Poison Flowers (15 page)

‘You can't bury a body like this until the police are satisfied that it can't tell them any more. Presumably the family want to do something now. I can't possibly show up at something like that, but you could.'

‘At the memorial service of a total stranger?' said Willow in outrage. ‘I couldn't force myself on that poor woman and spy.'

‘You amaze me,' said Tom. ‘I never thought you were so sentimental. You wouldn't be forcing yourself on her; you wouldn't need to speak to her and you certainly wouldn't spy … You just might discover something. Couldn't you think up an excuse to be there? What about the famous romantic imagination?'

At that barrage of insults. Willow was almost determined to tell Tom Worth that he could take his investigation and bury it, but she disapproved of people who let their emotions get in the way of work they had undertaken. Besides, the person she was tracking had begun to take on a vague but compelling identity in her mind, and she was becoming increasingly determined to find out more.

‘Where was this doctor at medical school?'

‘Dowting's,' said Tom, ‘in South London.'

‘Right. I must go now,' said Willow. ‘Ring me if you get any more information. Goodbye.' She put down the receiver with more than a slight snap.

His suggestion of her going to the memorial service was not stupid, she had to admit, and her instinctive distaste for it was easy to rationalise away. Having explained to the shrinking part of her mind that there were many things she might discover at the service without at all inconveniencing or worrying any of Dr Bruterley's family, Willow went to sort out some suitable clothes.

The next day, clad in a straight-cut black coat, thin black tights, black calf shoes, and carrying her gloves, bag and Cossack-style hat, Willow caught the 11.05 am train from Paddington to Cheltenham. As Cressida Woodruffe she always travelled first class, and so she made her way along the dirty platform until she reached the first-class carriages. As usual they were cleaner than the rest, perhaps because the people who travelled in them were less inclined to fling their mess around. The first no-smoking carriage she reached was empty and so she went in, put her hat carefully on the luggage rack, took a slim book out of her handbag and sat down in the window seat facing towards Cheltenham.

Opening the book, she found that she had picked up the wrong one. She had meant to bring a second-hand copy of one of Ben Jonson's novels she had bought after her conversation with Tom Worth the previous day. Instead she found herself with an equally battered hardback edition of Marcus Aurelius's
Meditations.
Willow could not even remember having bought it, but she was quite certain that she had never read it, and must have had it lying in the bookshelf where she had put Ben Jonson's novel when she brought it home.

Like everyone else, Willow knew about the meditations and had even referred to them in conversation as though she knew them well, but flicking through the pages at random, she was surprised by the simplicity and the common sense of the exhortations the Roman emperor had written to himself. Her eye was caught now and again by ideas that seemed particularly apposite to her condition and she read on and on. ‘If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly … expecting nothing, fearing nothing … thou wilt live happy', she found at one moment and nodded emphatically as though the Stoic emperor was sitting there opposite her.

The train stopped at country stations every so often, but Willow hardly noticed as she read, taking more and more time to think about what she was reading. She had just reached the words, ‘Let no act be done without a purpose, nor otherwise than according to the perfect principles of art', when the door of her blessedly empty compartment was slid open with considerable force. Willow looked up. A very large man in a formal dark suit and black tie stood in the doorway. There was an uncertain expression on his face, and it seemed to Willow that he was not accustomed to feeling any lack of certainty.

‘Sorry,' he said shortly. ‘I thought this one was empty.'

‘That's all right,' said Willow, remembering that she was in a public conveyance and not her own car. ‘I haven't reserved the whole compartment. Come in and sit down.'

‘Thanks,' he said, lowering himself on to the seat diagonally opposite Willow's and extending his long legs. He looked at her as she sat there in her black coat and shoes and then let his eyes flick upwards to look at the luggage rack above her head, where she had put her elegant hat. ‘You look as though you are going to poor Jim Bruterley's service too,' he said, gesturing to his own funereal clothes and black tie.

‘What an extraordinary coincidence!' said Willow, shutting up Marcus Aurelius. Despite her natural inclination to avoid talking to chance-met strangers, this one offered an unexpected opportunity to hear about the dead man and to pursue her task according to ‘the perfect principles of art'.

‘Not really,' said the large man. ‘The train's full of us. I just got rather pissed off with the bunch I was with and thought I'd pay a bit extra for some peace and quiet.' He sat in brooding silence, staring at his knees for a while, and then lifted his head again to add: ‘They seemed to think it was a party. Poor Jim. I really …' He broke off once more and stared out at the brown-and-green smear of country that shot past the sticky-looking windows.

‘Did you know him well?' asked Willow politely, but with her mission in mind as well.

‘I used to,' he said, still looking out of the window nearest to him and presenting the back of his head to Willow. ‘We haven't seen much of each other these past few years, but … well, he was always there.'

He turned back to Willow and for a moment she thought that there were signs of tears in his eyes, which seemed unlikely.

‘You know,' he went on, ‘when one of you gets married you think everything'll be pretty much the same and for a year or two it is: both the friend and the wife work hard to like each other for the husband's sake, but then either it all comes to seem too much trouble and they move away, or something happens and you drift.'

Willow thought that she could recognise in the man's babble the loquacity that comes from a severe and sudden shock. Before she could say anything, he had started again.

‘But I never thought that just because I didn't push hard enough to see him old Jim would go and die on me like this.' He sighed. ‘I haven't even seen him for nearly two years.'

‘Were you at Dowting's together?' asked Willow.

‘Dowting's and school before that …'

‘Blockhurst?' asked Willow, remembering that that was where Simon Titchmell had been educated.

‘God no! Nothing Scottish about either of us. We were at Michaelson's. We really became doctors because of each other, spurred each other on, competed with each other … My wife could never really stand old Jim, but at the beginning she tried to pretend.'

‘Oh,' said Willow surprised, ‘I thought it was his wife you meant when you talked about drifting apart.' The large man shook his head, took out an enormous white handkerchief and gave his nose a thorough blow.

‘Hay fever starring early,' he said defensively. ‘No, old Jim only got married about six years ago. I did it as soon as we qualified.'

‘Is your wife on the train?' asked Willow.

‘Yes, she's with that crowd down in the bar … having a whale of a time,' he said bitterly. ‘What are you reading?'

Willow obligingly held up her book.

‘Ah,' said the man surprisingly, ‘And “Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgment.” Well, that applies to poor old Jim all right.'

‘How strange that you should know Marcus Aurelius so well,' said Willow, suprised without quite knowing why. Plenty of doctors were well read in subjects beyond their own. Perhaps it was his air of success and gins-and-tonics and hearty games that made the idea of his studying the musings of the ancient emperor-scholar so odd.

‘I find the old boy's thoughts help when things get rough – like now. I say, d'you mind my interrupting you like this when you're probably wanting a bit of peace to think of old Jim?'

‘No,' said Willow smiling. ‘I feel a bit of a fraud coming to his service, actually, and was even thinking of turning straight back to London.'

‘Why on earth?' asked the man, showing a little more interest in her. Willow shrugged in her well-cut black coat.

‘Well, you see, I only ever met him once. But he did me a singularly good turn and so …' She made her voice tail off artistically, as she tried desperately to think of something the dead man might have done for her and a likely place for them to have met.

‘Old Jim was a bloody good man, whatever they said,' said his erstwhile friend. ‘Pulled me out of more than one scrape. What did he do for you?'

Willow suddenly smiled brilliantly.

‘He stopped me from trying to go to medical school as a mature student,' she said. ‘And instead I started to write romantic novels and found my metier. I'd have been an awful doctor. When I read about his death, I thought it was the least I could do to come to the service. D'you think his wife would mind?'

‘Should think she'd be delighted. Damn good of you to bother. Not many people would,' said the man. He straightened up and held out his right hand. ‘By the way, my name's Andrew Salcott.'

