Festering Lilies (20 page)

‘I see,' was all he said, drinking some of his own coffee, which must have been quite cold by then. ‘I have come across men like that, and it is interesting that the deceased was of their fraternity. Do you know whether there were any other women in the department who had a similar experience?'

‘I am afraid I do not,' said Willow, relaxing a little now that he seemed to have left the subject of Algy's attempted seduction. ‘But I do not partake of the gossip of this place and since I work only part time I might easily miss something that the rest of my colleagues know intimately.' There she was sounding idiotically pompous again. But with luck, she thought, the very dullness and arrogance of her phrasing might bore the policeman so much that he would decide that she was a nonentity.

‘He seems to have had the knack of arousing deep emotions in almost everyone he came up against: devotion from some, considerable antipathy from others,' suggested Inspector Worth.

Almost unbearably tempted to tell the inspector all the things she had learned about the dead man since they had last met, Willow knew that there was little she would have enjoyed more than a real talk with him. She could have told him about Gripper and described her other suspicions and asked him everything she needed to fill in the gaps in her knowledge. Opening her mouth to ask him whether he had even considered Eustace Gripper as a possible suspect, she suddenly remembered who and where she was. She hastily shut her mouth again, shocked by her reactions to the policeman's rational kindness.

‘Were you angry with the minister?' he asked suddenly. At that short question Willow stiffened again and forgot her wish to have a really good talk with him.

‘I was extremely irritated that so intelligent a man should be so damned silly, since you ask. But personally angry? No,' she said, sipping her coffee.

‘Not even that – as I think you said earlier – your colleagues were all discussing the affair amongst themselves?' suggested Inspector Worth carefully. Willow smiled.

‘I was exceedingly angry with them,' she said. ‘But that was for their unwarranted if understandable assumption that I had succumbed to the red roses and flattering attention, been, as it were, enjoyed and then discarded. Their gloating so-called sympathy was what angered me, not the cause of it.'

‘I see. Well, thank you very much,' said Inspector Worth getting out of his chair. Willow looked a little startled, but since it was clear that he was dismissing her she too rose.

‘Not at all,' she said automatically. She knew that there was going to be no easy way to ask him about Algy's will and so all she said was, ‘Please let me know if there is anything else that I can tell you.'

‘I shall indeed. Thank you again,' he said. As she walked past Mr Englewood towards the door, he too stood up.

‘Well done, Willow,' he said. She saw that there was a most curious expression in his tired, grey eyes and she had the strange feeling that he was commending not her performance in front of the police but her determined chastity in the face of the minister's pursuit. For some peculiar reason that seemed to be almost more insulting than everyone else's view that she had been used and discarded. The intensity in Michael Englewood's eyes and voice bothered her and, since there seemed to be no suitable answer to his compliment, she merely smiled coldly and left the interrogation room.

Safely in the lift once the doors had closed, she leaned back against the stainless steel wall, let her head fall back and breathed deeply. Her idiocy in making herself compete with Inspector Worth seemed worse than ever before. As Richard had annoyingly warned her at the beginning, the police had endless resources and back-up teams, from accurate information to forensic scientists, with which to find the murderer. She had nothing except the information she could disentangle from the DOAP gossip and her own powers of analysis and imagination. Self-pity (the cardinal sin in Dr William King's household in Newcastle) threatened to engulf her.

Recognising the danger, Willow straightened her head, rubbed her eyes and said out loud: ‘Well at least Aunt Agatha's safe for a little longer, thank God.'

The steel doors parted with their usual soft swishing noise on the eighth floor and she straightened her shoulders and walked into the outer office to confront her staff. Roger's pale eyes were alight as she walked towards his desk.

‘Well, how did it go, Miss King?' he asked, clearly as avid for sensation as ever. ‘Did that terrifying ex-SAS man give you the third degree?'

‘SAS, Roger? What are you talking about?' Willow said over her shoulder as she put out a hand for the papers Barbara was offering her. She had quite forgotten the profile she had read in the Sunday newspaper. ‘I'm glad to see you're better,' she added noticing that the scars on his face had almost disappeared.

