Poison Flowers (19 page)

‘I wish I'd come to places like this before I planned my flat,' she said, ‘although I can't quite see myself in such a gold-encrusted confection. What about you?'

Caroline considered the elegant bed for a moment.

‘Somehow I don't think it would quite suit Ben,' she said at last. ‘He's quite a one for plainish living, having been brought up pretty poor and still being less well off than …'

‘I can imagine so,' said Willow with sympathy in her voice, ‘if all I've heard about academic salaries is true.'

‘Alas, yes,' said Caroline, turning her back on the luxurious furniture and going to look out at the green park. ‘I think it's probably quite difficult for him that I'm already making about three times his earnings and that the division can only widen, but he says he doesn't mind if I don't.'

‘He seemed far too sensible to resent something like that,' said Willow, remembering the gentleness of his voice and the intelligent tolerance of his views. Caroline turned her back on the view to face Willow. Very seriously she rebutted the suggestion of resentment.

‘But what is difficult is knowing that I could so easily afford to buy the things he has to struggle for; that if he were earning the same as me we could get a much more luxurious house in a far nicer bit of London. That sort of thing … He doesn't resent it, but he's too sensitive not to mind the fact that he can't give me the material things I could give him. He gives me plenty of the rest, of course,' she added earnestly.

Willow thought of her recognition of a similar discrepancy between herself and Tom Worth over the bottle of wine he had brought her the previous weekend and understood something of what Caroline faced.

‘It's beautifully sunny now,' she said. ‘Why don't we go out for a bit?'

Caroline agreed and they made their way down the main staircase and out into the garden. Walking down one of the
allés
, Willow idly admired a particularly fine plant. Caroline identified it, surprisingly giving both Latin and ordinary English names for it.

‘Goodness, how learned you sound,' said Willow, impressed by Caroline's unexpected knowledge and trying not to remember the lists of the murderer's characteristics.

‘Well, my parents have a garden and my mother is pretty keen – I used to help her and learned a bit that way. It's coming in quite useful now that Ben and I have our own tiny garden to plan. We go to Kew and Wisley quite often at weekends for ideas.'

‘Did Simon help as well?' asked Willow.

‘Not much. He was usually too busy.'

‘Didn't your mother mind that?' asked Willow in genuine curiosity. Caroline's voice took on a tiny amount of bitterness as she answered the question.

‘My mother did not consider that it was Simon's business to help with anything in the house or garden: he was too important to be bogged down with domestic tasks,' she said. ‘No, the only thing mother minded was his devotion to girls she did not like. She could get quite cross with him sometimes.'

‘Good heavens!' said Willow. ‘I'd never have imagined that that sort of thing still went on.'

‘What, mothers criticising their children's lovers? Definitely! Luckily she likes Ben,' said Caroline.

‘I'm not surprised,' said Willow, ‘but I really meant assuming that daughters will help domestically while sons are exempt. Didn't you mind?'

Caroline managed to laugh.

‘Yes, when I was in my rebellious teens I minded very much indeed,' she said, ‘although oddly enough it didn't change any of my affection for Si.'

‘In your school holidays, I suppose,' said Willow, dragging the conversation back to her suspicions rather clumsily. ‘Talking of school, I've been meaning to ask whether you or Simon ever knew Claire Ullathorne.'

‘Who?' said Caroline, looking and sounding genuinely puzzled. ‘Ullathorne? I don't think I've ever heard of her. Why?'

‘I just wondered,' said Willow lamely. ‘She was at Hampshire Place and became an actress. But she must have left some years before you got there.'

‘No,' said Caroline. ‘I've never come across her and I can't imagine how Simon would have, unless of course she was one of that beastly set. I suppose she could have been. Is …?' But before she could finish her question; Willow forestalled her.

‘Did you like his girlfriends?' Willow asked. ‘Or did you share your mother's views?'

