Bloody Roses

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Anything. Locked them in his private safe that evening and smuggled them out in a briefcase later. Opened up his antique astral globe and dumped them there. Your colleagues,’ she added drily, ‘clearly never thought of searching the place.’

  ‘With Crescent covered in blood and his fingerprints all over the murder weapon, it’s hardly surprising.’

  Very coldly indeed, Willow said: ‘They ought to have listened to his story and checked it.’

  Tom reached out for one of her hands. Willow put them both in her lap.

  ‘Come on, Will. Be reasonable. It’s a ludicrous story. You must see that.’

  ‘But that’s exactly why they should have checked it,’ she said, feeling deeply critical of her own doubts again. ‘Surely no one of Richard’s wit and brains would invent a story quite as stupidly unconvincing as his.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but why on earth would the chief executive have wanted to kill Mrs Allfarthing? And even if he had, why do it at the bank?’

  ‘God knows. The secretaries undoubtedly believe that he was in love with Sarah, as do most of the other employees, although he denies it. He cleverly told me that he had tried to ring Sarah up about eight, when he discovered that his wife was not going to the dance after all, and he told me that he thought Sarah must have gone because she didn’t answer. As it turns out, she could really have been dead by then.’

  ‘It sounds pretty unlikely,’ said Tom. ‘You must see that.’

  ‘Oh, I do, but at least there’s a possibility now that we could shake Moreby’s case. Admit that.’

  ‘All right, I’ll admit it. But I don’t think you’d get very far in court.’

  ‘Nor would she, trying to pin down the time of death like that. From what my medical source has told me, any decent pathologist could throw doubt on it.’

  ‘All right. Then what about the smell?’ asked Tom.

  As though disregarding his own question, Tom picked up a sandwich and began to eat. Willow, who remembered her own vivid imaginings when she studied the police photographs, knew just what he meant.

  ‘Richard was very preoccupied when he got back from New York,’ she said slowly, ‘and he dashed into the office in an enormous hurry. He might easily not have noticed the smell of blood. There’s a very efficient air-circulation system. There are people in that department who smoke and yet I’ve never been conscious of the smell of their cigarettes.’

  She, too, chose another sandwich and refilled her tea-cup.

  Tom watched her and recognized in her uncharacteristic excitement the relief of serious anxiety. Although he longed to protect her from the discovery of Richard’s guilt, which he knew would almost break her, there was nothing he could do. He changed the subject abruptly by asking her what she thought of the book reviews in the day’s newspapers.

  Willow allowed herself to be diverted and their day together began to improve as they talked. When Tom hugged her just as he was about to leave, Willow let herself relax against him and even began to feel the sensations her body had denied them both earlier. Feeling it himself, he let his hands move to her breasts. The crispness of the cotton could not disguise their sudden response. Willow gasped.

  He pulled back a little way so that he could gesture to the closed door of her bedroom. There was an amusingly enquiring smile in his eyes. After a moment Willow nodded and led the way.

  Later the next day, when he had gone, happy and in love, Willow settled down to telephone Emma Gnatche.

  ‘I’d have rung you myself but I didn’t want to disturb you.’ Emma’s voice was breathless with terror or excitement.

  ‘I know. But I’m longing to hear how it all went.’

  ‘Are you alone?’ As Emma asked her question, Willow realized that the breathlessness might have been caused by embarrassment and felt herself blushing slightly.

  ‘Yes. Come on, what did you discover?’

  ‘Well! Quite a lot, actually. At first Jeanine was weepy and full of her mother’s praises, but after a bit we got talking and I … I …’

  ‘What’s the matter, Emma?’

  ‘Well, I said some pretty awful things about my own mother, and I wish I hadn’t.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Em, she’ll never know and saying them probably helped Jeanine.’

  ‘It certainly got her talking.’ The dry, half-amused tone reminded Willow that although Emma was young and in many ways astonishingly naive, she had never been stupid.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Disentangling the useful facts from the guilt, resentment and self-justification, I think the most important thing she told me was that her mother used people and manipulated them into doing things for her.’

  ‘A lot of successful people do that, either with cajolery or the threat of anger or withdrawal of patronage.’ Willow hoped that she was not sounding contemptuous or superior.

  ‘This sounded a bit different. Jeanine said that her mother flirted until the men she needed succumbed to her charms and then went cold on them and forced them to compete for her favour. She also said that her mother was terribly selfish and made Mr Allfarthing live a miserable life without her while she swanned about completing her machinations.’

  Willow thought of all she had read and written about daughters and their fathers. She herself had neverhad the opportunity of intervening between her parents and was rather glad of it, but she had met and read of several couples who were being driven apart by their daughters. In almost every case the gravamen of the daughter’s charge was that her mother was making her father unhappy. The possibility that the reverse might be true never seemed to occur to those crusading girls; nor did the thought that their interventions might make matters worse.

  ‘Nothing Mr Allfarthing said or did suggested that his wife made him unhappy while she lived,’ said Willow, feeling both sorry for Sarah and relieved that she herself had no daughters. ‘By the way, did Jeanine say anything about her mother’s health?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘I asked whether there had been any problems.’

  ‘Well done!’

  ‘Thanks. It seemed quite an obvious question to ask.’ Emma sounded surprised.

  Willow smiled in appreciation and pushed herself more comfortably back into her long sofa.

  ‘And she told me that her mother had had no more than the usual colds and flu and a few gynaecological problems.’

  Willow was silent, trying to make use of that information.

  ‘I did ask,’ said Emma, sounding embarrassed again, ‘whether she thought that any of those might have been, well … the result of any of her flirtations.’

  Willow could not help smiling at Emma’s mixture of practicality and tentativeness.

  ‘Did she give you any kind of answer?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She was quite open about it and said that her mother was too cold to let any of her adorers sleep with her.’

  ‘She does sound a nice, affectionate girl.’

  ‘Don’t be like that, Cressida. She’s awfully unhappy. And it does sound as though her mother was pretty beastly to her.’

  ‘In what way?’ Willow was surprised to find herself identifying with Sarah Allfarthing and tried to moderate her partisanship.

  ‘Oh, making all kinds of rules that she herself would never have dreamed of keeping; sneering at Jeanine’s spots; trying to make her dress as though she were forty, too; forcing her to work for one of the adorers. Urn …’

  There was a sound of paper rustling. Willow waited.

  ‘A man called James Certes. He’s the partner at Blenkort & Wilson who Jeanine does most of her work for. Apparently he’d do anything for Mrs Allfarthing: recommend clients, help her out of scrapes, anything.’

  ‘Did Jeanine say what he was like?’

  ‘Only that he’s incredibly demanding and makes her do all sorts of unoffice chores for him. And he insists that she and the other temps and clerks hang about in case something comes up even when there’s no urgent work. She had to wait for him on the night it hap
pened so that he could dictate a whole lot of notes about his meeting at the bank when he came back. Whenever she protested he told her it was good for her to discover what real life is like. She thinks her mother told him to force her to work hard and she can’t wait to go.’

  ‘Is she leaving?’

  ‘Not before the agreed time. She said she’ll stick it out until the end of the summer and then never go near a firm of lawyers again.’

  Willow sat up straighter. ‘What’s she going to do? Her father told me she was planning to be a solicitor.’

  ‘Well, actually, she wants to be a chef and so I’ve promised to introduce her to Sarah Tothill, who can give her some good advice. But you must promise not to tell her father anything about it. He’s too loyal to his wife to take the news properly quite yet.’

  ‘Emma, you’ve done really well. Thank you.’

  ‘There’s lots more and I’ve been trying to type it up, but my machine’s gone on the blink. I did wonder.’

  She left Willow to interpret the elliptical sentence.

  ‘Whether you could use my word processor? Certainly: Come tomorrow, if you like. I’ve got to go out early to sit in at a bank meeting, but Mrs Rusham will let you in. Use the telephone, the photocopier, whatever you want. She’ll feed you.’

  ‘Gosh, super! Thanks, Cressida.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Before she left for the bank at seven thirty on Monday morning, Willow typed and faxed a letter to Martin Roylandson asking him to get his pathologist to check whether the condition of Sarah Allfarthing’s blood provided any real evidence of the time of her death and whether she suffered from a lack of Vitamin K or any other deficiency that would affect the clotting time. Willow then scribbled a note for Emma and left the flat.

  Reaching the bank with ten minutes to spare before the meeting, Willow took the time to stand just inside the doors of the Corporate Finance Department, trying to imagine Richard rushing in and turning to his right without noticing that there was anything wrong. It was perfectly true that no one at the door would be able to see past the big baffle behind the secretaries’desks. But could anyone have failed to smell all that blood? Could anyone have avoided noticing the splashes that must have extended beyond the line of the screen?

  Willow wished that she had brought the photographs with her. She was fairly sure that there had been blood at least two foot away from Sarah’s desk.

  ‘The carpet’s dark grey,’ she told herself angrily. ‘It might have been impossible to see blood against it. And he was in a hurry.’

  ‘You all right, Miss King?’

  Willow started and looked to her right. Jeremy Stedington stood there, his arms full of files and papers. She had neither heard nor seen him until he appeared round the screen.

  ‘Fine,’ she said sternly. ‘Am I late?’

  ‘No, but you do look faint and –’

  ‘I’ll be perfectly all right. Is it time to go down? I’ll dump my briefcase. Just a moment.’ Willow walked round to Sarah’s carrel and laid down her black case, leaning heavily on the edge of the desk as she waited for her head to clear.

  She swallowed down the hot saliva that had filled her mouth, took a comb out of her handbag to tidy her hair, and turned her back on the place where Sarah had died.

  ‘You still look pretty white.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Jeremy. Just occasionally I feel horribly sick when I think of what that poor woman went through. Sometimes I even feel as though it might have happened to me.’ She laughed to drive out the fantasy, but she neither was nor sounded amused.

  ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have given you her desk,’ he said, ‘but, as I told you, I knew it would help the department’s jitters if they saw someone coming and going there normally. I watched Maggie walk quite close to the chair on Friday without turning a hair. The strategy is working, but it’s rough on you.’

  ‘Good. Poor things,’ she said absently. ‘Jeremy, why are the desks arranged in that bizarre fashion? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a passage down the middle and let at least half the staff look out at the daylight?’

  ‘We tried that,’ he said, holding open one of the double doors for her. ‘But it didn’t work well. The partitions between the desks were lower, too, and the boys complained that they could never concentrate on their documents. This way, they get more of an illusion that they’re on their own while not sacrificing the proximity necessary to keep everyone abreast of what they need to know. And they can always turn-round and see the daylight.’

  ‘Those on the right, anyway. How is that fixed? Who are the ones who get daylight behind them?’

  Jeremy Stedington shrugged, but he looked slightly self-conscious, too. ‘A variety of reasons. Pecking order, mostly.’

  ‘So Richard was higher in that than Sarah?’

  The lift doors swished open and Willow preceded her escort into the lift.

  ‘Good Lord, yes!’

  ‘That sounds very emphatic,’ she said, gritting her teeth as she remembered Chief Inspector Moreby’s contempt for Richard. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, he was a lot more experienced; done some bloody good deals, Richard; and he was –’

  ‘One of the boys?’ Despite her partisanship, Willow could not help sounding a little sarcastic. Stedington’s face flushed.

  ‘I was going to say “one of us”, which is not the same but which you might have misunderstood even so. Here we are. Come on; mustn’t be late.’

  Willow hurried after him and at the doors of the meeting room she grasped his left sleeve.

  ‘Jeremy, stop. This is really important. What did you mean? Why wasn’t Sarah Allfarthing one of you?’

  ‘Cressida,’ he said, throwing discretion to the winds. ‘This is my job. I must concentrate on the meeting. We can talk afterwards if you like. But, please, don’t distract me now.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  They walked in to the room, where a plump, smiling woman in her fifties was sitting talking happily to a slight man in a dark suit.

  ‘Mrs Zelland,’ said Stedington in the voice of a child presented with a new bicycle at Christmas, ‘how good to see you.’

  ‘Jeremy. I do hope you’re feeling better.’

  ‘Very much, thank you. May I introduce you to Miss King? She’s not one of us,’ he said and stopped for a second. ‘But she’s observing the way we do things here with a view to advising us on our training needs. Miss King, this is Hughina Zelland.’

  Willow was already extending her hand towards the client when Jeremy pronounced her name and the shock of it made her pull it back.

  ‘I know; isn’t it ridiculous?’ said Mrs Zelland, holding out her hand.

  Willow managed a short laugh and shook the hand, which felt soft but quite dry. ‘Not at all,’ she said, recovering her composure, ‘merely surprising.’

  ‘It was my father. He wanted a son and by the time I was born – I was the sixth, you see – he knew he’d have to make do with me.’

  ‘Yes, I see. And what is it that your company does, makes?’

  Mrs Zelland smiled and Jeremy Stedington hastened to explain.

  ‘Mrs Zelland owns Powers and Jenkinsons.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Willow involuntarily. She knew perfectly well that Powers, which had once been a small but effective textile concern in the north of England, had expanded under its present management until it not only supplied many of the major chains with clothes, and owned its own shops and factories under a variety of names and in several countries, but also extended into other industries.

  ‘You’ve kept yourself well out of the public eye, Mrs Zelland,’ said Willow, thinking of the lunches, the interviews and all the other efforts designed to publicize the achievements of women in business.

  ‘And it’s to stay that way,’ she said, still smiling comfortably, but with a flash of determination in her eyes.

  ‘Naturally,’ said Willow coolly. To emphasize her independence, she turned to the young man who
had been sitting quietly at the conference table and recognized him.

  ‘Oh, yes, and this is James Certes,’ Stedington said as the doors opened and a group of people were ushered in by one of the uniformed receptionists.

  ‘We’ve met,’ said Willow, examining him far more closely than she had at their first encounter.

  ‘So we have,’ the lawyer agreed, as he stood up to shake hands.

  Willow thought that he was a surprising figure. From the descriptions of him as one of Sarah’s admirers, Willow would have expected him to be at least the same age as the dead woman, but he looked as though he were in his middle thirties at the most. He was dressed in an oddly unconventional suit: baggy and too long in the leg. It was the kind of suit that men in television or possibly publishing and journalism might have worn and as different as possible from the pinstriped convention. Willow thought that he looked just the kind of man likely to appeal to a tetchy adolescent like Jeanine and wondered whether Sarah might really have asked him to give her daughter a hard time.

  Watching him as he said something suitably polite to her, Willow thought of one reason why he might have chosen to dress so oddly. He was not only slight but short as well; his smooth hair was angelically fair and his face beautifully modelled. The catchphrase ‘small but perfectly formed’might have been invented for him, and Willow could well imagine the diffidence he might feel among the huge, powerfully built men she had met in the Corporate Finance Department. At first sight Certes’s trendy clothes were more noticeable than his shortness and made him look different rather than insignificant.

  Having shaken his hand, Willow turned back to Jeremy Stedington, who introduced her to the new arrivals: two bankers from a much bigger and better-known merchant bank, their client, who owned some dreary, cheap clothes retailers, and his lawyer.

  ‘There don’t seem to be many of you today,’ said one of the bankers, a young man called Andrew Crants, with a disparaging smile. He was accustomed to big deals and disliked the sensation that his less important rivals had the better client.

  ‘We’re two short at the moment,’ answered Stedington, sounding harsh.