Poison Flowers (10 page)

Willow immediately left her work and mopped the resulting damp ring. When she saw Tom watching her in considerable surprise and curiosity she made her shamefaced admission:

‘Mrs Rusham would be furious with me if I left a damp ring. And don't bother to tell me that it's my table and she's my employee – it doesn't help.'

‘All right, I won't. Shall I open the bottle?'

Thinking of the distinguished Montrachet chilling in her fridge, Willow had a small struggle with herself.

‘Lovely,' she said, not wanting to force him to accept the fact that she was so much richer than he. ‘Or if you prefer, there is some white in the fridge. We're going to be eating fish.' She tried to keep her voice absolutely neutral, but out of the corner of her eye she saw a gleam of amusement in his. He went straight to the fridge, found her bottle and uncorked it.

Later, when they had eaten the fish and the apricot flan that Mrs Rusham had made and were drinking coffee, Worth broached the subject that he had come to discuss.

‘And are you still of the opinion that the murders are part of a series?' he asked.

‘Yes,' said Willow, twirling her coffee cup round and round as she watched the viscous debris at the bottom cling to the fine bone china and then release itself to sink slug-like to the other side. ‘I can see why your colleagues disagree, but I do wonder about their determination to shelve the Titchmell enquiry.' She had decided to tell him nothing about her misplaced terror of being bombed, but she did add:

‘By the way, why did you send that message about my being so careful and discreet?'

Tom's dark eyes held hers for a moment and then looked away.

‘I was afraid,' he said, ‘that your zeal might be overtaking your discretion. When you left that message about talking to PC Leathwaite …'

‘For heaven's sake, Tom!' said Willow, surprised by his assumption that she would be silly enough to ignore the need for secrecy. ‘I thought you must be afraid of reprisals or violent warnings-off.'

‘I'm sorry, Will,' he said, touching her hand lightly. ‘Things are very sticky at the moment with cuts and wildly different ideas about the purpose and style of policing London, and I'm anxious not to rock the boat unnecessarily.'

‘But not so anxious that you could let the investigation go by default?' she said, finding herself more interested in him and his ideas than in almost anyone else she had ever met.

‘That's right,' said Tom. ‘And I'm sure that there is some connection between Titchmell and Commander Bodmin.'

Willow thought of her researches in the London Library and told him of Titchmell's firm's work for the police. Tom thought it unlikely to have anything to do with Bodmin, but he promised to check for her.

‘Good,' said Willow calmly. ‘And while you're doing that, all I have to do is to find out what connection there is between the poison victims and leave it to your undermanned force to arrest the killer.'

‘Yes. Your difficulty is going to be that there is no obvious connection. It's possible that they merely reminded the killer of specific people who have frustrated him, in which case you'll never find the link. Or perhaps the poisoner just likes killing and chose them quite at random,' said Tom, looking as nearly defeated as she had ever seen him.

‘I find that hard to believe,' said Willow in a judicious voice. ‘I don't know much about serial killers in general, but this one seems too clever, neat and cool to choose victims except for some real purpose. After all, whoever it is is bright and controlled enough to find out about the poisons, collect the necessary plants, extract a fatal dose from them and get it into the food and drink of the victims. If the killer spent that much time and effort it suggests that the victims must have been chosen for some quite powerful reason: after all, it's not as though they were simply strangled or shot.'

Tom got up from the table and strode up and down the long kitchen as though the act of sitting still would make it even more difficult for him to contain his frustration. He reached the window, looked out for a moment over the dustbins ranged in a small yard behind the tall house, and then wheeled round to face Willow again.

‘And yet it is difficult to see what possible connection there could be between a young architect, an almost middle-aged actress, and an elderly retired nurse,' he said.

‘I know,' said Willow, leaning forward to pour more coffee into both their cups. ‘Presumably you – or your opposite numbers in Newcastle – have already eliminated the obvious motives in each case?'

‘Oh yes. There are no jealous lovers, blackmailers or anything like that in any of the cases,' said Tom.

‘Or individual grudges? I've heard of lots of people feeling nearly murderous towards their architects.' Tom shook his head, but he smiled too.

‘We've got to start somewhere,' said Willow, ‘and the things I want to know are: whether they had ever lived in the same place at the same time; shared the same doctor, shared the same bank, worked together in any circumstances whatever, been in the same hospital at the same time…'

‘We've been through all the obvious questions and the rest would be almost impossible to establish,' said Tom gloomily. ‘It's just those sort of enquiries that take an enormous amount of time and produce nothing very useful in the end. No, I wanted your help for something different.'

‘Come and have some more coffee,' said Willow, ‘and try to explain what you think I can do if I'm not to ask those sorts of questions.'

He came back to the table, pulled out his chair and sat down. He picked up the cup she had filled with coffee and sat, holding it to his lips, with both elbows propped on the table.

‘I suppose that I thought you'd be able to see some link that never occurred to the rest of us,' he said rather hopelessly. ‘I can't imagine what.'

Willow saw that his face had taken on the tight unhappy look she had first noticed in the Pimlico restaurant. She was surprised by how personally he was taking the case and she wondered whether there was something he had not told her.

‘Well, I'll just have to find something a bit more subtle then. We agree that there's too much coincidence in so many deaths from plant poisons. That being so, there must be a link.'

‘May I make some more coffee?' Worth asked, pushing himself up off his chair. ‘This is cold.'

‘Yes do,' said Willow, pleased with his informality and his refusal to assume that as a woman she would make the food and drink available for him. ‘I've already put some ferrets down various holes, but I doubt if I'll get any rabbits for a few days.'

‘Ferrets?' repeated Tom, turning to watch her face. His voice sounded amused again, which pleased her. ‘Such as?'

‘I've arranged to meet the architect's sister; so that I can find out more from her about him and the girlfriend. I've sent a trace in to find out about Miss Fernside's previous employers – information which I suppose you might well have already, now I come to think of it – and…'

‘Yes, I suppose we have. But I haven't got it here,' said Tom.

‘But at your flat?' asked Willow.

‘No. I'd have to get it from the office. The earliest I could get it to you would be Monday evening.'

‘In which case I might as well wait for the trace. Tom, you are a bit tiresome: you might have thought I'd need to know that,' said Willow mildly. ‘Will you at least try to get answers to my other questions?'

‘Very few murders are caused by events or emotions from the distant past. Willow,' he said, and then added a little crossly: ‘What are you smiling at?'

‘I didn't realise that it showed,' she said.

‘Well it did. You looked transformed by it,' said Worth, as though the compliment was being dragged from him. ‘It made you look happy.'

‘I am, except when I think about the murderer, the victims, or you as the victim of your colleagues'malice,' she said, smiling more openly at him. ‘I was just thinking that you are the only man I know who could say something like that – about murders not being caused by things from the past – without sounding patronising or contemptuous.'

As she spoke, Tom Worth's craggy face also relaxed into a smile, and his right hand stretched out towards her. Willow put her own into it.

‘Well, Will? What about it?' he asked, as though he were suggesting a walk in the park. Willow was not deceived, but she was not pressed into a decision either.

‘Why not?' she said at last.

As he was shutting the door of her bedroom, Willow turned back, suddenly aware of the risk he represented to her peace of mind.

‘Don't say it, Will,' said Tom, gently brushing one hand across her lips, leaving a trail of sensation where he had touched her. His certainty and the feel of his skin on hers made her breathless.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I remember, too. Come to bed.'

She put out both hands and he gripped them, leaning forward to kiss her. His hands left hers and she felt him pull her closer until she was leaning against him. Her muscles seemed to have turned to jelly and something had happened to her mind. She could think of nothing but him and the dizzying sensations that his hands and his lips and his body sent through her.

By the time they were lying on her huge, soft bed; she knew that any risk was worth taking and reached for him, to take and to give.

Two-and-a-half hours later Willow got quietly out of bed to run a bath. When she went back into the bedroom she saw that Tom was still asleep, flat on his back, his dark hair falling over his forehead and his right hand lying on top of the linen-covered duvet, palm upwards. He looked vulnerable and almost unbearably attractive as he lay against the brilliantly white linen. Willow stood, clutching the primrose dressing gown around herself and looking at him.

Love had not been an element in either of her lives before Tom had appeared to smash through her self-sufficiency and the perfect arrangements she had made to keep herself protected from difficult and frightening emotion. Looking back to her peculiar childhood, she understood why her parents had treated her as they had, but having discovered how completely incompetent she was in the real world of feelings she found it hard to forgive them.

Richard, who had his own distaste for emotion, had been the first person in whom she had ever confided or for whom she had allowed herself to feel any affection at all. Now she was confronted by feelings that were far stronger than that and she was terrified. She did not know how she would read or what she would do, whether she could survive a real passion and whether she could give enough. It was obvious that unless she sent Tom Worth away her life would change, and yet the idea of its changing worried her still. Nothing could be clear-cut any more; everything seemed dangerous and frightening in a world where she cared so much for someone else.

A changing note in the sound of the bathwater rescued her from her introspection and she went to turn off the taps. Lying back in oiled and scented water wrought its usual calming influence over Willow's mind and by the time Tom appeared in the doorway, she was able to smile at him with some of her self-protection back in place.

‘Did you sleep well?' she asked. He nodded with a schoolboy grin.

‘Did you mind my going to sleep?'

‘No, Tom,' said Willow. ‘It is, I understand, a normal physiological reaction to … you know.'

‘I love your primness, Will,' he said, laughing and coming to sit on the edge of the bath. ‘It seems so out of character.'

Willow could feel herself blushing and hoped that he would put it down to the steam from her bath, but was fairly sure that he would not.

‘You know an awful lot about women,' she said irrelevantly, washing her right foot. ‘I suppose that just means that you've had a lot of experience.'

‘I like women,' he said, and she believed him. ‘I really like them. Can I have that bath after you?'

‘Why not have a new one?' she said. ‘There's plenty of hot water.'

When they were both dressed again. Willow asked him about his talk with PC Leathwaite, adding:

‘I know you've given me those notes, but tell me what you remember. It'll be fresher like that.'

‘He's a bright lad,' said Tom, leading the way out of Willow's green-and-white bedroom towards the kitchen. ‘D'you want a cup of tea?'

‘Not really,' said Willow. ‘But do help yourself.'

Tom went to switch on the kettle, while Willow sat in her old chair at the kitchen table.

‘So? What did he tell you?' she prompted.

‘He said that Titchmell struck him as being thoroughly sound, what he called a “solid citizen”, and perfectly responsible.'

‘What did that mean? Responsible for what?'

‘I think he meant that Titchmell had done everything he could, short of installing a burglar alarm, to make his house burglar-proof, and when asked why he didn't have an alarm, he explained that he thought they were anti-social and in any case did very little good.'

‘Do you agree with that?' asked Willow, diverted into leaving the investigation.

‘No, on balance I think they are worthwhile,' said Tom.

‘How did they get into Titchmell's house?'

‘Chucked a brick through the kitchen window,' said Tom. ‘And no locks are going to protect anyone against that sort of thing.'

‘But didn't anyone hear anything? Breaking glass makes a hell of a racket.'

‘No one's admitted to it, but you know the great British public. They hate reporting anything. Besides, most people who live in those streets work all day, and it seems likely that the window was broken at about half-past three in the afternoon.'

Willow got up as soon as he had finished speaking and went into her writing room to fetch her notebook.

‘What's so important about that?' asked Tom, fishing a tea bag out of his mug.