Poison Flowers (16 page)

‘I say,' said Salcott, staring out of the window, ‘we're nearly there. I must go and collar my wife. I dare say I'll see you at the service. Thanks.'

‘For what?' asked Willow, surprised.

‘Providing a spot of peace and quiet and minding about Jim,' he said as he left the compartment.

Willow felt guilty for having disliked his attitudes towards women. She was sorry for his wife and felt forming in her mind the single dismissive syllable ‘men!' that so infuriated Richard whenever she had said it after he had provoked her by silliness or arrogance. But then she thought warmly of Tom Worth for a moment and of Ben Jonson. Neither of them showed any signs of the ‘women are really only good for one thing'habits of mind, and Tom was … Willow could feel her face relaxing into a smile and she wondered what was happening to her. Until the eruption of Tom Worth into her life she had never, ever, caught herself daydreaming about love.

She stood up and, balancing one knee on the opposite seat, examined her face in the rectangular mirror that was screwed to the wall too low to be used in any comfort. Adding a little extra mascara to her eyelashes and another coat of lipstick helped to deal with the slightly travelled look her face had taken on, and a light dusting of powder removed it altogether. Then she lifted the expensive hat from the rack and tried it this way and that until she had achieved a becoming angle, when she skewered the hat in place with a long Edwardian jet-tipped pin. By the time the train stopped she was ready, both for the memorial service and for her enquiries.

Having taken a taxi to the church, Willow was rather early for the service, but went in and allowed herself to be shown into a pew fairly near the back. That suited her because she could watch the rest of the congregation. They came in singly and in couples and family groups. It was easy to recognise Andrew Salcott's group for they had obviously enjoyed themselves on the train and, although they were compelling their faces into suitably sad expressions, their eyes were too bright and their cheeks too flushed to hide their excitement.

The church smelled of damp, slightly rotting flowers, mildewed hymnbooks and expensive scent. The flowers were all white, as though for a wedding, and curiously there were pink candles in all the holders. Willow had never seen pink candles in a church before and wondered about them. She sat in her hard seat, watching the mourners and waiting for something, anything, to strike her as revealing. Various other people were shown into her pew and she stood politely to let them shuffle apologetically past her. None of them looked as though they might be particularly useful. There were a few single women in the church, but none who looked desperate enough to be a spurned mistress, and several men on their own. The dead man's colleagues were obvious, as were his family. Willow was rather shocked when at last the widow arrived, with two small children clinging to her hands. A memorial service did not seem to her to be at all suitable for children as young as three and five.

In one respect the tabloid newspapers were right, she thought, the widow was extremely beautiful. As tall as Willow, but a lot more graceful, she had thick blond hair that had been brushed up into an elaborately plaited bun, rather like a Viennese loaf, on which she had perched a small black hat with a veil. Her suit was made of thick corded black silk and it seemed to have been made for her, so closely did it follow her excellent figure. The children were not dressed in black. The younger boy had a navy-blue duffle coat over his shorts and jersey and the elder was dressed in grey flannel, perhaps his school uniform.

As soon as the widow and her offspring were settled the vicar appeared, dressed in black and gold vestments over his white surplice. The organ rolled and the congregation stopped whispering and stood up to sing, ‘Fight the good fight, with all thy might.' Willow, who had always liked the tune, sang cheerfully. She rather admired Mrs Bruterley for choosing such a rousing hymn. As she was looking round, singing the words by heart, she caught sight of the first familiar face and stopped singing at once.

Willow could not think of any reason on earth why Emma Gnatche should be at the service, but there she was, wearing a prettily cut black dress with slightly puffed sleeves; her large-brimmed black hat was tilted on the back of her blond head, making her face look even more innocent than usual. The burly, white-haired man standing next to Willow politely handed her a service sheet, as though he thought her sudden silence had been caused by lack of words to follow. She smiled to thank him and started to sing again.

