Rotten Apples (26 page)

There were two gates, about five feet high, set at an angle to each other at the end of the passage. She pushed at the one that seemed to lead to the Scoffers'garden. It did not give at all.

Thinking of her tights and short straight skirt as much as her bandaged hands, Willow was reluctant to try to climb over the gate. She reached up so that she could tip her right hand over the top and felt around for a bolt. There was one only a few inches from the top of the gate, and she pushed it back. There might have been another at the bottom, which would have been impossible to undo from the wrong side, but she was in luck and the gate gave way.

The back garden was as tidy as the front of the house. There was a small lawn, very deep green and evenly mown, with tall, bright but ill-matched bedding plants arranged in rows all round it. A small, gleaming lean-to greenhouse, which seemed to contain nothing but tomato plants, stood next to a locked shed, presumably housing the mower and tools. An empty washing line had been slung between two sturdy-looking fence posts.

Hoping that the ease with which she had gained entry to the garden was not a fluke, Willow pushed at the handle of the back door. It yielded at once and she pushed the door open. Immensely grateful for Mrs Scoffer's surprising carelessness. Willow called out: ‘Hello. Anyone there?'

There was no answer. Inside the kitchen, Willow felt even more sympathy for the widow. The room must have been arranged before fitted units became affordable. There was an old but impeccably white pottery sink between two wooden draining boards, which were pale with scrubbing. A large, formica-topped table with slanting metal legs provided most of the working surface, and the cooker was a small gas stove, perched up on legs, of a kind that Willow had not seen since she last watched a film set during the Second World War. The only modern thing was the fridge, which at least looked as though it might have been bought in the last ten years. There were two tall, narrow, dresser-like cupboards, free-standing and painted pea green.

The top of the cream-coloured table was covered with piles of cups and saucers and plates of sandwiches draped with damp tea-cloths. Other plates held neat squares of fruit cake, covered in cling film, and empty jugs stood next to a sugar bowl. It was clear that Mrs Scoffer was expecting to return to the house for tea with several of the other mourners.

Checking that there was still time before the likely end of the service, Willow left the kitchen to explore, not at all sure what she expected to find but obscurely certain that she would not be doing her duty if she did not look.

The front room was bare of everything but a velvet-covered three-piece suite and two highly varnished revolving book cases filled with hard-backed books that did not look as though they had ever been opened, let alone read. The whole room smelled of furniture polish, mothballs and stale air, as though it were hardly ever used. Behind it was a smaller room with a big television and video as well as a square oak dining table and matching chairs with grey-velvet seats. Everything was completely dust-free. There were no pictures; the few books were neatly stacked in their shelves, apparently arranged by size rather than author, title or genre; and there was no sign of any alcohol at all.

Upstairs Willow found the main bedroom with narrow twin beds covered in mushroom-coloured candlewick, and a highly polished, mahogany-veneered dressing table on spindly legs near a matching wardrobe with a mirrored door. Once again there was a powerful smell of mothballs.

Risking a glance between the net curtains, Willow was shocked to see a large dark-blue BMW parked about three houses further along the street. She did not recognise the registration number, but she had not even looked at the number plate of the car that had almost crashed into Kate's. With a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Willow wondered whether someone might be watching her after all.

Letting the curtain drop, she backed out of the room and went on to check the rest of the house as quickly as she could. The next room was obviously a spare bedroom. The bed was flat, covered with another candlewick bedspread, and all the rest of the furniture was draped in old-fashioned dust sheets. Apart from the bathroom, there was only one other. It looked as though Len had used it as a study.

Willow went at once to a filing cabinet that stood beside the window and pulled at the top drawer. It was locked. Cursing herself for not having learned how to pick locks, Willow turned instead to the desk. All she found were neat sheaves of receipted bills and a series of account books. Even though she already knew all there was to know about Scoffer's finances, she opened one and looked down at the tidy entries.

