Festering Lilies (30 page)

‘What, designing this?' she said, turning from the Aga, where she was starting to make a pot of tea. ‘Yes, it was terrific fun; the idea of having enough money to have whatever I wanted in the way of cookers, pots and pans was one of the earliest delights.'

‘That too,' he answered, watching her with a smile in his eyes. ‘But I really meant shuttling between Abbeville Road and this, knowing that no one who knew you in one life had any idea of the other – except whatsisname.'

Willow picked up the heavy kettle and poured boiling water on the Lapsang Souchong tea leaves, before attempting to answer. This man with his dangerously attractive character and the strength of his large body had understood her far better in a few days than Richard had done in three years.

‘His name is Richard,' she said crisply, and poured out the tea. Then in a quite different voice added: ‘but I don't think he is the only one who knows.'

‘No,' agreed Worth. ‘Clearly this bloke knows, too. Have you decided yet who it is?'

Willow drank some tea, swallowed and then said:

‘I think it must be Albert – the minister's driver.'

‘Now why?' asked Worth. There was no antagonism in his voice, but he was clearly doubtful. ‘I know you've suspected him, and I know you don't like him, but you must accept that he has been cleared of all suspicion of the murder.'

‘Are you sure?' said Willow. Then she shook her red head: ‘I'm sorry; that sounds as though I think you're stupid and I don't think that at all.' He drank some tea and laughed.

‘Thanks for the testimonial,' he said. ‘Yes, we are sure: apart from several other witnesses, there is a woman whose ground-floor flat overlooks that corner of Cedar's Road. She was so surprised to see such a large, opulent car parked outside her building that she watched it for nearly two hours – hoping, I suspect, for the sight of some glamorous celebrity.'

‘But…' said Willow. Worth put a large hand over hers as it lay on the table.

‘Wait, Willow,' he said. ‘At nine-fifteen when Albert decided that there was something wrong, he saw the light in the old girl's flat, rang her bell and asked to use the telephone to call us. She has positively identified him – and he was still in her flat when our men got there to talk to him.'

‘Oh,' said Willow inadequately, thinking once again how unfair was the advantage that he and his men had over an amateur like herself.

‘But,' he went on, ‘that's not to say he couldn't have done this. Even if there is a connection with the murder, I'd stake my job on the fact that whoever's wrecked your flat is not the same person who beat Endelsham to death.'

‘Tell me why not,' she said, and felt interest pricking the fears out of her mind.

‘The men who did this are the sort to put the boot in – it was rough, straightforward and efficient violence. Endelsham was killed by someone in a panic and a hurry.'

‘Did the wounds tell you that?' Willow asked, and Tom Worth was relieved to see that her eyes were slowly returning to normal, the pupils shrinking again and the lids blinking in normal time.

‘Yes. They were all over the place – some on the head, some across the eyes, some on the cheeks and chin,' he said and Willow felt sick all over again. Determined to keep her brain going, she decided to ask something that had been teasing at the back of her mind.

‘But, Tom,' she said and his head lifted at the sound of his name.

‘Yes, Will?' His voice was very kind.

‘If it was as frenzied as that, surely Algy must have got some blows in. He was a tall man and if not as strong as you, certainly as heavy. I cannot believe that he'd have stood quietly by, while some thug or lunatic did that to him.'

Worth sipped his tea and put the mug down on the table, wondering how much she could take. After all, he thought, she had been fairly close to the man even if she had denied him what everyone seemed to want of her.

‘No, we're sure he didn't.'

‘In that case, wasn't there something on his hands or under his nails that could identify the killer for you? Wouldn't he at least have scratched whoever did that to him? And if he did, couldn't you have got some tissue out from under his nails that would allow you to do that DNA fingerprinting business?'

‘If he had we probably could have. But whatever he did to defend himself, seems not to have broken the skin. That's why we haven't been examining all the suspects for surface cuts and abrasions.'

Then that definitely puts Roger in the clear, thought Willow relieved but not very surprised.

‘The only blood we've identified on the corpse belonged to it,' went on Tom, ‘and all we've got from under his nails was the usual mixture of London dirt, sweat and minute bits of whatever he had for lunch. We've some hairs on his clothes – both male and female, but they haven't been identified yet, and in any case probably got there quite innocently.'

‘I see,' said Willow, glad of the confirmation that Roger's scratches had had nothing to do with the murder on the common. ‘So we're back with motive. Are you quite certain that it couldn't have been random louts like the ones I was afraid of on the common last week? Or the vigilantes?'

‘I think that's highly unlikely. The so-called vigilantes are a bunch of youths full of sound and fury, happy to bash up a pub or two, scratch broken bottles down the sides of expensive cars and throw dogs'excrement about; but they're not into real violence – thank the Lord.'

Willow got up and walked across to the Aga. Standing with her back to it, she leaned against its warmth, clasping her porcelain mug of tea in both hands.

‘It's all so horrible,' she said naively. ‘I never knew that there was so much violence and hate about.' Then she made herself laugh a little. ‘That must sound idiotic to someone like you: SAS and the police – violence and hate are what you're there for, aren't they?'

‘Will you tell me why you think that Albert could have done this?' he said, ignoring her outburst.

Willow left the Aga's warmth and walked slowly across the quarry-tiled floor.

‘Listen, Tom,' she said, her face taut and somehow professional looking, as though she had forgotten both her fear and her disgust. ‘I think that Albert is running some kind of scam at the department.'

Tom's face creased into a tolerant smile, which annoyed Willow, but as she expounded her theory of the pension fraud, his expression changed: the tolerance and the amusement were overtaken by curiosity.

‘Don't pensioners have to collect in person and show some form of identification?' he said as she finished.

‘Of course not, Tom. You must know that. Think how many pensioners are in wheelchairs, arthritic, unable to go themselves, without transport if they live in the country, or being cared for in homes or hospitals. It simply would not be possible to insist on personal collections. Albert and whoever he has recruited could have the money posted or they could go and collect from selected post offices.

‘And as for the department's checks,' she went on warming to her story, ‘what happens is that a letter is sent to the pensioner's registered address asking if they're still alive. Albert and his troops would merely reply in the affirmative and everything would go on as before. I don't see that Albert could do enough of it on his own to make all that much money, but if he's subborned one or more of the clerks and uses other drivers to do the collecting of the books in the first place, he could get a nice little earner going.'

‘It sounds feasible,' said Tom, betraying none of the excitement Willow had felt when she had invented the scheme and merely sounding very tired. ‘It'll have to be investigated – although you have no evidence at all. It may be no more than your novelist's brain inventing the improbable.'

‘It's entirely supposition,' she agreed, responding to his rational objection without even thinking about it. ‘I've always been doubtful about whether Albert has the brains to organize anything like it, but you could find out fairly easily, I imagine. You'd need to know whether Albert has any friend, mistress, relation – or even blackmailee – in the lower ranks of the clerical officers. Your best bet would be the under secretary (estabs)'s secretary, Valerie, I imagine – or you could try my CO – Roger. He knows everything.'

‘Okay,' said Worth. ‘But I'd need a bit more solid evidence before I diverted manpower away from the murder just at the moment.'

‘Well,' said Willow, seeing the force of his objection. ‘There are one or two clues to support the idea that something is going on at the department.'

‘Such as?'

‘On the Thursday after the murder when I left DOAP to come here, I was convinced someone was following me – although I couldn't actually see anyone doing it. Nearly a week ago – as I told you – someone searched this flat. Then, when I got back to DOAP, I realised that the same person had been through my office there.'

‘How?'

‘I don't know,' she said crossly. ‘How do people normally search offices?' At that Tom laughed and the sound made Willow feel almost as warm as the Aga had done.

