Poison Flowers

by Natasha Cooper

  The rest of them added their views and at last the chairman released them for lunch, adding that the man they were expecting to interview that afternoon was ill and so the session would be cancelled.

  Wishing that she could go straight back to DOAP, eat a sandwich at her desk and get on with some work, Willow instead walked with the psychiatrist to the restaurant where he had booked a table. Just off Piccadilly, it was upsettingly close to the world she inhabited as Cressida and for a moment Willow was worried that she might be recognised. A quick look at her reflection in a big mirror in the ladies’lavatory assured her that no one accustomed to Cressida’s luxurious curls and subtly painted face would see anything familiar in the pale, slighty freckled skin, sandy eyelashes and severe hairstyle.

  When she went back to the table Michael was tasting a glass of white wine and nodding appreciatively at the wine waiter. As Willow sat down, Michael half rose from his seat, offered her a glass of Chablis and then said:

  ‘Let’s choose what we’re going to eat and get it ordered before we relax. I know that we both have an unexpectedly free afternoon, but …’

  ‘There’s too much work waiting in the office to waste it in idle chatter,’ said Willow, interrupting without conscience.

  ‘Precisely,’ said the psychiatrist and handed her a large maroon menu. Willow read it carefully and then said:

  ‘Oysters, I think.’

  ‘Oysters, and what then?’ asked Michael.

  ‘Grilled sole and some spinach, please,’ she answered.

  ‘How austere!’ Michael signalled efficiently to the waiter and ordered himself potted shrimps and then an elaborate lobster dish. When all the questions had been asked and answered and the waiter had eventually disappeared, Michael turned back to Willow.

  ‘Now, tell me what all this is about,’ he said.

  ‘You sound rather severe,’ said Willow. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your questions: the ones you asked me last week and the ones you put to that poor flummoxed girl this morning. What is going on?’

  Willow took a gulp of the sharp, cold wine to give herself a moment to think.

  ‘At first I thought that you must be writing – or planning to write – a detective story in your spare time, but after this morning I am beginning to think that you must really be worried about some actual deaths,’ said Michael.

  Wishing that she could blush to order, Willow put down her wine glass and looked at Michael, making her eyes widen slightly as those of Cressida Woodruffe’s heroines tended to do when they were faced with unexpectedly attractive men.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said slowly, lowering her undarkened eyelashes, ‘that being a psychiatrist you are taught to look for unlikely motives.’ If she had been a toucher she would have patted his shoulder or hand. As it was, even as Cressida, she never went in for casual touching except with Tom Worth.

  ‘It is a bit embarrassing,’ she went on, ‘and I’ll have to rely on your discretion. I’d hate my colleagues to know about my secret ambitions. You could be very useful to me, you know,’ she added.

  Michael Rodenhurst leaned back in his green leather chair, with an amused and rather knowing smile. Willow was prepared to put up with it to continue her placatory campaign, although she did feel the humiliation of some subordinate member of a tribe of gorillas presenting her backside to be groomed by the silverback chief.

  ‘You can’t really mean that you are writing a murder story,’ he said.

  ‘Well, “trying to write” would be more accurate,’ she answered with a deceptively frank smile. ‘And I’m anxious to get as much verisimilitude in it as possible – hence my questions. I have got one or two more; in fact.’

  ‘What is the plot?’ he asked, looking even more amused.

  When Willow had sucked one of the gelatinous molluscs from its smooth-lined shell, she produced the information she thought necessary to convince him of her own imaginary veracity.

  ‘The book is all about a woman who poisons the men who have spurned her.’

  ‘Rather far fetched, I would have thought,’ said the psychiatrist, obviously enjoying his potted shrimps.

  ‘What about all those ancient saws?’ asked Willow and was pleased to see his face crease up into a real smile.

  ‘“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”,’ he quoted. ‘Yes, but you and I know that that is long out of date even if it ever held true.’

