Poison Flowers (8 page)

Willow replaced the fat, red book on its shelf and instead turned to the
Architects'Yearbook
in search of information about Simon Titchmell. There was no indication that he had ever done any stage design, but Willow thought it just possible that he might have designed a set or two and perhaps even met Claire Ullathorne that way. Willow resolved to ask his sister that at Richard's dinner party. Before she abandoned the reference books, she looked up the entry for the architecture practice which had first employed Simon Titchmell.

She saw that among the projects they had completed was a complex of buildings for the Metropolitan Police and at once she began to wonder whether Commander Bodmin might have had a hand in selecting the architects, giving the work to his father's godson's firm and consequently believing himself vulnerable to a charge of nepotism. That information, too, was filed both in her memory and her notes, although she could not quite bring herself to believe that anyone would refuse to pursue a murder investigation because of so vague a threat.

Having gutted the reference books, Willow tidied up her papers, took the heavy volumes back to their shelves and then made her way down to the sepulchral basement where the back copies of
The Times
and
Country Life
were kept. It was often hard to stop herself browsing through the really ancient copies of
The Times
, but for once she was interested enough in her current enquiry to go straight for the volumes for the past few years. Heaving the great dark-red books on to the high metal table, she read through vast numbers of theatrical, film and television reviews, finding only four that referred to Claire Ullathorne. All were favourable and the most recent was positively eulogistic. Even though she had failed to get the part she evidently wanted, she was quite successful.

There was nothing in any of the few architectural columns about Simon Titchmell.
Country Life
proved more fruitful, but only to the extent of a pair of articles about large country houses that he had restored. Looking at the photographs and reading the accompanying text. Willow thought that she understood precisely why Richard had called Titchmell's work ‘precious', but there was nothing there to throw any light at all on why he might have been murdered, or even have stupidly taken a fatal dose of aconite for some peculiar purpose of his own.

The thought of aconite sent Willow upstairs to the ‘Science and Miscellaneous'shelves for a book on poisons. The only one she could find had been published in 1906, but she thought it unlikely to be badly out of date.

‘Poisons can't have changed much in eighty years,' she murmured, much to the surprise of a young man leaning against the stacks further into the gloomy room.

Willow took the fat book down to the front desk and signed for it. Checking the catalogue, she discovered that the library did own a more modem book on poisons and so she put in a request to borrow it when it was next returned.

When she emerged into the sunlit green-and-whiteness of the square, she decided to walk back to Chesham Place. There was half an hour to spare before lunch and the exercise might stimulate her brain.

She planned to go via Jermyn Street and found herself seduced into a little self-indulgent window shopping, which soon turned into the real thing when she let herself buy a luxurious yellow silk shirt in one shop and a pair of soft black-leather shoes in another. Once again her long-entrenched frugality protested at the extravagance. She partly salved her agitated conscience by dropping into Hatchards in Piccadilly for a book about English wild flowers, which she thought might help her avoid making another mistake like the one she had made over the aconite. She also asked in the non-fiction paperback department whether there were any books about serial killers. To her surprise the assistant went immediately to an American study of the phenomenon and offered it to her. Willow read the blurb and, deciding that it might be useful, paid for it and took it away.

When she reached the flat, ten minutes after one o'clock, Mrs Rusham greeted her with patent disapproval and a clutch of telephone messages. Ignoring the first, Willow thanked her for the messages and, having washed, walked into the dining room for lunch. When she saw what had been laid out for her, she thought that Mrs Rusham's disapproval of her lateness was a bit absurd, for all the food was cold. There was a perfectly arranged salad of radiccio, goat's cheese and olive oil to start with and a miniature game pie to follow.

Mrs Rusham was a past-master of the art of making raised pies, and since Willow was not particuarly keen on pork pies, her housekeeper always had plenty of game in the freezer instead. As usual the pastry was crisp on top and delectably chewy beneath the surface and the partridge, pheasant and hare filling was a small miracle of flavour, presumably moistened with something beyond the jellied stock that glistened in all the interstices. Willow washed it down with a glass of Vichy water and completed her lunch with a ripe pear.

