Poison Flowers (7 page)

‘I wasn't suggesting you were being mean, Richard,' she said when the
sommelier
had left them again. ‘But do think about it. I'd like to meet her. I'd lend you Mrs Rusham, Richard. She's been pining for you these last four months, and she'd do all the shopping, cooking, flowers. Come on. It would be good for you. I'll even pay for the dinner and then there won't be any debts between us.'

As she said that Richard's pleasant face changed until he looked really angry.

‘Why are you so obsessed with money at the moment?' he demanded, showing her a side of his character she had never encountered before.

‘I'm not,' she said, making certain that she did not sound defensive. ‘But you've been so emphatic about paying your debts: I didn't want to be any less punctilious.'

Richard fiddled with the salt cellar for a moment and then looked up at her with accusing eyes.

‘There are other debts, though, Willow: more important than monetary ones.'

Willow smiled in order to relax her facial muscles and so prevent her voice from coming out harsh.

‘I know that,' she said. ‘It was recognising it that told me I had to stop what I was doing to you. Don't let's talk about all that now. What about having a dinner party?'

‘Well I suppose …' Richard was beginning when their first courses arrived. Willow watched him slurping up the first of his oysters and put her spoon into the frothy green soup she had chosen to draw a line between all the dinners they had shared in the past. It was quite pleasant, if a little sharper than she would have liked.

‘You're making a mistake,' said Richard, enthusiastically licking his fingers. ‘These are wonderful and we're not likely to get many more until the autumn.'

‘What about it? I'm sure Mrs Rusham could get you oysters just as good as those,' said Willow cajolingly.

‘I've never been able to resist you when you were determined on anything,' said Richard, picking up another of the thick grey shells, squeezing lemon juice on to the quivering blob it contained and tipping it into his mouth. ‘I might as well give in gracefully. When am I to have this dinner party?'

‘As soon as possible,' said Willow. ‘Next week? Thursday or Friday, perhaps?'

‘All right,' said Richard amenable at last, ‘but in return I want you to tell me what this is all about.' He sucked up another oyster and drained the liquid its shell contained straight into his mouth.

When he had dropped the shell on his plate, he looked at her. She was relieved to see that there was a smile back in his greyish eyes.

‘I can't do that, I'm afraid,' said Willow, deciding that she had eaten enough soup to last her for some time. She put down her spoon.

‘You're not playing your old game, are you? Racing that policeman to the solution of some mystery? Presumably he can't work out who caused Titchmell's death and you …' He paused, but Willow was far too experienced to be rushed into speech by someone else's silence. She only smiled, wondering whether her mouth looked as much like the Mona Lisa's as it felt.

‘Well in that case, I can see that I shall just have to help you out,' said Richard with a self-satisfied smile. ‘You wouldn't have got anywhere last time without me.'

Remembering that she had said something very similar to Tom Worth, Willow decided to allow Richard his triumph and laughed with him.

Eating one of Mrs Rusham's best breakfasts the following morning, Willow ran through her list of questions to ask about the four victims and thought about the people who might be able to answer some of them. She decided that if she were to telephone them to put in her various requests for information, she could then reasonably ignore the investigation for the rest of the day and go shopping. There was to be a sale of fine English furniture at Christie's the following week and she would be able to view the lots any time that day.

She had just finished eating when Mrs Rusham came in with the newspapers and a second cup of coffee.

‘Thank you, Mrs Rusham,' said Willow, looking up. ‘That was perfect. You really are a splendid cook.'

‘I'm glad you think so, Miss Woodruffe,' said Mrs Rusham. For some reason Willow had never understood, her housekeeper had always treated her with cool formality although she had shown Richard an almost confiding devotion, and her severe features lightened into a real smile as Willow told her about Richard's plans for a dinner party.

‘And since he has very little time and not a lot of expertise, he wondered whether you would be prepared to help him out,' said Willow at last.

‘Well of course, Miss Woodruffe,' said Mrs Rusham happily. ‘It's always a pleasure to do anything for Mr Lawrence-Crescent.'

