of the nursing staff as they bustled about the six bays on the ward.

Worth stood up and half turned to look out of the wide windows at the London skyline. The weather had broken and the newly emerged leaves and flowers were being lashed by unseasonable rain. The clouds outside the windows were heavy and black. Neither Tom nor Willow spoke, both absorbed in their thoughts of what had happened and what effect it was going to have on everyone involved.

‘Tom,' said Willow at last, ‘have you seen Caroline?'

‘No,' he answered. ‘I know she has talked to the Legal Aid people for him, but that's all I know.'

‘She must be in a frightful state,' said Willow, betraying only some of the anxiety she felt. ‘I've tried to get hold of her through Richard Crescent, but he doesn't seem able to make her answer the door or the telephone. He says that there are lights on in the house whenever he knocks on the door, but that no one ever answers the bell.'

‘The lights could be on time switches to baffle burglars,' suggested Tom. ‘Perhaps she has gone to stay with her mother or gone away.'

‘I don't think so,' said Willow, putting a hand to her head as though it ached. ‘I don't think that would be in character. I think she is in there, trying to deal with it all on her own and I think she should be got out. I can't go and batter on the door while I'm strung up like this.'

Tom got out of the chair and walked to the foot of Willow's bed. He turned, put both hands on the steel bars of the bedstead and took a deep breath.

‘That's not really in your style is it, Will? Trying to make people express their emotions for their own good? Shouldn't she be left to deal with them as she sees fit?'

‘You're right about a lot of things, Tom, but this time I think the need might be so severe that it would justify interference. Don't look at me like that, Tom,' said Willow, seeing mockery where perhaps there was only a dawning hope that she might one day be able to face the fact that he, too, had severe emotional needs – and she herself as well.

‘Do you want me to bring her? I imagine she's too embarrassed by what he's done to you to come here without some forcible reason.'

‘Would you?'

‘Yes,' he said. ‘If you really want her. I'll try to bring her tomorrow.'

‘Good,' said Willow. ‘Oh, before you go, Tom, did Swaffield's confession of his lies produce any real information about him and Miranda?' Tom's face changed. ‘I can't help being interested,' said Willow. ‘Please tell me.'

‘All right.' Tom laughed. ‘It was a simple enough story. According to Sarah Rowfant (whose mental trouble, by the way, turned out to be a relatively mild case of anxiety treated with a short course of valium some years ago), Miranda and Swaffield had been playing platonic lovers for a year or more. Bruterley did not particularly mind …'

‘I should think not!' exclaimed Willow. ‘When he was unfaithful and probably had been since his wedding day.'

‘It does sound as though he had had a girlfriend on the side since the second year of his marriage,' Tom admitted. ‘But he had noticed Miranda's growing predilection for his senior partner and he was worried that she might divorce him.'

‘Ah, and she was the one with the money,' Willow said.

‘Precisely. And when Bruterley went to Swaffield to warn him off, Swaffield in turn …'

‘Blackmailed Bruterley with the fact that Sarah Rowfant was a patient of the practice,' said Willow hardly aware that she had interrupted him. ‘I see. And fearing for his matrimonial home and income, rather than for his professional standing, which was not really at risk, he told her that he was going to have to stop their affair?'

‘Just that. And she, devastated, fled to the wilds of northern Scotland and the telephoneless croft, poor girl.'

‘Poor girl, indeed,' agreed Willow, ‘but silly girl, too. He was married. What a mess emotions cause!'

‘On that note, my dear Will, I'm off,' said Tom with a grin. ‘Is the food in those boxes all right?'

‘Wonderful! Thank you for sending it, but now that Jonson has been restrained, you don't really need to go on,' said Willow.

‘But don't you prefer the picnics to hospital food?' Tom asked, and when she smiled and admitted that she did, he added, ‘Well, I'll carry on then. Goodbye.'

She watched him go, thinking that he looked more like his usual tough self than when she had first woken and seen him staring down at her with that slight smile on his lips and the bruised expression in his eyes. Sighing a little for the energy that caring about him took from her, Willow twisted sideways as she had learned to do and picked up a new book Michael Rodenhurst had brought her. But she could not concentrate on it. There were so many loose ends left in her knowledge of the case, but she knew that she would have to wait until the trial itself to hear about the police work that had turned her leaps of imagination and analysis and guesswork into solid, provable forensic evidence.

She heard nothing of Caroline for two weeks and during that time learned to relax properly. Dr Salcott visited her every day on his rounds and she wondered how she could ever have suspected him. He seemed as he had done when she first met him on the train – amiable, loquacious, unthinkingly sexist and conventional – but as her body repaired itself under Georgina Wakehurst's care she recognised, too, that he must be a good doctor, able to instill the necessary confidence in his patients as well as diagnose their gastroentestinal diseases.

Members of her DOAP staff came daily, too, and gradually she felt herself growing back into her own professional life as she assessed their problems and gave advice and the occasional admonishment. Her terror that the two sides of her life might coalesce grew less as she rediscovered the discipline and order of her Civil Service work.

By the time Tom did bring Caroline Titchmell to the ward, late one Friday afternoon, Willow felt that she was herself again. Her legs were still strung and weighted, but her mind was once more in order; and she was no longer afraid.

Caroline looked terrible. Her skin was grey and her remarkable eyes seemed dimmed and deeply sunk into their sockets. Her mouth was pinched and looked as though she had been chewing her lips and tearing little bits of skin of them with her teeth and fingers. She had obviously lost a great deal of weight and her clothes seemed to hang from her shoulders as though from a cheap wire coat hanger.

‘Your summons surprised me,' she said to Willow by way of greeting, ‘but I understand from Chief Inspector Worth that you were instrumental in sorting out what was happening.' Her voice sounded hoarse, as though she had rasped her throat with weeping or perhaps with talking. She looked round, but Tom had tactfully disappeared.

Willow wanted to tell Caroline that she felt guilty for ruining her happiness with Ben, but she could not do it. Guilt there was, but only for asking questions in the guise of a friend. Ben had had to be stopped. There were a lot of things she wanted to say to Caroline, but Caroline had to speak first. Willow waited for some time.

‘He seemed so gentle always,' Caroline said at last. ‘That's what I still can't understand. I've never known anyone as gentle and considerate in my life. But how could I not have known what he really was?'