  ‘Well never mind that,’ said Willow before swallowing her last oyster and laying its heavy, gnarled grey shell back onto the seaweed-decorated ice on her plate. ‘What has been bothering me particularly is that from the only useful book I’ve managed to find it seems that most serial murderers are male, and I particularly want to have a female killer in my book.’

  ‘I wonder why,’ said Michael. ‘You know, Willow King, you interest me very much indeed.’

  ‘A case study?’ she suggested, sounding coldly dismissive. ‘A case study in repression, perhaps,’ she added, remembering all the snide comments and jokes she had ever overheard about her undoubted virginity, her sexlessness, her joyless life, her unattractiveness and the terrible deprivation of living life without a man. For years she had persuaded herself that she was entirely indifferent to them, but recently she had been beginning to consider the possibility that she had actually minded being so despised. Perhaps her determination to make more money than her colleagues could ever earn had been her way of taking revenge for their contempt.

  ‘No,’ he said, drawing out the vowel to what Willow thought excessive length. ‘But you are not at all what I expected from what I’ve heard about you in the department or from my observations of you on that first day; you present yourself as one sort of person when you are quite obviously very different.’

  Willow turned her face away, suddenly stricken by the thought that the two characters she inhabited so satisfactorily – and separately – might be drawing closer together. No one who had met her as Willow King had ever suspected that she was not altogether what she seemed until she had been confronted with Chief Inspector Worth. Somehow he seemed to be having a discernible effect on her. That worried Willow considerably.

  Damn Tom Worth, she thought bitterly, and then remembered how much she liked him.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said carefully, having schooled her face back into chill formality, ‘you were simply guilty of judging by appearances – and of prejudice.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the psychiatrist, nodding to the waiter who was hovering near the table with their main courses. When everything was arranged and Willow was already calmly eating her sole and spinach, Michael went on:

  ‘What …?’

  ‘Michael,’ said Willow, using his name for the first time, ‘I can’t stop you speculating about whatever neuroses and unreconstructed complexes you think I may suffer, but I’d rather you kept your conclusions to yourself. Whatever is wrong with me – and I am quite prepared to believe that there is plenty – I am a functioning human being and I’d rather not investigate the aspects of my character that might make me stop functioning. Do you understand what I’m talking about?’

  He nodded, ate some lobster drenched in rich, dusky-pink sauce, and when he had swallowed said:

  ‘All right, no questions from me. Why don’t you ask the rest of yours? Or shall we merely talk about the last time we went abroad?’

  Wanting to kick him, but determined to take his suggestions at face value, Willow asked him everything else she wanted to know about the tracking down of killers through psychological assessment. Unfortunately she learned nothing that gave her any clues.

  When they had finished their fish, Willow declined both pudding and coffee and insisted on paying half the bill. Gracefully accepting her contribution, Michael asked her whether he had offended her.

  ‘You’ve given me a good deal to think about,’ she said accurately. ‘It would be pleasant to continue the discussion, but I’ve too much work waiting.’ She stood up, collected her ba
g and held out her hand. ‘I’ve enjoyed our various talks,’ she said, shaking his hand.

  ‘So have I,’ he said, holding on to her hand for longer than necessary. Willow could feel it sweating slightly. ‘I hope that we can have more – and that if you need any more copy for your detective story you will ring me. Here’s my extension number,’ said Michael, offering her a small piece of paper. Willow took it, thanked him and left the restaurant without reciprocating.

  As she walked down the Haymarket towards Trafalgar Square and the bus stop she wanted, she thought that the last person she would contact of her own free will would be Michael Rodenhurst. He saw too much and was too free with his questions to be a safe source of information or even friendship. That was a pity, because she had both liked him and found him interesting, but it could not be helped. Willow was not going to admit anyone else into the secrets of her double life if she could help it.

