Poison Flowers (31 page)

Possible motives:
Once wanted to marry Miranda. His own wife is losing interest in him; perhaps he believed Miranda would marry him if he were divorced and Bruterley dead. Alternatively, he stands to inherit Bruterle's paintings; one is a Stubbs – are the others even more desirable? No apparent connection with Simon Trtchmell, although he has known Caroline, but perhaps he was involved in Titchmell's drug habit. Might have known Edith Fernside when he was at school. Perhaps he was the father of the scandalous baby and his anger at my asking about its father was not caused by fear of a scandal about Bruterley.

Observations:
Was unexpectedly emotional on the way to Bruterley's funeral and claimed tears as the result of hay fever, but the pollen count was particularly low. Known to be a mountaineer, therefore burglaries would not be difficult.

Reaching the end of her notes, Willow thought of the hour she had spent with him that evening and shivered. He was by no means the only suspect, but at that moment she was almost convinced of his guilt. She clipped all her notes together, folded them and put them into her Clapham handbag ready for the following morning. There was nothing more she could do that night and so she undressed and went to bed.

After an hour and a half of fruitless effort, she realised that she was not going to sleep naturally and got up to take two sleeping pills. They calmed her over-active brain eventually and she slept heavily until the following morning, when her alarm clock woke her at six o'clock.

With a thick head and gummy eyelids, she forced herself out of bed and splashed cold water over her face until she felt awake enough to face the day. Then, dressed in her jeans and sweater, she set about making the change from one life to the other.

Having packed her red nylon parachute bag with under-clothes and washing things as camouflage, she transferred ail Cressida's identification documents, cheque book, credit cards and the Cartier gold watch to the safe at the back of the wardrobe. Retrieving Willow's documents, her much more ordinary watch and the keys to the Abbeville Road flat, she put everything she needed into the worn black-leather shoulder bag that always accompanied her in Clapham.

Then she let herself out of the flat, locking it carefully behind her. She stood for a moment on the top step outside the front door, checking the empty street for Watchers. The trees and glossy parked cars and tall white houses looked almost unreal in the cool, slightly hazy light of the early May morning. There was no one about to witness her transformation and she set off towards the bus stop, swinging her parachute bag and striding along, determined to ignore her worst fear that the killer knew of her existence, watched her and planned to dispose of her if she came close enough to pose a threat.

It would be relatively simple to find out whether Salcott had been in Newcastle at the relevant time, she thought, and if he had been to pursue some enquiries there. He could have no way of knowing that the woman he had met as ‘Cressida Woodruffe'was also Willow King and so even if he were her quarry and aware of what she was doing, she would be safe for the next three days.

When she had unlocked the door of her flat in Abbeville Road, she checked that there were no signs of forced entry anywhere and then made herself some breakfast and went through her usual routines of getting ready for DOAP. Half an hour later, dressed as Willow King again in a plain, unbecoming grey suit, she walked to her office and immersed herself in the piles of papers that Barbara had arranged her desk.

By the time her staff arrived she had plenty of tasks to distribute among them, and as soon as she was sure that they were all immersed in work she went back to her office, shut the door and made a series of private telephone calls. The first was to Newcastle University and eventually elicited the information that Dr Andrew Salcott had been there three weeks before Edith Femside's death. The second was to her publishers to find out whether there were any photographic libraries that specialised in not particularly famous people. Her editor sounded puzzled as she said:

‘What sort of people?'

‘Doctors,' said Willow promptly. ‘A friend of mine who wants to be a freelance journalist is preparing an article about the medical profession and wants to have all the necessary illustrations to send out with his piece.'

‘Oh,' said the editor. ‘Well, I don't know of anywhere, but I'll get on to our best picture researcher and let you know. OK?'

‘Wonderful. If I'm not in, would you leave a message on the machine?'

‘Sure,' said the editor and rang off. Willow then telephoned Jane Cleverholme at the
Daily Mercury.
Keeping her voice as low as possible, so that no denizen of DOAP should hear her identifying herself, Willow said:

‘Jane, Cressida here. I badly need something that I think only you could provide.'

‘Are you still going to give me a story?' said Jane with considerable acerbity in her hoarse, smokey voice.

‘If I can,' said Willow, ‘but there may not be one after all.'

‘Well I suppose that at least your honesty is in your favour,' said Jane. ‘What do you want this time?'

‘Just photographs of the various people involved in that Cheltenham poisoning case,' said Willow, detecting more brittleness in Jane's manner than usual. ‘You are the only person I know who is likely to have them.'

It took a great deal of persuasion to make Jane agree even to check whether the paper had any photographs of the Bruterleys or Sarah Rowfant, but in the end she said that she would, adding:

‘You'll owe me a lot of stories for this.'

‘I know,' said Willow, wondering whether she might be mortgaging her own protective secrecy.

‘All right then,' said Jane. ‘How urgent is it?'

‘Fairly. Why don't I ring you back in a while to find out whether you have got them and then I can get them picked up?' said Willow, realising that she could hardly ask Jane to deliver them to DOAP if she wanted to protect her double identity for a little longer. The complications of her life were impinging as they had never done before.

Three hours later, having sat through a meeting with the Minister and the Permanent Secretary, dictated twelve letters and found a builder who was prepared to come and assess the damage to her flat and quote for repairing the roof, Willow rang the
Mercury
to discover that Jane was having a full set of prints made. Willow thanked her, said she would get a messenger to collect them and then telephoned Richard Lawrence-Crescent.

With a certain amount of resignation in his voice, Richard agreed to arrange to have the package picked up. Once it was delivered to his office, he would re-address it to Willow King and post it to the Clapham flat.

‘I've given up asking what on earth you're up to,' he said when she also asked him to send her a photograph of Caroline Titchmell. ‘But how on earth do you
expect
me to get hold of that?'

‘I know you can if you want to,' said Willow caressingly. ‘Please,
Richard
?'

‘Oh all right,' he said. ‘Look, I'm too busy to chat. I'll see what I can do.' Willow thanked him and, in some relief, went back to her proper work.

Before the end of the afternoon she rang the answering machine of her Chesham Place flat and listened to her messages. Her editor had left a message with the name and telephone number of a photographic agency that might be able to supply portraits of uncelebrated doctors and she telephoned them with her list of names. They promised to go through their files and send a pro-forma invoice for any prints they had.

‘It's a bit too urgent for that,' said Willow. ‘Couldn't I give you my credit card number instead?'

‘Well, we don't usually …' said the young female voice to which she was speaking.

‘But there's no reason why you shouldn't now,' said Willow as firmly as she had spoken in the meeting with the Permanent Secretary. Eventually she managed to persuade the young woman and dictated details of her credit card.

Two hours later she left the office to walk slowly back to her flat. Feeling tired and yet surprisingly restless, she took off her coat and shoes and let down her hair. She was bored with spinning ever-more fantastic stories and asking sidelong questions to try to solve Tom's mystery and wanted to take some direct action to identify the murderer before anyone else was killed, but there was nothing she could do before all the photographs arrived.

Willow was very tired when she reached Newcastle after eleven o'clock on Thursday night, but she was happier than she had been for some time. Tom had left a message on her machine the previous evening to say that the ‘Cheltenham boys' had persuaded Dr Swaffield to admit that he had lied about drinking malt whisky with Bruterley. Tom had added that Swaffield had obviously done it to protect Miranda Bruterley, and that ‘things are unrolling nicely'. Willow had looked at the glossy black-and-white photographs she had collected and considered telling Tom what she was planning to do, so that there would at least be one person who knew where she was. She had tried to telephone him, but was answered by his machine and so she merely thanked him for his message.

She took a taxi to a large, impersonal hotel in the middle of Newcastle and signed the register as Willow King. After a good night's sleep and a large breakfast, she took the photographs she had collected out of their cardboard envelope and put them into her briefcase, together with an official-looking notebook, the novel she was planning to read and a newspaper for bulk, and set out for the retirement homes where Edith Fernside had died.

As she had expected the warden showed some irritation when she introduced herself as a relation of Miss Fernside, anxious to discover the identity of a mysterious visitor of whom the old lady had written in several letters before her death. Willow, who had invented and rejected various cover stories during the train journey from London, explained that Miss Fernside had written in such glowing terms that various members of the family wanted to meet the visitor to thank him or her and offer a keepsake from her few possessions.

It was a fairly thin story, but the alternative of impersonating a DOAP inspector looking into reports of maladministration of pensions in the area would be too easy to disprove. The warden seemed to accept it, but mentioned caustically that it was surprising to find Miss Fernside's relations so scrupulous after her death when none of them had shown the slightest interest in her while she was alive. Willow found herself blushing, as much for the real relations as for herself, and wondered at her apparently ever-increasing sentimentality.

‘I should like to show you some photographs and ask whether you recognise any of the men or women,' she said, reverting to her familiar coolness.

‘All right,' said the warden, shrugging. ‘Anything for a quiet life.'

Willow took the prints out of her briefcase and fanned them out on the table. The warden took his time, stopping and going backwards and forwards among the pictures, but in the end he denied ever having seen any of the people before except for Miranda Bruterley, whom he thought he recognised.

‘But I'm not a gatekeeper. I only meet visitors by accident. They might all have come and I could easily have missed them,' he said, pushing a hand through his thinning, greasy hair.

‘Pity.' said Willow economically. ‘In that case I wonder if I could speak to one or two of your residents in case they can tell me any more?'

‘That's not for me to say,' he said, glaring at her. ‘They're not children, or prisoners either. Up to them whether they'll talk to you or not. Who do you want to see?'

‘Whoever might have seen her visitors,' said Willow. ‘How about the people living either side of her?'

The warden escorted her across a pleasant, lawned quadrangle and pointed the way through a brick arch. Willow thanked him and went on her way alone. When she knocked at the door of the house to the right of Miss Fernside's a rather quavery female voice called:

‘Who is it?'

Willow checked over her shoulder that there was no sign of the warden and then said gently:

‘My name is King. I'm a niece of Miss Fernside and I wondered if I could talk to you about her. I've just come home from Australia.'

The door was opened at once and a woman in her late seventies, dressed in a baggy tweed skirt and toning green cardigan, stood there smiling.

‘Come in,' she said. ‘Come in. Poor Edith. How she would have loved a visit!'

The woman, who must have been in her late seventies, introduced herself as Stella Browning and insisted on making a pot of tea for them both before they settled down. Willow waited as she boiled a kettleful of water and made the tea. She loaded a tray with the big brown pot, a jug of milk, bowl of sugar and two saucers and carried it into her front room. Willow noticed that there were no cups and asked whether she should fetch them.

‘Oh dear, yes, I'm getting so absent minded,' said Mrs Browning, looking anxiously behind her as though she expected to see the cups following her. Willow went out to the kitchen to fetch them. When she returned, Mrs Browning said:

‘Did you say you'd been in Australia, dear? I don't think poor Edith ever mentioned anyone living there.'

‘I went out there when my parents died,' said Willow, ‘and I rather lost touch with the rest of the family. I only heard about Aunt Edith when a lawyer wrote to me.'

‘She didn't have much to leave you though, did she, dear? I always understood she only had her pension,' said the old lady, sounding much brighter than she had earlier.

‘She didn't leave me anything,' said Willow truthfully. ‘But I had to go to see them about something else and they told me then. I wished I'd been able to see her again. Did you know her well?'

‘Not especially well,' said Mrs Browning, pouring out two cups of of tea. ‘I only moved in here nine months ago.'