‘Splendid,' said Willow, wondering what Richard had ever actually done to arouse the affection she could see shining in her employee's usually dull brown eyes. ‘Why don't you ring him up at his office – here's the number – some time this morning and sort it all out with him?'

Willow would not have been surprised if pressure of work had made Richard quite forget his promise to entice the patent agent to dinner, and a little gentle reminder from the besotted Mrs Rusham would do no harm. The housekeeper agreed and asked whether Willow would be lunching at the flat.

‘Yes, I think I probably will,' she said. ‘But don't do anything very elaborate. I ate enormously with Mr Crescent last night.'

‘Very good, Miss Woodruffe,' said Mrs Rusham formally and departed for her immaculate kitchen, carrying the egg-smeared Minton plate with her.

Willow leaned back in her chair, picking up her coffee cup in one hand and
The Times
in the other. When she had read the home news, the letters and the ‘Friday page', she put the newspaper down and instead leafed through the
Daily Mercury.
Sensational, badly written and smudgily printed, it was not a newspaper she had ever read until she had met one of the journalists who worked on its diary section during the course of her investigation into the murder of the Minister. Willow had felt rather bad about having cheated information out of Jane Cleverholme, the journalist, and as a sop to her conscience had taken the paper ever since. Willow rarely read much of it, but was occasionally entertained by the different ways it reported the same items she had read in
The Times.

That Friday the
Daily Mercury
had its usual complement of death, disaster, failure, petty malice and sex. Willow dropped it fastidiously into the wastepaper basket, as she usually did, and thought of an excuse to telephone Jane Cleverholme.

When she answered, Willow announced herself, adding:

‘I've just been reading the
Mercury
and wondering all over again why on earth you …'

‘Don't say it,' said Jane bitterly. ‘I know; but it pays well and I still haven't had the break I need to get out. Never mind that now. How are you, Cressida? Still planning to write your romance-among-the-tabloids book?'

‘Well actually,' said Willow slowly and feeling guilty, ‘I'm not sure that it's going to work. My agent is a bit doubtful about it and the more I think about it, the more worried I get. I imagine that there'd be even more elephant traps than usual.'

‘What are you talking about?' demanded Jane briskly.

‘Elephant traps,' Willow repeated in an obliging voice. ‘Oh, you know, Jane, ghastly opportunities for wholly unconscious libel and that sort of thing. And newspapers are so used to being charged enormous sums when they libel people that they might be a bit vindictive. I'm an appalling coward about libel, I'm afraid.'

‘So what can I do for you?'

‘How shaming that you think I'd only ring you if I wanted something!' said Willow. ‘But in fact you are right; I wondered whether you knew anything at all about an actress called Claire Ullathorne? She died just over a month ago: suicide, I think.'

‘I'm not sure I've ever heard of her,' said Jane. ‘Why d'you want to know? A backstage romance?'

‘That sort of thing,' lied Willow calmly. ‘The strains and stresses of that life. You see, I've heard that she was reasonably well-off and attractive, and so it seems that she must have killed herself just because of a part she didn't get. Where could I find out about her?'

‘Hmmm,' said Jane. ‘I could look through our clippings library if you like; but you'd probably get as much information from the reference books, although they wouldn't have our inimitable style and gloss.'

‘Good idea,' said Willow foreseeing that her self-indulgent day was going to be more taken up with the investigation than she had planned. ‘But what are they? I don't suppose she'd have made
Who's Who
.'

‘No,' agreed Jane. ‘But she's bound to have been in
The Stage
.'

‘You are a mine of information, Jane. Thank you.'

‘I'll ring you if I find anything in the library,' she said.

‘And then we can have another of our dinners,' answered Willow gratefully. ‘Good bye, Jane.'

