Poison Flowers (27 page)

‘What poison could it be? Is there any plant that could do this?'

‘Lots, I'd say. But there's plenty else,' said the strange voice. ‘It looks quite like oysters to me. Does she eat oysters?'

Tom said something then that Willow could not understand and she forced herself to break out of her own weakness to say:

‘Oysters for lunch.'

‘Did she say something?' said the doctor.

‘Willow,' came Tom's voice, ‘say it again, please.' She lifted her eyelids with as much effort as though she were heaving up a cabin trunk filled with rocks, and said as distinctly as she could:

‘I … ate … oysters … for … lunch.'

‘Aha,' said one of the men and Willow heard no more.

Nightmares mixed with people doing things to her, asking her questions and telling her things for several hours and Willow was not at all sure what was real and what was not, but at eight the next morning she woke in her right mind to discover herself in a high white bed, lying in a shaft of sunlight from a vast modern window.

‘Hello,' said a cheerful voice to her right. Willow turned her head lazily to see herself being watched by a young nurse in a blue-and-white striped uniform.

‘Hello,' said Willow herself. ‘It wasn't poison, then?'

‘An allergic reaction to the oysters you ate, the doctor thinks. You'll be fine in no time at all. How do you feel?' Willow thought about it for a bit.

‘Fragile,' she said at last. ‘Fragile but … alive.'

‘Do you want anything to drink – or eat?' asked the nurse, watching her closely.

‘No,' said Willow, feeling her eyelids dosing again. She vaguely heard the sound of rubber-soled shoes squeaking against linoleum and slept.

When she woke again Tom Worth was standing beside her, looking down at her with an expression of profound relief on his familiar face.

‘You frightened me, Will,' he said when he saw her eyes focusing.

‘You're not the only one,' she said with the beginnings of a return to her familiar self. ‘I was convinced they'd poisoned me.'

‘Tell me what happened,' he said, dragging up a chair. ‘You said something about Caroline Titchmell last night.'

‘It was probably slander,' she said, rolling her head from side to side on the pillow to make sure that all her nerves and muscles still worked. Miraculously they did. ‘But it seemed so pat. After we'd met last Sunday and I'd asked her questions, she rang up and invited me to supper. I'd already decided that she couldn't have had anything to do with the deaths or I'd never have gone near any food she'd prepared. But then once I was being so vilely ill last night, I thought I'd got it wrong somewhere and that she must have been frightened by something I'd said, and decided to do away with me by means of snails that had been specially fed on belladonna.'

‘Far fetched,' commented Tom with what Willow considered not nearly enough sympathy for someone in her condition, ‘and unlikely to work.'

‘Not at all,' she said in the voice she used to her most tiresome subordinates – and superiors – in the Civil Service. ‘The snails? were served in individual dishes, six for each of us. The belladonna ones could easily have been given to me without risking anyone else. It doesn't seem any more far fetched to me than putting nicotine in malt whisky or foxgloves into sloe gin.'

Tom looked for a moment as though he were going to change the subject to something more soothing for an invalid, but eventually he changed his mind.

‘What made you suspect Titchmell in the beginning?' he asked. ‘She inherited nothing from her brother, and …'

‘But until Bruterley, she was connected with two of the three people who died,' said Willow, ‘and there is even a tenuous connection with him in that his wife was at school with her.'

‘But why should Titchmell have wanted to kill the spinster in Newcastle?' asked Tom in protest. ‘I know that she was the matron at Titchmell's school and didn't believe that the girl had meningitis. But that's hardly enough, surely?'

‘One wouldn't have thought so, but Caroline did say that she had felt terrible rage and frustration then.… Anyone mad enough to murder must blow minor hurts up into major tragedies, or they'd never get as far as murdering. Perhaps it was enough.'

‘Not twelve years on,' said Tom mildly. ‘And there was nothing connecting her to Claire Ullathorne.'

‘Except that they had been at the same school,' said Willow. ‘The trouble was that they can't have known each other there, and Caroline did say that she had never heard the name. Of course she would if she'd actually killed Ullathorne. And it is just possible that Claire knew Simon Titchmell. But…'

Willow sat up suddenly, ignoring the ugly hospital nightgown she was wearing, which had no usable buttons and flapped around her nakedness.

‘Wait … Something's occurring to me. Tom, you put something in your notes about Ullathorne and her doctor. What was it?' Willow asked. Her cold green eyes were shining with enthusiasm and her voice was lighter and livelier than at any time since her dramatic sickness. Tom Worth smiled and delved into his memory.

‘I can't remember saying anything, but the information we got from the doctor was that Ullathorne never consulted her except for matters of innoculation, contraception and cervical smears,' he said.

‘There was something else, though,' said Willow. Suddenly she did become aware of the stiff, ugly, rust-stained nightgown she had been dressed in and slid back beneath the bedclothes. ‘Something about inflammation of the joints.'

‘That's right. She was suffering from the early stages of arthritis. But the doctor confirmed that she'd never … Don't tell me that your belladonna snails book …'

‘It does,' said Willow. ‘The first book I got out said that colchicine was often used in patent medicines for gout, but the more modern one says that although an infusion of colchicum seeds has been used since time immemorial for treating gout, recently it has been discovered to help arthritis as well. I bet she was interested in herbal medicine and made the dose herself.' Willow laughed.

‘She probably had window boxes of the stuff growing outside her flat and you bobbies never noticed,' she said.

‘We did in fact check the contents of her window boxes and roof garden,' said Tom with a certain satisfaction. ‘It was thought that she might have taken the stuff by mistake … people do, I gather.'

‘And what about her allotment?' asked Willow. To Tom Worth then she looked almost like a witch, her green eyes wild, her skin paler than ever and her red hair crackling with electricity and flying about her thin face.

‘What makes you think she had an allotment?' he asked, looking at her sideways. ‘I can't think of many actresses who have, particularly not rich ones.'

‘I don't know whether she did or not. But she might have done, mightn't she? People do, I gather,' said Willow, neatly mimicking his own patronising intonation. ‘And when you think how much time most actors have to spend resting, an allotment would be a very good idea – cheap vegetables and flowers, exercise … and she did live in North London after all.'

‘You, my dear Miss Woodruffe,' he said with a smile she enjoyed, ‘are feeling better. I think it's most unlikely, but I shall look into the allotment question.' He stood up and replaced the plastic chair on which he had been sitting.

‘By the way,' he said, coming back to her bedside, ‘we've found Sarah Rowfant.'

‘Ah,' said Willow, ‘and from your expression of pity I take it that she's not the girl in the school scandal and her flight from Cheltenham was entirely innocent.'

‘Precisely,' he said. ‘She left Cheltenham as soon as she heard that Bruterley was dead because she needed solace and had no idea that he had been murdered, and she took refuge with a friend in a croft on a virtually deserted Scottish island.'

‘Where there is no telephone, they received no newspapers and never listened to the radio,' supplied Willow in the sing-song voice of a lift attendant in a department store.

‘That's right. And apparently accurate, too. She's never had an abortion and has been entirely frank with the Cheltenham boys about her affair.'

‘So that's that,' said Willow, sounding ill again. ‘We're back at at the beginning. ‘I don't quite know where to go from here, except that I must talk to Miranda Bruterley. When am I going to be let out of here?'

‘I don't know,' said Tom.

‘Well go and find out,' said Willow as though he were a particularly dilatory and idiotic typist. ‘Here am I – quite literally working my guts out for you – it's the least you can do in return.' Laughing, Tom went to carry out her orders.

He came back with the white-coated doctor, who looked her over, took her pulse and blood pressure again and told her that she could leave on Sunday unless she had any kind of relapse.

‘Right,' said Willow when he had gone. ‘Now find me a telephone and get the Bruterleys'number for me.'

Tom raised an eyebrow and smiled his irresistible smile and Willow relented.

‘Please, dear, sweet Tom … not that I approve of sexual harassment,' she said.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘It's sexual harassment to use patronising endearments in your efforts to persuade people to do things for you,' she said, laughing at him.

‘And I'd taken the endearments as their straightforward selves,' he said, turning away. ‘Ah me.'

When he came back, pushing a yellow telephone trolley in front of him, Willow first demanded change from him, and then dismissed him, saying in an off-hand voice:

‘There, there, I do love you – really I do.'

Tom, who had been walking away, spun round on his heel and looked down at her as seriously as he had done when she was ill.

‘Really?'

Something in his voice or eyes terrified her, but before she could say anything, he grinned again.

‘Don't worry about it,' he said. ‘I shouldn't have asked. Don't go eating any more oysters, will you?'

‘That I can promise you,' she said and tried to smile, but the recognition of how near she had come to committing herself was too awful to be treated lightly. As she picked up the telephone receiver she suddenly remembered her poor housekeeper and the mess that must have greeted her when she arrived for work at seven-thirty that Friday morning. Instead of dialling the number Tom had given her for Mrs Bruterley, Willow rang the number of her own flat in Belgravia.

Mrs Rusham sounded genuinely relieved to hear from her employer and expressed considerable sympathy when she heard that ‘Miss Woodruffe' was in hospital. Willow thanked her, apologised for the unpleasant mess in the flat and assured her that she would be back there as soon as the doctors released her on Sunday. Once Mrs Rusham was pacified, Willow pressed the ‘follow-on call'button on the telephone and dialled the Cheltenham number. She was answered by a young foreign female voice and assumed that it must belong to the nanny.

‘Could I speak to Mrs Bruterley?' Willow asked, taking care to speak clearly, but not so slowly as to insult the girl's unknown command of English.

‘Who is speaking, please?' came the competent reply.

‘My name is Cressida Woodruffe,' said Willow, wondering whether Miranda would have read the letter Willow had sent after the memorial service or remember her name.

‘Please to wait, please,' said the nanny. Willow watched the figures on the liquid-crystal display screen on the telephone flash down from the two pounds she had pushed into the machine. They had reached 50p before another voice, tired and somehow wary, said:

‘Cressida Woodruffe? This is Miranda Bruterley. Thank you so much for your sweet letter.'

‘You did get it, then,' said Willow. ‘I am glad. And I'm sorry to be intruding at such a time; it's just that I have to be in Cheltenham on Monday and I wondered if I could possibly come and talk to you. I promise not to take up too much time.'

There was silence at the other end of the line, which did not surprise Willow very much. Before she could plunge on with explanations of her odd request, Miranda Bruterley said:

‘I'm not very good company, you know.' Willow thought that an odd remark under the circumstances.

‘It's just that I need your help, although I can't really explain it on the telephone,' she said.

‘How well did you know Jim?' Miranda said with some animation in her voice at last. There was suspicion in it, too, which Willow was quite glad to hear. The black figures on the little screen started to flash nought and Willow fumbled amid the small heap of change Tom had left for a fifty-pence piece to thrust into the slot. It dropped with a loud clunk and the screen ceased to threaten.

‘Hardly at all,' Willow answered, almost honestly. ‘And I hadn't seen him for years.'

‘Ah, then you're not … sorry, I did warn you I'm not at my best. Well,' Miranda went on, sounding only tired by then, ‘come if you want. But I don't know how much I'll be able to do to help.'

‘May I come just after lunch?' asked Willow. ‘About half-past two?'

‘Yes, all right. I'll see you then,' said Miranda. ‘I did like your letter, you know,' she finished and then put down the telephone.

Willow was still feeling rather shaky when she reached Cheltenham in her large and comfortable Mercedes at half-past one on the following Monday afternoon. She drove around until she found the Bruterleys'house, parked in the road beyond their gates and decided to order her thoughts and questions in the half hour before she could go in.

She had been convinced for a long time that the murders of Miss Fernside, Simon Titchmell and Dr Bruterley were connected. The type of poison – easily made from readily available ‘natural ingredients' – and the method – a burglary, or perhaps in Miss Fernside's case a decoy official visit, a short while before the death and the remnants of poison found in the victims'food or drink supplies – were too similar to be coincidence. Claire Ullathorne's death, on the other hand, she was more and more inclined to put into a separate category. There had been no burglary and there were no remnants of poison to be found.