‘Cressida Woodruffe,' said Willow, shaking hands with him. As soon as she saw the doubtful look on his face, she hurried to reassure him. ‘Don't worry, I'm sure you've never come across my books. They're not at all your sort of thing.'

His face cleared and he even smiled.

‘It's true I don't read much except science fiction and Dick Francis,' he said. ‘Except for medical journals, of course.'

Willow thought his smile rather attractive and approved of his wish for quietness on his way to his dead friend's memorial service. She admired his obviously genuine regret for Jim Bruterley's death, and wished that he did not present such a good opportunity for interrogation.

‘D'you think it's true what the papers are saying?' she asked.

‘Which one?' he asked, and there was both anger and bitterness in his voice. ‘I'm perfectly certain that Jim would never have committed suicide – and certainly not over some trollop … sorry, some girl who was a patient. If anyone like that had started to blackmail Jim he'd have seen them off pretty damn quick, believe you me.'

‘And yet murder seems so unlikely,' said Willow, making her face puzzled. ‘Could it have been an accident? Or one of those frightful maniacs who go round putting ground glass in tins and packets of food, do you think?'

‘Couldn't have been that. First thing I thought of too,' he said, smiling admiringly at Willow. ‘I asked Miranda if it was a new bottle, but she said no: only about a quarter full.'

‘And no one but he ever drank from it?' said Willow. ‘I find that hard to believe.'

‘Not many people,' admitted Andrew Salcott. ‘I dare say he'd have unscrewed it for me and one or two others, but he wasn't a great one for offering single malts to w … all and sundry.' His voice tailed off as he reached the unfortunate word. Willow, tiring of his relentless ‘manliness', spoke it for him.

‘Women and such like, I take it?' she said, gritting her teeth and making herself smile.

‘That's right. Had rather old-fashioned views about women, did Jim. I didn't altogether share them,' he hastened to add, ‘but they were part of him.'

‘Such as? I thought he was a gynaecologist; surely he can't have disliked women. Did he disapprove of women doctors?'

‘He wasn't really. That was the papers. He'd done various gynae jobs but he was a GP these days. He didn't much like women as doctors. You see,' he started, trying to explain his friend, ‘he had awfully high standards of feminine … charms, say, and he hated to see really lovely women wearing themselves out and making themselves ugly in the cause of work.'

‘So only ugly women should work?' suggested Willow, again with the clenched smile. Andrew Salcott smiled too, rather sadly she thought.

‘Well they don't get much choice, do they? Poor things,' he said.

Willow brushed her left hand over her eyes for a moment, trying to hide from him the despair that his assumptions aroused in her. When she looked at him again, she saw that he was embarrassed.

‘I say,' he said, looking obviously at her ringless left hand, ‘I didn't mean to suggest … I mean a smashing looking bird like you …' His voice died completely.

‘Choice comes into it sometimes, you know,' she said, and then deciding to take advantage of his confusion added, ‘Tell me about Jim's girlfriends … before he was married, I mean.'

‘He played the field a bit,' said Andrew. ‘Always had his pick, you see. The most gorgeous creatures used to flock round him – and the other sort of course …'

‘What,' said Willow, making herself sound disinterested, ‘the ugly ones?' Andrew nodded.

‘He was so goodlooking and didn't care a hoot for any of them until Miranda turned up again,' he said. ‘Did you ever meet her?'

‘Miranda? No,' said Willow. ‘He and I only met on that one occasion. What's she like?'

Dr Salcott's heavy face took on an affectionate light.

‘She's a duck,' he said unexpectedly. ‘Pretty, well-dressed, sweet, lovely mother, super wife, gentle, oh you know … We all wanted her in the old days, but she only had eyes for him. He just didn't notice till later.'

‘I see,' said Willow, wondering how to put her next question. ‘She must have been awfully hurt by the things the papers have said. Presumably if she's that special there's no truth in their innuendoes.'