‘Thank you, Miss King. My colds never last that long, though they're beastly while they are there. But the SAS, Miss King: the inspector downstairs used to be in it; rather a hero in Ireland, they say. But, you know, officers aren't allowed to stay very long in the SAS and he didn't fancy ordinary regimental soldiering again after all the high-jinks and so he left and joined the police.'

‘Goodness!' Willow found that her uncharacteristic tensions were dissipating slightly under the ordinary conditions of her office. ‘How did you discover all that?'

‘Roger doesn't ever need to discover anything,' said Scottish Barbara in her usual caustic tone. ‘Little pockets of information open themselves out in front of him and tiny drops of gossip just drop into his flower-like ears. Don't they, Roger? And then he just can't resist passing them on.'

‘Do they, Roger?' said Willow in a tone of exaggerated interest. ‘Then you can probably answer something that was exercising Barbara and me last week.' Roger looked happily expectant, and Willow drove all thoughts of embarrassment out of her mind in the interests of her enquiry.

‘The messengers seem to have been reading about the minister's private life in the
Daily Mercury
and to have formed the impression that the minister's sexual orientation was not of the most obvious kind.' As Willow spoke, she could have kicked herself for both the pomposity and the ambiguity of the words she had chosen. But when she saw Roger's face quiver and become suffused with a deep-tomato-coloured blush, she wished that she had never embarked on the subject.

‘Never mind,' she said at once. ‘I'm sure you know no more than we, and no doubt that dreadful rag had it all wrong.' Roger seemed to make a tremendous effort to pull himself together. Turning away from Willow to face Scottish Barbara, he said:

‘There's more than one secret I've never passed on, Barbara.'

‘Really, Roger?' she said, her voice at its most Morning-side, ‘and what might they be?'

‘Well, honestly! If I told you that, they'd not be secret any longer,' said Roger, shrugging. Then he saw that she was laughing at him, and added: ‘Besides, I've never noticed that you're bored with the things I tell you, Barbara. Have you, Miss King?' He did look at Willow then, and she thought that there was a pleading expression in his eyes. She was not sure whether he wanted protection from the Scottish girl, whose sarcasm could sometimes get a little vicious, or whether he was begging her not to talk any more about the minister's possible preferences.

‘No indeed,' said Willow, wondering whether she had been wrong about Gripper and all the rest of her suspicions. Could Roger really have had anything to do with the death? Could those horribly deep scratches have been driven into his face by Algy's scrabbling hands? Telling herself that the proposition was ludicrous, she went on: ‘But we all have more than enough work to do to listen to any more of them now. I'll deal with these, Barbara. Thank you. Roger, bring in that report as soon as you've finished it, will you?'

‘Yes, Miss King,' he said, settling to his keyboard once more.

Willow shut the door of her inner office, ready to be grateful for the familiarity of it all, the heaps of crested paper on her desk bearing their no doubt irritating minutes from the PUS or the junior minister and their impossible drafts of answers to parliamentary questions from her staff. But as soon as she leaned back against the door she had just shut, she was jerked out of her growing relaxation.

‘That damned smell,' she whispered as she caught the faint cigarette-and-sweat-and-aftershave stench that had so frightened her in Chesham Place. All thoughts of Roger's scratches were pushed out of her mind.

Trying to tell herself that the smell was some unreal product of her mood – some symptom of paranoia, perhaps – Willow carefully examined her office. After even the most cursory search it would have been horribly clear that she should no longer doubt the reality of the smell. Drawers that were usually firmly closed were slightly open, papers that had been neatly stacked in trays were slightly askew, and there were scratches around the keyholes of the only two locks in the room. The safe in which she kept most of her confidential papers was impregnable, but the bottom left-hand drawer of her desk had been broken into and left unlocked and unlockable.

