Rotten Apples (28 page)

The boy shrugged and looked away again. The chair tilted dangerously backwards. Willow only just stopped herself reaching out a hand to steady him.

‘Rob, will you tell me something?'

He shrugged again and lifted his milk shake to hide his face from her. His hair flopped forwards.

‘We were talking once before about the last time you climbed out of school, and then the water tank exploded and so you never had time to answer. I know that the police were wrong when they tried to prove you'd been out of school on the night of the fire, but it would really help us all if you could tell me when it was.'

The boy muttered something into his drink.

‘I'm sorry? What did you say?'

‘Don't see why. It's got nothing to do with the fire.'

‘No, I know it hasn't, Rob. But I'm as anxious as they are to find out everything about everyone involved. I'm sure you can understand that.'

‘'Course. But I'm not involved. I wasn't there. It wasn't anything to do with me, whatever the filth think.' He stared down at the remains of his milk shake.

His statement was longer than anything else Willow had yet heard from him, and it made enough sense to give her confidence.

‘No, you're absolutely right. But I've got a problem with it.' She looked at him and as he glanced up at her for an instant she thought she saw understanding in his dark eyes.

‘When we were talking before, you looked guilty. I don't think that you had anything to do with the fire, but I have to be sure. If you could tell me what made you feel ashamed when we were talking, I'd be in a better position to get everything cleared up. D'you see what I mean?'

His spots almost disappeared as his face reddened painfully. He scratched the patchy stubble on his chin.

‘Yeah, I see all right.'

‘Lots of us often feel guilty about things that are not our fault at all. For instance, your aunt told me that she feels guilty about what happened to your mother, and I suspect that you do, too. I think everyone does when someone they're close to dies, especially like that If that's what it is, I wish you'd tell me.' Willow smiled at him. ‘It might help you, too, to talk about it.'

A slight look of shock in his eyes was followed by a sulky glare. Whatever Rob was feeling was well under control and the sullen mask did not shift again. Willow thought that she could understand the frustration that the police must have felt when they interviewed him, and the difficulties the boy's teachers had with him; and probably his mother, too.

The chair shuddered as Rob let it clunk back on to all four legs. Something in his dully angry face gave Willow a clue.

‘Was it the day she died that you climbed out of school?'

Tears appeared under Rob's eyelids and he pushed them away with the back of his sticky hand and then licked it.

‘Did you go to see her?'

He shook his head. Willow could not see much of his face as he sat staring down at the half-empty glass he was gripping in his lap. His black fringe hung right down in front of his face.

‘Can't you tell me about it, Rob?' she said with all the gentleness at her command.

He swung round in his chair to put the glass down on the table, leaned his elbows on it and, twisted though he was, buried his face in his hands. Willow waited.

‘I thought she was just asleep.' His voice was muffled by his hands, but enough of it reached Willow to let her make out his words.

She got up from her chair and went to stand beside the hulking, weeping child. She did not try to stop him, perhaps remembering her own howls by the fridge on the day Tom was shot; she laid one hand on his shuddering back. When he had finished for the moment, she fetched a roll of kitchen paper and silently offered it to him.

He ripped off two sheets and blew his nose, then took two more sheets and mopped his eyes.

‘Sorry,' he said, his voice even deeper than usual.

‘Don't be sorry, Rob. What happened? Did you go home?'

‘Yes,' he said, staring at the table. ‘I needed my old squash racket for a match. It was in the attic at home. I had to get it'

‘But how did you get in? Your aunt said that the front door was bolted on the inside.'

He looked up for a second and Willow flinched at the misery in his dark eyes.

‘It was. So I went round the back and got into the garden over the wall. I always had a key to the back door as well as the front—Aunt Serena has, too—and I just let myself in.'

Willow thought that she was beginning to understand a little more, but there was still a lot of uncertainty. ‘Did you see her?' she asked gently.

Rob shook his head, but he would not look at her, and something about his face made her think that he might be lying.

‘Her curtains were shut. I thought she was asleep. I found the letter, but I didn't read it then and I didn't go in because I thought she was asleep. I didn't want to disturb her, see. I didn't read it then. I took it back to school and I didn't look at it till the next day.'

‘What was the letter you found, Rob?' asked Willow very gently.

He sat still.

‘I know it's probably the most private thing you have, but…'

He looked at her with a kind of miserable resignation that, made her feel almost unbearably guilty for making him face his awful memories. At last he put his hand into the pocket of his tracksuit bottoms to take out a crumpled, grubby sheet of paper, and handed it to her.

Willow thanked him, unfolded the paper and silently read:

My darling, darling Rob, I am so sorry. I've been such a bad mother and made you so miserable. I can't help you at all. I wish I could. At least this way you'll be free to find a life for yourself that won't mean having to see me through any more of these awful times. I can't bear to go on hurting you like this. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I love you very much.

Mum.

Willow imagined some of the thoughts that would have gone through her mind if she had been in Rob's place. Intelligent as he undoubtedly was, he must have thought about the possibility that he could have saved Fiona. What could it be like to live with the thought that she might still be alive if he had only read the letter at the time or bothered to go into her room to see how she was? No wonder he had looked so guilty whenever questions made him think about that day.

‘Thank you for showing it to me,' Willow said, handing it back to him. At least, she thought, since no one but she had ever doubted that Fiona had killed herself, no one else need see or even know about the letter. She could leave the boy that bit of privacy at least with a clear conscience.

‘Can I go now?' he said, still staring at the table.

‘Of course you can. You're not any kind of prisoner here, Rob. I'm sorry to have put you through so much,' said Willow. She had not time to say anything else before he was out of the door.

Having given him plenty of time to get into the sanctuary of Tom's study, she followed him upstairs to bathe and dress in cool, baggy Chinos and a thin grey-blue shirt. She looked at the John Buchan novel that had kept her company during some of her vigils at the hospital and shook her head.

With almost all her doubts about Rob banished at last, she hoped that she would be able to think constructively about the fire and her report on Fiona Fydgett's death—and whether the two were connected—while she waited for Tom to come round. Her hands felt better, too, and so she slid her notebook computer into its carrying case, slung that over her shoulder and set off for the hospital.

Out in the street the air was even stuffier than it had been during the previous few days, and she was glad that she had managed to leave the car under one of the few trees at the edge of the pavement. The steering wheel was hot even so, but at least her bandages protected her from the worst of that.

There was not much traffic and she reached the hospital ten minutes later. Since it was Sunday she parked in the main road. Locking the car behind her, she felt sticky in spite of her light clothes, and pulled her shirt away from her sweaty back.

The main foyer of the hospital was even more crowded than usual and very noisy. Willow made her way through hordes of patients, visitors with little children, and volunteer helpers selling flowers and cards and baskets of fruit from a fancily decorated stall opposite the entrance. She ignored them all and shook her head at a woman with a clipboard, who started forwards and looked as though she wanted to ask questions for some kind of market research. Through the crowds at last, Willow headed for the lifts and the tenth floor.

The Intensive Care Unit was still and wonderfully cool in comparison with the mayhem downstairs. As usual all the blinds were down across the windows and the light was dim. The nurses moved smoothly past the beds, checking monitors and drips, replacing dressings and talking with soothing efficiency to anyone who was awake and frightened. One of the women nurses saw Willow and smiled at once.

‘It is difficult waiting, isn't it?' she said, talking quietly but without any suggestion of a whisper. ‘But Mr Richardson is quite pleased with his condition. Come along. I'm just going to check his drip.'

Willow smiled back, not trusting herself to talk about Tom, and followed the nurse into his room. He looked just the same as he had done on the day of the shooting. His chest was pulled up and down by the ventilator, the drip still fed life-preserving fluids into his bloodstream, and the catheter collected the urine his kidneys produced. But nothing else moved. Willow tried to believe in the encouragement that the doctor had given her three days earlier.

‘I brought this word processor to do some work,' she said when the nurse had finished attaching a new bag of fluid to the frame above the bed. ‘Will it interfere with any of the monitors?'

The little nurse laughed so loudly that Willow looked at Tom to make sure he had not been disturbed.

‘This isn't the flight deck of Concorde, you know,' said the nurse cheerfully.

‘Good.'

The nurse put a chair ready beside the bed and rolled forward a table.

‘It's a bit high for you to work at. Will you be all right? And will you have enough light?'

‘You are kind. Yes, I'll be fine. I can use it on my knees,'

When the nurse had gone, Willow took the computer out of its case, switched it on, and found the relevant floppy disk from her handbag. She called up the first draft of her report for the minister and cut and edited what she had written as well as she could, but it was not gripping enough to keep her mind off Tom for long.

When she realised that she had retyped the same paragraph four times without actually changing anything material, she filed that document again and let her mind turn instead to the question of who could have killed Len Scoffer.

It was clear from Harness's appearance in Croydon that he, too, was still searching for convincing suspects. Either he had crossed the Fydgetts off his list or he had never wanted anything more from them than background information.

Tom's necessarily discreet accounts of some of his cases had gradually taught Willow that a great deal of police work in a murder investigation is like using a shotgun. If you fling enough pellets in the air you are almost bound to hit something. If you interview enough people, talk to enough possible witnesses, ask enough questions of enough people, you are likely to stumble on something useful in the end.

There was a slight movement somewhere in the room and she looked instantly at Tom. He seemed to be lying utterly still. Her raised hopes were making the waiting even harder than it had been before. She felt as though she would not be able to bear the suspense for much longer.

Gritting her teeth, aware that she had no choice, she wrenched her mind back to the investigation and ran through the things she still needed to know until she remembered Miss Andrea Salderton. Brian Gaskarth was obviously having trouble tracking her down, but Willow suddenly thought of a way to find out what her connection with the minister might be.

There was a telephone just outside the Intensive Care Unit. It had no privacy, but on the other hand there was no one else in the shiny, clean-smelling lobby, and anyone using it would be able to see possible eavesdroppers long before they could get close enough to hear anything.

Willow dialled Jane Cleverholme's private number.

‘Jane, is that you? It's Willow here.'

‘How are you feeling?'

‘So so. My hands are better and my brain's less fogged, although it's still pretty slow.'

Jane laughed. ‘And?'

‘And I've been thinking about your proposition. I really can't go poodlefaking in some pseudo-romance with the climber while Tom's still unconscious, but I am prepared to write a piece for you about what it felt like to be trapped in the fire and helped down by his expertise.'

‘That's great. And I do understand. How is Tom?'

‘The consultant says that the… This is off the record, Jane,' said Willow, suddenly afraid that her friend's interest might be professional.

‘Oh, my wretched job! I know it's off the record. Don't be silly.'

‘Good. Apparently the signs are encouraging, but I've been sitting with him all morning and I can't see any change. It's hell waiting.'

‘I can imagine. Look, d'you want to come in and have lunch one day next week?'

‘That would be nice,' said Willow, recognising Jane's affectionate intent ‘It depends on how Tom is. Could I ring you next week when I know more? Would that be all right?'

‘Fine. Ring any time so long as it's soon. Oh, I can't do Wednesday.'

‘It will be soon. Thank you. By the way, Jane?'

‘I might have known it.' Jane's voice was heavy with resignation, but Willow thought that there might be a hint of amusement in it, too. ‘What little titbit do you want now?'