Poison Flowers (30 page)

‘That seems rather cruel,' said Willow. ‘I thought you were old friends.'

‘So did I,' he said. ‘But she obviously bears some kind of grudge that I knew nothing about. It's an unpleasant feeling.'

Or perhaps, thought Willow for the first time, she suspects you of killing her husband.

The waiter put a plate of fish in front of her and when he had gone she started to chew the first mouthful. It seemed to turn to cottonwool in her mouth and she found it almost impossible to swallow. Forcing herself to recognise that no public restaurant would poison a client's food even at the behest of someone like Salcott, she managed to swallow the chewed fish.

She knew that she had a splendid opportunity to ask questions, but in her residual weakness, she found that she could not bear the idea of sitting eating opposite a man who might have poisoned at least four people. Laying down her knife and fork, Willow held her forehead in her right hand and murmured:

‘I feel most awfully sick. Do you think they could get me a taxi?'

Salcott insisted on driving her home himself in his blue Citroen, leaving his own dinner unfinished. When they reached Chesham Place, he tried to escort her upstairs to her flat to make certain that she got into bed safely. Willow, still concealing her fears from him, managed to keep him outside her front door only by promising to telephone the following day to report on her health.

It was only half-past nine when Willow shut the door behind Andrew Salcott and so she went straight to her answering machine. There was a message from Tom asking whether he could drop in and see her, and since it was still early she rang him to ask him to come there and then. While she waited for him she went into her pale-grey writing room to fetch pen and paper so that she could write an account of her inchoate suspicions and sort them into some kind of rational sequence.

Tom's first words when he arrived twenty minutes later were:

‘You do look tired. Is it really all right for me to come in?'

Willow smiled as she held the door open wide. Tom grinned and walked past her into the tiny, immaculate hall. Mrs Rusham had arranged a glass bowl of early roses on the little oak chest, the floor and furniture gleamed with beeswax and turpentine and the glass in front of the two paintings was pristine. Willow watched him as he looked appreciatively at it all. His dark eyes were soft and for once his mouth looked very gentle.

‘Come on in and help yourself to a drink,' said Willow, leading the way into the drawing room.

‘May I pour you one?' asked Tom. Willow thought for a moment and then asked for a white wine spritzer, explaining that there was a half bottle of hock in the fridge.

‘What my grandfather always called hock and seltzer,' he said as he returned carrying two glasses. He handed her the taller of the two.

‘I suppose you don't look too bad,' he said when he had examined her face minutely, ‘considering.'

‘I'm glad to hear it,' said Willow astringently. Thinking of the the terrors that had been tormenting her since she had insisted on involving herself in his investigation, it seemed a little unfair of him to damn her with such faint praise.

‘I meant in terms of your recent illness,' said Tom, ‘as you very well know. But never mind the compliments now: do you want to tell me or shall I tell you first?'

‘You first,' said Willow over the brim of her glass as she sipped the white wine and soda water. ‘Mmmm, this is just right. Your grandfather taught you well.'

‘Well, I can tell you that you really must be a witch. Claire Ullathorne did have an allotment. It's the most unlikely thing I've ever come across, but it's true. The whole place is smothered in weeds now, of course, but there are rows and rows of colchicums planted like vegetables, as well as a great variety of medicinal herbs. She must have grown them so that she could dose herself with her own concotions.'

‘It's not proof that she overdosed herself, of course,' said Willow.

‘No,' agreed Tom, ‘but it's highly suggestive.' He looked at her as she lay back against the over-firm sofa cushions, her red hair curling about her perfectly painted face and her green eyes intent.

‘I wonder,' he said slowly, ‘whether I've wasted all this time of yours and the whole thing was a wild goose chase after all.'

Willow picked up her glass again and raised it as though she were toasting him. Then she drank and laid her head back to let the fizzy diluted wine trickle back down her throat. When she had swallowed it all, she said:

‘No, I don't think you have. I am still not quite sure who the killer is, but I am certain that there is one.' She laughed abruptly; there was no happiness in the sound. ‘All the people I've been talking to have secrets or discreditable pasts to hide, and lots of them seem quite capable …' Her voice died as she asked herself whether any of the people she had met were really capable of killing another human being.

‘Who seems capable of murder?' asked Tom. Willow thought of giving him the lists she had been compiling before his arrival, but decided to talk instead.

‘Well, if I had to choose from instinct alone, I'd give you a doctor called Mark Tothill,' she said, thinking back to Caroline Titchmell's dinner party. ‘There's absolutely no evidence that he's killed anyone and I haven't turned up any motive for him, but he's a vile man, extraordinarily resentful about perfectly ordinary people … and angry. I don't think I've ever seen anyone show anger quite so obviously before.'

‘Who is he?' said Tom. ‘I don't think I've ever heard the name before.'

‘The husband of a friend of Caroline Titchmell,' said Willow. ‘But, as I said, I've only my dislike of him to go on and I've probably slandered him.'

‘All right. Ignore the unpleasant doctor. Who else?'

‘Consider Miranda Bruterley for a moment,' said Willow. Ignoring Tom's expression of half-contemptuous amusement, she went on: ‘You know that you told me Dr Bruterley's senior partner had drunk some of his whisky after she had gone away with her children?'

‘Precisely,' said Tom. ‘Therefore she could not have poisoned it.'

‘I take it that the partner is John Swaffield?' said Willow. Tom merely nodded.

‘Well in that case, I do wonder whether he was lying,' said Willow. ‘He's definitely consoling the widow at the moment and it did occur to me as I was driving back to London that he might have been simply protecting her, which would mean …'

‘That, the breaking-and-entering could have been the occasion for the poisoning of the bottle after all. I'd better have a word with the Cheltenham boys. What's the matter?' Tom demanded as Willow's face changed. She looked as nearly shifty as she ever looked, and very much younger than usual. ‘What have you done?'

‘I feel as though I'm blushing,' announced Willow annoyed with herself, ‘and I don't see why I should.'

‘Tell me,' commanded Tom, but there was a note of such affection in his deep voice that Willow let herself smile reluctantly back at him.

‘I told Miranda Bruterley that I thought there might be a connection between the murder of her husband and Simon Titchmell,' she said rather quickly. Tom's face hardly changed, but Willow thought that if she were one of his suspects she would find his new expression quite frightening. There was no gentleness left in it at all. Willow turned away to drink a little more spritzer and then put the glass down on the small mahogany table beside her.

‘Damn you, Willow,' said Tom after a moment of grappling with his temper.

‘It was the only way I could ask her anything useful at all,' said Willow. ‘I don't actually think I need to excuse myself, but I made absolutely no suggestion that I had any contact with the police and I impressed on her that it was entirely my own idea and that Caroline Titchmell did not know what I was doing.'

Tom said nothing. Willow thought of asking him how on earth he expected her to solve his problems if he hobbled her ankles and put a blindfold over her eyes.

‘I suppose,' she said, struggling to be fair to him, ‘you thought that I could sit here and spin fantasies that might have some bearing on your crimes. But there just wasn't enough information to do that.' Tom stood up. Looking down at her, he seemed enormously tall and powerful.

‘Would you believe me if I told you that the only reason I didn't want you to go involving yourself physically in these cases was because I didn't want you to risk yourself?' he asked. ‘Or is that worse? Patronising?'

Suddenly feeling weak and almost tearful – shamingly like the heroine of her last book – Willow shook her head. Her fears were too vivid for her to object to anything Tom might do to try to ensure her physical safety. But she knew that there was really nothing he could do to guarantee it, which is why she never told him how bad the terrors were. Despite her determination to keep them hidden, she shivered.

Tom leaned forward to look at her more closely.

‘You'd better tell me now,' he said at last.

‘Tell you what?' asked Willow, wondering whether it was her imagination or her reason that had created the fear. She had made a fool of herself over the suspect bomb already, and built up the Clapham burglary into far more than it might have been, but at least she had done that in private.

‘Something you learned in Cheltenham is upsetting you,' said Tom, looking closely at her. He seemed to have mastered his anger completely. ‘Is there another connection with Caroline Titchmell?'

Realising that he did not yet know quite how afraid she was, Willow became determined to behave as though the fear did not exist.

‘In fact there is, although it's not enough to explain murder.'

‘Tell me,' said Tom.

‘It seems that when they were all at school, Caroline Titchmell was in love with James Bruterley and he spurned her rather cruelly. But, Tom, that must have been sixteen years ago at least. She's found all kinds of satisfactions for herself since then and so why would she need to kill …?'

‘Perhaps having found the satisfactions she has become confident enough to take revenge?' he suggested, playing devil's advocate. He had never believed in Caroline as a possible killer.

‘These murders started very recently …' he began. Willow interrupted.

‘As far as you know, but you did say that a lot of poisoning must go undetected. I cannot believe that a woman like Caroline … it would be easier to believe that Miranda did it, with or without the help of John Swaffield. Miranda is a highly suitable name for her, now I come to think of it.'

‘“Fit to be admired”' said Tom, surprising Willow, who had assumed that he knew no Latin. She made a face at him, which he did not see, because he had got up off the sofa and was walking slowly around the room.

‘Why should she have killed her husband? Miranda, I mean?' asked Tom, puffing aside one of the heavily lined curtains and peering out into the street.

‘Having discovered about Sarah Rowfant, perhaps,' said Willow, remembering that Miranda had appeared to be more upset about her husband's mistress than about his death. ‘Or perhaps she just couldn't stand him any longer. He sounds the most appalling tyrant: not allowing the children to make any noise or bother him; locking up his decent whisky and making his wife drink something less good; being vilely unpleasant about the burglary even though it was hardly her fault.'

‘But she knew nothing about Rowfant until after the murder,' protested Tom, ignoring the question of blame for the burglary. Willow shook her head.

‘She could easily have been lying,' she said. Her eyes narrowed to glistening green lines between her darkened lashes as she developed the story. ‘John Swaffield is being “absolutely sweet” to her; it is quite possible that he lied about drinking the whisky to protect her; it is more than probable that he has been coaching her in what to say to the police and warned her not to admit to knowing about the mistress because that would have given her a motive. How I wish I could interview them all face to face!'

‘I can imagine how frustrating it is,' said Tom, coming back to lay a hand on her shoulder. Willow put up one of hers to cover it.

‘And then there's Andrew …'

Before she could tell Tom anything more the telephone rang. He moved away from the sofa at once.

‘Don't worry about it,' said Willow, rather annoyed that he was attempting to answer her telephone. ‘It's probably my agent. The machine can take a message.'

‘I think it may be for me,' said Tom. ‘We're in the middle of something important and so I left your number. May I answer?'

‘If you must,' she said as he was picking up the receiver. She heard him give his name, listen, ask two sharp questions and then say:

‘I'll be there in ten minutes.' He put down the receiver and was on his way to the door when he added: ‘I'm sorry. Will. Well have to continue later.'

‘Tom,' she said quickly. ‘There is just one thing I need to …'

But he was already out of the drawing room and a moment later she heard her front door bang. She followed him more slowly and relocked the door behind him. Then she went back to the sofa. Ignoring the notes she had made about Caroline Titchmell and Ben Jonson, about Sarah Rowfant, Mark Tothill, Miranda Bruterley and John Swaffield, she re-read what she had written under the heading of ‘Andrew Salcott'.

Means:
Poison. As a gastroenterologist he would know precisely what dosages to use. He has research facilities at Dowting's, where he could prepare the poisons. He has access to hypodermics and scalpels for inserting poison unobtrusively into boxes and bottles.

Opportunity:
Goes to Newcastle four times a year. (Check whether he was there just before Edith Fernside's death.) He could also have lectured in Gloucestershire and taken a detour to Cheltenham; or he could have stayed with his old friend Bruterley while Miranda was away – he admitted that Bruterley would have got out the whisky for him, and he could have poisoned it then. With no teaching responsibilities at Dowting's, he could have slipped away in time to perpetrate the burglary on Titchmell's house in the middle of the afternoon with no one at the hospital knowing where he was.