They were all concerned with household expenditure. Turning the pages, Willow saw that month after month the totals were within a pound or two of the sixty he allowed his wife. It seemed that as well as the food and the heat and light she had to pay for her own clothes, small presents, and anything spent on the house or garden. The only thing approaching frivolity was her subscription to a local bowls club.

From the evidence of the account books, her existence seemed appallingly bleak.

‘Well, at least she'll be a rich widow,' said Willow aloud, putting the books back where she had found them.

The wastepaper basket was annoyingly empty and there seemed to be nothing else in the room that looked at all promising, except for the filing cabinet. Willow could not imagine what he kept locked up in it, and felt that she had to find out.

Spurred on by frustration, she suddenly remembered reading in a novel that filing cabinet locks are not at all difficult to deal with. The cabinet merely needs to be tipped back and the steel bar holding the drawers shut can be pushed up to release them. There was no need to pick the lock at all. The only difficulty would be lifting the cabinet.

Willow dealt with that by putting her shoulder to the top of the cabinet and pushing. The front lifted neatly away from the thin nylon carpet, but she could not keep the cabinet far enough up to force her bandaged hands between it and the carpet to push up the bar. She needed a knife—a longish paper-knife.

There were no promising implements on the top of Scoffer's desk, or in its drawers, but there would probably be a carving knife downstairs. Willow was just stepping down from the hall passage into the kitchen when she heard a key in the front-door lock. Hardly thinking, she wrenched open me door under the stairs, and shut herself in.

She found herself not at the top of some cellar stairs, but in a musty cupboard filled with old paint pots and decorating tools. There was only just room for her to stand between the door and the piled tins. Hearing heavy footsteps coming towards her, she held her breath.

A police siren wailed in the distance, came nearer and then passed on, growing fainter in the distance. There was a tremendous crash as a thick shoe crunched into the fragile wooden door that was Willow's only protection. Expelling her breath through her nose as quietly as possible, and trying not to think of the people who might have been following her that morning, she pressed both bandaged hands to the inside of the door. It seemed a pathetic form of defence.

‘Bloody fucking hell!'

It was a male voice, very angry, and slightly American. Its owner kicked the door once more, so hard that Willow's wrists were badly jarred.

‘Fucking shit. Bloody, bloody,' hell. What a shit. What a fucking shit.'

Through the stream of obscenities, Willow heard the coy sound of the front-door chime. The man outside her cupboard stopped yelling and kicking the door and for a moment there was silence until the chime sounded again. Then the footsteps retreated towards the front of the house. Willow let herself breathe more deeply. A click followed and then the angry voice, a little moderated, said. ‘Yes? The funeral's at St Michael's, just down the road there. But you'll be late. They're half-way through already.'

‘Mr Scoffer? Mr Martin Scoffer?' The second voice sounded vaguely familiar to Willow, but she could not place it.

‘Yeah. That's me. Don't you want the funeral?'

‘Not exactly.'

‘Then what can I do for you?'

‘My name's Harness.'

Willow stiffened in her dark cubbyhole.

‘Chief Inspector Harness, actually. I was at the church, hoping to have a word with you after the service: When I saw you rushing off, I thought perhaps I ought… Could we do this inside, do you mink?'

‘Sure. Come on in.' There was a sound of heavy breathing gradually brought under control. ‘You the guy investigating the arson?'

‘That's right'

‘Then come on down to the kitchen and I'll make a cup of tea. I could do with one. There's not a lot I can tell you. I wasn't even in the country when the place burned. But I'll do what I can.'

Willow, whose left leg was beginning to ache and jump as cramp seized her calf muscles, realised that she was stuck. She could not emerge from the cupboard without humiliating herself in front of Chief Inspector Harness, and if the two men were going to settle down to tea-and-questions they might still be there when the mourners came back for their carouse. She leaned down to rub her calf and suddenly smelled gas. The meter was just behind her and the main gas tap on a level with her eyes.

Wonderful! she thought Stuck in a cupboard with a leaking gas meter. Well, at least North Sea gas isn't poisonous, even if it does explode.

Despite all her desperate attempts at humour, her predicament seemed quite unfunny.

‘Mr Scoffer, have you seen that the back door's open?'

‘Oh, shit! thought Willow with almost as much violence as the man himself had used.

‘That's one of the few ways my poor mother could get back at my father,' said Martin, sounding as though he had been loosening his tie and rubbing his Adam's apple as he spoke. ‘He was very security conscious, but she knew that there was nothing worth stealing in this hellish house, and so she used to leave the windows or the back door open as a kind of pathetic defiance.'

‘You sound as though you disliked your father.' Harness spoke as though only mildly interested in the answer.

‘Sure,' said the younger Scoffer easily. ‘It's taken me nearly ten years in expensive analysis to be able to say it, but I hated him.' There was a pause and then he added cheerfully. ‘And I can't say that I never fantasised about killing the bastard as I grew up, but in the end I ran away instead.'

‘Perhaps that was wise.'

‘Maybe, but it meant she was alone with him here. I'm not particularly proud of that. On the other hand my anger didn't help her any. In some ways it probably made it harder for her. Yup: I hated him all right, but I didn't set fire to his office.'

Willow thought she recognised someone who felt horribly guilty, trying to persuade himself that he was not nearly as bad as he feared. She wished that she could talk to him herself.

‘I know that,' said Harness. There was a sound of chair legs being pulled along a hard floor. ‘You were still in Maryland on the day he died, well alibi'd by all your colleagues at the lab.'

‘You've been checking up on me, Inspector. Tea? Or would you rather have a beer?' There was the sound of the fridge door opening. ‘That's another bit of rebellion. This was a wholly dry household until he died, but I took my mother to the nearest Majestic yesterday and loaded up with a couple of cases of lager, which she loves.'

‘It's rather early for me, thank you, but I wouldn't say no to a glass of cold water.'

‘How austere! You don't mind if I have a beer, do you?' A ring pull was ripped off the top of a can, but there was no sound of liquid being poured into a glass. ‘Ah, that's better. You can't think how good it feels to give that bastard two fingers in any way available. How she put up with it I'll never know.' A tap was turned on and then off again. The cramp in Willow's leg was so painful that she started to bite the insides of her cheeks to make certain that she did not groan aloud.

‘Sorry, I forgot; here's your water. Now, what do you want to ask me?'

‘Anything you can tell me about your father—or his enemies.'

There was a short, barking laugh.

‘There were plenty of those, I can tell you. Maybe one day I'll let myself think what it must have been like for him to hate everyone and be hated back—I don't suppose that there can be anyone in the world who minds that he's dead—but I can't yet. He didn't know how to be with someone else and not bully them. He ought to have got help, but it would never have occurred to him that there was anything the matter with what he did. He thought he was right and the whole of the rest of the world was wrong.'

‘Poor man.'

‘Easy for you to say, Inspector. You were never a target'

‘So who was, particularly?'

‘I don't suppose I could even list them. Everyone he came into contact with. Though to be fair I can't think of any I've ever met who'd go to the lengths of burning down a whole building to get back at him. Plenty might have liked to strangle him or beat him over the head, but why torch the office? I'd have thought that was someone who wanted to get even with the Revenue, wouldn't you? A disgruntled employee, probably.'

Willow stopped trying to massage her agonising calf muscles for a moment. The smell of gas was still only faint, but something had given her a frightful headache.

‘Why d'you say that?' came Harness's voice, quite clearly despite its quietness.

There was a short silence, followed by the sound of deep swallowing and the complicated clinking rustle as a crumpled can hit the inside of the garbage bin.

‘I've been reading about the minds of serial killers and other criminals recently,' said Martin Scoffer. ‘One thing one of the books said, which struck me as pretty sensible, was that someone who can't fit into an organisation or deal with the people in it tends to want to destroy it for everyone else: maybe to prove that no one else can succeed where he failed. See what I mean?'