Festering Lilies (10 page)

Knowing that if she returned to her flat she would have to make some excuse for her presence to Mrs Rusham, Willow decided to retreat to the anonymous safety of the coffee shop at the top of Peter Jones. There, at least, there would be no furious males to threaten the complete vulnerability that had just been revealed to her.

Ten minutes later, Willow was queueing for her coffee behind a row of smiling, chatty women with bags of shopping. One or two had babies in buggies and there were several blond toddlers rushing about in their blue-and-white-striped Osh-Kosh dungarees and red-leather shoes. The air of bright innocence and peaceful femininity began to restore Willow's damaged nerve. She took a large Danish pastry from the counter, vaguely thinking that the carbohydrate might help subdue her residual panic. Having paid for it and a cup of coffee, she carried her tray to a seat near the window overlooking the King's Road and sat down looking out and seeing nothing.

After a while the banging of her heart had slowed almost to normal and the sweat on her hands had dried enough for her to pick up her cup. The coffee was strong and still hot enough to help control the nausea she felt. She drank thirstily and when the cup was empty began to eat the sticky bun. When that, too, was finished she did feel better. Even so she could not help remembering what Richard had said the previous evening and wondering what she had let herself in for when she launched herself on the investigation.

In one way it was satisfactory to have had first-hand evidence of Eustace Gripper's temper and territorial instincts. The strength of his reaction to a possible snooper, and the precise words he had used, did suggest that Gino's tittle tattle might have some basis in fact. And a man who could so threaten a wholly unknown woman who just happened to pass by his house might well take violent exception to the seduction of his wife. But even so, would he go as far as murder?

Willow was just deciding that she would have to find some way of investigating both the Grippers and discovering whether they had alibis without ever coming face to face with him again when her gaze focussed on a bus which had just pulled up at a stop down in the street below. It was a number 19, which, she knew, went to Clapham Junction. Moving decisively at last, she got up from the small table and left the restaurant.

Having told Mrs Rusham that she would be out for lunch, she could hardly go straight back to the flat and had been wondering what on earth to do with herself. The bus had decided her; she would return to Clapham Junction station and try to inveigle the tramp to some place where she could question him without fear of being interrupted by helpful station staff.

As she was waiting for the lift, she caught sight of herself in a long mirror and realised that she would need something to disguise herself a little. The Burberry and black boots she had chosen when she hoped to talk to Mrs Gripper would not stand out too badly in Clapham, but her hair might well betray her. Ignoring the lift, she hurried down the stairs to the hat department and bought herself a large, not very becoming, black PVC rain hat, into which she could tuck all of the gleaming, dark-red curls. With the hat brim flopping irritatingly in front of her eyes, she was confident that no one would either recognise or remember her in the future.

Reassured of her anonymity, she went out into the street and joined the bus queue. It seemed strange to be heading south of the river on a ‘Cressida Woodruffe'day, and Willow even felt a prick of conscience that she was not working at her novel; but her search for Algy's murderer had suddenly become serious. It was no longer just a matter of pitting her wits against those of the policeman who had interviewed her in order to avoid humiliating exposure. Now she had been threatened by a man who might have killed the minister. Gripper had not specified what he might do to her, except sue her for libel if she wrote about him, but she could forget neither the viciousness of his voice as he warned her off nor the aura of physical power that had surrounded him.

Her quest had taken on a personal quality. If Algernon Endelsham had been killed by Eustace Gripper, then Willow wanted him behind bars. If he were innocent, then she needed to have proof in order to exorcise the terror he had induced in her. As it was, Willow knew that she would not be able to walk through that part of Belgravia again without fear.

A bus drew up at the stop and Willow shuffled on to it with the rest of the queuers. The drive to Clapham would have taken not much more than ten minutes in a car on a trafficless road, but on that Friday morning, with some commuters already leaving London for the weekend, shoppers milling into the road at every possible opportunity and the early lunchers clogging each crossing and junction of the road, the bus took well over an hour.