‘No, idiot,' he said kindly. ‘How do you know it was the same person?'

‘There was a smell,' she said and even at the memory all the warmth drained out of her. She shivered in disgust. Tom did not press her to tell him anything more. Willow tried to pull herself together.

‘Now this afternoon, I had a chance to interrogate Albert, and I asked him whether he and the other drivers had found any profitable ways of using all the time they have to spend hanging about waiting for us.…'

‘Oh, my God,' said Worth, running both hands through his thick, dark hair. ‘Never mind now. Tell me how Albert could have known you were interested in him before this afternoon's indiscretion.'

‘Damn,' said Willow briefly. She had been too taken up with other things even to consider that. ‘No wait,' she went on after a few minutes'silent thought, ‘I do know. On the day after Algy's murder, Albert overheard me cracking a joke with a man who works in the registry department. I was suggesting – frivolously – that the minister might have been blackmailing the registry staff because he had discovered some nefarious goings-on there. It was just a joke, to try to make him and the rest of them stop speculating so wildly about what Algy might have been doing to get himself killed. But Albert must have thought…'

‘Hmmmm,' murmured Worth. ‘It's fairly far-fetched – and wholly circumstantial. But we'll have to look into it. Damn.'

‘Why the curse?' she asked, getting up again to refill the teapot. Her mouth felt furred with tannin, but she was too restless simply to sit doing nothing.

‘Because,' said Worth, still sitting in his chair, ‘I've enough on my plate trying to prove who murdered your minister.' As she came back to the table with the teapot, he held out his mug for more tea. Her eyes widened.

‘That sounds as though you think you know who did it,' she said. He could hear the tightness in her voice, but he could not know that she felt suddenly faint. She sat down heavily on a chair opposite him, nursing the hot teapot in her lap. At last noticing the heat against her thighs, she put the pot back on the table.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I think so. We usually do know who, but it's far more difficult getting proof to satisfy a court of law.' He paused and then said quite gently: ‘And you know, too, don't you, Willow?'

‘No,' she said more emphatically than she should have done. Worth simply looked at her.

‘I don't believe it,' she added rather pathetically. ‘There's no real motive. I think it's far more likely to have been the vigilantes.'

Worth sat across the table from her, his eyebrows meeting across his misshapen nose. Despite his obvious strength and the brains of which she was so well aware, he seemed vulnerable then and desperately tired. Quite against her better judgment, she said abruptly:

‘Have you talked to the tramp at Clapham Junction yet?'

‘Tramp? What tramp?'

‘There's an old man – homeless presumably – who hangs about the station there, who told me that on the night of Algy's murder he saw a man washing in the gents'. It may mean nothing, but the washing was obviously fairly extensive, because otherwise he'd never have told me about it: I'd asked him, you see, if he had seen anything unusual that night.'

‘And trains to Surbiton stop at Clapham Junction,' said Worth meditatively.

‘And a vast number of other places,' Willow snapped back at him.

‘I know, my dear,' he said, and then looked down at his watch. ‘You ought to be in bed. Will you promise me something?'

Willow neither moved nor spoke.

‘Promise you won't ask any more questions,' he said. ‘You've made someone bloody angry and they've already had a go at your flat. I don't want them getting their hands on you.'

‘I thought the police were far more exercised about crimes against property than against the person,' said Willow nastily, because his concern for her moved her and she did not want him to know it.

‘Willow, two nights ago we made love to each other; you slept in my arms. Did it mean so little that you think I wouldn't care what happened to you?'

‘No,' she said with such emphasis that she shocked herself. ‘I mean … you … It meant a lot. Please don't think that. It's just… I'm just all shaken up. I'm sorry. You were angelic to come to the rescue tonight, and to worry about me.'

‘You've had a bad shock,' he said, raising his head at last and smiling at her so kindly that she almost burst into tears again. He hugged her before he left, but he did not even try to kiss her as though he had understood her reluctance to be touched.