‘I loathed the druggy ones, but I thought Annabel was sweet,' said Caroline, rather repressively, Willow thought. Caroline turned away and said in a voice that sounded as though someone was throttling her: ‘That's another thing that makes their deaths so bloody unfair: at last he'd found someone to love who was really worth it and worth him and now … they're both dead. I'm sorry, Cressida.'

Willow saw that she was in tears again and thought that once more she had misjudged Caroline. Willow asked no more except about the flowers and trees they saw, but her mind was full of questions. Would it be too far fetched to think that a woman who was besotted with her own son might decide to murder him and his latest mistress because she hated her? Yes, Willow decided a little regretfully, it would.

‘Did your brother always eat healthy things like muesli?' she asked suddenly, unable to suppress a question that did not seem at all dangerous. Caroline looked startled as well she might, but she answered straightforwardly enough.

‘No. He'd always rather despised that sort of thing, but Annabel was a real health-freak and insisted that he have a proper breakfast full of grains. She even bought it for him, I think.'

Willow drove them both back to Belgravia with plenty on her mind. When she had parked the Mercedes outside her flat she remembered that Ben had brought Caroline there and asked whether she would like a lift home.

‘Actually, Ben said he would pick me up at half-past four,' said Caroline with a slight smile. ‘I warned him that we might be later than that but he swore that he didn't mind waiting. He's parked over there,' she added, waving towards a large dark-blue BMW on the opposite side of the road.

Through the windscreen Willow could see a figure reading a newspaper. Quite involuntarily she said:

‘Doesn't it drive you mad to have him hanging about for you?'

‘No,' said Caroline, looking surprised. ‘No one has ever looked after me like this before … it's a wonderful feeling being collected from stations or airports after exhausting meetings with inventors or lawyers, and parties are infinitely better when you don't have to worry about taxis or parking. And besides, he likes doing it and my miseries have been getting him down, so … But he's begun to cheer up again in the last few days.'

‘I think you're very kind to put up with it. It would make me terribly twitchy to know that there was someone else who knew exactly where I was and what I was doing all the time,' said Willow, quite unable to imagine giving anyone else so much control over her. Caroline laughed.

‘I don't mind that much, although I would have in the past,' she said. ‘It must be love softening my brain – or at least my independence. I do sometimes feel as though I've succumbed to some peculiarly beguiling temptation that will lead to all sorts of trouble in the future, but it's all right at the moment.'

‘I'm glad,' said Willow. It was all she could bring herself to say in the face of something that would be anathema to herself. ‘And do you reciprocate?'

‘You mean, do I collect him from things? Not really. His working hours are so much more flexible than mine. I'm nearly always stuck in my office when he gets back to London. He … he's much kinder to me than I am to him,' said Caroline with a rather wistful smile.

‘Well, I think he's lucky,' said Willow politely.

Much as she had enjoyed the expedition to Ham and much as she had liked Caroline Titchmell, Willow could not let herself ignore the links she had discovered between Caroline and three of the four victims. Caroline had a reason at least to resent both her brother and Miss Femside. On the other hand, Willow still could not fit Caroline into the murderer's space in her mind. And unless she were mad, Willow told herself again, Caroline had had no reason to kill anyone, least of all her brother, even if he or his friends had once played a cruel and dangerous trick on her.

Reminding herself that for other people at least ‘the heart hath reasons reason knows not of,' Willow went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. Feeling momentarily tired from the expedition, she took the tea to her bedroom and drank it propped up against a bank of down-filled pillows. As she put the empty cup down on her bedside table she heard in her mind an echo of Caroline's cultivated, sensible, well-articulated voice saying, ‘I don't think I shall ever forget the sensation of complete powerlessness …'

The telephone buzzed in Willow's left ear, making her start. She put out a hand to pick up the receiver, but the small shock had made her clumsy and she pushed the telephone off the bedside table on to the floor. Reaching over the side of the bed to pick it up off the grey-green carpet, she felt the blood thumping unpleasantly in her head and when she straightened up again with the telephone securely held between both hands, she was slightly breathless.

‘Willow?' came Tom Worth's voice, vibrating with energy and strength, ‘what's the matter? Did I get you out of your bath?'

‘No,' she answered shortly as she regained her self-control. ‘I have a telephone in the bathroom.'

‘So you do; how absurd of me to imagine the greater spotted Woodruffe flying to answer a bell,' said Tom. Willow thought irrelevantly that only Tom Worth would be able to tease her without either hurting or annoying her.

‘I was asleep,' she said, smiling to herself. ‘How was your lunch?'

‘Pleasant but not frightfully instructive. And yours?'

‘It wasn't lunch,' she answered literally, ‘but …'

‘You actually sound worried, Willow,' he said. ‘I wish I could see that face of yours. Are you all right?'

‘Yes. But I am a little concerned. Can you tell me whether the Fulham investigation went into the question of who might or might not have had expectations under Titchmell's will?'

‘He hadn't all that much to leave,' said Tom readily. ‘A mortgaged house, a life-insurance policy that paid off the mortgage, the proceeds of a self-employed pension policy, and about ten thousand pounds.'

‘The house must have been worth a bit,' said Willow, ‘if the life insurance paid off the mortgage.'

‘A fair bit,' agreed Tom. ‘As to who might have had expectations: we didn't get very far, because he left no will. No one was admitting any private expectations and there was no reason to suppose anyone had any.'

‘So who did inherit?'

‘His parents – which is what happens if you die intestate unless you have a spouse or children,' said Tom.

Willow thought that of all people Caroline Titchmell would have known the intestacy rules; after all, she had qualified as a solicitor before becoming a patent agent. And if it was improbable that she would have killed her brother for revenge for the drugging, it was even less likely that she would have killed him for the price of a house in Fulham.

‘Willow?' said Tom into the silence.

‘Yes?' she said, thinking of all the other people whose miseries and motives she had yet to explore.

‘I wish you'd tell me what it is that's bothering you so much,' he said.

‘There isn't really anything to tell,' she said. ‘Just a feeling: and I'm damned if I'm going to be accused of relying on female intuition even if that happened to you. Did you really discover nothing about Hampshire Place at your sister's?'

‘Nothing. She's almost as neurotically conscientious as you are when it comes to her children, and she made stringent enquiries before she chose the school for her precious daughter,' said Tom. ‘It's stricter than most under this headmistress, having been relatively liberal under the one before.'

‘In what way?' asked Willow, remembering Emma Gnatche's announcement that her friends thought it horribly strict.

‘Oh they used to be allowed to wear their own clothes at weekends and even have contact with carefully chosen neighbouring boys' schools,' said Tom. ‘Dances and shared debating societies, and so on. But the dragon in charge now considers that too many girls wasted time and energy on premature romantic entanglements and stopped all that. She had a lot of support from parents when she let it be known that one of the girls had got pregnant after an encounter in the bushes with a sixth-former from Michaelson's.'

‘Good Lord! I wonder,' said Willow, remembering that Andrew Salcott had said that he and Bruterley had been at Michaelson's. Salcott had definitely given her the impression that his friend had been given to accepting the eager pursuit of beautiful women.

‘Wonder what?' asked Tom.

‘I haven't worked out the idea enough to talk about it yet,' she said quickly and was relieved when he did not press her. She seemed to be floundering in a welter of disjointed, irrational, unsustainable suspicions of probably wholly innocent people and she had enough respect for Tom's brains not to want to display her muddled thoughts. Thank you, Tom. I'll let you know if I get any further. ‘Thank you for ringing. No, before you go, there is one thing: you must have come across Titchmell's sister when you were dealing with the case …'

‘Yes, I had quite a lot of time with her. Why?'

‘What did you make of her?' asked Willow. She trusted Tom's judgment and thought that his verdict might help to clear her brain of suspicion of Caroline.

‘I liked her,' he said slowly, ‘although I never felt that I'd quite got to the bottom of her.'