As soon as Jane had replaced her receiver and Willow could hear the dialling tone again, she tapped in Tom Worth's home number. As she expected she was answered by his machine and carefully dictated into it the message she had planned:

‘Tom, Cressida here. Can you get me in touch with the PC who dealt with the Titchmell burglary? I need to find out everything he heard and thought about Titchmell and his girlfriend, and his house and the break-in. That's all for the moment. Oh, and would you like to come to Sunday lunch here?'

That done she decided to go straight to Christie's to see whether there was anything in the sale that might take the place of her ruined furniture. The sale rooms were conveniently close to the London Library, of which she was a member, and so she could consult whatever reference books they had while she was in St James's.

It hardly seemed worth while getting her car out of the garage just to drive it ten minutes across London only to struggle to find a parking space, and so she asked Mrs Rusham to ring for a taxi while she herself went to tidy her face and hair and get a jacket. The weather had been almost miraculously warm for April, but it might well change.

On that thought Willow pulled a straight-cut navy blue coat out of the cupboard instead of the jacket she had planned to wear and slung it round her shoulders.

It occurred to her as she took a quick, derisively admiring look at her reflection in the long glass in her bedroom, that a longish string of pearls would have gone well with the dress and lightened the heavy colour mixture, but she had none. When she had first been able to afford real jewellery she had wanted gold and diamonds and emeralds; the quieter charms of pearls had seemed less attractive. If the new book sold well, perhaps she should give herself some pearls at last.

‘The taxi's downstairs, Miss Woodruffe,' called Mrs Rusham, and Willow went down to the street.

The large first-floor room in Christie's main building was full of dealers, sightseers and a few private buyers when Willow arrived. She bought a catalogue and unscrewed her fat black Mont Blanc pen ready to mark anything she liked.

Some of the estimates were way out of her price range, but she found a charming eighteenth-century folding card table made of kingwood that she liked and fell badly in love with a superb seventeenth-century walnut secretaire. It was of much better quality than the bureau bookcase she had had before, and according to the catalogue the cloudy looking glass on its doors was original, as were the two perfectly preserved candlesticks. The estimate in the catalogue was high.

Quickly working out in her head precisely what she would receive of her publisher's latest advance after the Inland Revenue had had their share, Willow decided that she could afford an extravagance and went to leave bids for the two pieces.

‘Shaking a little at the prospect of spending so much money and feeling for a disconcerting moment more like the frugal Willow King than the freely extravagant Cressida Woodruffe, she walked out of Christie's and turned left along King Street and left again into St James's Square. She had joined the London Library after her first book had been published and loved the stateliness of it as well as the enormous convenience it offered.

Taking the creaking, groaning lift up to the first floor, she walked into the reading room as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the elderly gentlemen reading newspapers and journals in the low red-leather chairs. Willow herself had once spent a morning in one of those chairs and had fallen into the heaviest and most comfortable sleep she could remember enjoying out of either of her beds.

Austerely laying her handbag and large notebook on a small table in front of a hard, upright chair, she then walked to the racks that ran down the middle of the room in search of the reference books Jane Cleverholme had recommended. To that pile she then added the
Architects'Yearbook.

From her loot she discovered that there was no immediately obvious connection between the 40-year-old actress and the 35-year-old-architect. They had been born and brought up in quite different parts of the country. Simon Titchmell had lived in Fulham and Claire Ullathorne in Canonbury. They were of different ages and sexes. It struck Willow that Claire Ullathorne's divorced husband might have been the connecting link, but when she took a chance and looked him up in
Who's Who
, she found that he was a distinguished soldier, twenty years older than Simon Titchmell and on the point of retirement. They – had had no children, which made her wonder about the evidence of childbirth she had read in the post-mortem report.

Simon Titchmell did not figure in
Who's Who
, but his godfather, the retired Chief Constable, did. The entry was not particularly illuminating, although it did list his recreations as ‘fine wine, good conversation, bridge and the theatre'. Willow filed that information, away in her memory and made a note to try to find out whether the Chief Constable's interest in the theatre had ever led him to an acquaintance with Claire Ullathorne. His son, Commander Bodmin, did not appear.