Festering Lilies

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• Natasha Cooper
  
• Dedication
  
• 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
  
• Epilogue
  

Natasha Cooper lives in London and writes for a variety of newspapers and journals. She was Chairman of the Crime Writer's Association in 2000/01 and regularly speaks at crime-writing conferences on both sides of the Atlantic. N. J. is the author of the Trish Maguire series and has also written psychological suspense novels as Clare Layton.

For Gerald, with love
and many thanks for the scam

Willow King learned to lie in 1983. Her first attempt being successful, she started to work at her new talent for deceit, refining and polishing it until it had brought her most of the things she had ever wanted – and a lot of other things she had never even suspected herself of wanting. As the years passed, her talent also brought her amusement and no small degree of happiness. By the end of the decade she believed that it had made her impregnable to misery or disaster. But then chance, and someone else's tragedy, showed her how wrong she was.

When she arrived for work one icy morning in November, quite unaware of the storm that was about to break over her head, she was pulled up short by the sight of the office forecourt. Instead of the usual trickle of Civil Servants parking their cars or chaining bicycles to the railings, there was a positive phalanx of policemen drawn up ahead of her. Six white police cars, the first with its blue warning light still flashing, were parked in front of them. Willow's first sanguine thought was that there must have been a bomb scare, or perhaps some threatened riot. But even as the thought formed in her mind, she knew that those crises could not have drawn so many – and such senior – policemen to the Department of Old Age Pensions.

Willow was shocked by the instinctive fear induced in her by the sight of such immense police strength. Reminding herself that despite her facility for deception she had done nothing actually criminal and therefore had no need to fear any policeman in the world (and particularly not in London), she walked firmly towards the constable who stood nearest the main door. She was almost as tall as he, which helped her to control the instinct to cringe before him.

‘Yes, Miss?' he said as she made to sweep past him.

‘My name's King,' she answered crisply, flashing her pass at him, and waiting for him to open the door for her. ‘Assistant secretary (finance).'

‘Thank you, Miss,' he said, making no move to open the door. Instead he held out his hand for the pass.

Blinking a little, Willow handed it over and watched him as he carefully examined it. For the first time in years she found herself embarrassed by the dreadfulness of the photograph that had been embedded in the plastic rectangle. She knew that it made her look older than her thirty-eight years and even more dowdy than usual. The photograph being black-and-white, there was not even the colour of her dark-red hair to give any kind of distinction, and her spectacles had caught the camera's flash, reflecting it so that her, eyes looked like liquid egg white.

‘Miss Wil-hel-mina King?' asked the young officer, pronouncing her impossible name as though it were three separate words. It must have been about thirty years since anyone had used anything but her nickname and Willow was disconcerted for a moment. Then she nodded, she hoped with the requisite dignity and coldness.

‘Report to the officer inside, Miss King,' said the policeman.

Willow did as she was told, asked fruitlessly what was going on, and then made her way to the lifts. For one absurd moment she wondered whether this police operation could be some frightful new economy drive, designed to frighten the Civil Servants into working harder, arriving on time, or ceasing to use the photocopying facilities for their own private affairs. But even as she allowed her imagination to quicken, she knew that she was being unsuitably frivolous. There was an air of drama and even of suppressed violence about the place that morning, which did not square with any government-inspired efficiency drive.

Working on her self-control and reminding herself that her part-time job at DOAP required a degree of seriousness foreign to the other side of her life, Willow took the lift up to the eighth floor. The lift was old and inefficient and so Willow was accustomed to read something during its jerky ascent to stop herself exploding at the waste of time. On that particular morning she took from her briefcase a minute from the under secretary about an esoteric pensions problem. As the lift arrived with a bump on the eighth floor and the doors swished open, Willow walked forward still immersed in her memorandum and almost collided with the heavy blue-clad figure of one of the department's drivers. Raising her head in order to deliver a nicely judged apology, she saw the ugly face and angry brown eyes of Albert Dagnan, the minister's personal chauffeur.

‘What are you doing up here, Albert?' she asked genuinely surprised. He might perhaps have legitimate business on the tenth floor, where the minister's offices were, but otherwise his place was in the canteen, the garage or the drivers'room on the ground floor.

