Bloody Roses

by Natasha Cooper

  Taking the dark-red booklet off the shelf in front of her, Willow found Jeremy’s extension number and got through to his office.

  ‘Do you know the password for this machine?’ she asked. ‘You don’t need a password to operate it. If you’re having problems, ask Maggie. She’ll help.’ Stedington sounded thoroughly irritable.

  Willow patiently – and very quietly – explained why she wanted the password and eventually Stedington agreed to try to get hold of it for her. Frustrated, Willow typed in her own message to Annabel, the chief executive’s secretary, requesting a meeting. When she pressed the buttons to send the message the machine offered an elaborate ritual for creating a new password, which she completed. She then spent half an hour roughing out headings for her training report in order to put enough into the computer to establish her alibi at the bank.

  Towards the end of the morning she had mastered the graphics facility of the computer and drawn up a series of impressive-looking charts with lists of multiple-choice questions to be addressed to each category of staff. Each of the four possible answers to the first question led on to the next layer of questions and eventually to a neatly boxed recommendation for training. Once the charts had been completed, Willow would be able to present the bank with an easily read analysis of the staff’s existing skills and the areas in which they needed more expertise.

  She walked round the thick screen to talk to the secretaries to find out how to print her lists and charts in sufficient numbers to distribute around the Corporate Finance Department.

  ‘Maggie,’ she started. The girl looked up with a professionally helpful smile that only made her look more miserable. ‘I wonder whether we could fix a time when you might not be too busy so that we can talk.’

  The helpfulness was diluted by a slightly harassed frown.

  ‘I’ve got a huge report to finish, actually. I’m staying late tonight. I don’t think –’

  ‘That’s fine. It doesn’t have to be today. When you can see a short gap, why not pop round to my cubbyhole?’

  ‘Oh, if that’s all right, of course I will.’ She was already laying her fingers back on the keys as she finished speaking.

  Willow agreed with Stedington’s assessment of her attitude and turned to the other secretary.

  ‘Tracy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. I’m not too busy to talk at all.’

  ‘Excellent. Then perhaps you could help me with these.’ Willow explained what she needed and Tracy showed her where both the printers and the photocopiers were housed. While one of the machines was spitting out a pile of questionnaires, Willow said:

  ‘You have been helpful, Tracy. Have you got plans for lunchtime, or could I take you out? We could have a chat over a drink somewhere.’

  The girl looked rather surprised but after a moment she picked a piece of sticky mascara off one of her eyelashes and said, shrugging:

  ‘Okay. That’d be great. One o’clock?’

  Willow looked at her slim watch and noticed with a sinking feeling that she had not changed Cressida’s gold Cartier for Willow’s more utilitarian watch. For the first time in her life she hoped that anyone who noticed it would think that it was a fake.

  ‘It’s twenty to one now; why don’t we go off as soon as the printing has been done? It’s work, after all.’

  Nothing loath, Tracy picked up the pile of paper as soon as the machine had stopped, removed her key card from it and escorted Willow back to her desk. Having collected their handbags, they left the building and went, at Tracy’s suggestion, to a cocktail bar she liked. There she asked for a cheeseburger and chips and a sickly-sounding mixture of amaretto, coconut cream, grenadine and gin. Willow suppressed any comment and ordered a spritzer and a smoked-fish salad for herself.

  As soon as the drinks were brought to their table, she said: ‘I know that you’re leaving the bank, Tracy, and I expect that because of that you can give me some very useful help.’

  Tracy removed her lips from the bent and highly decorated straw that protruded from her viscous drink. ‘Why’s that?’ she asked, looking stubborn.

  ‘One of the things that executive staff often lack,’ said Willow smiling brightly, ‘is the art of delegation and proper use of support staff. From what I’ve seen at the bank, I think it is possible that you and Maggie have to put up with a lot of frustrations.’

  ‘Sometimes.’ Tracy applied herself to the straw once more.