When she had finished that, she carried her plates out to the kitchen to thank Mrs Rusham.

‘I'm glad it was satisfactory, Miss Woodruffe,' she said. ‘As you will have seen from your messages, Mr Lawrence-Crescent telephoned this morning, and he also asked me to tell you that his guests have all accepted for Thursday next week.'

‘Excellent,' said Willow, genuinely pleased. ‘And have you and he decided on a menu?'

‘He said that he would leave everything to me,' said Mrs Rusham, beaming with remembered gratification. ‘Is there anything you would like this afternoon, Miss Woodruffe?'

‘This afternoon? No, I don't think so. Do you want some time off?' asked Willow.

‘Oh no. But I thought I would deal with the laundry and take your dry cleaning out if you didn't want me for anything else.'

Willow shook her head and took her small sheaf of telephone messages to her small writing room. The only unexpected call was from Eve Greville, her literary agent, asking her to ring back. One of the others was from Tom Worth. In reading Mrs Rusham's laboriously neat writing, Willow discovered that Tom could not possibly introduce her to ‘the young man', but would do what he could to find out ‘the information' for her. The message ended: ‘Please tell Miss Woodruffe to be very careful and very discreet indeed.'

Willow sat looking at that message for some time, before trying to telephone Tom to ask what he meant. For once he was in his office and she was quickly put through to his extension. But it did not help her much. All Tom would say when she pressed him for an explanation was:

‘I can't talk about this now. We're very busy here. But I cannot stress enough that in such a situation you must take great care. It could be … People are not likely to appreciate questions and may take … evasive action. I must go. Goodbye.'

As she listened to the empty buzz produced by her receiver and thought about the grey formality of his usually expressive voice, Willow realised that he must have been afraid that he was being overheard and so she tried to fill in the gaps in what he had actually managed to say. He was clearly afraid for her safety, which seemed absurd. Even if there really were a poisoner on the loose he or she could hardly have become aware that Willow had any interest in him or her. Only Tom and to some extent Richard Crescent had any idea of that. She could not believe that either of them posed any threat to her.

The only other people who could know anything at all were Tom's colleagues and superiors. Someone at his office might have noticed that he had had the relevant files out when they ought to have been consigned to some defunct-case storage. It was just possible, she supposed, that they might then have tapped his telephones and discovered that Willow was helping him uncover the poisoner. Could Tom really be afraid of something like that?

On reflection. Willow decided that he could, and, knowing his bottomless store of commonsense and courage, she could not help feeling shaken.

Deliberately deciding to ignore her weakness. Willow opened the toxicology text book she had brought from the library. Cross checking its references to plants with the English flora she had bought, she grew more and more appalled at how easy it was to obtain lethal poisons from the bogs, meadows, woods and gardens of Great Britain. She had always assumed that apart from the odd fungus and, of course, deadly nightshade, only tropical plants were poisonous. Her own absurdity made her laugh for a moment, but as she thought about the omnipresence of poisonous plants she began to question her own and Tom's conviction that there must be some connection between the deaths. She also began to wonder how she could protect herself if the person she were trying to unmask really did discover her activities.

After a while she went back to the book and discovered from the statistics quoted that surprisingly few murderers had used such methods. She felt slightly comforted.

‘But it is eighty-odd years out of date,' she reminded herself. ‘And perhaps detection of poison is more efficient now.'

Before she could get any further, she heard the front door bell ring. There was no sound from the kitchen and so. Willow went out to answer it herself, realising that Mrs Rusham must have already gone to the dry cleaners.

‘Package for Woodruffe,' came the crackling voice through the intercom.

‘I'll come down,' said Willow and, taking her keys, she walked downstairs to open the front door. When she got there she looked around for the expected man in motorcycle kit wanting a signature, but there was no one. A shabby, often re-used padded envelope had been propped against the top step. Willow picked it up and saw that it was addressed to her in ill-written pencilled capitals.