There followed prayers, two readings and an address, which was of more interest to Willow than all the rest. The vicar stood in his pulpit and addressed his congregation in a pleasantly authoritative voice. It became clear during his first few sentences that Jim Bruterley had been a reliable member of the church. Willow found that surprising and listened with increasing attention. The vicar referred to ‘the tragic accident that has deprived Jim's family of a devoted husband and father, his colleagues and his patients of an excellent doctor, and the rest of us of a much cherished friend.' He talked, too, of the dedication of a man who could have become a rich Harley-Street specialist, but had decided instead to serve unspectacularly as a general practitioner; and he talked of the universality of sorrow.

At that, the man sitting beside Willow gave a convulsive start and she heard him whispering to the woman on his other side:

‘Sorrow for Bruterley won't be exactly universal, will it, m'dear?'

Willow could hear only a ‘shhhh'sound from his wife. With the rest of the congregation she stood to sing ‘Christian dost thou see them?', which seemed an even odder choice of hymn than the first. The elderly man by Willow seemed to take exception to the hymn as well as the address, for when the congregation sang, ‘Christian, up and smite them, Counting gain but loss;' he muttered to his wife, ‘Damned accountants'hymn.'

A suppressed smile tweaked at Willow's lips as she heard the
sotto-voce
comment, but as they reached the last verse, she thought that perhaps she understood why Miranda Bruterley had wanted to have that particular hymn sung:

‘“Well I know they trouble,
O My servant true;
Thou art very weary,
I was weary too;”'

At the end of the hymn they all knelt again for more prayers for the dead man, for his ‘family and friends'and for the peaceful future of mankind. Another reading, this time from
The Revelation
, allowed the congregation to sit. As the words rolled down the stone aisles of the great grey Gothic church, Willow thought that she could understand the vast anger of the woman who had arranged the service.

‘But the fearful and the unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolators, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.'

After that, the last hymn – ‘God be at my head' – came almost as balm to the rasped nerves of all those sensitive enough to share the anger. When they reached the final verse, ‘God be at mine end/ And at my departing', Willow felt a lurch of genuine emotion, a mixture of regret that anyone so young should be dead and fury that if, as she and Tom suspected, Bruterley had been murdered, anyone should have thought their private satisfaction or revenge worth the loss of his life. Her quest was beginning to seem almost personal, and she wished that she had some more direct way of tackling it.

At the end of the service, she let all the others past her and waited by her pew until she saw Emma coming down the aisle and then said quietly:

‘Emma?'

‘Hello? Goodness, Cressida. How extraordinary! Mummy, this is Cressida Woodruffe: you've heard me talk about her. Cressida, my mother.'

‘How do you, Lady Gnatche?' said Willow, shaking hands. ‘Emma, I didn't know you knew Jim Bruterley.'

‘I didn't really, but Mummy knew him on the Conservatives. She's chairman of the local party, you know,' she added, seeing that Willow was lost. ‘And since I'd come home for the weekend, I've come with her.'

‘Of course, you live near here. I'd forgotten.' They walked together down the long aisle and out into the sunshine. Lady Gnatche left them to fetch her car.

‘Are you coming up to the house, Cressida?' asked Emma as they watched her go.

‘Lord no,' said Willow. ‘I didn't know them that well. It was nice to see you at Richard's the other day, Emma.'

‘I liked it, but I did feel very young,' she said. Willow laughed.

‘By the way,' she said, telling lies again, ‘that school you were talking about with Caroline Thingummy seems to be awfully famous; the people in my pew today were talking about it, too.'

‘Well, Miranda Bruterley was there,' said Emma. ‘Oh golly, there's Mummy with the car; she loathes being kept waiting. I'd better go.'

‘What was her surname before she married, do you know?' asked Willow, making sure that she did not grab Emma's shoulder to keep her as she wanted.

‘Northcote,' called Emma over her shoulder. ‘See you in London, I hope.'

Willow telephoned Tom Worth as soon as she got back to London.

‘Tom?' she said in relief as she recognised his human voice rather than the recorded version. ‘I'm back from the funeral; I haven't discovered much, but I've come across something that seems to be one connecting link between them all. Can we meet, or are you busy?'

‘Let's meet,' he said. ‘Would you like to come here?'

‘To your flat?' said Willow, rather surprised because she had never crossed his threshold. ‘Yes, all right. Thank you.'

He gave her the address in Pimlico and directions, and for once she took her car, an almost vulgarly luxurious Mercedes that she had bought very soon after she first made money. She was curious to see Tom's flat, but even more eager to discuss with him the possible relevance of Hampshire Place, the expensive and fairly exclusive school for girls.

When she reached the flat Tom would not let her tell him anything until he had taken her black coat and poured her a glass of wine. She sat sipping it and looking around the room, which was large, and peaceful. The walls were painted white, the carpet was a subtle, slightly bluish, dark-grey, the lamps black with white shades, the upholstery white and the cushions startling pink. There was no pattern anywhere except in a large abstract painting that hung on the wall opposite the empty fireplace and in a colossal pink-and-white azalea planted in a nineteenth-century
famille rose
pot. The room was the complete antithesis of everything that Willow had tried to achieve in her own flat, and yet she liked it: the calm, the order and the emptiness pleased as much as they surprised her.

‘You look better in that green,' said Tom, referring to the dress she had been wearing under her funereal coat. ‘Now, tell me: what is the link you have discovered between the victims?'

‘All of them in one way or another are connected with Hampshire Place – the boarding school for girls in the New Forest,' she said, adding caustically, ‘and there's no need to look as though you think I'm a lunatic.'

‘I hadn't realised that I was,' he said, smiling slightly. ‘I'm interested in your conclusions, if not particularly hopeful. Tell me more.'

‘Edith Fernside was matron there for sixteen years. Claire Ullathorne was a pupil. Simon Titchmell's sister was there and so was Bruterley's wife. It's too much of a coincidence to be merely – well, coincidence. But I'm a bit stuck now. I can't think of any way to go down there and grill the staff … except,' Willow said as she thought of an excuse, ‘as a prospective parent. Perhaps we should go together?'

‘Perhaps we should,' said Tom, looking at her so seriously that Willow quickly changed the subject.

‘There's one other thing, Tom. May I tell one other person about all this?' He shook his head straight away. ‘There is a reason,' Willow went on.

‘What?'

‘The DPR psychiatrist on my board is interested in something called offender profiling. I've talked to him about it and I think it's possible that he could help. If …'

‘Willow, he's a Civil Servant,' said Tom. ‘Very few of them are like you, in my limited experience, despite their fearsome oaths of secrecy. I really don't think it's a good idea. Besides, I'm not sure profiling would be much use on this case; ours are not classic serial killings.'

‘So I understand,' she said. At the look on Tom's face, she added: ‘He explained the American studies and the kinds of cases they've worked on over there.'

‘I see.'

‘I also,' added Willow, not wanting to lie by omission or even by implication, ‘tried him out by pretending to invent some of our cases. What he said was that we should look for someone – probably a man – with an unusually high mixture of vanity and inadequacy.'

‘That's bloody helpful! I can think of lots,' said Tom with a laugh in his voice. ‘But none come to mind who have anything to do with schools like Hampshire Place.'

‘Do you know anything about it?' she asked. ‘Everyone except me seems to.' Tom grinned and rubbed his broken nose.

‘Well, yes, Willow, in fact I do,' he said. ‘One of my nieces is there at the moment.'

‘That's the answer,' she said. ‘Why don't we go down there tomorrow and take her out to tea? Oh no, I can't; I'm committed to Simon Titchmell's sister tomorrow. But you could, Tom.'

‘Giving me orders, eh, Willow?'

‘Yes, I am. You shouldn't have turned the investigation over to me if you didn't want me to lead it,' she said a little stiffly.

‘All right; though it's difficult to imagine what I could possibly find out. I'd better give my sister a ring and set it up. The school would probably have me arrested as a child molester if I turned up unannounced. There's a casserole in the oven; why don't you go and give it a stir while I telephone?'