  Willow watched her, noticing the narrow, peaky-looking face, the exaggeratedly long brown leather jacket that looked so incongruous over the short skirt and white, high-heeled shoes. Willow tried to imagine herself as Tracy in order to think of ways to break through her obstructive shortness. Eventually, with a mixture of flattery and artificial sympathy culled from the dimly remembered complaints of her own typists at DOAP, she managed to find a key to Tracy’s dissatisfactions. Then the only difficulty was to control the flow and pick out from it something that might be useful.

  Among other things, Willow learned that although all the corporate financiers were difficult and demanding and unreasonable in the way they used secretarial time, Sarah Allfarthing had been the worst; that Maggie had always sucked up to her and received unfairly favourable treatment; that Tracy couldn’t wait to leave the bank and had a far better job lined up with a firm of solicitors called Blenkort & Wilson; and that among the things she had done that had made Mrs Allfarthing angry was sending some confidential documents in an envelope addressed to the wrong recipient.

  Willow sat listening to the outpouring and felt her sympathy for the murdered woman growing with almost every word. She watched Tracy in amazement as she reached the end of her puddinglike cocktail and sat up straight again, twirling the paper parasol between her fingers.

  ‘I had heard that Mrs Allfarthing was a particularly popular woman,’ Willow said. ‘Would you like another drink?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t mind. Like I said, Maggie liked her, but I thought she was really awful. I shouldn’t say so now she’s dead and I’m really sorry about that. I am. Really. But I never wanted to work for a woman. They’re always worst. I get on fine with all the men, but she just liked finding fault. I don’t know what they all saw in her.’

  Willow signalled to the waitress, who stopped chatting to her friend behind the bar and came to take the order. When she had gone, Willow turned back to Tracy.

  ‘I don’t quite understand. What did who see in her?’

  ‘All the men; they were all in love with her. Or else pretending to be.’

  ‘All of them?’ Willow’s smile and mocking voice made Tracy’s sharp little face flush.

  ‘Most. They all took her out to lunch and gave her presents and flowers. Roses. Bloody roses arrived twice a week.’ Tracy spread out her hands and pointed to two fading marks. ‘I used to hurt myself doing her horrible flowers.’

  ‘How irritating for you. Who sent the roses?’

  ‘It could have been any of them: even Mr B himself. She called him “Mr Big”. Or it could have been Bill Beeking. D’you know?

  He was always going through her diary and her wastepaper basket when she was out.’

  ‘Why on earth?’ Willow was too interested to take much notice of the relish in Tracy’s face.

  ‘To see who else she was having lunch with, of course. She really played them off against each other, you see. Drove them mad, in my opinion. I think that’s what happened to poor Richard Crescent.’

  Willow took a draught of her cool drink to calm herself.

  ‘Do you mean that you think he killed her?’ she enquired.

  ‘Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? The police know he did it and he was all covered in blood, after all. They say that his fingers were actually dripping with it, as though he’d – you know – felt about in her cut throat.’

  Willow felt sick. Tracy seemed to notice nothing amiss. She picked up her second drink and took a good suck at the straw.

  ‘She was asking for it, if you ask
me,’ she went on when she had freed her lips. ‘I wasn’t surprised that something happened even if I didn’t ever suspect that he’d kill her: all that flirting to make him jealous and then spoiling his deal like that. She asked for it.’

  Before Willow could protest, the waitress returned with their food. Willow picked at the minute piece of smoked salmon that lay in the middle of her salad, rejected the large, oily slab of orange smoked mackerel and tried to eat the lettuce and cucumber that filled the rest of the plate.

  ‘She wasn’t so clever either, for all the airs she gave herself,’ said Tracy, breaking the silence.

  She took the top bun off her burger, added a large splutter of tomato ketchup from a squeezable bottle and put the bun back.

  ‘She was always losing and forgetting things,’ she said as soon as she had swallowed her mouthful. ‘I sometimes used to think she’d forget her own name.’