  She reached her office in a mood of determined efficiency that made her voice sharply crisp and jolted her staff out of their post-lunch languor. Without letting any of them make excuses for dilatoriness or sloppy work, she spoke to most of them, looked at what they had been doing for the previous two weeks, reprimanded those who needed it, complimented one or two and retreated to her own laden desk to process all the papers that had accumulated there.

  By the time she remembered her hair appointment at Gino’s salon and the dinner party she was supposed to be attending afterwards, it was twenty-past six. Hurrying to lock away her classified papers and write a list of things for Barbara to deal with over the next two working days, Willow then ran out of the building and back to her flat.

  When she got there, she remembered with a lurch of dismay that she had done nothing about finding people to mend the roof and cursed herself, wondering whether some of Cressida’s frivolity and reliance on Mrs Rusham were infecting her in her Clapham life. There was no time to do anything that evening and so she changed into her jeans and sweater and set off for Sloane Square.

  That evening she did not gain her usual relaxation from the self-indulgence of the hairdressing and manicure. As she sat down at the basin to have her hair washed, she began to wish that she had gone home to Chesham Place first and cross-examined Mrs Rusham about who had been to the flat while she had been away. It was not so much burglars that worried her, because the alarm and all the locks ought to keep them out, as spurious officials from the council or meter-readers or anyone else that Mrs Rusham might have allowed through the front door.

  Gino, the lively gossiping owner of the establishment who always dealt with ‘Miss Woodruffe’s’ hair, was silent as though he understood that she was preoccupied. While one of his apprentices was dusting the prickly ends of hair from her neck after the cutting, Gino laid a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Please don’t let it get to you so much,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘Whatever it is will cure itself and worrying about it gives you ugly lines all over your face.’

  At that Willow’s frown broke up into a laugh and the lines fell into place.

  ‘Thanks, Gino,’ she said. ‘I needed a little common sense to sort me out. I must go. I’m late.’ She left a larger than usual tip for the apprentice, paid her bill and left in order to change into something suitable for Caroline Titchmell’s dinner.

  Remembering that it had been described as ‘informal’, she eschewed the dresses she wore when she and Richard dined together and chose a pair of comfortable black trousers made by Issey Miyake and a loose shirt of fine black-and-white-striped double poplin. Large baroque pearls set in gold in her earlobes and a heavy gold chain round her neck added the necessary touch of ostentation for a successful romantic novelist, and quickly but carefully applied makeup banished all signs of the Civil Servant.

  She had ordered a taxi as soon as she reached Chesham Place and before she could so much as read her letters or listen to the messages on her telephone answering machine, the driver rang the doorbell. Grabbing a black suede jacket and shoving money and keys into the pocket, Willow let herself out of the flat, set the alarm and double-locked the door behind her as she had done ever since her burglary and ran down the stairs.

  The taxi found his way easily to the house in Notting Hill and she was relieved to see that she was only twenty minutes late. She rang the front-door bell with an apology ready, but Ben Jonson gave her no chance to say anything.

  ‘Cressida!’ he exclaimed, as though her appearance were a wonderful surprise. She thought that he was looking a lot happier than he had done when they met at Richard’s. ‘How good that you’ve got here. I’m afraid that Richard is going to be late.’ Willow laughed.

  ‘These bankers!’ she said, but then added more seriously, ‘Surely you were expecting me?’

  ‘Yes, we were,’ he said, ushering her into a brightly lit hall, ‘but I can never manage to get over the feeling that guests won’t turn up after all: that they will have forgotten, decided that they didn’t want to come, or even that I never asked them.’

  ‘But in this case you couldn’t have worried about the last, because it was Caroline who did the inviting,’ Willow said over her shoulder, laughing kindly at him. She rather liked the honesty of his admission of insecurity, but could not quite understand the face he made at her then.

  ‘Caroline, hello,’ she added, seeing her hostess in the open doorway of what turned out to be the drawing room. ‘How nice to see you.’

  ‘And you,’ said Caroline, who was wearing a short dress of deep violet linen that set off her dark hair and made her eyes look brilliant in her pale face. ‘Come and meet Mark and Sarah Tothill. Sarah is going to do the food for my wedding.’

