Festering Lilies (8 page)

‘I had no option, Richard, unless I was going to throw all this away.' She gestured at their sumptuous surroundings, gobbled up the rest of her oysters and then looked across the table at him. ‘Oh, come on Richard, smile! It's not that serious. Either I'm going to discover who did do it before they check out Aunt Agatha, or if they get there first, I can always confess – but privately. I really am not going to have Cressida Woodruffe trumpeted all through the lino-covered corridors of that hellish plague-ridden building for them all to point and giggle at.'

Richard, sighing as though he simply could not cope with her, signalled to a waiter to clear away their plates. He was half genuinely appalled by her lawlessness; but the other half of him was secretly excited by it. One of her greatest attractions for him had always been the hint of Cressida's irresponsible, self-indulgent wickedness, which was so easily kept in check by Willow King's unassailable probity: she had the tamed, almost contrived, wildness of an eighteenth-century ‘wild' garden, and he had always felt free to enjoy it without fear of any real danger.

‘Don't worry so, Richard,' she said, suddenly touched by the serious expression on his thin face. ‘I can devote the whole time until next Tuesday morning to solving the mystery – the book's gone sticky on me anyway and a little mild detecting will probably clear my brain. I'm sure that I can discover…'

‘Better than the police, forensic scientists and so on?' Richard demanded, with all the arrogance of which he was quite unaware. There were times when Willow found it so infuriating that she challenged him, but on that evening for some reason she found it merely amusing; perhaps her reaction was part and parcel of her dressing up to please him.

‘I really do think you have gone mad,' he went on, and Willow began to feel a licking flame of anger somewhere in her mind. ‘You think that your novelist's brain will invent the motive, don't you? And that you can present the guilty one to the police with a flourish next Tuesday morning? You need to rein in that imagination of yours. It could get you into serious trouble.'

‘Don't sneer too much at my imagination, Richard,' said Willow with more than a hint of Civil Service crispness. ‘It earns me even more than your banker's brain earns you.'

‘
Touché
, b'gad,' he said with the rueful smile that always disarmed her. ‘But you must be careful about pinning all your investigating on motive, mustn't you? I mean, do remember what Lord Peter said about motive to Harriet in
Busman's Honeymoon.
'

Before she could answer, the waiter brought their grouse and then made way for the sommelier with a bottle of Burgundy. When they had both gone and Willow had eaten at least half of the delicious bird, she took up the conversation where Richard had left it.

‘But you know, Richard, it is really a question of motive.… Not the killer's,' she said quickly as he made as though to protest. ‘But the minister's. I mean, what could he possibly have been doing bang in the middle of Clapham Common at the end of a working day in November? That's got to be sorted out before anyone – police included – can have any idea about who killed him, because there were no witnesses, there was no weapon left at the scene, no physical clues at all – according to the DOAP gossip anyway, and that's usually accurate.' She caught herself up at that, but did not bother to deny it aloud. After all Richard knew nothing of Algy's pursuit of her or the highly overheated speculation that that episode had generated.

‘What about his driver? He must have had an official car, presumably,' said Richard.

‘Albert – yes, but unfortunately he's in the clear. Apparently the minister told him to take the car to the top of Cedar's Road and wait there. Plenty of witnesses have been found to confirm the order and the fact that he sat there. After all a huge black car like that with a chauffeur is pretty conspicuous in Clapham,' answered Willow, who had already considered and rejected Albert as a possible suspect. She had always thought him a bit of a thug and without an alibi he would have seemed a likely murderer.

The word ‘witnesses'seemed to jog Richard's memory.

‘Are you certain that no one saw anything? As far as I can remember Clapham Common is remarkably open and fairly well lit. Hardly any trees. Could anyone have been killed without being seen? Of course, it is a very long time since I've been near the place.'

‘I don't know,' said Willow, picking at the carcase of her grouse. ‘There are lights along most of the paths, but when I was there last night, I discovered that it can get pitchy dark in the middle of the grass bits,' she went on, forgetting the previous day's fear in amusement at Richard's distancing himself from his days of struggle in a small Clapham flat.