‘I didn't know I was answerable to you, Miss King,' he said with all the truculence for which he was notorious in the offices of DOAP and shouldered his way past her into the lift.

Willow blinked and made a mental note to have a quiet word with the establishments officer next time she ran into him. Lack of polish was one thing but gratuitous rudeness to a senior Civil Servant was another and could not be allowed to pass uncensured.

Righteously indignant, she walked briskly into the anteroom of her office to find her administration trainee, Barbara, and her typist, Roger, both working hard.

Pleased by the unusual industry, she bade them good morning and was surprised that even then they did no more than look up briefly and acknowledge her greeting. Willow let her pale-green eyes narrow as she looked at Roger, virtuously pounding away at the electric typewriter and occasionally sniffing and blowing his nose with all the theatricality he used to signal his frequent ailments.

‘You're very industrious this morning, Roger,' she said, allowing the approval to sound more obviously than usual in her chilly voice. ‘What's up?'

He turned his head so that she could see the whole of his face and she tried to suppress a gasp as she saw two long scratches down his right cheek and painful-looking bruising around his right eye. Poor Roger had suffered several times from thugs who pretended to take exception to his undoubted campness as an excuse to beat him up on late-night tubes, in dark streets and wherever else his nocturnal life took him.

‘Haven't you heard, Miss King?' he said hoarsely, as though his throat hurt him too. Despite his ailments, he smiled like someone faced with an unexpected treat. Willow shook her head vigorously, confident that the ‘Extra-firm' hairpins that skewered her long chestnut hair in place would stay in, whatever she did to them. Roger's expression changed to one of mingled excitement and sympathy, and for one dreadful moment Willow wondered whether the secrets that underpinned her life had been found out. No, she told herself, that was absurd; the atmosphere in her outer office must have something to do with all the police downstairs. Looking far more censorious than she realised, she said:

‘Heard what? Barbara, what on earth has been going on?'

‘The minister has been killed, Willow,' answered the black-haired Scottish girl with an equally sympathetic expression on her round pink face.

‘Poor Algy,' said Willow inadequately. She felt as though she had just been kicked – hard – in the solar plexus. ‘What happened? Was it a car accident?'

‘Oh no, Miss King,' broke in Roger, with the excitement fighting the sympathy all too successfully. He sneezed explosively, but for once he had a real drama on his hands and ignored the minor physical one. ‘He's been murdered. They found his body on Clapham Common last night. He'd been beaten up and his head smashed in.'

‘Roger!' Barbara's voice was full of reproach before she turned to the assistant secretary. ‘Why not sit down, Willow, and let Roger get you a cup of tea? It must be a terrible shock.'

Willow shook her head slightly, but then relented.

‘Yes, a cup of tea would be nice, Roger. A strong one, I think. Bring it into my room, will you? Barbara, come to my office in an hour, when I've had a chance to sort things out.'

‘Yes, of course, Willow,' the girl answered, efficiently slapping a pile of papers into place. ‘Oh and by the way, the PUS wants to see you as soon as possible.'

‘All right,' said Willow, checking her watch and wondering whether she would be able to put all thoughts of Algy's death out of her mind for long enough to summon the patience necessary to deal with the permanent secretary. ‘Find out if he can see me at, oh, say half-past eleven.'

She turned her back on the pair of them and went into her own room, badly wanting solitude in which to deal with the shock of what they had told her. Putting the briefcase down on a side table between the windows, Willow stood staring out over the grubby buildings of Clapham towards the common where Algernon Endelsham had met his end. Still shuddering inside from the shock, Willow found it as hard to blame her staff for their suppressed excitement as it was easy to understand their sympathy. The lives they led were of stultifying boredom, lightened only by the dramas, shifting romances and sexual affairs of their colleagues. The murder of any minister, let alone one as spectacular and famous as Algy Endelsham, would have been the drama to end all dramas, and Willow could imagine how the entire population of DOAP must be longing to discuss it.

In a way it was hard on her own staff that they felt they had to disguise their interest because of their ineradicable conviction that she had been desperately in love with the minister. She was both touched and a little repelled by their apparent care for her sensibilities.