Rotten Apples (17 page)

‘Aren't you afraid of letting an arson suspect into your house?' Serena demanded, not commenting on Willow's apparent certainty that she could do the job better than the police.

‘Don't be ridiculous.' Willow was quite unable to imagine the woman at the other end of the telephone skulking about setting fire to an uninhabited old hut on a patch of waste ground miles from anywhere, let alone a government building in a busy street in the middle of the capital.

Even if she had encouraged her sister to commit suicide, or possibly even taken a more active role in her death, there was not much she could do to Willow in broad daylight with Mrs Rusham in the house as a witness, if not an actual protector. Besides, Willow was curious to know more about the nephew. If someone as astute as Chief Inspector Harness had been interviewing him for three hours, there must be something pretty suspect about him.

‘Why not come round and have some lunch with me and talk?'

‘What, now?'

‘Yes.' Willow looked at the little gold carriage clock on the mantelpiece. ‘It's half-past twelve. It'll be lunchtime by the time you get here.'

There was a pause before Serena said: ‘Oh, why not? I'm too furious to do any work. Thank you. I'll be with you in about twenty minutes.'

Thinking that her estimate was optimistic, Willow went down to the kitchen to tell Mrs Rusham what she had done and to make sure there would be enough food for the unexpected guest. Not much to her surprise, Mrs Rusham looked positively insulted at the idea that she might not be able to cater for one extra at a few minutes'notice.

Willow thanked her and retreated to her writing room to call the minister at his Whitehall office. It was not until she heard the ringing tone that she realised she had been using her hands without thinking and that, clumsy though they were, and painful still, they did operate as she wanted.

The minister's staff were reluctant to put Willow through to his office, even though one of the more senior secretaries admitted that he was there.

‘Then please tell him that I need to speak to him,' said Willow in a tone her own civil service staff would have recognised. It had its usual effect, and she was relieved to discover that love and terror for Tom had not destroyed all her old skills. Keeping busy, cramming more work into the day than seemed possible, was having its usual effect of keeping her emotions in check.

‘Willow. Glad to hear you're up and about again,' said the minister a moment later. ‘What can I do for you? I'm very busy this morning.'

‘So I gather. I wanted to thank you for your flowers and also to say that we need to talk again before I can get any further with the report. This is obviously not a good time. Could we meet?'

‘Is it really necessary?'

‘Essential.'

‘Ah,' said the minister, also responding to Willow's celebrated icy determination, ‘in that case, how about the terrace of the House of Commons for a drink this evening?'

‘I'm not very good at standing at the moment,' said Willow, wanting to make sure that they talked in a place where they could not be overheard. ‘Couldn't I just come to your office—and rather earlier than drinks time? I've got a lot to do, too.'

‘Very well.' The minister sounded taken aback to be treated

like an underling, but he did not appear to resent it. ‘If you go to the House at four I'll be there then, and I could spare you a few minutes. Goodbye now.' He did not wait for Willow's reply.

‘Ms Fydgett's downstairs,' said Mrs Rusham just as Willow replaced the telephone receiver.

‘Good,' she said. ‘Could you bring one of those bottles of Alsatian wine to the drawing room?'

‘Certainly.'

Mrs Rusham moved aside so that Willow could go downstairs first. She found Serena standing in the middle of the elegant room, looking quite different from the composed, confident professional of their previous meeting. Her dark hair was loose and looked as though it had not been washed since they had last met, and her suit was almost as crumpled as Blackled's. There seemed to be absolutely no resemblance between her and the photograph of her sister. It occurred to Willow that one or both of them could have been adopted, which might have explained some of Serena's ambivalent feelings.

‘Come and sit down. Have a glass of wine. You look as though you need something.'

Serena shook her head.

‘Oh, come on. A drink will perk you up. I'm having one.' ‘No, really. I never drink in the middle of the day.' Serena sat down on one of the silver-grey sofas, while Willow poured herself a glass of wine.

‘So tell me what happened,' Willow said, watching Serena impatiently push a pink cushion out of her way. ‘With the police, I mean.'

