Bloody Roses

by Natasha Cooper

  Mr Crants winced and flushed slightly as he remembered what had happened to Sarah Allfarthing.

  ‘There’ll be plenty of backup when we need it,’ said Jeremy dismissively. ‘Let’s not waste time. Our client is not prepared to offer work to all the staff or to take over, certain outstanding liabilities. I will summarize …’

  Willow’s mind slipped. She had no interest in whether Mrs Zelland was going to extend her empire or at what price. What did interest her was the way the meeting was conducted and how tempers might be raised. As she sat half listening and watching avidly, she tried to picture that other meeting when Richard’s latent violence had been aroused.

  Once she caught James Certes looking at her with interest and she quickly made a meaningless note on the lined pad she held in her lap. A little later she caught Jeremy’s eye and was surprised when he winked. After that she studiously avoided eye contact with anyone.

  Halfway through the morning the temperature of the meeting had begun to rise and Mrs Zelland to show considerable restlessness. People began to make excuses to leave the room for a moment, as though they needed a chance to regain their self-control, and Willow began to listen more closely.

  ‘It’s perfectly clear what she’s trying to do,’ said the other side’s client in an unpleasantly nasal London accent. ‘She wants the sites. She’s no interest in the workrooms or the staff or the good will we’ve built up in south London over a hundred and fifty years. She’s going to asset strip, and –’

  ‘You have no assets,’ said Mrs Zelland coldly. All traces of motherliness had gone and she looked every inch a top profitmaker. ‘Your shops are dismal and need gutting and complete refitting. Your workroom machinery is out of date. Your staff is ill-trained and has the lowest morale in the business.’

  She sat back. The man opposite her reddened and seemed to swell, as though someone were pumping him up with compressed air. Willow was interested to see young James Certes lay a hand on his client’s wrist and gently squeeze it.

  ‘If you think it’s all so frightful, why the hell have you been buying up the shares and putting me through all this?’ demanded her opponent.

  Mrs Zelland smiled. ‘Because I hate to see anything so badly managed,’ she said. ‘And south London needs something better than you’ve given them. They’re not charladies any more, you know.’

  Four people started to talk in tones of outrage.

  ‘If I might interrupt.’ James Certes spoke quietly but there was something about his confidence that stopped the others.

  Willow listened as he calmed them all down and proceeded to suggest a solution to the various difficulties. Jeremy Stedington followed his lead and the meeting slowly sank towards a consensus. There were still a few legal niceties to be discussed when Mrs Zelland announced that she had spent enough time on a small matter and needed her lunch.

  ‘What a good idea, Hughina,’ said James Certes with a charming smile. ‘Why don’t you let Jeremy take you away? I’ll fiddle through all the tedious details with Andrew, Tom and Jonathan.’

  ‘Excellent.’ Mrs Zelland turned to Willow, who was sitting writing more meaningless notes. ‘Miss King? I’m sure you don’t need to watch the lawyers pick nits all afternoon. Why not come and witness some client management?’

  Laughing, Willow looked towards Jeremy Stedington, who nodded slightly.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Zelland. I’d like that immensely.’

  While the client was in the lavatory, Willow turned to Stedington.

  ‘Sarah was the dog on this deal, wasn’t she?’ she asked, having picked up the bank’s pejorative term for the junior members of the Corporate Finance teams.

  ‘Not really the dog, you know. That was Beeking; we just didn’t need him today. Sarah was an assistant director, after all.’

  ‘Sorry. I hadn’t appreciated quite the degrees of doggedness. But she was working for you on the deal?’

  ‘Yes. I thought you might get something useful from watching the residue she’s left. I’ll have an urgent telephone call to make at some stage during lunch and you can cross-examine the client about her.’

  ‘You’re a brick, Jeremy. Now tell me quickly before she comes back: why wasn’t Sarah one of you?’

  ‘She didn’t muck in,’ he said. ‘We’re all out for ourselves –’

  ‘Naturally.’

  He smiled slightly. ‘But she was ferocious in defence of her own territory – and … and she lived by different rules; wouldn’t work the same hours, didn’t drink with the boys, that sort of thing.’

  ‘In fact she was a woman,’ said Willow, thinking rather bitterly of the different attitudes obtaining in the bank and the world outside it. To Sarah’s husband the hours she had worked seemed very long, and yet to her fellow bankers she had been a slacker.

  Stedington only shrugged, but his face looked angry. Before Willow could say any more, Mrs Zelland re-emerged and they all went out to lunch.

  Willow learned very little about Sarah Allfarthing from the encounter, but she did discover during Jeremy’s diplomatic absence that he was in the process of a particularly messy and unhappy divorce.

  ‘I hadn’t realized,’ Willow said quickly. ‘No wonder he’s taken some of my frivolously feminist remarks so badly.’

  ‘He’s been deeply unhappy. From his point of view poor Sarah’s tragedy has not been altogether bad.’

  Willow was still finding it difficult to relate Mrs Zelland’s soft plumpness, her pearls and her old-fashioned perm to her ruthless mind, and she remembered Martin Roylandson’s having accused her of judging by appearances. Gathering her wits, she asked in what way the murder had helped Jeremy.

  ‘Sarah had been carrying him through the last few deals they did together. I’m not sure how much he understood it, but her absence has certainly forced him to concentrate again.’ Mrs Zelland’s eyes looked uncomfortably shrewd.

  ‘Did she have anything to do with the divorce?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought so. I’m the last person to deny that powerful feelings do grow between people who work together.’ Mrs Zelland looked down at a magnificent sapphire on her left hand with a bitter expression. ‘But those two showed no signs of it.’

  ‘What are the signs?’ Willow was interested, both as novelist and investigator.

  Mrs Zelland’s eyes twinkled, the bitterness receded and she looked once more like someone rehearsing for the part of a sweet old lady.

  ‘The odd catching of eyes, avoidance of physical contact, picking up each other’s half-spoken sentences, knowing too much about each other’s past and interests: that sort of thing. It’s hard to categorize but unmistakable when you see it.’

  ‘You sound pretty convincing,’ said Willow and then, remembering that she was supposed to be interested in training, asked: ‘Does it affect efficiency?’

  ‘I’d have said: inevitably. At the beginning it heightens everything wonderfully. Both parties will work harder and better, partly because the sexual spurt gives them added interest in their jobs and partly to preen before the beloved; but later both tendencies slacken. I think it’s always a mistake in the end. And when it is the end, of course they tend to be wiped out for a time, completely useless and desperately unhappy. People should be warned to look out for it in themselves and in their subordinates and stamp it out at once.’

  ‘I suspect you’re right,’ said Willow. ‘It’s an aspect of management training that we don’t normally address.’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Zelland drily. ‘I don’t suppose you do.

  But it’s becoming more important now that women are establishing themselves in less and less subservient jobs.’

  ‘Do you think it had some part to play in the tragedy here?’ Willow asked.

  ‘I suspect it may have.’

  ‘Do you believe in the police’s suspect?’

  ‘I never met him. James always insisted that we have Sarah as the assistant director on our deals.’

  ‘What a pity,’
said Willow with obvious sincerity. Mrs Zelland looked at her once again and Willow longed to be able to tell her the truth and ask for advice. There were brains behind that placid exterior that even Willow could admire, and a detachment that she envied.

  ‘I wonder what’s happened to Jeremy,’ she said.

  ‘Keeping out of our way for a bit,’ said Mrs Zelland.

  ‘He doesn’t much like women at the moment, poor boy.

  I suspect he’ll skip the rest of lunch and drag you back to the office when he comes back.’

  ‘Before he does, will you tell me one thing?’

  ‘If I can.’

  ‘Was there something going on between James Certes and poor Sarah? It seems curious otherwise that he should have particularly asked for her on his deals.’

  ‘He was a lot younger than she – not that that means much,’ said Mrs Zelland. ‘I’d often wondered, and when I saw how badly her death affected him I did think he might have cared for her. You won’t have noticed, because he’s adept at keeping his face, but he’s been quite, quite desperate recently. And yet I think it might have been something other than an emotional attachment.’

  ‘Such as? I’m sure you’ve some idea.’ Willow’s smile was a great deal more twinkly than she suspected, and Mrs Zelland responded to it.

  ‘Yes, I have. I came to the conclusion that it might have been simply because he felt easier with her than with the men. He’s quite small, as you saw, and by and large merchant bankers are big.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed that,’ said Willow with a laugh. ‘Big and loud-voiced.’

  ‘And then I suspect he felt he had more influence with her. He’s a very creative boy, you know. When everyone else is thrashing about trying to impose their will on the rest, James is quietly working out how to get round the obstacles instead of trying to beat them down by main force. I think Sarah might have been more receptive to ideas from a lawyer than the bankers usually are. She had less machismo to protect.’

  ‘Do bankers despise their lawyers?’

  ‘Both sides despise each other, dear. And when you’ve got accountants, too, it’s hardly bearable. They’ve all got to score points off each other and the client is left paying the bill for their vanity. That’s why I don’t let them all get together on any of my meetings.’

  ‘I’d wondered about that today,’ said Willow simply for something to say.

  ‘Oh, pooh! Today’s was a deal so small as to be almost irrelevant. But I’ve done some quite big ones with Jeremy Stedington.’

  ‘And always with James Certes?’

  ‘Since he became a partner at Blenkort & Wilson, yes. There’s Jeremy. Wait and see if he’s prepared to have pudding.’

  Willow laughed and then laughed again as she watched the gentle but inexorable pressure that made him agree to eat a raspberry sorbet before going back to the office. Mrs Zelland left them outside the restaurant and they walked back together.

  ‘Impressive woman,’ said Willow when they were out of her hearing.

  ‘You’re telling me – but nice with it.’

  ‘You sound surprised. Haven’t you ever met that combination before?’

  Stedington looked down at her. Despite her height, he was a good six inches taller. There seemed to be contempt in his face.

  ‘Are you trying to trap me into saying that I hated Sarah and killed her because I can’t take professional women?’

  ‘No.’ Something in Willow’s short monosyllable seemed to carry conviction, for his face relaxed and he started walking again.

  ‘Niceness and impressive ability do seem quite rare in combination, but as you’ve no doubt been told I am feeling pretty jaundiced about women at the moment.’

  ‘All anyone has told me – and that was Hughina herself – is that you’ve been going through a messy divorce. No details.’

  ‘Messy!’ It was extraordinary how angry he sounded.

  ‘Messy is a serious understatement. You’re obviously a feminist. Listen and tell me if I’m mad and chauvinist to think what she’s done is outrageous.’

  Stedington walked over to a bench covered in pigeon droppings and sat down. Willow, glad that she was not wearing any of Cressida’s expensive clothes, followed reluctantly.

  ‘I thought we were getting on fine; we’d got past all the stages people warn you about: the end of the first flush of excitement; the strains of moving house; her giving up work and having nothing to do all day; the first baby and all those broken nights; less thrilling sex; and so on.’

  He stopped and when Willow looked sideways at him she saw that his face was set and hard.

  ‘And?’ she asked gently.

  ‘And she came to me one morning and told me that she’d been having an affair with my best friend for four years, that our youngest child might even have been his, and that she was leaving me for him.’

  ‘Some friend!’ Willow was fairly sure that expressions of sympathy would be unwelcome.

  ‘I know. But even so I wanted to push to get things right again. It wouldn’t have been the same, but I was damned if I was going to give up that easily.’

  ‘Didn’t you hate her for it?’ Willow watched a pigeon with a club foot hobbling and flapping its way among the sandwich crumbs on the pavement.

  ‘No. I hated what had happened, but…she was my wife.’ Stedington looked more puzzled than unhappy, as though he were still trying to understand what had happened to him. ‘I’d loved her for so long it couldn’t all just be put away because of what she’d told me.’

  Thinking that he sounded unrealistically saintly, Willow waited for the rest.

  ‘We got divorced and because we’ve four children under ten she got half the value of the house, which really meant keeping it, and a huge proportion of everything I earn. Is that fair?’ He pushed both hands through his hair in a way that reminded her sharply of Richard. ‘Particularly when I didn’t want a divorce at all and she’d been unfaithful all that time.’

  Accustomed to the stories of betrayed and deserted wives, Willow was silenced. If the story were as he had told it, it sounded so unjust that it made her feel as angry as all accounts of cruelty were beginning to do.

  ‘It sounds horrible,’ she said frankly. ‘Obviously the court didn’t want to penalize the children by driving them into poverty, and doing a job like yours you’re hardly in a position to look after them yourself. But I agree, it sounds bitterly unfair.’

  ‘Bitterly. That’s right. I’m bloody bitter.’ He turned his head away. ‘But it didn’t make me slit Sarah Allfarthing’s throat.’

  ‘I’m sure it didn’t,’ said Willow after an uncomfortable pause.

  In her embarrassment she half remembered something he had said to her about the way Sarah worked, which seemed important. Before she could pin down the memory, Stedington turned on the bench beside her and gripped her arms above the elbows. ‘How can you possibly say that? You don’t know me at all.’

  ‘You’ve an alibi,’ said Willow coolly, ignoring his unpleasantly tight grip. ‘You were in a meeting that you left in company with several others.’

  He laughed then, with a short cracking sound, and released her.

  ‘You’re all right, Miss King,’ he said. ‘Richard always did have good taste in birds. I’d better get back. Are we going to see you this afternoon?’

  ‘For a bit, but I’ll have to go at about four. I’d better ask some training questions to establish my own alibi. Tell me one thing. Does Mrs Biggleigh-Clart involve herself in charities or is it just her husband?’

  ‘Yes, she does,’ he said, pushing his long body off the grubby bench and waiting for Willow to join him. ‘But not in such a practical way as Bob. She runs something called FACA – Fight Against Child Abuse – and she’s involved with most of the other children’s charities, even if it’s only at the level of buying a place at lunches and concerts.’

  ‘Always children?’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Do they have their own
?’

  ‘No. I believe there’s some kind of problem. That’s bloody unfair too, because they’re some of the best people I know. They’ve kept me going during all this hell.’

  ‘Poor things,’ said Willow, thinking of the unhappiness that most people lived with every day of their adult lives. Her own long isolation seemed petty and stupid, as did her double life and all its secrets. Surely, she thought, she could have got over her loveless childhood and learned to live with other people without putting herself through such extraordinary hoops. She smiled up at Jeremy and turned the conversation to the people who had been at the morning’s meeting.

  He echoed Mrs Zelland’s encomia of James Certes’s talents, but in a voice that made Willow wonder how well the two men actually liked each other. She asked Jeremy directly.

  ‘Quite frankly, I think he’s a little shit – personally.

  But that doesn’t mean that I don’t like the fact that he pushes his clients towards us, or that he’s not good at his job. I suppose it’s because he’s slippery, and angry in a rather neurotic way.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. He showed no signs of it today, but he can come out with some pretty spiteful remarks – always calculated, I think, to cause maximum embarrassment to the opposition, which is useful to us. But I don’t like it. Occasionally he can be morose, too, which is tricky.

  He’s –’

  ‘Not one of us?’ suggested Willow, laughing.

  Jeremy joined in and agreed, adding: ‘I could never fathom Sarah’s passion for him.’

  ‘Passion sounds an odd word. One of my informants said that she was cold.’

  ‘Oh, not sexual passion. Your informant is right: she wasn’t the type to go in for leg-over situations. But she was always on the telephone to him, teasing him, asking for advice, getting him to do little chores for her. I rather suppose that’s why the idiotic Tracy is going to work at Blenkort & Wilson. She could hardly have got the job on merit.’

  They reached the elegantly designed doors of the bank and Jeremy checked his watch.

  ‘I must dash; there’s an important meeting. Thanks for listening – and not beating me about the head with feminist claptrap.’