Bloody Roses

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘How did you get on to it?’ Biggleigh-Clart sounded both perturbed and rather annoyed.

  ‘A mixture of intuition and deduction,’ said Willow. ‘It wasn’t very difficult when I started to match up the things everyone had said to me about her. There was time missing. She had to have spent it somewhere and you all told me that she wasn’t the kind to take a lover.’

  ‘So do you want congratulations?’ The last of the warmth had gone.

  ‘No.’ The denizens of DOAP would have recognized the crispness in Willow’s voice and she heard it herself with gratitude. ‘I want the address. Presumably, since you’ve apparently told neither her husband nor the police, you promised not to pass it on to anyone, but she’s dead now.’

  Biggleigh-Clart said nothing. Willow tried again.

  ‘If her murderer is to be brought to justice, I need to know the address of her house,’ she said.

  ‘How will it help you?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but I need to see the place. It’ll help me to know her if nothing else and that in itself will be useful.’ There was another reason, but Willow was not prepared to articulate it to anyone on whom the slightest suspicion had fallen. After a little more persuasion, he reluctantly disgorged the information:

  ‘Mill Cottage, Blewton, Berkshire,’ he said. ‘It’s about an hour’s drive down the M4. Between Pangbourne and Goring.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Willow. ‘Is there a telephone number?’

  ‘No. Sarah always took one of the bank’s portable phones when she went there. It saved trouble – and identification of her whereabouts.’

  Willow was already off the bed while he was talking and as soon as he stopped she said:

  ‘And the key? It wasn’t on her key ring, because her husband identified them all for the police. He told me so.’

  ‘I believe that she collected it when she went to Blewton. I don’t know where, though,’ said Biggleigh-Clart, ‘And I have a feeling one other person had a key, but she never said who.’

  Willow thought she heard some satisfaction in his voice and frowned. Shrugging, she said: ‘Before you go, there is one other thing I need from you.’

  ‘Time is getting short. Can you tell me quickly?’

  ‘Yes. I know that places like the bank often make a taped record of all the telephone calls in and out.’ Willow paused so that the chief executive could either confirm or deny what she had said. But he did neither, simply waiting for her to continue.

  ‘And I need to listen to the calls that Sarah made and answered on the afternoon before she died. Can you get the tape for me?’

  ‘If there were such a tape in existence, it would be highly confidential and I would not be able to release it to anyone except the police on production of a warrant,’ he said formally. ‘If that’s all, I must say goodbye now. No doubt I shall see you at the bank soon.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ said Willow, frustrated.

  She had assumed that there might be a tape and his response suggested that there was. Willow tried to picture herself suborning the guardian of the tapes like a Second World War heroine or breaking into the bank and stealing them like a fictional American private eye. But neither fantasy was remotely convincing and she was left with the knowledge that the only way she could get hold of the tapes would be to persuade Chief Inspector Moreby to demand them. Willow dropped the receiver on to its cradle, deciding to concentrate first on the evidence that Sarah’s cottage might produce.

  On her way back to Emma, Willow felt the second mental sneeze begin to form. It was almost as though her mind had been galvanized by the success of discovering Sarah Allfarthing’s cottage and was working properly for the first time since the murder. Willow went to fetch the pictures of Sarah’s body once again. She looked at the top one and smiled before riffling through the rest to make certain she was right. The sneeze was achieved and the satisfaction considerable.

  ‘Cressida?’ Emma’s voice, sounding doubtful, brought Willow’s head round. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I am. Emma, come here. Look at this: what strikes you about the evening dress?’

  Emma obediently bent her neat blond head over the horrible coloured photograph.

  ‘It’s smart,’ she said doubtfully, ‘sleeveless, silk, pale yellow, covered in blood … What do you want me to tell you?’

  ‘It’s covered in blood,’ said Willow with quiet satisfaction. ‘Emma, what woman brings an evening dress – a pale-yellow silk one – into the office and has it hanging on her partition all day without any kind of protection?’

  Emma straightened up and turned to Willow, her eyes bright as diamonds.

  ‘The cleaner’s bag! You think that that’s what he used. That sort of plastic is even finer than the mackintosh. But what could he have done with it when he’d killed her?’

  ‘Exactly. It’s not in any of the photographs. The police must have gone through all the rubbish that night. In fact I know they did because that’s why they were so sure there was no suicide note. They must have searched and so the cleaner’s bag can’t have been there.’

  Emma was scooping back her hair over both ears, which Willow knew was a sign of embarrassment or distress.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Don’t be cross,’ said Emma, sounding like a frightened child.

  Ashamed of having been the cause of such fear, Willow shook her head.

  ‘I just thought that if there wasn’t any blood on it, they might not have mentioned it. D’you see what I mean?’ Emma still sounded afraid and Willow made herself relax the muscles of her face. ‘Suppose Sarah had decided to dress because Richard was so late and taken the plastic off and put it in a wastepaper basket, and…’

  ‘That’s sensible,’ said Willow carefully and was relieved to see the fear dying out Emma’s eyes. ‘But I don’t think so. She had expensive clothes and took care of them. Wouldn’t she have kept the plastic to put her suit in?’

  ‘I suppose she might have,’ said Emma, looking happier. ‘But if he did use it, how did he get rid of it?’

  ‘That’s the question. I suspect he bundled it up, carefully keeping the blood to the inside – perhaps even sellotaping it so that it would stay folded up safety – and then he must have put it somewhere about himself and kept it until he could get rid of it.’

  Willow was silent, thinking of the river, of the innumerable skips around London where any piece of bloody plastic could be buried beneath rotten timbers, obsolete kitchen cupboards and ancient bricks, of the municipal dumps, and of the literally thousands of accessible dustbins throughout the residential areas of the city.

  ‘But where about himself? It would never have fitted in his pocket without an obvious bulge.’

  ‘No,’ said Willow slowly, ‘but what about under the arm? Or perhaps in his groin.’

  ‘Ugh! And then where would he have got rid of it? It could be anywhere.’

  ‘I know. It’s hopeless.’ Willow thought of something that she could usefully do, checked that her guest had finished tea and then said: ‘Emma, I’ve got to go out now.’

  ‘Can I come with you?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Willow instinctively. As she watched Emma’s disappointed face she almost changed her mind, but a powerful need to be alone when she discovered Sarah’s secrets kept her silent. ‘I’ll ring you up when I get back.’

  ‘I think you ought to have someone with you,’ said Emma in a small voice, ‘if it’s to do with the case. If you’ve been asking questions at the bank and of all Sarah’s friends and relations, you may have frightened … I think you ought to have protection.’

  Willow smiled as she looked at Emma’s slender figure, neatly dressed in a pair of well-pressed jeans and a pink-and-white-striped shirt with a frilled collar.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Willow said. ‘No one is going to do anything to me that would betray the fact that Sarah’s killer is not already in prison.’

  ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘I
’m not sure: three hours perhaps.’

  ‘Please, may I wait here? I won’t be a nuisance. Please. Then I’ll know that you’re all right.’

  Willow looked at her in silence for a long time. Emma’s affection was warming, but it was constraining too. Remembering that she was trying to find a way between the deliberate loneliness in which she had lived in Clapham and the falsely based friendships of Cressida’s life. Willow found a way to smile. Emma’s face relaxed.

  ‘It’s sweet of you to mind about me, Emma. Yes, do stay here if you’d like. Make Mrs Rusham give you some dinner and help yourself to anything you want to drink.’

  Emma folded her lips together and looked like a child’s drawing of stubbornness. Willow laughed.

  ‘You won’t make me any safer by starving yourself,’ she said, adding with a smile: ‘But what you could do is ring Martin Roylandson and tell him I’ve found the house. He’ll know what that means.’

  Emma wrinkled her nose into a mischievous grin.

  ‘All right, but please take care. Will you tell me where you’re going?’