‘First they badgered me for an alibi, and when I declined to give it to them they went and got hold of Rob, presumably to force me into talking to them. It's the most despicable piece of manipulation I can imagine. To use a child like that—and one in the sort of state Rob must be after Fiona's death. Outrageous!'

‘Hold on for a minute,' said Willow, offering her a cheese-and-cayenne biscuit from the tray Mrs Rusham had provided. ‘I can't keep up. Why wouldn't you give them your alibi?'

Serena looked furious, and shook her head at the biscuits. ‘If you don't know without being told, you'll never understand,' she said.

‘Explain to me in words of one syllable and then I probably will understand,' said Willow, putting the plate back on the tray. ‘If I'm being particularly obtuse, I'm sorry. Most of my brain is still taken up with dealing with what's happened to my husband. Humour me and explain, won't you?'

The other woman shrugged. Her shoulders looked very broad under the black linen of her suit jacket ‘Oh, all right. My sister was outrageously bullied by the state. I can't do anything to help her now, but at least I can get back at them by refusing to let them bully me.'

Serena paused, as though she were listening to the echoes of what she had just said, and then added: ‘I suppose that sounds childish, but that's just too bad. The police have no evidence whatsoever to connect me with the fire, and yet they came banging on my door at six-thirty in the morning, demanding information to which they have absolutely no right'

‘I can't believe they really had nothing.' Willow remembered the few things Tom had told her about some of his investigations. ‘I can quite accept that whatever they had was wrong, but they must have had something they thought connected you with the fire.'

Serena shrugged. ‘It was enough for them, apparently, that I am known to be angry with the man who died, and that I once defended an alleged arsonist'

‘Really?' Willow tried to disguise her interest. She could see why Harness and his team might have wanted a little more information before they eliminated Serena from their enquiries. ‘How had he done it?'

‘I successfully defended him.' Serena looked faintly amused for the first time that day. ‘That means he was innocent'

‘Yes, I know it does.' Willow smiled back at her. Both of them were fully aware of what the other was thinking. ‘We are on the same wavelength, you know, even if I don't understand about the alibi. Tell me how that fire was started.'

‘The prosecution alleged that the underfloor wiring in my client's warehouse had been tampered with. In fact, it had been damaged by mice. They had chewed through the insulation. That's one of the commonest causes of domestic fires, you know, and doubtless of those in commercial buildings too.'

‘I didn't actually. What a lot you know!'

‘Most barristers do.' Serena seemed to be relaxing. ‘Just as they know their clients'rights and the lengths to which some police officers will go to get confessions. The men who came to my house seemed to think it extraordinary that I might choose not to co-operate with them. But even they could hardly arrest me without any evidence.'

Willow drank some more of the wine and sat down on the low hearth stool opposite the sofa where Serena was sitting. ‘I'm sorry if this makes me sound unsympathetic, but I have to say that it seems a bit extraordinary to me, too,' she said, looking up from her deliberately lowly position. ‘If you have an alibi, isn't it sensible just to give it and let them get on with the work they're paid to do?'

Serena hunched her shoulders and looked away from Willow's intent eyes. ‘They treated me like a criminal and tried to persuade me that I had to go with them to the police station. I lost my temper, explained to them that unless they arrested me I wasn't going anywhere with them, and refused to say anything. That's all. I'm sorry I took it out on you. It wasn't fair.'

‘Don't be silly. Come and have some lunch. It'll be ready by now.'

They walked through to the sunny dining room, where Mrs Rusham served them with cold Vichysoisse, fillets of subtle-tasting smoked eel with a chopped tomato salad in a gentle dressing, and a pink mousse that had been made with a mixture of mulberry, passionfruit and
crème fraiche.

Willow and Serena ate slowly and talked their way back into friendship, ignoring the subjects of the fire, the police and Fiona. Willow thought it much more important to re-establish good relations than to ask Serena questions straight away.

‘That was lovely,' Serena admitted when Mrs Rusham came to clear away the dishes. ‘I feel much better—and a complete fool for having got so wound up. I must go back to chambers now, but thank you, Willow. You've been very kind.' She stood up.

‘Nonsense,' said Willow firmly. ‘And I haven't thanked you for the flowers yet. It was so good of you to take such trouble when we hardly knew each other.'

‘Not at all. What happened to you was awful, and you were put at risk only because I…because I had protested about what happened to Fiona.'

As Serena spoke, Willow cursed herself for her overactive imagination and instinctively suspicious nature. If Serena had had anything at all to do with her sister's death, she was hardly likely to have stirred up interest in it by writing to protest about the Inland Revenue's treatment of Fiona. All she would have had to do was keep mum and soon everyone would have forgotten her sister.

‘I'm all over the place at the moment,' Serena said. ‘Half the time I don't know what I'm doing or saying or even what I ought to do. It's unprecedented. I've always been so sure of everything before.'

‘Then we're alike in that as well,' said Willow. ‘I loathe it too, but I can't help feeling that both of us will revert to competence again in the end. It's too deeply ingrained to be completely wiped away even by what's happened.'

Serena smiled. ‘I hope so. You are all right really, aren't you? I mean, I can see that the burns must be agony, but there isn't any permanent damage, is there? I couldn't bear that. The consequences of what happened to Fiona just seem to go on and on, and I've been castigating myself for interfering. I ought to have done something before she died or kept my trap shut and not gone involving other people—like you.'

‘I'm fine,' said Willow, almost convinced of Serena's honesty. ‘And I don't hold you responsible for what happened to me in the fire. I'm determined to see that whoever was responsible gets his just deserts, but I know that it wasn't your fault'.

There was a pause before Serena said quite simply: ‘Thank you for that. I won't forget it'.

When Serena had gone, Willow went back up to her writing room, trying to understand her. She was intelligent, appealing, and almost convincing, and yet her reasons for withholding her alibi from the police seemed so silly that they were hard to believe.

Tom had often said that if everyone connected with a case stopped trying to protect their own irrelevant secrets, the detection of crime would be a lot easier. Once he had been so angry that he had stomped out into the tiny garden in the pouring rain, muttering that if people wanted the police to deal with crime they couldn't expect to be allowed to withhold any information whatsoever, even if it was entirely innocent or seriously confidential.

Willow had spent so much effort for so long keeping her own secrets that she had disagreed with him then, but she was coming to see exactly what he meant Serena's determination to protect her privacy—if that was what she was doing—was merely wasting time. The sooner the case was solved, the sooner everyone else could get back to normal.

The telephone rang just as Willow remembered that her life would never be normal again unless Tom regained consciousness. She stood up to reach for the receiver, cursing her hands again as she gripped too hard and the edge of the plastic pushed into one of the swollen blisters on her palm.

‘Willow King.'

‘Willow, it's Eve here,' said a voice that sounded full of warmth and pleasure.

‘Oh, hello.'

‘I think the book's wonderful,' said her agent at once. ‘The best you've done by a long way.'

‘Oh, good.'

‘There's almost nothing that needs work, except for a looseness at the beginning of chapter nine.'

‘Really? What's wrong with it?' Willow noticed that Eve's approval of the book was not having its usual effect on her. Normally she would be flooded with relief and exuberant delight. No one but Tom knew how much she had come to depend on Eve's judgment or how childishly depressed and angry she felt whenever it was withheld. She tried to sound more enthusiastic. ‘I'm really glad you like it. But tell me about chapter nine.'

‘It's nothing major, Willow,' said Eve, obviously sensing a lack of excitement in her client, ‘and I don't think now's the time to go into it. You must still be feeling ghastly about Tom, and after what happened to you in that fire. I can't tell you how appalled I was by the news reports. How are you feeling?'

‘Not so hot, as it were.' Willow managed a short laugh and then, thinking of Jason Tillter's repellant sense of humour, sobered up. ‘But I'm functioning again. I was unbelievably lucky. Thank you for your flowers by the way. They're lovely.'