Festering Lilies (18 page)

Determined to get her hands on a copy of the will if she possibly could, Willow sat back and waited in some impatience for her host to finish his dinner. At last the grisly entertainment began to draw to a close. Willow watched while Anthony Gnatche paid the bill and then got up from the table in relief. She felt the weight of her fur coat sink on to her shoulders and thought that the sensation of returning freedom almost compensated for her headache and the rigid tension in her neck and shoulders.

‘Thank you for a lovely dinner,' she called from the steps of the Chesham Place house when he had driven her home. ‘Let me know when you're next going to be in London.'

‘Will do,' he said, putting the car into gear again. She did not wait for anything else, but let herself into the flat and shut the door behind her with a deep sigh. But her home did not give her the usual feeling of sanctuary. She felt slightly uneasy and much less safe than usual. Perhaps something in Gnatche's attitude to life and his fellow mortals had upset her more than she had realised.

Poor Emma, she thought to herself as she went to hang up her coat. What a man to have in one's life! She wandered into the kitchen to make herself some soothing cocoa (which she remembered from childhood as having a good effect on her spirits) and then carried the cup into the drawing room to listen to the rest of her messages. One was from Eve Greville, her literary agent, asking her to ring to discuss some amendments to a Japanese contract for one of ‘Cressida's'books.

Willow checked her watch to make sure that it was not too late to ring Eve, and then thankfully punched in the number. Ever since she had sent her first, unpublishable, novel to Eve Greville and received her amused but highly critical assessment of it, Willow had liked the clever, astringent woman, and she felt that a few minutes of discussion with Eve might help to remove both the memory of an excruciatingly boring evening and the uneasiness from her mind.

Eve answered the telephone promptly and brushed aside Willow's apologies for ringing so late. They thrashed out the problems on the contract and then Eve asked her usual question:

‘How's the writing going, Cressida?'

‘Not all that well, actually, Eve. I've got stuck and have been diverting myself with thoughts of the next one,' said Willow, not wanting to talk about the murder.

‘So I hear,' came the ironic and amused voice of her agent. ‘I was having lunch with Nan Hambalt today and she told me you were thinking of setting the next one in a newspaper gossip-column office. Nice idea, if you can get it right.'

‘Do you think so?' said Willow, deliberately forgetting that her approach to Nan had been part of her investigation. ‘I'll have to be careful, of course, because I've heard that the gossip chiefs are even more litigious than their victims.' Eve laughed and Willow heard the effect of years of smoking sixty a day rasping down the telephone.

‘Yes and some of them are vile, too. Have you ever come across a man called Gripper?' Willow sighed inaudibly. Clearly she was not going to be able to ignore the hornets'nest she had stirred up in her own mind.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘But don't tell me you've had dealings with him?'

‘Once, ages ago,' said Eve. ‘He wanted me to represent him, and sent me a full synopsis and about five chapters of a novel he was writing. It was absolutely terrifying.'

Willow, remembering the fear that Gripper had induced in her, asked why. Eve said:

‘He thought it was a literary novel as though “literariness” could excuse that kind of cruelty. It was about a woman married to a man she hated and the revenge she took on him for the things she had imagined he had done to her. Told from her point of view.… But all it told me was that Gripper knew nothing whatever about women. Made me feel sick, and very sorry indeed for his wife.'

Willow was silent for so long that Eve said:

‘Are you still there, Cressida?'

‘Yes. Sorry. I was just thinking of what a vile man he must be. Never mind. I haven't asked yet: how are you?'

‘Fine, as always,' answered Eve. ‘Pretty excited at the moment. I've just taken on a new client. She's young – very young; just out of university – but she has written a really rather remarkable novel. I even think it's quite a strong Booker possibility.'

‘Why, is she foreign? Or is it one of those brilliantly written, excruciatingly boring, posey, storyless numbers?' said Willow with more than a hint of snappishness. ‘Sorry, Eve. I didn't mean that. Cheap sneers are all too easy and lots of Booker winners are bloody good. I know that perfectly well. It's only jealousy.'

‘You're probably tired, Cressida,' said Eve, sounding as nearly soothing as she ever did. ‘And I've been boring on for far too long. Go and get a good night's sleep, and don't worry too much about the novel. They generally do get a bit sticky in the middle. You'll be all right.'

‘Thanks, Eve. You're very good to put up with all my moans,' said Willow with rare insincerity. After all, she reasoned, she was paying Eve ten per cent of everything she earned. As that miserly thought entered her mind, she nearly laughed, remembering a story she had heard at a publishing party of an agent who always referred to his authors as ‘those bastards who take ninety per cent of my income'. The amusement warmed her voice as she said goodbye to Eve and thanked her properly.

It was as she was replacing the receiver that Willow felt an inexplicable sense of panic. She looked down at the letters that Mrs Rusham had left beside the telephone answering machine and saw that they were not piled into the usual neat arrangement; but that could not account for her sudden terror. When she looked around her drawing room, trying to work out what could have caused it, she saw that there were other signs too. Mrs Rusham would never have left the sofa cushions overlapping as they were, and the fringe of the heavy silk rug was turned under at the comers as though someone had lifted the rug and then let it drop back carelessly.

Even more alarming was a very faint but quite revolting smell, which must have been what had first warned her subconscious mind of possible danger. Normally the flat smelled of fresh flowers, beeswax-and-turpentine furniture polish, Chanel No. 19, and just a little of whatever Mrs Rusham had been cooking. That evening there was something else as well: something slightly stale, acrid, and with overtones of some artificial sweetness. There was old tobacco smoke in it somewhere, Willow decided, male sweat and a faint hint of some kind of scent, possibly aftershave.

Dropping the envelope she had picked off the pile, she nerved herself to search the flat. Not surprisingly, there was no one there, but in each of the rooms except for the kitchen there was the same faint horrible smell as well as innumerable little signs to show that someone had opened, lifted and pushed aside her possessions as though looking for something.

As she went from room to room, Willow could not pretend that she had imagined either the smell or the small betraying untidinesses. Someone had been searching right through her flat. But the more she checked the more puzzled she became. Her floor safe was intact and when she opened it, she found all her jewellery there. In her writing room all her papers had obviously been rifled through, but they were still there and all in the order in which she had left them.

Willow grew more and more uncomfortable. Straightforward robbery would have been less upsetting, she thought, as she walked back into her bedroom for the second time. Even the bedcovers were slightly disarranged. She quickly stripped the bed and remade it with sheets from Mrs Rusham's linen cupboard, determined that she would not sleep in sheets touched by whoever had been there. She flung open the bedroom windows, too, to try to get rid of the smell, which was beginning to make her feel sick as well as afraid. That done, she went to check that all the other locks in the flat were intact and even pushed home the two big bolts on the front door as well as double locking the Chubbs.

At last, knowing that there was nothing else she could do to secure her flat, she went back to the drawing room to deal with her post, hoping that concentrating on something else would help her to get rid of the sense of outrage – and almost horror – that afflicted her whenever she thought of who might have invaded her home and fingered all her clothes and books and possessions.

None of the letters looked particularly interesting, but there was a large, brown-paper parcel under the table with one of her publisher's labels stuck on the top. The package seemed to promise more useful distraction from her fears, and so Willow pulled it out from under the table.

She broke an expensively varnished nail trying to get into the parcel and swore as she marched into the kitchen to get a knife. Wielding it as Madame Defarge might have done, she slit the tape and pulled apart the cardboard flaps that sprang free. The box proved to contain a large selection of glossy magazines with gossip columns and a heap of back numbers of the
Daily Mercury.
There was also a note.

Dear Cressida
,
Goodness knows if these will be any help, but I thought it
might amuse you to browse through them to get your
background for the gossip-column book. I've taken the liberty
of mentioning it at the editorial meeting and everyone else is
just as excited as I am by the prospect. I've rung Jane, but
she's out of London on some investigation. She's very reliable
and I've asked her to ring me back as soon as poss. Happy
hunting.
Love Nan.

Smiling at the characteristic style, which she had long ago learned disguised an extreme efficiency, Willow picked a pile of magazines off the heap and took it to one of the soft, grey-green sofas. Half an hour of frivolous magazines might help put her in the mood for sleep. Sipping at her cool cocoa, Willow flipped through the fashion pages of the magazine and browsed through the reviews for books and films and plays that had appeared nearly two years earlier. They quite amused her and when she had finished them she reached down for another magazine. But the lure of the diary section at the back of the first one proved too much for her determination to ignore the subject that seemed to loom all around her, and she looked through all eight pages of small square black-and-white photographs searching for Algy Endelsham's face.

There was no sign of him on the first of the diary pages, but she did come across a photograph of both Mr and Mrs Gripper, standing side by side. Eustace Gripper had his arm casually around the shoulders of his wife, who looked as though she had just tossed back her fine, fair hair and was looking sideways at him as though she really liked him. A consummate actress, perhaps? Willow wondered whether it might really be possible for someone to love two people so different from each other at the same time.

Then, almost to distract herself from that thought (which made her feel extraordinarily uncomfortable), she examined the background to the photograph. The occasion was some smart race meeting and the Grippers had been photographed just in front of their car. Both carried binoculars with clusters of cardboard shields attached to the straps to show that they were habitues of the racing scene. What intrigued Willow, however, was neither the pose nor the accessories they sported but the big burly figure of their chauffeur. The man was not in focus – because who, reading a society magazine, would want to identify a chauffeur? – but to Willow his outline and stance seemed familiar. She did not for one moment really believe that he was Albert, the minister's driver, but the similarities were surprising.

Shrugging, Willow turned the pages, looking for Algy's face. It cropped up often enough, at weddings, race meetings and even at one debutante dance. Willow was surprised enough by that to look more closely at the other photographs taken at the same dance.

‘Dance held by the Lady Gnatche for the Hon. Sarah Gnatche,' read Willow, looking down at the young, bland faces on the glossy page. Sarah herself was there, posed against a large fan-shaped arrangement of roses and lilac between her mother and her half-brother. Willow found herself feeling a little sorry for the girl who stood there, looking rather plump and a little bit spotty but horribly expectant in her best frock. But in the end she found herself concentrating on the large and handsome figure of Algernon Endelsham, as though she could wrench out of the photograph some of the information she so badly needed.

Of course it told her nothing that she did not already know and she fell to imagining ways in which she could get hold of a copy of his will. That at least would tell her who or what Algy really cared for, quite apart from giving her the identity of the people who stood to gain from his death.

The woman to whom Willow had spoken at Somerset House had said that her only hope would be to ask the solicitors for a copy. Willow did not imagine that they would be likely to hand the will over to a complete stranger who had no official business with it, but she ought at least to try. Somehow she would have to find out who Algy's solicitors were and invent some reasonably plausible excuse to request a copy of the will. Apart from a straightforward request, which was likely to be denied, the only plans she could think of all involved crime, and Willow King was simply not equipped to burgle a solicitor's office, blackmail a partner or bribe a clerk.

Looking at her watch, she realised how late it was and told herself to go to bed, knowing that there was nothing she could usefully do that night. But she dreaded the thought of lying alone in the dark thinking of the people who had searched her flat – and why and for what. After five minutes'useless rationalisation, she obeyed her own instruction, but allowed herself to take two of the little yellow sleeping bombs her doctor had once prescribed for her.

There were many Tuesday mornings when Willow locked the door of the Chesham Place flat with a certain satisfaction. Although Tuesdays meant leaving behind the down-soft luxury of her writing life, they also meant leaving Richard's sometimes irritating behaviour, Mrs Rusham's overbearing efficiency, the requests of publisher and agent – and, of course, The Book. Whichever book it was, there were always moments during its writing when it seemed to be an enemy, dull but insatiably demanding of her time and effort. Sometimes the page or screen would mock Willow, telling her that she would never be able to write another word that anyone would want to read, that all her success had been no more than a fantasy. Such moments usually occurred as she reached the end of the first draft, when she was frequently tempted to tell Eve Greville that the whole thing would have to be thrown out because the plot was dreary, the characters absurd and the jokes the unfunniest she had ever read. Luckily, Eve was adept at nursing her over such obstacles and generally persuaded her to fill out, de-absurdify and tickle up the relevant parts of the book.