Festering Lilies, page 15
‘The inspector would like a word, if you’ve a moment to spare, Miss King.’
‘Certainly,’ she answered, hoping that her voice had not given the sudden lurch that her insides had suffered. ‘When?’
‘Well, now Miss, actually,’ said the constable, looking and sounding rather less gentle.
‘Good heavens!’ Willow said with entirely assumed cheerfulness. ‘The inspector starts work early.’ For some reason he must have decided to test her alibi and discovered that Aunt Agatha had no existence outside Willow’s imagination. She felt cold all over. Then she saw a sudden shaft of light. ‘I don’t suppose poor Mr Englewood has been dragged this early from his home?’
‘Oh yes, Miss,’ said the constable, opening the lift door for Willow and putting out the light in her mind. ‘He’ll be there to see you’re not pushed into saying anything you don’t want or shouldn’t say.’
With that exasperating reassurance echoing all round her, Willow found it hard to smile properly at Mr Englewood when he stood up to greet her. But she made herself do it, and began to feel as though she were looking at him for the first time. She wondered at the lines in the skin around his eyes and nose. Had it always been like that or was the strain of listening for any hidden brutalities in the inspector’s interrogations beginning to exhaust him? Willow realised that her mind and feelings really were more disordered than she had believed when she found herself thinking that Englewood looked startlingly familiar to her and yet almost as though he were a complete stranger. The flesh that veiled his cheekbones seemed slacker than usual, and his grey eyes were dragged at the corners as though with anxiety.
‘Good morning, Miss King. I’m sorry to drag you away from all the urgent matters on your desk when you’ve only just got back to it.’ The sound of the deep, noncommittal voice of the policeman brought Willow’s contemplation of the establishments officer to an abrupt halt. She swung round and nodded with modified politeness to the inspector. The vitality of his expression and the extraordinarily healthy-looking whites of his eyes made the contrast between him and the establishments officer complete, and Willow rediscovered all the hostility she thought she had lost. She bitterly resented the policeman’s power, of course, but there was more to her hostility than that, although she would have sacrificed a year’s royalties before she would have admitted it. She did, however, admit to herself that it would have been comforting to have been able to tell him about the searching of her Belgravia flat. But she could not do that while Englewood was listening to her every word.
Inspector Worth smiled at her. He was standing at his desk, taller than Willow but dwarfed by his magnificent sergeant, and dressed in a plain suit of such conservative cut that its quality was hardly noticeable; but it did much to disguise the width of his shoulders and splendid bearing.
Pretending that she would have to make an inventory of his clothes as a way of controlling her feelings about him, Willow made a mental list of the grey worsted suit, plain white shirt, dull navy tie with some small unintelligible emblem woven into it. She could not see his shoes and socks, because of the desk, but as he gestured for her to sit down, his cuff rode up a little way and she saw his watch. For some reason it seemed incongruously personal. Willow would have expected some big, masculine-looking watch on a metal bracelet, but in fact it was an exceedingly old-fashioned rectangular gold watch on a worn, brown-leather strap. With her spectacles on she could see that the face of the watch was worn too, and its small black roman numerals badly rubbed.
‘Miss King?’ he said and for once there was a hint of individuality in his voice; it had warmed up a fraction. Instinctively she looked at him and discovered that his mouth looked friendly and his dark eyes smiled. Only the broken nose and firm, rounded chin still looked formidable. She smiled back despite her antagonism.
‘That’s quite all right,’ she said, at last answering his first question. ‘It’s obviously something urgent. What can I tell you?’ she went on, sounding to her own ears at least quite calm.
‘Please sit down, Miss King. We’ve fixed up a coffee machine now: would you like a cup?’
Willow nodded, not trusting herself to speak any more than necessary as she took in the new courtesy and apparent concern for herself. The young constable poured coffee into a thick, ugly mug, offered milk and sugar and then handed it to her. Willow thanked him, glad to hear that her voice still did not shake. Gripping the mug and grateful for the warmth that was slowly reaching her hands through the thick earthenware, she faced the inspector.
‘Now, Miss King, you do understand that in a murder enquiry we have to fossick about in the private affairs of a great many people, ninety-nine per cent of which turn out to be entirely irrelevant to the enquiry, don’t you?’
Now it’s coming, said Willow to herself. Is there anything I can say to Englewood, anything I can offer him, to make him keep it to himself? And what of the constable? What if his mother or – worse – his girlfriend were soon to be seen reading the latest Cressida Woodruffe: would he ever be able to resist boasting of his discovery that the glamorous rich author is really the plain, feared spinster of this dullest of all government departments?
‘Yes, I quite understand that,’ she said in a small, cold voice and waited.
‘Good. That being so, I have to ask you some questions about your relations with the deceased.’ He paused, as though he expected her to protest. Willow, hardly understanding that she had been reprieved for the moment at least, said:
‘Naturally I shall answer any questions you feel that you have to ask, but might I perhaps speak to you alone? Presumably anything that I can tell you will remain confidential unless you find that you need it in some eventual prosecution.’
Inspector Worth looked across her navy-blue shoulder at the establishments officer, who got out of his chair and came to stand in front of her. She concentrated on the details of his suit, which was made of hairy lovat tweed quite inappropriate for a London office, although it did go with his brown country brogues and the cravat he wore again at the neck of his thick checked shirt.
‘Miss King,’ he said with unfamiliar formality, ‘surely you do not think that I would pass on anything that is said during interviews such as this?’ His tone was of such personally injured honour that Willow smiled rather sickly and assured him that she had had no such doubts.
‘I can promise you that anything you say will remain confidential as far as I am concerned,’ he said as he retreated to his chair. ‘I am here only for your protection.’
‘Thank you,’ said Willow and looked back at the inspector, squaring her shoulders.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I have heard from various sources that you were the object of the deceased’s attentions – if I may call them that – and I wondered whether you could tell me the story from your own point of view.’
‘It is a very simple story, Inspector,’ Willow said, her voice quite steady. ‘Mr Endelsham did indeed – what was your phrase? Ah yes, make me the object of his attentions. It started about two years ago, perhaps a little more, and I think that by the following May he had understood that I genuinely did not wish to be such an object and was not merely being coy and trying to inflame him. Having grasped that, he eventually ceased to single me out.’
‘Ah,’ murmured the inspector, fiddling with the pencil in his hand. ‘May I ask why you did not want his “attentions”?’
‘Well really, Inspector!’ snapped Willow, banging her thick mug down on the desk in front of her and spraying coffee over some papers that were lying there. ‘I fail to see what that has to do with your investigation. But perhaps you are at one with the entire population of this office in thinking that if a man as goodlooking, famous and well-off as Algernon Endelsham should start to pursue a middle-aged unattached woman like me, she should be so dumbfounded with gratitude that she would lie on the floor like a spaniel with all four legs in the air.’
Willow was yet more enraged when she looked furiously into his face and saw that he was laughing at her. He shook his head as he caught her eye.
‘No, Miss King, I do not think any such thing. I merely wanted to know what it was about him that did not attract you so that I can get some insight into the man he was. I did not know him and in order to find my way through this investigation I need to find out what he was like. All right?’
At that appeal to reason, Willow’s flaming anger cooled a little. After all, the inspector was doing no more than she herself had tried to do in the five days since her last encounter with him. It was an unsettling realisation to make.
‘I beg your pardon. The reaction of my colleagues has caused me to be a little jumpy on the subject and would itself have constituted a perfectly good reason to avoid any close relationship with the minister.’
‘I can understand that,’ said Inspector Worth seriously. ‘But the way you have said it suggests that you had other reasons as well.’ Willow laughed a little and was glad to see him smile back at her.
‘I had indeed. There was the unsuitability of the whole idea. I cannot imagine anything more prejudicial to the smooth running of the department than any kind of romance between a minister and a relatively senior official. Had I wished to encourage the minister, I should have had to resign, I imagine, and quite frankly my career is a great deal more important to me than a few months of doubtful felicity as the mistress of such a man.’
‘Such a man,’ repeated the Inspector. ‘What kind of man?’ Forgetting that there were any other people in the room, Willow spoke to the inspector as to an equal, quite forgetting that she had had gentler thoughts about Algy and perhaps even mixing him up in her disordered mind with the character she had invented for Eustace Gripper.
‘The kind of man who knows who he is and where he is in the pecking order only by constantly reassuring himself of his sexual power over the women he meets,’ she said. ‘Most of the women the minister encountered were only too obviously drawn to his looks, money and success and he therefore had no need to impress them. Unlike many of my sex I do not find such things aphrodisiac. On the other hand, I greatly enjoyed the minister’s company and found his attitude to the work of the department and his incisive intelligence highly invigorating. I can only suppose that the combination of my sincere admiration for his mind and complete lack of interest in his perhaps more obvious attractions made him wish to see whether he could break down my resistance.’ Willow knew that she had fallen into the style of some of the more pompous of her colleagues and almost expected the inspector to ask her to have her statement typed and signed in triplicate.
‘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?’