Despite her horror of the idea of people searching her rooms – and her terror of someone apparently having connected Willow King and Cressida Woodruffe – she allowed herself a small smile at the thought of her bottom drawer: all she kept there was her London Atlas, a box of sulphur-free dried apricots in case of desperate hunger, and her emergency supply of tampons.

Willow sat in the ruined sanctuary of her inner office, thinking that the stresses of Algy's death and her investigation of it must be turning her brain. It simply was not possible that the person who had searched her Chesham Place flat could also have found his way into her office at DOAP. There was no one (except of course Richard, who did not count) who could have connected the formidable spinster of DOAP with the absurdly rich Cressida Woodruffe, she told herself, and then remembered with a sickeningly deep intake of breath her feeling that someone had been watching her at Sloane Square tube station on the night of her last weekly transformation. Had someone actually followed her from DOAP that night?

Willow dropped her head in her hands. Rationally she knew perfectly well that it did not really matter if she were to be unmasked – however awkward or embarrassing that would be – but the idea of someone creeping behind her, cheating his way in to her flat, going through all her most personal possessions and lying in wait to expose her was horrible.

Quite apart from the fact that such an invasion of her much-cherished privacy must have a bearing on the case, Willow knew that she could not ignore it. Trying to keep calm, she thought about the people who might have wanted to follow her and expose her, but her analytical talents seemed to have deserted her. With the faint, but nauseatingly familiar smell of her adversary in her nostrils, all she could think of was the sinister intensity in Michael Englewood's eyes and voice as he had commended her so little time earlier, of her unprecedented meeting with him on the steps of DOAP the previous week and his extraordinary concern for her.

Without stopping to think any more, Willow flung open the door to her outer office, saying sharply, ‘Barbara!'

‘Yes, Willow?' said the young Scottish woman, sounding a little surprised at the unusual urgency of her chief's voice. But Willow ignored her, having seen Roger staring at her, his mouth open in surprise. At his side stood the bulky, threatening figure of Albert, the minister's driver.

‘And what on earth are you doing here, Albert?' she demanded, wishing that she could get away from the smell of the man who had searched her home and her office.

‘He… er… he just brought up a message, Miss King,' said Roger, patently terrified.

‘Oh yes,' said Willow, heavily sarcastic. She held out her right hand for the message and, to her considerable chagrin, the driver handed her a standard DOAP brown envelope.

‘I beg your pardon, Albert,' she said formally. ‘I'm so busy at the moment I don't know whether I'm coming or going. Thank you for bringing it,' she added, far more ashamed of her fear than of the sarcasm in which she had indulged herself.

‘It's my job to do what I'm told, Miss,' he said, with slightly less than his usual rudeness. ‘And while the police need to keep me hanging around like this, I've been turned into a bleeding messenger. I'll be off then – unless there's an answer.'

Willow shook her head and retreated to her own room. The message proved to be a complete anti-climax, being no more than one of the establishments officer's standard memos about getting submissions for the annual promotion boards to him in good time.

There was a faint echo of the vile, stale smell hanging about her desk, which made her screw up the envelope and hurl it into the wastepaper basket. The uncharacteristically savage gesture did nothing about the smell, but it served to relieve some of her feelings of powerlessness.

Just as Willow was putting Mr Englewood's note in her filing basket, the door of her office opened and Barbara put her dark head into the room.

‘Did you want me, Willow?' she asked.

‘What?' said Willow, raising her head. ‘Oh, yes, come in please.'

Barbara sat down opposite Willow's desk and looked interested. Willow suppressed a smile.

‘I just wanted to ask you who had been up here while I was away?' she said, considerably calmer then than she had been when she had erupted into Barbara's office.

‘Let me think,' said the girl irritatingly. ‘The usual batch of messengers, the establishments officer…'

‘Why?' said Willow sharply. Barbara shrugged.

‘He quite often looks in when you're away – keeps Roger up to the mark anyway; that man has an awful tendency to skip off when there's no one to check up on him – and unfortunately he's not at all afraid of me,' she said.