Richard, not noticing her amusement, immediately demanded to know what she thought she had been doing wandering about in the dark in much the same terms that the inspector had used, and before she thought, Willow found herself explaining her actions and motives to him. He listened, expressionless, but when she had finished telling him about the joggers and her dramatic encounter with Inspector Worth, Richard put his head in his hands. Concerned for him, Willow reached across the table and laid one of her hands on his thick hair, mildly admiring the contrast of her raspberry-tipped nails against the darkness of his head. He looked up.

‘Willow, I know I have no right to say this, but I do wish that you wouldn't do things like that. I… I…'

‘What, Richard?' Willow asked.

‘Oh God, you might think of me before you go and risk yourself like that. If anything happened to you.…'

Willow looked at him in surprise. Until that evening he had always been scrupulous in keeping his side of their unspoken bargain: Cressida Woodruffe was fair game, but he had no part in Willow's Clapham life.

‘Oh I know, I'm sorry. What you do at DOAP is none of my business. But, Willow, it's just so damned dangerous – and if you go annoying whoever it was who killed Endelsham, then you're going to risk even worse. Willow, promise you won't do anything to get yourself hurt.'

‘Richard, I…' she began, but then stopped herself from making him any dangerous promises of obedience.

‘Let's get out of here,' he said far more roughly than she had ever heard him speak. He stood up and signalled impatiently for the bill. When it came, he added a hefty tip and signed it. Taking Willow by the arm he then whisked her out of the restaurant and into his Audi. Neither spoke on the short drive back to Chesham Place. When they were at last in Willow's bedroom, Richard tried to make up for his attempted infringement of her independence.

‘I couldn't help it, Willow. I'm sorry.' He dropped on his knees in front of her, wrapped his arms around her waist and buried his face against her silken skirt. She laid both hands on his head and there was even a hint of tenderness in her smile as she said:

‘Richard, my dear, don't worry so much. I shan't get hurt. Come on; get up and come to bed.'

He tipped back his head and she bent to kiss him.

Willow woke early the following morning to the depressing sound of heavy November rain beating against the windows of her bedroom. Hearing the soft snuffle of Richard's breathing, she twisted her head to the right to look at her illuminated clock. Six o'clock: there was an hour and a half to go before Mrs Rusham would arrive and make breakfast. Willow hated lying awake in bed with nothing to do, but she was loth to wake Richard by turning on the light to read. Instead, she slid carefully out of bed, wrapped herself in her thick velvet dressing gown and padded silently out to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea and think.

The kitchen was a wonderful room, designed to fit all Willow's fantasies in the days before she had even envisaged having a housekeeper who would keep her out of it. In the centre of the long wall was a white four-door Aga, far too big for any single woman's flat, let alone one who was away for half of every week. But it was supremely cosy on a grey morning, and Willow loved feeling the warmth of it against her thighs as she leaned forward to lift the heavy lid of the fast ring.

While she waited for the kettle to boil, she took a pad of paper and a pencil to the cushioned rocking chair in the corner and sat down, tucking her feet up under her, to list the few things she knew about Algy Endelsham's life before DOAP. That done, she looked contentedly around the kitchen, noting the almost aseptic cleanliness of it all, and hoping that Mrs Rusham shared some of her delight in the soft redness of the quarry tiles and the silky gleam of the copper pans and bowls that hung on the wall opposite the Aga above the thick beech work tops. Whenever the housekeeper was in the flat she made it quite clear that she wanted her employer to stay out of the kitchen and she always greeted any sullying of its impeccable tidiness with a frigid politeness that was expressive of extreme disapproval. Willow put up with it not only because Mrs Rusham was an excellent cook and organiser, but also because she had never betrayed the slightest hint of curiosity about her employer's private life or unexplained absences. Willow prized that restraint even more than she prized her glorious kitchen.