Willow left it in some relief and walked into the station in search of her tramp. She found him without trouble and was relieved to see that there was no sign of any station staff to interfere. The whole place appeared to be deserted. The tramp was sitting on a bench, a bottle of cider beside him and a filthy-looking, half-eaten sandwich clasped in one hand.

‘You look cold,' she said cheerfully, sitting down at the opposite end of the bench. There was no reply. The man tilted his cider bottle – still wrapped in its paper bag to his mouth. Willow tried again. ‘I saw you here on Wednesday evening; you asked for the price of a cuppa. I should think you'd like something hot now, wouldn't you? It's a beastly day.'

She hated to hear herself sounding like Lady Bountiful, but the interrogation of an independent minded tramp was not something for which either her Civil Service training or her writing talents had prepared her. The man looked slowly round, as though the words she had used had taken time to penetrate his mind. There was no recognition in his eyes, and Willow waited without much hope. It suddenly seemed absurd to think that she would discover anything. Even if the tramp had seen anything unusual on the night of the minister's death, there was no guarantee that he would remember it or bother to pass it on even if he did remember.

‘Wouldn't mind,' he said at last.

‘A cup of tea?' said Willow brightly. Determined not merely to hand over some money, she went on, ‘I'd like one too. I'll just nip across to the buffet and get them. What about something to eat, too? I expect there're hot pies or something.'

‘Wouldn't mind,' he said again and rubbed the back of one filthy, mittened hand across his swollen lips.

Willow went quickly to the station buffet, hoping that she could buy the tea and get back to the bench before someone moved the tramp on or he decided to give her up as a bad source of nourishment. The whole episode seemed rather unreal, as though she were playing a detective in a rather poor play, but she was determined to go on with it and put up with whatever peculiar sensations of artificiality she felt.

Just as there seemed to be no passengers waiting for trains, there was no one queueing in the buffet and Willow was back on the tramp's side of the platform in barely five minutes, balancing a hot pie on top of two paper cups of tea.

‘So what did you see last Monday?' she said, as she put her loot on the red metal bench.

‘Nothing,' he answered, reaching for the pie. Willow handed it to him and asked her question again, adding:

‘Was there nothing different, no one behaving strangely that night?'

The man shook his head and bits of pie flew off his beard with each movement. Willow tried to suppress her distaste, leaning back against the bench and sipping her tea. She could not think what to do next. None of the detective stories she had read – or wooden plays that she had seen during her student days – provided any model. Once-again she felt a fool and most unlike herself.

‘He was washing.' The tramp's voice jerked Willow's head round to face him again. ‘Washing,' he repeated more loudly as though he had taken her blankly surprised expression to mean that she had not heard him the first time. An express rattled through the station just then, making any speech impossible to hear. When it had gone at last, Willow said:

‘Who was washing?'

‘Bloke in a mac. On Monday. Kept it buttoned all the time and the collar up. Washed his hands and face. Water all over the collar, but he kept it up.'

‘How do you know it was Monday?' asked Willow, remembering her doubts about his intelligence and memory. She was disconcerted by the blaze of anger in the man's bright grey eyes, which seemed so incongruous in his dirty, pouchy face.

‘I'm not daft, you know,' he said. ‘Last Monday.'

‘What did he look like?' Willow asked, unable to apologise to the man for underestimating him, but equally unable to leave before she had heard everything he had to tell. But it seemed that he felt he had done enough to repay her for the hot pie and tea, for he shook his head again.

‘Just a bloke.'

‘Old or young?' Willow prompted.

‘Yes,' said the tramp irritatingly. ‘It's too cold here.' Willow sighed and did not try to stop him as he heaved himself up from the bench and shambled off. She had got more information than she had expected, if considerably less than she had wanted.

It was little enough, though, and probably not even reliable. But if he really had seen a man washing on the Monday when Algy had died, perhaps.… No, there was nothing whatever to connect the washing man with the murder except her vague idea that the murderer might have left Clapham by a train from the Junction. She was no further on. Willow got up from her bench and carried the paper cup, still half-full of tea, to a large bin and dropped it in, wiping her hands fastidiously on a handkerchief, which she then threw in after it.