  Willow shook hands with Sarah, a tall handsome woman in her early thirties, and, remembering the conversation at Richard’s dinner, said something about knowing that Emma Gnatche had been working for her company.

  ‘She’s such a good girl, and all the clients like her,’ said Sarah, smiling. ‘I hate the thought of losing her when she goes off to university.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ answered Willow, and was about to ask a question about the economics of private catering when Sarah’s husband interrupted.

  ‘I think she’s about the most irritating girl I’ve ever met,’ he announced.

  ‘Little Emma?’ cried Willow. ‘How can you think that? She didn’t annoy you, did she, Ben?’ she went on, turning to include her host in the conversation. He looked nonplussed for a moment until Willow reminded him that he had met Emma at Richard Crescent’s dinner.

  ‘No,’ he said after a moment’s thought. ‘I think that as an example of the over-privileged and under-educated classes who own everything in this country, she was remarkably inoffensive.’

  There was a sourness in that answer that Willow would not have expected from someone as kind as Ben, but, remembering her own reaction to Emma’s unearned privileges when they had first met, she smiled at him. At least he had defended her protégée from Mark’s gratuitous unpleasantness. She could not imagine what Emma could have done to provoke it.

  ‘What would you like to drink, Cressida?’ asked Caroline, who clearly thought that they had talked enough about someone she hardly knew.

  ‘A glass of wine, please,’ said Willow and looked interestedly round the room. She had seen that the house was a flat-fronted, early Victorian building as she was hurrying up the four steps to the front door, and had rather expected it to have been furnished in the familiar stripped pine and swagged curtain school of interior decoration.

  The double drawing room was quite different from all her expectations. The walls were as starkly white as those of Tom Worth’s flat, but there were no other similarities. Where his rooms were austere and minimally furnished, this one contained some remarkable things. There was a very fine marquetry chest against one of the long walls, rows and rows of books along the other, some exquisite Jacobite wine glasses arrayed along the chimneypiece, and some old-fashioned, overstuffed chairs and a sofa covered in dim cretonne.
There was a fender stool upholstered in some attractive petit point, and as a final touch of eccentricity the curtains were of worn but superb antique silk brocade in a colour between red and orange and pink, which Willow recognised as ‘carnation’from her visit to Ham House.

  ‘What a wonderful room!’ she said, looking up and down it.

  ‘Rather a jumble, I’m afraid,’ said Caroline. ‘Simon would have hated it, but we both enjoy having things we like around us, whether they go together or not, don’t we, Ben?’

  ‘It seems sensible,’ he said, his voice gentle again. ‘And combining my glass and your tapestry would be impossible in any other kind of decor.’

  ‘Your tapestry?’ said Willow curiously. ‘Do you do it yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Caroline with a slight blush. ‘I find it enormously therapeutic after days dealing with infuriating people. It calms me and slows me down and makes me sane again.’

  Ben touched her cheek in a gesture of extraordinary tenderness and went out of the room saying something about fetching the wine.

  ‘There’s lots more stuff to come, though,’ said Caroline, recovering her complexion. ‘This is really the only room we’ve finished. We only moved in a month ago and haven’t yet decorated the room where we’re going to keep Ben’s masque sets; they’re exquisite and it’s important that they don’t get damaged.’

  Willow was just about to ask more when Ben reappeared and handed her a glass of red wine. At Caroline’s invitation Willow sat down in one of the big chairs between Sarah and her heavy-faced husband, who was smoking a small cigar, which Willow thought was quite as offensive as his remark about Emma had been.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s only Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon,’ said Caroline, watching Willow sip her wine.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with that,’ said Willow, who always drank it herself in Clapham. She assumed that Caroline, who could obviously well afford better wine, had adjusted her tastes to her fiancé’s means so as not to underline her financial superiority. On her left Mark said sotto voce: