Bloody Roses

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Really? Why was that?’

  ‘She’d done a lot for me one way and another,’ said Certes, drinking some more champagne. When he had put his glass down again, he looked at Willow with what appeared to be insincere and rather unpleasant self-deprecation. ‘There was one particular occasion when she and I were both at the same dinner: rather an important one at the Biggleigh-Clarts’. I’d been mad enough to take a girlfriend who was … well, not as discreet as she might have been. She drank too much and started making the most appalling remarks. It was thoroughly difficult, and the more I tried to intervene, the worse it got.’

  He fell silent, staring down into his glass. Willow waited, wondering why she should feel such complete lack of sympathy for him.

  ‘And then Sarah took a hand,’ he said at last. ‘How she did it I still don’t know, but she managed to save the whole evening. She took the creature in hand, talked to her, took her away to the loo and calmed her down. She was like that, you see: efficient and kind. I owed her a lot.’

  ‘Was that why you helped to find her clients?’ asked Willow.

  Certes sat quite still, a puzzled frown on his face.

  ‘They all say how much you helped her career at the bank,’ Willow went on, trying to think what could be so worrying about her question.

  ‘Do they? Ah, well. Yes, it was partly that.’

  Something in the acute way he was looking at her suggested to Willow that it was time to turn the conversation back to her cover job and she asked Certes what the bankers lacked in the way of skills and management techniques. As she listened to his answer and went on to ask more questions, Willow found herself impressed with his intelligence and perceptiveness but still repelled by him. Mrs Zelland had said that he was enormously creative, but Willow preferred Jeremy Stedington’s description of him as brilliant but slippery – and a shit.

  The story of Tracy’s new job seemed typical of him: very clever and quite ruthless. It also seemed fundamentally cruel and Willow could not believe that the Sarah Allfarthing for whom Richard had such affection, could have agreed to it. As she acknowledged the discrepancy, Willow felt a clenching in her guts. Richard’s affection might well have blinded him to the side of Sarah that Clara and Jeremy Stedington disliked, but it was just possible that his apparent affection was merely a cloak for some quite different emotion.

  Losing interest in James Certes, Willow finished her lunch. She walked back to the bank with her mind in a muddle of fear and renewed suspicion. All the vivid impressions her imagination offered seemed to quarrel with the few facts she had, each of which seemed to become shadowy whenever she tried to use it.

  She wished that she had been able to talk about it all to Tom, but he had not yet returned her last telephone call. She told herself that he was probably very busy, but she knew that he might also be awkwardly tom between his loyalties to her and to his colleagues.

  There had been plenty of times when Willow had been reluctant to see Tom, but, unreasonably, she hated the thought that he might be loath to see her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When Willow returned to her desk in the Corporate Finance Department, the carrel to the right of hers was empty, but the young banker had left her a note:

  Dear Miss King, I have been thinking about your suggestion for allocating deals more sensibly and I can’t after all produce any useful advice. Until all of us are equally successful and effective, the directors and team leaders will always want the best. The best will always be the busiest and will only turn down a deal if they absolutely have to. Thus the natural order means that the best will always be working slightly below par because they have too much to do and the less good will get less experience because they’re less in demand. I can’t see any way round it. Sorry. Yours (off to Milan on a big one), C.P.

  Without planning to, Willow looked along the row of dark-red screens to Bill Beeking’s desk and saw the back of his curly fair head bent conscientiously over his work. ‘Less in demand indeed,’ she muttered to herself as she packed her papers away in her briefcase and switched off her computer.

  She left the department by way of Jeremy Stedington’s office. He did not look particularly pleased to see her and snapped:

  ‘Is this necessary? I’m extremely busy.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, undeterred. Having checked to see that there was no one in the corridor behind her, she asked her question: ‘I know you don’t want to tell me, but I need to know who the client was at your meeting on the night of the murder.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake! What difference can it possibly make now?’

  Willow said nothing.

  ‘I suppose you’ll stand there, clogging up my office, until I tell you,’ said Stedington bitterly. ‘It was Ronald Hopecastle. Don’t pass that on.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Willow, diverted.

  ‘None of your business. Now leave me alone.’

  ‘Please may I ask just one more question?’

  ‘Bloody hell! Oh, all right, but be quick.’

  ‘Can you tell me whether anyone left your meeting on the night Sarah died?’

  ‘Definitely. Probably each of us left at one time or another. Why?’

  ‘I just need to know if anyone had a chance to telephone out of the bank,’ said Willow, hastily thinking up an innocuous excuse.

  ‘Several,’ he said again, looking irritated. ‘I left to shout at that idiot Tracy for sending down the wrong papers. Beeking nipped out at least three times to fetch things or photostat or telephone after the secretaries had gone. Yes, he definitely made at least one call for me and could have rung someone else. The client went to wash at least once – and so did Certes.’

  There was a slight sound of amusement that banished the impatience from his rich voice.

  ‘What was funny about Certes’s absence?’ asked Willow.

  ‘Poor bugger’d eaten an iffy take-away the night before after a meeting with some of our rivals, and he had to run to the bog several times.’

  ‘I see,’ said Willow, wishing that he had told her that only one of them had left. ‘Thank you, Jeremy. There’s just one more thing …’

  ‘Not now,’ he said, really angry. ‘I’m expecting a conference call at any minute. They’re bloody difficult to concentrate on even when they’re entirely within this country and there’s no damn fool woman asking idiotic questions. This one is between me, a Frenchman in Tokyo, an American in Atlanta and a Japanese in San Francisco. I need –’ His telephone rang. ‘Get out!’ he said to Willow and she obeyed.

  She carefully walked down the window side of the department on her way out so that she did not have to go anywhere near Bill Beeking. As she passed Richard’s empty desk, she saw Tracy arguing with the man who sat on his right. Hurrying to the secretarial workstation, she said quietly:

  ‘Maggie?’

  The girl looked up. Her eyes were clearer than they had been at the beginning of the week and her smile seemed a little less unhappy.

  ‘Yes? Can I help?’

  ‘You were fond of Mrs Allfarthing, weren’t you?’ said Willow, still quietly.

  ‘Very,’ said Maggie, closing her eyes for a moment.

  ‘She worked hard, didn’t she?’

  The dark-brown eyes opened and focused on Willow’s face.

  ‘Yes, she did, but not like some of them.’ Maggie gestured towards the double row of desks. ‘She never worked all night unless it was really necessary and she always took all her holidays. She said it was silly to ruin your health for a job. She was so sensible.’

  Maggie looked away from Willow. With her head bent over her keyboard, she started flinging her fingers across it in a maniacal dance. Willow took the hint and left, having got the information she needed.

  The tube was a lot less disgusting in the middle of the afternoon than during the rush hours, and she arrived at Chesham Place cooler and more herself than she had expected. She went straight to the kitchen to warn Mrs Rusham that Emma Gnatche would be ther
e for tea and found the big room empty except for an extraordinary mess of what looked like tomato ketchup and olive oil all over the floor. Willow stood in the doorway for a moment, trying to work out what Mrs Rusham could possibly have been doing. For one dreadful moment Willow wondered whether her housekeeper could have given in to the strain of Richard’s ordeal and gone mad.

  Distracted by a sound from her writing room, Willow went quickly to investigate. When she got there she could not suppress a laugh of extreme relief. Emma Gnatche was sitting in Willow’s swivel chair, while Mrs Rusham stood behind her dressed in a plastic mackintosh that reached three inches above her ankles. A brilliantly polished Sabatier steel knife lay on the desk; At the sound of the laughter Mrs Rusham turned, blushing furiously.

  Emma swung the chair round.

  ‘Hello, Cressida. I just don’t think this would work. Look,’ she went on, pulling Mrs Rusham’s hand round to the front of her own neck, ‘the blood would have spurted forwards and down – which you can see in the photographs – so that it’s the hand and cuff that would need protecting most, not the body of the killer. It’s gauntlets he’d need, not a mackintosh.’

  ‘I think you’re right, Emma. Besides, if anybody came into my office dressed like that on a summer’s evening I would ring 999 at once – even if it was someone I knew. Blast!’

  ‘And then there’s the difficulty of folding it up again if it was all covered in blood. We did all kinds of experiments in the kitchen, and –’

  ‘So I saw,’ said Willow drily and then smiled reassuringly as Mrs Rusham, who had been standing in silence, flushed with humiliation or anger.

  ‘I shall fetch your tea, Miss Woodruffe.’ She unbuttoned the coat and handed it to Emma, who thanked her enthusiastically.

  ‘It was a relief to be able to do something,’ said Mrs Rusham, ‘even if it was useless.’

  ‘She’s awfully sweet when you get to know her, isn’t she?’ said Emma when she and Willow were alone again.

  Willow patted her shoulder. ‘Sweet isn’t exactly the word I’d have used of Mrs Rusham, but she’s extremely fond of Richard. I always thought she’d never approve of anyone except him, but you seem to have got through all her defences. Well done,’ said Willow, trying not to smile at the incongruity of the pair of them flinging tomato paste all over the kitchen. ‘I’m sorry about the mac,’ she went on. ‘It was a poor idea. I ought to have thought of the way the blood would spurt. I hope you didn’t have to trail all over London for it.’

  ‘No. It was easy to get hold of it.’

  ‘Good,’ said Willow vaguely. Something was teasing the edge of her mind, some idea that kept just out of reach. After a few moments, she added: ‘I suppose we ought to go and have that tea. It’s not really fair to keep Mrs Rusham waiting. Come on, Emma.’

  Willow led the way to the drawing room, cursing her inability to focus on the half-formed idea. There was something she had heard, or seen, that held the key to Sarah’s life and Willow could not remember what it was. The sensation was tiresomely familiar: it was like waiting for an orgasm or a sneeze. She could feel it gathering in her brain, she longed for it, and yet she could not bring it to fruition.

  Emma became motherly over tea, pouring it out for Willow, urging her to eat more sandwiches and to put her feet up on the sofa. Willow let her do it and then tried to pin down her ideas by putting them into words:

  ‘You see, Emma, there are things they’ve all said about Sarah Allfarthing that don’t ring true. Everyone agrees that she was fun, clever, successful and glamorous. Some of them were in love with her and some of them weren’t. Richard says she was never cruel and that her loyalty meant she would do almost anything to avoid hurting someone who cared about her. Beeking says that she hated conflict. Her husband, whom she married when she was eighteen, says she’d changed enormously over the years.’

  Willow took a bite of her sandwich and put the rest down on the plate beside her.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Emma, watching in fascination.

  ‘It’s somewhere in all that. Married at eighteen to a man older than she; now enormously changed. She was, too. When they met she was a trainee with the Inland Revenue; pretty but plump and naive. When she died she was beautiful and sophisticated.’

  ‘Yes?’ The fascination in Emma’s round blue eyes was dwindling into perplexity.

  ‘She was married for over twenty years to the man who appealed to her when she was young and unaware of what she was really like. Their tastes are now completely different. He told me that. She exercised ferociously …’

  ‘Presumably,’ said Emma, picking up a sandwich that oozed with mayonnaise, ‘to keep herself from getting plump again.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Willow, laughing. ‘But she bit her nails, too. Doesn’t that suggest to you someone trying to distract herself from things she did not want to acknowledge in her own character?’

  ‘You mean that she was tired of him but too kind to tell him so?’

  ‘I think she might have been. Too loyal to want to destroy their marriage and yet too different to feel at home in it any more. He says that she worked terribly hard, took hardly any time for holidays and often had to work overnight in the office.’

  ‘Bankers do have to,’ said Emma, licking her fingers. ‘Richard and James Montholme often have.’

  ‘And yet one of the secretaries who worked for her says that Sarah Allfarthing always took her full holiday entitlement – which is six weeks – and rarely allowed anyone to make her work all night.’

  ‘You mean she was having an affair after all?’ Emma’s eyes dilated. ‘With Richard?’

  Willow shook her head. ‘Not with Richard; I’m certain of that at least.’

  The mental sneeze was coming closer to the surface. She considered the distance she herself had come from the plain, hard-working northern twenty-one-year-old who had joined the civil service as a trainee and of the things she had craved as she changed.

  ‘No, I don’t think it was a lover at all.’ Willow sneezed. ‘Everyone seems to agree that she wasn’t interested in sex. Her husband said so in almost as many words and no one at the bank believes she slept with any of the adorers. I think it was space and solitude she wanted, not more emotional complications.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Emma.

  ‘I don’t think it was another man she went to when her husband thought she was working. I think it was a house. Somewhere away from both London and Essex; a place she could go to be just herself and have a bit of blessed loneliness.’

  ‘Why would she want that?’ The astonishment in Emma’s voice made Willow laugh. She pushed herself off the squashy clotted-cream-coloured sofa and padded towards the telephone in her bare feet. She looked over her shoulder.

  ‘Various reasons,’ she said, not wanting to explain why she believed that she understood the dead woman’s needs so well. She rang Martin Roylandson’s office and when she had been connected to his extension, she told him her theory.

  ‘Could you find out if it’s true? Even if she used a false name in the place where the house is, presumably somewhere there must be a record of its true ownership.’

  ‘I’m sure there is, but it could take weeks to find it. And if Mrs Allfarthing really wanted to keep it secret, wouldn’t she have simply rented it for a while? Then there need be no record of a purchase.’

  ‘What about asking the police to help?’ asked Willow, thinking that Roylandson was a lot brighter than she admitted.

  ‘I don’t think that would be sensible at this stage,’ he said, giving Willow the distinct impression that he would rather not look foolish in their eyes. ‘If there were such a house we’d need to know rather more about it before making them a present of whatever? evidence it might contain. I’ll do my best to find out.’

  ‘Let me know if you do get anything, and I’ll see what I can do. There is one person who may be able to help,’ said Willow, thinking of Mr Biggleigh-Clart.

  ‘I’m delighted
to hear it.’ The solicitor’s sarcasm hardly touched Willow. ‘By the way, there were no scratches on Mr Crescent because Mrs Allfarthing had bitten nails.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Willow, not quite able to suppress, her satisfaction at having got there first. ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘He does think Richard’s guilty,’ she said as she walked back towards the sofa and Emma. ‘That’s why he’s being so useless. Tom told me that Roylandson is one of the best when it comes to defending the innocent but not so good at getting the guilty off a charge. Damnation!’

  ‘We’ll just have to persuade him of the truth,’ said Emma. She sounded confident, but her big blue eyes were pleading.

  ‘We will. Emma, I’ve a private call to make. Do you mind if I disappear for a moment?’

  ‘Of course not. Or I could go and talk to Mrs R.’

  Willow shook her head and went into her bedroom. She had absolute faith in Emma’s honesty and knew that she would never listen in on the drawing room extension. Lying back on the Irish lace coverlet, she dialled the bank’s number and asked to speak to the chief executive. A few moment’s after she had given her name to Annabel he came on the line.

  ‘I’m rather busy this afternoon. Is this important?’

  ‘Very,’ said Willow. ‘I’ve an idea that Sarah Allfarthing trusted you.’

  ‘I like to think so,’ said Biggles, sounding fractionally warmer.

  Willow stared at the French oil painting on the opposite wall and mentally substituted the elegant figure of Sarah Allfarthing for the frothily dressed enchantress on her ribboned swing. They both seemed to have had the same effect on the besotted men around them.

  ‘And I suspect that she told you about her house,’ said Willow, striving for a casual voice.

  There was silence at the other end of the telephone and she wondered whether she was making an idiot of herself.

  ‘I can’t believe that she would have gone away without letting anyone at the bank know where she’d be, and you seem the most likely candidate for that confidence.’