  ‘What can you mean?’ Willow drank some of her mouth-puckering white wine and was relieved that it had been diluted with soda water.

  ‘Well! For a start she often couldn’t remember the combination of her briefcase locks. They all get them, you see, after they’ve been at the bank for four years. Black leather briefcases with those programmable locks. They decide on the lock numbers themselves, and she chose 987654, because she always used a series of numbers like that for anything where she needed to remember a code, but even so she couldn’t always remember which number she started the series with. She was always having to ask Maggie or me. And I once caught her kicking at the doors, you know, because she’d forgotten the code that opens them. And once she even had her cash card swallowed by the bank because she couldn’t get her own pin number right. And then she carried on as though she was the brain of Britain. I mean!’

  Willow listened, unable to imagine the efficient clever, admired banker that Richard had described having such trouble with code numbers: If it were true there must be an explanation, but none occurred to Willow. Perhaps Sarah’s mind had always been too full of other things to remember all the different codes she needed; or perhaps her forgetting them had been some kind of psychological resistance to, or defence against, the extraordinary world in which she had worked. After sitting in silence for a few minutes, staring unseeing at Tracy’s face. Willow asked another question that set the girl talking again.

  It was well after half past two before they returned to the bank, by which time Willow had had her fill of Tracy Blank and firmly sympathized with the dead woman’s reputed impatience with her. How a girl of such limited intelligence and such obvious laziness had avoided being sacked, Willow could not understand. But Tracy had been useful.

  She had made it quite clear that Sarah Allfarthing had enjoyed the attentions of her male colleagues, allowed them to take her out to extravagant restaurants for lunch and to give her flowers and presents. It sounded as though Emma had been right in suggesting that the main applicants for Sarah’s favours had been young Mr Beeking, a bachelor who had been at the bank a year less than Sarah herself, and the chief executive, whose wife, according to Tracy, was a skinny, spendthrift socialite who had no time for him.

  That afternoon Willow made a point of watching Tracy work and discovered that she was in fact a perfectly efficient and quite quick typist. If her work were confined to typing and photocopying it would have no scope for devastating mistakes and she might well be an adequately useful member of the department.

  Walking back to her miniature office, Willow began to think that what Tracy lacked might be imagination more than actual intelligence. She clearly found it impossible to put herself in anyone else’s position or to think of the consequences of what she or anyone else might say, but that was something she shared with numberless people of considerable intelligence.

  Pushing aside her analysis of Tracy’s character for the moment, Willow worked on her ideas for executive training for a while and then sat, trying to sort out the questions she would have to ask to get at the truth of what had happened on Friday evening. The buzzing of the telephone interrupted her and she answered it to find the chief executive’s secretary offering her a meeting at nine fifteen the following morning.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Willow at once. ‘That would be splendid.’

  Putting the receiver back, she fell to wondering whether Jeremy Stedington had been one of Sarah Allfarthing’s many suitors. Willow got the chance to ask him herself that evening when he came round to her carrel at six o’clock to give her the list of people whom the security men could remember having left the building late on the evening of the dance.

  He handed it to her, saying: ‘I’m afraid it won’t be much help. These two chaps will be on morning duty for the next two weeks and so if you need to ask anything, you’ll get them between half past seven and noon. The dance list will be sent down in the morning. How did you get on with young Tracy? I saw you taking her out.’

  ‘Did you?’ Willow pushed back her chair, enjoying the smoothness of its casters after the elderly and less comfortable chair she had had at DOAP, and put the list into her briefcase. ‘Have you got a minute?’

  ‘Plenty. As I said, all my deals are held up at the moment. Come into the office.’

  Willow followed his tall figure past the carrels where shirt-sleeved men were telephoning, tapping figures into their computers, sweating over proofs of offer documents, reading the cricket scores off their Reuter’s screens or telling each other hair-raising jokes.

  ‘What was she really like?’ asked Willow when they were alone in Jeremy’s office.