It dawned on her that as there was no longer a reason to hang about the undeniably depressing environs of the Junction, she might as well take a train back into the middle of London. There was no one around to tell her the time of the next train and it took her some minutes to find a timetable. Finding that there would be at least fifteen minutes to wait, she decided to take a quick look outside the station.

There was nothing much of interest to see and nothing to spark off any useful ideas in her mind. She passed dull shops and various pubs, including one called The Pig's Ear, which she vaguely remembered hearing discussed in the office. Annoyingly she could not remember the context. Thinking that it looked peculiarly depressing, she walked on, eventually buying a local paper in a tobacconist's shop.

She took the newspaper back to the station and read it while she waited for the train. There seemed to be almost nothing in it except crime; everything from an unsuccessful attempt to rob a building society to cases of child abuse and murder and rape. There was nothing about the minister in it, which surprised Willow until she remembered that it was a weekly paper.

As her train pulled slowly into the station, she threw the newspaper into the rubbish bin and then took her seat, strangely disturbed by what she had read.

Real violence had not touched anyone she knew until Algy's death and she had hardly thought about how much of it there was only just below the surface of everyday life. Suddenly it seemed as though there were a core of hot, molten violence rather like the lava at the centre of the earth that could erupt through any flaw in the protective crust. And if that were true, Willow thought, then it followed that almost anyone could have become angry or frightened enough to have killed the minister.

It might even, she thought reducing the whole proposition to absurdity, have been Richard Crescent, wreaking revenge on the tormentor of his schooldays. At that thought Willow pulled herself up. Just as Richard was her alibi, so she was his. Besides, Richard was quite incapable of violence.

The train was held up outside Waterloo station, and as she sat in it, Willow asked herself how she could be certain that Richard could never resort to violence. With common sense slowly returning, she told herself that if he had shown no signs of it during the three years he had been her lover, he was unlikely to do so in the future.

But then presumably Algy had felt the same about whomever he had met on Clapham Common. Willow shivered and all of a sudden wished that she had not decided to unmask him. It was axiomatic that anyone who had killed once would not hesitate to kill again, if only in self-protection. Remembering that, Willow was disturbed to think that she had cut herself off from the protection of the police.

Returning to the haven of Chesham Place, Willow retreated at once to the small room in which she wrote her novels. She wanted to regain at least the illusion of safety that her writing had always given her.

Compared with the rest of the flat the writing room was plain and functional, but it contained one exceedingly comfortable armchair upholstered in deep heather-coloured corduroy as well as an ergonomically designed typing chair in front of the word processor. The only decorations on the plain silver-grey walls were two charming watercolours of one of the bleaker aspects of the North Yorkshire moors, but Willow had never felt that the room lacked sympathy for her endeavours, and at that moment it seemed like a sanctuary.

Willow pulled off her boots and left them sagging by the door; her mackintosh was draped over a tall bookcase; and she herself sat in the cushioned embrace of the deep armchair. Resting her aching head against a cushion, she allowed herself to come to the conclusion that it would be more sensible to avoid direct detection in future and proceed by analysis and deduction alone. Because she had never in her adult life let herself be deceived by wishful thinking, fantasy or exculpation, she admitted that her decision had more to do with her newly discovered fear of violence than with her well-known talent for analysis and rational thought. But she did admit in support of the decision that her amateurish attempts at physical detection had not taken her very far.

After all, she had learned only that Mr Gripper was an angry, apparently powerful man who resented the thought that a journalist on a rival newspaper might be watching him or his family with a view to writing about them with the snide salacity his own organ found so profitable, and that a man dressed in a mackintosh had washed his hands and face in the men's lavatory at Clapham Junction station one evening. She could not even be certain that the ablutions had taken place on the night of the murder, although it was possible that the tramp's memory was accurate.