She looked once more up and down the street for the messenger but eventualy shrugged and took the package upstairs. It was not until she had reached her own front door that she began to wonder about the parcel. Knowing that she was not expecting anything, she tried to think who might have sent it to her. Her publishers and agent often sent her manuscripts in recycled padded bags, but they always had her address typed on labels bearing the name of their company. Handwritten packages sometimes came her way from struggling authors wanting advice on the writing of bestsellers, but those always came through her publishers. Very few people indeed had Cressida Woodruffe's private address.

She held the parcel out in front of her to try to decipher the various postmarks that had been stamped on it at one time or another, but most were blurred or incomplete and did not help. Her skin began to prickle as an explanation presented itself to her. At first she would not let herself believe it, but it came to seem more and more likely. She sniffed the thick, dark-yellow envelope, but the only smells she could distinguish were cigarette smoke and dust. But she did not think that she would have recognised the smell of an explosive even if it was there.

Her hands were suddenly slippery with sweat, her tongue felt dry and swollen and her throat ached. She dropped the package and flinched violently as it hit the floor.

It was some moments before she realised that the ringing sound that came from somewhere behind her was the telephone and that the parcel was lying innocently where it had fallen. Walking with some difficulty, as though her terror had ruined her co-ordination, Willow went to answer the telephone.

‘Cressida?' said a voice she could not recognise.

‘Who is it?' she said urgently in a voice made hoarse by tension.

‘Jane Cleverholme. Are you OK?'

‘Oh … Jane. Yes. Yes, I'm fine. I've just had rather a shock.

What can I do for you?' said Willow, struggling to regain her equilibrium.

‘I just rang to say that I've asked one of the messengers to bring you a bag of cuttings about your actress. He said he'd drop it off whenever he had a gap in his legitimate jobs.'

‘What?' said Willow, hardly able to grasp the fact that all her fear had been for nothing. ‘Cuttings. Oh I see. Thank you, Jane. Yes, they've come. He dumped them on the front doorstep a while ago. I'll ring you when I've had a chance to look at them. Thank you.' She put down the receiver without waiting for Jane to say anything more and went to brew herself a soothing cup of cocoa.

When she had drunk it and banished all but the last echoes of terror, she went to collect the parcel from the hall and took it into her writing room. There she abstracted the staples from the padded envelope as carefully as she would have done in her Clapham life, forgetting that there was a stack of nearly fifty untouched padded bags in the cupboard beside her desk, and pulled out the bundle of photocopied newspaper cuttings.

Clipped to the top one was a note from Jane.

‘Dear Cressida,
I hope these are some help. If you're looking for a reason for
the suicide perhaps the top two cuttings hold a clue.
Good luck with the book. Jane.'

With increasing eagerness, Willow pulled the note away and concentrated on the cutting it had hidden.

‘Actress discovers long-lost daughter,' said the headline of the article, which was dated about nine months before Claire Ullathorne's death. As she read down the column, Willow discovered that Claire had had an illegitimate child, whom she had given for adoption at birth. On her eighteenth birthday the child had exercised her rights and tracked down her natural mother. Claire Ullathorne was quoted as having said: ‘This lightens all the sadness I felt when I had to give Amanda up at birth. It's the best thing that has ever happened to me.'

Wondering why Jane thought that that could have led to Claire's suicide, Willow turned to the next cutting, where she read of a horrible car crash in which a stolen van, driven by a drunk, had ploughed into a line of stationary traffic on the opposite side of the road, killing the driver and two passengers of the leading car. One of the passengers was named as Claire Ullathorne's daughter.

‘Oh, poor woman,' said Willow aloud. Looking at the date, she saw that the crash had been reported the previous autumn, at least six months before Claire's death. Willow asked herself whether the loss of the child she had known for only about three months could have made the actress kill herself, and if so why she should have waited so long to do it and why she should have chosen so unlikely a death as colchicine poisoning.