  ‘Sarah?’ said Jeremy, opening a cupboard and taking out a pair of glasses. ‘You will have a glass of wine, won’t you?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘She was in her early forties,’ he said, removing the cork from a bottle of 1982 Château Le Grolet with neat-fingered efficiency, ‘very good-looking, quite good at her job, good company, not at all what we’d been afraid of.’

  ‘What was that?’

  Stedington grinned at Willow over his dark-grey houlder as he poured out the wine. He put down the lottle and brought her a glassful.

  ‘She was the first woman in Corporate Finance here and most of the boys were afraid she’d be a ballbreaker or a siren. But she wasn’t either of those.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ Willow muttered into her drink. Then she looked up. ‘Everyone talks of her with respect and affection – except for Tracy that is – and yet someone hated her enough to kill her. How do you explain that if she was really such a paragon?’

  Stedington took a deep swallow of wine. He looked at Willow rather as though she were a traffic warden writing a ticket for his car: resentful, slightly ashamed and therefore angry.

  ‘Of course she wasn’t a paragon,’ he said sharply.

  ‘No one working here could be. The job needs other talents.’ He gave a short, sharp laugh. ‘She was ruthless and ambitious – like the rest of us – but that doesn’t make her murder excusable.’

  There was genuine fury in his eyes and Willow hastily told him that she considered no murder was excusable unless in self-defence.

  ‘Clearly there was no question of that here.’

  ‘No,’ Willow agreed. ‘But what about suicide? That does seem to be the most likely explanation given all the looked doors.’

  Stedington thought for a while.

  ‘I can’t see it myself,’ he said at last. ‘She was so sensible.’

  ‘So everyone tells me, but what if something happened to threaten her? She had a demanding life but it sounds like a very satisfactory one: high-paying job, devoted husband, healthy, clever daughter. What if…?’

  Willow broke off, putting Sarah Allfarthing in the position of one of the characters in her books. After a moment she looked up and smiled.

  ‘Perhaps she had been told she had a terminal illness and she couldn’t face it. Per –’

  ‘If she couldn’t face that, she’d hardly have the courage to slit her own throat, would she?’
<
br />   Willow remembered vividly that one of the reasons Richard had given her for disbelieving in the suicide theory was that Sarah was too courageous for it.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Then perhaps she had succumbed to one of the suitors and found herself pregnant.’

  Stedington looked at her as she had been tempted to look at Tracy. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Sarah could have dealt with that easily.’

  ‘What about some professional misdemeanour from early in her career? Isn’t that possible? What if someone were blackmailing her – threatening to have her blacklisted by the Bank of England? She sounds far too good a woman to kill a blackmailer. Perhaps she could not face the disgrace.’

  ‘That’s the only one so far that has the remotest flicker of plausibility,’ said Stedington, ‘but I still don’t believe it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Far too unlikely,’ said Stedington instantly before taking a moment to sort out his ideas. ‘She wasn’t the kind to go in for misdemeanours: too honest. Occasionally more honest than the letter of the law actually demands, which could be tiresome. Besides,’ he added more slowly, ‘she was always making jokes about blackmail. She’d never have done that if she was a victim herself.’

  ‘What sort of jokes?’ Hearing the sharpness in her own voice made Willow say: ‘Sorry to sound like an interrogator, but you surprised me. Can you give me an example?’

  Stedington shrugged, his powerful shoulders making themselves visible through the tailor’s buckram and padding in his suit.

  ‘The kind of thing we all say all day, you know: “Come on, Bill, if you help Ben call over these listing particulars I won’t tell about you and the woman at Bognor.” Meaningless teasing. Stuff that oils the wheels and stops people getting irritable when one has to make them do tedious and repetitive work.’

  Willow considered her own office career and decided that merchant banks must be very different indeed from the civil service. She also wondered how one or two of her Treasury colleagues had managed to adjust when they swapped their government safety and mingy salaries for the excitement and dizzying rewards of the private sector.