Festering Lilies (16 page)

It might just be possible, Willow thought, to intercept a percentage of all notifications of death, collect the books, write as though from the address on the book to inform the department that the pensioners had moved from their original address and arrange to have the pensions paid by post to accommodation addresses or even collected from various post offices around the country.

Willow got up from her chair and prowled about the room, running her fingers madly through her red hair, trying to find first practical objections to the scheme and then possible perpetrators. If Algy were to have become interested, then the perpetrator must be relatively senior; he would have dealt quickly, ruthlessly perhaps, and openly with some peculating clerk.

What she found hardest at that stage to believe was that any of the dull but worthy men and women who staffed the department would have the imagination, the dishonesty or the human resources to carry off such an embezzlement successfully. Nevertheless she scribbled an account of her speculation on her list of motives and then turned back to her search for Algy's brother.

There was no one except Algy in the telephone book under the name Endelsham, and Willow began to wonder whether the brother could possibly be ex-directory, and if so why. Of course, if he were as hopeless as Emma's accounts had suggested, then he really might be destitute and ‘of no fixed abode', in which case obviously he would not be listed in the telephone directory. Once again her mind was inexorably drawn to the tramp who lived in and around Clapham Junction station. But again she ignored him on the grounds that the coincidence would be simply too absurd. More realistic was the possibility that Algy's brother might live outside London; but Willow did not think so. It had definitely sounded from Emma's chatter as though the poor man lived in London.

There had been no references to a brother in any of the newspaper articles about the murder, and even the obituaries had ended merely, ‘He never married.' The only certain information Willow had was that the brother had been at the Jeremiah House prep school in Hastings at least thirty years earlier. She dialled Directory Enquiries and got the number of the school.

Posing as a journalist, she then told the school secretary who answered that she was writing a mood piece about Algernon Endelsham's childhood for a women's magazine and was seeking any nice stories about his time at the school. Unfortunately, she was told, the school had changed hands three times since those days and was now a progressive co-educational establishment, specialising in speech and drama.

‘I'm afraid that none of the teachers working here now would have the faintest idea of anything that went on here in the old days. It was a very repressive, out-of-date place, you know,' said the woman in an indefinably irritating voice.

‘So I gathered,' said Willow, trying to make her own voice sound cosy. ‘But is there really no one – even an old gardener or anything – who might have stories to tell about the old days?'

‘Well,' came the slightly whining voice, weakening a little. ‘There is old Mr Caldervale in the town. Frankly he's the most awful nuisance, turning up on Parents'Day and banging on about falling standards. God knows if he was here at the stage you want, but he certainly taught French here for years. I can give you his address if you like.'

‘Thank you very much. That might help,' said Willow, and wrote down both address and telephone number. At first she thought of telephoning on the same pretext and in the same guise, but then the words ‘banging on about falling standards'made her stop, just as her finger was landing on the first button of her telephone. An elderly man who minded so much about standards might well clam up at such an approach. Willow thought that she would have to go and see him – and not as a sexy, rich novelist either.

With her DOAP personality to hand, she thought that she probably would not have too much difficulty in gaining his confidence. Rejecting the idea of being a pensions investigator, she decided instead to be an emissary from a firm of solicitors in search of Algy's brother as beneficiary under a distant relative's will. She assumed that there was no reason to suppose that the casual-sounding school secretary would ever tell the ‘tiresome old man'that she had given his name and address to a journalist.

Cursing, for the umpteenth time, her stupidity in having bought a vast cream-coloured Mercedes with leather upholstery instead of a small, inconspicuous car, Willow changed into the one suitable suit she had hanging in the back of Cressida's wardrobe, got out of the house before Mrs Rusham returned from her weekly shopping expedition, took a taxi to Charing Cross and a grubby, smelly train to Hastings, and at last found her way to a small house on the edge of the town. The sight of its sparklingly clean windows, lack of net curtains and general air of exposure to the sun and the wind gave Willow a moment's encouragement. A man who lived in such a house could not be the doddering old fool suggested by the secretary's contempt.

Willow, dressed in dark grey suit and white shirt, her hair put up and no cosmetics on her face, knocked briskly on the gleaming, dark-green front door. After a full minute's wait, she heard a halting tread and the soft thud and drag of a rubber-shod walking stick. Composing her face into an expression of unintrusive but friendly competence, she waited. The green door opened at last and she was confronted with a very tall, thin man, with bowed shoulders, who leaned on a stick. For a moment she was ashamed to have dragged a man obviously in pain from his warm chair and dropped her glance. She saw that he wore brown brogues with so high a gloss polished on to them that they might have been made of enamelled glass. Allowing her gaze to travel slowly upwards, she noted the shabby grey flannel trousers, which had been carefully darned on one knee, the thick checked shirt, whose collar points were fraying, the plain tie and the well-worn tweed jacket. At last she allowed herself to look at his face and she thought that she was not going to be disappointed.

Never had she seen a man with such piercingly bright grey eyes. They dominated a face that must always have been thin but was now almost skeletal. Deep grey crescent-shaped shadows lay under the eyes, on either side of a harsh nose and drew all attention from the mouth, which she decided might look almost gentle if it were not so twisted.

‘Yes?' the man said at last when she showed no signs of coming in or leaving him alone.

‘Mr Caldervale?' she asked, coming to her senses. He nodded, leaning on his stick, and waited for her to explain herself. Willow, who had faced innumerable aggressive, obstructive and merely terrifying senior Civil Servants in her time, was not flustered.

‘I am from Leonard, Friend and Winter, solicitors, Mr Caldervale, and we're looking for the beneficiary of one of our clients'wills. We believe that he was educated at your school until he was thirteen, but we have not been able to trace him since then. May I come in?'

‘Certainly,' he said, moving stiffly away from the door to let her in. ‘First door on your right.'

Willow followed his directions and found herself in an airy room, whose white walls were covered with bookshelves up to nearly shoulder height. Two modem wing chairs in sludge-green stretch covers provided the only seating, but there was a pleasant, shabby rug on the polished wooden floor. An exiguous gas fire popped and hissed in the blocked-in grate.

‘Do sit down, Miss…?'

‘King,' said Willow with the first honesty of the day. As she spoke she cast a backward look in her mind to her parents; no wonder they had been so insistent about her pension, she thought, if this kind of retirement was what they had envisaged for her. Telling herself that thanks to Cressida Woodruffe she need not fear it for herself, she smiled kindly at the old man.

‘Now, what was this boy's name?' he asked briskly as he lowered himself carefully into the chair on the right of the fireplace. It had had an extra cushion in an unmatching cover added to heighten the seat, but even so he had difficulty getting down to it. He propped the stick carefully against one of the arms and seemed to give Willow his entire attention.

‘Endelsham,' she said, still smiling. ‘There were two of them, and it's perfectly clear who the younger was, but we're concerned with the elder, Jonathan. Do you remember him at all, Mr Caldervale?'

‘A very great many boys passed through my French classes, Miss King; what makes you think that I might?' Mr Caldervale said. For a moment Willow was disappointed; but, catching a gleam in those extraordinary eyes, she took heart and spoke with what she hoped was engaging frankness.

‘Well, given that his brother turned out so well – and became so famous – and has just been murdered, I thought your memory might, perhaps, have been jogged,' she said, speaking as one intelligent being to another.

‘Hmmm,' he murmured, rubbing his strong, fleshless chin with one bent hand. ‘I always liked honesty.' When he said no more, Willow wondered whether she had been mistaken in accepting that as a compliment. He glared at her and she had a moment's anxiety that he might disbelieve her cover story or perhaps demand a telephone number so that he could ring her supposed partners to check it. She tucked an imaginary wisp of hair back into the pins that kept it all off her face and waited.

‘You're right,' he said at last. ‘I do remember them both, poor little things.' Willow was so surprised that she repeated the last three words. The old man nodded.

‘Yes, Jonathan was the obvious victim, but I often felt sorry for his brother, too; something was always driving him on to prove that he was so much cleverer, more popular, tougher and so on than anyone else. I've occasionally wished that I made more effort to find out what it was, but they were not in my house and it mightn't have gone down well.'

Willow was surprised to see that he appeared to be genuinely troubled, which seemed extraordinary. Surely his acquaintance with the two boys had been far too long ago to make him anxious still.

‘Did you like them, then?' she asked. Caldervale looked at her, but she had the impression that he saw something quite different for his clear eyes were not focussed on her.

‘Like them? I can't remember.' He put one knobbly, arthritic hand over his eyes for a moment and then said: ‘I loathed most of the little beggars I had to teach for all those years, and when they snivelled with homesickness or terror of my temper, I loathed them all the more. Poor little beggars.'

‘Were they good at French?' Willow asked, in order to change the subject. She was appalled by the sadness in his face, and by the loneliness that made him confide such sadness to a stranger.

‘Not very, but I can't imagine what that's got to do with your enquiry,' said Mr Caldervale with such cold surprise that Willow was both reassured about his state of mind and rather glad that she had never had to recite French irregular verbs to him in her own youth.

‘Nothing at all, Mr Caldervale; sheer vulgar curiosity, I'm afraid. No, all I need to ask you is whether you have any idea what happened to the elder brother? I – we, that is – can't find any trace of him through the normal channels; might he perhaps have emigrated or something?'

‘It's possible. They loathed each other you know… you might find that Jonathan left of his own accord – or even that his brother forced him out. I don't know,' said Caldervale, hauling himself up out of his chair. He reached for the stick and walked painfully towards her. Willow wondered what on earth he wanted and shifted uncomfortably in her chair. He walked straight past her and opened the window behind her head. A blast of icy wind blew down the back of her neck.

‘I hope you don't mind the air,' he said, and she thought there was a certain note of malice in his voice. ‘But I always have the windows open when I have a pipe – couldn't bear the kind of stinking fug most old men live in.'

Willow watched him walk slowly back to the mantelpiece, take a pipe out of his pocket and fill it from a stone jar that stood there. Then he eased himself back into his chair and set about lighting the tobacco. He sucked gently on the end of his pipe and Willow was suddenly transported back to her parents'ugly house in Newcastle: the tobacco he smoked must have been the same as her father's. There had been no alcohol drunk in Dr William King's home, and his pipe was his only extravagance. In some ways, he had been rather like the old man in front of her: clever, acerbic and reserved. She had not thought of him or his pipe for years, but the sweet, pungent smoke caught at her throat and she had to blink away the sudden memories:

Mr Caldervale shook his bald head suddenly and the spare flesh under his chin swung gently with the movement. To her own surprise Willow forgot her mission and was once again filled with pity for the old man; he seemed to her to be managing his old age with great dignity, and yet there he was living alone, obviously in pain and with not quite enough money. The school to which he had devoted his working life found him a terrible old nuisance, and he was filled with regret at his strictness with the ‘poor little beggars' he had taught.

‘I am afraid I've not been much help, Miss King,' he said, sucking comfortably on the pipe, the bowl lightly clasped in one arthritic hand. ‘What you need to find out is where Jonathan went after they left Hastings. I don't know which school it was, but it must have been somewhere less imposing than Eton certainly. If you could find that out, they'd probably know much more than I. I am sorry, Miss King, but at seventy-four one's mind does begin to slacken its hold on detail.'

Looking at his clear eyes, Willow found that hard to believe.

‘Why do I think that you know more than you are telling me?' she asked him. She was answered first by a short bark of derisive laughter.

‘Probably because you have an over-vivid imagination. Girls generally have, I've always been told,' he said: