Poison Flowers (37 page)

‘Because when he was with you he was gentle,' said Willow. There was more to say, but she knew that she would have to wait until Caroline had let out everything she had been bottling up as she fought her own feelings.

‘But when we lived together, when we … made love together. Do you realise that I lay in bed and …' her voice hardened until it sounded as ugly as the euphemism she used, ‘and
screwed
a man who killed my brother and the others?'

There was horror in her voice, which Willow could well understand, and a look of sick pain in her dark-blue eyes.

‘Sexual intercourse,' said Willow at her driest and most didactic, ‘does not bestow second sight on people. You could not have known anything about him that he did not want to show you. It's not your fault, Caroline.'

‘But it is my fault. I found him, I loved him, I leaned on him, brought him in contact with my family, I told him all the buried slights and miseries of my past and he took them to be far more important than they were and out of misguided … love, I suppose, he killed the people involved. I turned him into a murderer.' Her voice rose higher and higher with each word she spoke and Willow recognised the first signs of hysteria. Relieved that Caroline had obeyed her instruction to come to the ward during the transmission of
Neighbours
, Willow decided to try to prevent the incipient hysteria from turning into the real thing.

‘Stop there, Caroline,' said Willow, letting herself sound viciously angry. Her sharp voice had much the same effect as a slap across the face. Caroline gasped and was silent.

‘He was a psychopath, Caroline,' Willow said clearly. ‘The fact that he is not known to have killed anyone else before he met you may be merely that he was never caught or that he had not fully recognised his desire to kill. Everyone complains to people who love them about their past unhappiness, because in the new love they feel so secure that they think they can never be hurt again and it becomes safe to tell. You did nothing that ninety per cent of the population has not done before you,' said Willow. Then she added in a dispassionate voice: ‘Did you read any of his books?'

Caroline shook her head. ‘I was afraid that I might not like them or that I might hurt him by some crass comment. I thought it better not to risk it.'

Willow did not say aloud the thought in her mind: ‘And so you did not completely trust him. Did you feel that there was something wrong with him after all?' But she could tell that Caroline had thought the same thing. No wonder she looked just as the Spartan boy with the fox gnawing at his vitals must have looked.

‘They were all my victims, you see,' said Caroline painfully, ‘and so was he.'

‘That's nonsense. He was trying to control you. What he did gave him power over you, which is what he wanted. His job gave him power over his students, his books gave him power over anyone he wanted to chastise, and his crimes gave him power over you – as well as over his victims. Everyone one wants power and the most obsessed with it are not always the strutting Mussolini types …'

‘How do you know so much about it?' asked Caroline, sounding interested.

‘I don't,' said Willow, glad to see that Caroline was thinking of something beyond her own feelings. ‘But lying here I have been thinking over and over the whole business. I've remembered what he said when he told me that I must put part of myself in my own books. I'd never let myself see it before, but he's right. In the books I manipulate and take revenge and re-order the universe to my own satisfaction – and from what I have learned about myself and the way I do it, I think I can see how his mind worked.'

Caroline turned her head away to hide her face; her shoulders started to shake slightly.

‘But how could he have thought I wanted him to kill them?' she said at last and broke into really violent sobbing. Willow thought it indecent to watch someone in such paroxysms of grief and looked away. Over Caroline's bowed head Willow saw Tom Worth walking back towards them both.

Dressed informally for once in old dark-green corduroy trousers and a Guernsey sweater, he looked so sane, so much himself that her heart lifted. But he too liked power, as she well knew. Perhaps his saving grace was that he was afraid of his own response to it.

The sound of Caroline's whooping sobs had eventually reached the nurses'desk and one of them came to investigate. When she saw the state Caroline was in, the nurse lifted her from her chair by Willow's bed and took her away.

Tom took her place at Willow's bedside.

‘Did that hurt?' he asked.

‘My confession?' said Willow. ‘Yes it did. I've realised that we're none of us free of the desire to rearrange circumstance and other people. It's terrifying when you think of the implications.'

‘Not really,' said Tom in a voice that carried comfort although it was not at all soothing. ‘For most of us the balance between the satisfying of our own needs and those of other people is more nearly held. The trouble comes when a man's own needs seem to him so much more important than other people's that even their deaths count for nothing in the scales.'

‘Yes, I know,' said Willow. ‘Has he confessed yet?' Worth nodded his dark head.

‘Yes. I was afraid for some time that the sonnet he sent to poor Miss Titchmell would be as near a confession as he was prepared to get. I've got a copy here.' He pulled out of his pocket a small, old edition of Shakespeare's sonnets, bound in rubbed green morocco and gave it to her. ‘I've marked it.'

Willow opened the musty-smelling book and read:

‘How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I see, my weary travel's end,
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say,
“Thus far the miles are measur'd from thy friend!”
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider lov'd not speed, being made from thee:
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,
Which heavily he answers with a groan
More sharp to me than spurring to his side;
For that same groan doth put this in my mind:
My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.'

When she reached the last couplet, Willow looked up.

‘Melodramatic bastard!' she exclaimed. ‘He's enjoying it all, isn't he?'

‘I think he is,' said Tom. ‘He's the kingpin at the moment. How could he resist playing his part to the hilt? It must have been bitterly frustrating for him when he could be the only one allowed to know what he was doing. Perhaps that's why he finally gave in and told us all about it, unable to bear the thought that no one would ever know for certain that it was he who had made the kills.'

‘It's horrible,' said Willow, thinking of the broken woman who had just been taken away from the ward, of her mother and all the other secondary victims of the murders. ‘I wish I'd never … How do you cope with it, Tom? Do you just ignore it?' She put one of her hands on his arm and felt the rough wool of his sleeve.

‘You can't pretend not to have been through any experience, Will,' Tom answered gently. ‘You have to absorb it and do the best you can with it. With luck, it'll be useful to you one day.'

At that echo of Marcus Aurelius, Willow smiled and took away her hand. She wished that she did not look and feel so ridiculous with her legs strung up before her in their heavy plaster casings. There ought to be a grand gesture, she thought, to finish the case, but she was in no position to make one and grand gestures were not much in Tom's line.

‘You're a bit of an old Stoic yourself, aren't you, Tom?' she said.

‘Yes,' he agreed and allowed himself a hint of teasing in his smile. ‘It's lucky, isn't it, given the way things are with us?'

Knowing that he was not talking about the policing of society any longer, Willow felt like frowning at his mockery. But something had happened to her during the Case and her long weeks in hospital. At last the appropriate action occurred to her and she made her grand gesture.

As Willow stuck her tongue out at Tom Worth, a smile of rare pleasure swept aross his craggy face.

First published in 1990 by Simon & Schuster

This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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ISBN 978-1-4472-3851-5 EPUB
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Copyright © Natasha Cooper, 1990

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