Rotten Apples (34 page)

‘Until he's sent down,' said Willow.

‘As he must be, even if it is manslaughter and not murder,' said Tom from the further sofa. ‘Willow tells me he has a record.'

‘That's right He did some time in Wandsworth. Oh, by the way, Mrs Worth,' Stephen said, feeling in his jacket pocket.

‘Do call me Willow,' she said, ‘and take off that jacket. You look awfully hot.'

Harness smiled and did as he was told, neatly folding his jacket and laying it across his knees. She was amused to see that over his pristine blue shirt he was wearing bright green braces decorated with pink hummingbirds, and she wondered if he indulged in such eccentricities of dress at work.

‘I forgot to let you know about those four lifers you warned us about.'

Willow looked warily at Tom, who had heard the story of most of her activities during his time in hospital, but he had come to terms with it all by then and grinned at her. Much relieved, she turned back to Harness just as Tom was saying, ‘Don't worry about it, Steve. Black Jack reported to her a while ago, thank God. The pair of you really put the wind up her, you know.'

Thinking he heard anger behind the amusement in Tom's tired voice, Harness looked from him to Willow and back again and then seemed to make a decision. ‘We were just shaking the tree really.'

‘You what?' said Willow.

‘You had a better opportunity than anyone else for lighting that fire. Given that you escaped and the only other inhabitant of the office died, I had to find out if you were on the level. The superintendent insisted on chaperoning you and pretending we were worried that you had been targeted by Tom's would-be assassins, so that you didn't get upset by the thought that you were among my suspects. Given Blackled's rank I couldn't stop him coming with me without making more of a fuss than I wanted.'

Thinking of the waking terrors and the nightmares she went through after the fire. Willow was furious. ‘I don't know that I want you drinking my wine,' she said, trying to make a joke of her dislike.

Tom heaved his battered body off the sofa and padded across the floor in his bare feet to stand beside her with his hand on her head.

‘He had to do his job. Will, you know that.'

Harness's delicate skin had flushed a vivid blood red. ‘All I can say is that I'm glad that you turned out to be as you are. Until I'd interviewed you, I knew nothing about you. You must understand that, Willow.'

Tom raised his glass. ‘Now, we've had enough of all that. The case is over and done with and ought to be forgotten. Budge up,' he said, sitting down beside Willow and taking hold of her right hand in both of his. ‘Tell me when you first knew that it was Hallten, Steve.'

As Stephen Harness began to explain the course of his investigation, Willow lost some of her anger and listened in growing interest as he laid bare the ideas that had been running in parallel with her own. In the end she laughed. Tom leaned his shoulder against her in a gesture of pleasure and perhaps of gratitude, too.

‘We ought to have shared our information right at the beginning,' she said. ‘We'd both have got on to Hallten a lot faster if we'd done that, eh, Steve? And I wouldn't have had a bruised throat.'

He looked at her for a moment and then bowed his good-looking head. ‘That's pretty generous, if I may say so. I'd better be off. Tom. I'm sure I'll see you when you're back at work. Willow, I hope that our paths will cross again, although perhaps not in the way of business.'

Tom got up to shake hands with him and was all for escorting him to the front door, but Willow sternly sent him to lie on his sofa while she herself saw Harness out. At the front door, he apologised for upsetting her.

‘That's all right,' she said. ‘But if you feel you owe me anything, you could pay with a scrap of information.'

‘Oh, yes?' he said, looking at her warily.

‘Who was Serena Fydgett's alibi?'

The guarded look, in his eyes was transformed into a smile. ‘I can't tell you that, you know perfectly well.'

‘Yes, but I am terribly curious. I'm also completely discreet. I'd ask her myself except that we've become friends and I don't want to risk that—or Rob's trust in Tom, which is good for both of them.'

Harness waited for a moment and then nodded. ‘I shouldn't tell you, but for some reason I'm going to. I only hope
my
trust isn't misplaced. It was Malcolm Penholt, the MP.'

‘Aha,' said Willow as several other pieces of the jigsaw fell into place. Penholt's relationship with Serena would easily explain why he had been prepared to give George Profett time to make his enquiries before raising a fuss in the House of Commons. Any publicity he gave Fiona Fydgett's case could have backfired if his relationship with her sister had been exposed, which it probably would have been.

Their intimacy was obviously the reason why Serena had been less surprised to hear from Willow than might have been expected, and it could also explain what had made Serena so angry with her sister a short while before she had killed herself. From what Willow had learned of them both, it did not seem to be beyond the bounds of possibility that Fiona might have had a go at seducing her elder sister's lover.

When she got back to the drawing room, Tom smiled up at her.

‘Steve's not such a bad egg, you know, Will.'

‘No, I know. But I feel a bit… Oh, I don't know, used, I suppose. He charmed me into thinking how civilised he was beside Black Jack. I despise myself for having succumbed to his charm and believed his stories. It was plain old “good cop, bad cop” stuff and I fell for it.'

‘We all have our ways of getting people to talk. He couldn't have known that you are as unlikely to set fire to a building as Rob Fydgett is to swap intimacies with me. Although…'

‘What is it?'

‘Rob did tell me one thing, which I think I ought to pass on to you. I know you'll never let the boy know I told you.'

‘What is it?' Willow said again in a different voice.

‘He did go into his mother's room that day she killed herself.'

‘I thought he must have. Didn't he guess what she'd done?'

‘No. He said she was lying in bed looking incredibly beautiful and he suddenly needed to talk to her, to tell her things he felt and find out what she felt about him. You see, sometimes she was full of affection and a kind of dependence, and at others he says she seemed to loathe and despise him. She'd tell him he was tiresome and clumsy and stupid and that if he'd never been born she'd have been fine and never had any of her depressions or tried to kill herself. He said it just washed over him then that he needed to know which was right and so he tried to wake her up. He called her name a couple of times, but she didn't stir.'

Willow remembered the way Rob had whispered her name on the night he had been burning paper in the drawing room fireplace and she wished passionately that she had given him what he needed. She nodded to make Tom go on.

‘He said that he needed her so much that he bent down and kissed her forehead. When she still didn't move he kissed her on the lips. At that she sort of grunted, he said, and pushed his face away. He said he felt sick and desperate and he shook her, but she still didn't wake. Miserable, rejected as he saw it, and frightened by everything he felt, he just ran out of the room. He didn't notice the pill bottle or the whisky glass. He said that at that moment he hated her. But he had no idea she was dying.'

Willow said nothing but her face was quite expressive enough.

‘I know,' said Tom. ‘He told me that he felt utterly disgusted with himself for kissing her and bolted back to school. It wasn't until much later, when he'd read her letter, that he understood and realised that he could have saved her life. I've tried to explain to him that he didn't kill her and that it wasn't his fault, but it's going to take him a long time to come to terms with it all.'

‘Poor boy. No wonder he always seemed so guilty. I can't have helped, asking my questions, and the police interview must have made him feel even worse than he already did.'

‘Yes, I think that's probably right. But it had to be done. I know Harness hurt the boy, but you can't blame him. Rob just got caught in the crossfire.' Tom looked profoundly sad. ‘That's what crime does: its ripples affect huge numbers of innocent people who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

Willow said nothing, feeling obstructive. Tom tried again.

‘Look, you can't blame the police if, faced with a dead body, they trample over the sensibilities of the innocent in their search for the guilty.'

‘I suspect that that's pretty much what Len Scoffer thought about his job of hunting down tax dodgers, but I don't know that I can accept it. I don't think he ever actually broke a rule, let alone a law in his life, but he harmed people … innocent people.'

Tom sat up in defiance of her orders and patted the cushion beside him. ‘Come and sit down, and stop looking like an avenging angel, Will. Rob's going to recover. He'll find a way to tell himself the story that makes it all less awful. We can't help him by agonising over his feelings, just as we can't help Scoffer's victims by blaming him for the things they did in response to his bullying.'

‘No,' agreed Willow. ‘I've done my bit on that score by laying out for the minister exactly how Scoffer operated. If there's anything that can be done to prevent it happening again in the future with another cast, he'll do it. It's his pigeon now.'

Willow made herself smile. Tom took her hand.

‘One thing you haven't told me is who Miss Andrea Salderton turned out to be,' he said in a lighter tone.

‘Ah, now she is interesting,' said Willow following his lead away from the thought of Rob Fydgett and what he had had to face.

‘Oh?'

‘She's a protege of the minister's from his days with Amnesty. Some years ago she was a political prisoner of one of those awful South American regimes. I'm not sure which one. But she was tortured, repeatedly over several months. Someone got her out in the end and George Profett has been paying her an allowance ever since. She's getting better and doing bits and pieces of translation work, but she'll probably need his help for years yet.'

‘Good for him,' said Tom seriously. ‘Really good.'

‘I know. You can see why he got so angry when Gaskarth and I started truffling about trying to find out about her. As you can imagine, her hurts aren't only physical and the last thing she needs is any kind of publicity. But I think he was a bit naive not to realise that someone might notice he was subsidising her and start asking questions. Quite frankly, he's lucky that no one's tried to expose her as his mistress.'

‘You mean the tabloids haven't got on to her at all?'

‘Apparently not,' said Willow, thinking of the SCDD classification Jane's paper had given him. ‘Perhaps they don't bother with bank accounts unless there're some other clues to a good story, or perhaps the editors have a pact with him to keep off it.' Willow took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. They had almost recovered from the effects of the fire, but she was still reluctant to wear her lenses again.

‘Is he in love with her?'

‘I think he probably is, from what Gaskarth gathered from someone who knows them both; but she can't bring herself to trust anyone and needs to live alone. You can understand it.'

‘Yes, I think you can. And perhaps his fear of officials misusing their power comes from the same thing. From what you've said it does sound a trifle exaggerated, if not actually neurotic.'

‘Perhaps a bit. And not knowing any of the background, I just assumed he'd invented it to cover something else up. It kept me from seeing what was really going on for days.' Willow paused to rub her head against his shoulder. ‘That and my terror for you.'

‘Ah, Will,' he said, putting a hand under her chin to turn her face up. ‘Do you know, I think I rather like you in glasses.'

‘You can't,' she said, peering at him over the top of them to see whether he was teasing her. ‘I look ghastly.'

‘Don't be so hard on yourself.'

Willow looked round the beautiful room and, thinking about the ease and self-indulgence of her life, laughed.

‘You are, you know,' said Tom. ‘You give yourself a very hard time.'

Before Willow could answer, the door opened and Mrs Rusham reappeared, holding a brown envelope. ‘I quite forgot the post in all the excitement this morning,' she said, flushing. ‘I am sorry.'

‘I don't suppose it'll matter at all. It looks fearfully boring.' Willow took the proffered envelope and ripped it open.

‘What is it?' asked Tom as she started to laugh.

‘That bloody little Jason Tillter! I bet it's him.' Willow handed Tom the short, printed letter, which he read aloud:

Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to enquire whether you are certain that all your income for the years 1989/ 90, 1990/91 and 1992/93 has been declared in your tax returns.

Yours faithfully

The letter was signed with an illegible ballpoint squiggle over the printed title of Her Majesty's Inspector of Taxes.

‘Well, I expect that'll give you quite a lot of fun now that you know the way they operate,' said Tom, putting his arm around her. ‘And with luck it'll stop you doing anything else dangerous for a bit.'

‘In the circumstances, I suspect it will. It should keep me nice and busy while you're recovering your strength.' Willow eyed her husband for a moment and then added, laughing: ‘And perhaps it'll distract me enough to stop me asking how you're feeling every two minutes.'

‘That's m'girl!'

First published in 1995 by Simon & Schuster