The hiss of the kettle brought her approving reverie to an end; she made a pot of Earl Grey tea and poured some out into a fine bone-china mug, which she took back-to the rocking chair. There she sat, nursing the warm mug and rocking herself gently as she turned over and over in her mind all the possible reasons why a man like Algy Endelsham might have been killed.

When she had first heard about the murder, she had assumed that it must have been his womanising that had angered someone so much that he or she (or even they) had killed him, and Gino's titillating hints had tended to reinforce the assumption. But there was still the frightful possibility that Algy had merely been the victim of mindless violence, or perhaps somebody's spite or even lunacy. What Willow had to decide was how to proceed with her investigation with so few facts.

She was nowhere near any kind of solution when, nearly an hour later, she heard the sounds of Richard getting out of bed.

‘Tea, darling?' she called from the kitchen, and then smiled as he came in, his thick hair standing on end from a vigorous scratching and his long body clad in the heavy silk dressing gown she had bought for him. Navy blue with claret-coloured piping, it was, she considered, very suitable for a successful banker.

‘Um,' he said, ‘tea would be lovely, if it's not too much trouble.'

‘I'll make a new pot – this is hours old. Go and run a bath and I'll bring you a cup there.'

Richard looked a little surprised, but obediently went away. Willow smiled as she acknowledged to herself that she rarely exhibited her slight domestic gifts when Richard was in the flat.

She was less amused to realise that they had been stimulated by the faint sense of guilt she felt about what she was going to do.

She carried his tea into the bathroom and perched herself on the side of the bath. Richard put up a soapy hand to take the mug and looked at the position she had chosen.

‘You're going to get your elegant dressing gown very wet if you sit just there,' he said.

‘Never mind, my dear,' she answered. ‘I wanted to ask you something.'

‘Yes?' he said and his tone made it quite clear that he was prepared to block any question that might have a bearing on anything the bank was about to do. Willow was not surprised: she had often thought that Richard would find it difficult to tell anyone what the time was unless he had had it vetted by the bank's lawyers first.

‘What do you know about Algy Endelsham, Richard?' she asked.

‘Me? Nothing other than what I've read in the papers,' he answered sipping the hot tea. ‘You make a nice cuppa, Willow.'

‘Come on, Richard, wake up!' Willow said, leaning down to kiss his damp head. ‘Bankers always know about politicians; there must be something.'

Richard lay obstinately back in the hot water. A wicked little smile teased the edges of Willow's lips and she sneaked her fingers behind his neck to stroke his top vertebrae in precisely the way he most enjoyed. ‘Tell!' she commanded, still stroking. After about ninety seconds he could bear it no longer and sat up to grab a handful of her luscious hair with his free hand.

‘I'd like to strangle you sometimes,' he said, laughing and twisting the hair into a rope.

‘Like Porphyria's lover,' suggested Willow.

‘You're irritatingly well read, you know,' he said, letting the hair go. ‘For a mathematician, I mean. Yes, I do know a little about precious Algy, but it's not to his credit. Are you trustworthy?'

‘It's Willow you're talking to,' she assured him, ‘not Cressida Woodruffe.'

‘Okay; well he was a swine at school.' He let his eyelids drop for a moment and then took another reviving gulp of tea.

Willow was surprised. It was well known that Algy Endelsham had had, among his innumerable other endowments, the benefit of an Eton education, while Richard had been taught at a rather humbler establishment. One of the things Willow had never learned to understand was the importance that people like Algy and Richard laid on the place where they went to school.

‘You sound upset, Richard,' she said. ‘What happened? And when were you at school with Algy – wasn't he at Eton?'

‘We were at prep school together, and as I said, he was a swine. Bloody successful, of course, even then: captain of the first XI, head of school, leader of the choir … power crazy and a damned sadist.'

‘My poor Richard,' she said, thinking for the first time of what he must have been like as a child.

She had asked him very little about his family or upbringing, because it had quickly become obvious that he disliked talking about his more distant past. Since Willow shared his preference for the present, it had not been difficult to refrain from asking awkward questions. Now she realised that she had forced a confidence out of him and one that she might have to pursue if she were really to discover all the truth about Algernon Endelsham and his killer.