  Willow promised, dictated the address of Sarah’s house, and went to change out of her suit. She was tempted to ring Tom and ask her to go to the house with her, but that seemed both pathetic and unfair so she stamped on the impulse. A few minutes later, dressed in the serviceable black corduroy trousers and a dark blue shirt, with a sweater slung around her shoulders, she collected the camera she used to take visual notes for her novels and tried to think what else she might need. She knew that she had a stout torch in her car, along with a toolbox that she had never opened but that was said to contain everything that anyone could need to service a car. If she could not find the key to Sarah’s hideaway, at least she ought to be able to break in.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It took Willow fifty-five minutes to reach Blewton in her inconspicuous Metro and another fifteen to discover that there was no Mill Cottage in the village. There was a small grey church with an elegant house beside it; there were two telephone boxes, a post office, a row of cottages, a pretty humped stone bridge with a pub at its foot; but no mill.

  Clouds blocked out the sun and a few big drops of rain banged down on the windscreen as Willow searched. She drove past the pub several times and noticed with pleasure that it was called the Goat and Compasses. Her late rebellion against her cool, rationalist upbringing was beginning to give her a sentimental attraction towards the religion her parents had rejected in their pursuit of provable scientific truth, and the prospect that ‘God Encompasseth Us’pleased her. She also liked the joke.

  It occurred to her to stop at the pub and ask for directions, but she wanted no witnesses if she had to break her way into Sarah’s house.

  Slowly it dawned on her that the mill in question was likely to be a watermill and that if it had once served the people of Blewton it would probably have been upstream of the village. Parking her car at the edge of the simple stone bridge, she turned off the engine, wound down her window and listened to the chuckling rush of the river. Then, switching on the ignition again, she drove carefully over the bridge and turned right.

  The road she had chosen began to seem unlikely as it wound away from the river, narrowed, turned to hard ruts under her wheels and threatened to end only in a farm. She had almost decided to go back when the unsurfaced track turned once more to her right. The half-hearted rain stopped and the clouds parted enough to let the last of the evening’s sun sparkle for a moment on a distant prospect of water. Willow drove on, round a final bend, and found her way barred by an ancient gate.

  She got out, discovered that the gate was chained and padlocked, and climbed over it. It was clear almost at once that the house before her had once been part of a working mill and that for the moment at least it was unoccupied. Returning to her car, she backed it down the horrible, rutted track for about half a mile until she reached a patch of trees she had noticed on the way. There she drove her little car carefully up the shallow incline and in between the sparse trees until it was partly concealed from the road. Anyone searching would find the Metro easily, but a casual passer-by might not see it.

  Sliding a heavy spanner from the toolbox into the back pocket of her trousers, she slung the small camera around her neck and collected the torch. Equipped for every eventuality she could imagine, Willow then locked the car and made her way back to the empty house.

  It looked splendid in the dying sun of that summer’s evening, the rosy orange of the roof tiles glowing and the brick walls mellow. Nothing had been done to prettify it. There were fat pincushions of moss all over the roof, looking rather like dark-green sea urchins, and the paintwork was old and flaking in some places. The garden consisted simply of apple trees growing in rough grass. But with all its dilapidation, the house looked honest and welcoming – and empty.

  Willow could easily imagine Sarah leaving behind all the anxieties and importunate figures of her London life for this benevolent peace, where, presumably, she could be herself and ignore their expectations of her.

  Walking round the front door, Willow noticed that there were no dustbins to be seen, and was not sure whether to be relieved or disappointed that she would not have to pick over the accumulated rubbish for clues. When she reached the door, she felt along the top of the lintel and under the doormat and underneath various adjacent stones, but could find no key.

  She was reluctant to break a window and circled the entire house, skirting the flat millpond and inhaling the scent of the waterweed and the gently rotting wood of the great millwheel, in case there was another door or hiding place for a key. Halfway round she passed the entrance to the mill itself and tried the door. To her surprise it was not locked and she made her way in; walking gingerly and recoiling in horror as her steps alerted some creatures that started scrabbling in the gloom.

  Willow switched on her torch. At the sight of a group of what must have been rats, she retreated quickly to the door, gripping the architrave as she tried to control her towny disgust. It was there that she found a big iron key, hanging on a rusty hook screwed into the wood.

  She tried it first in the door of the mill itself and was so encouraged when it did not fit that she ran to the house, tripping on a stone buried in the rough grass and banging her knee painfully as she crashed down.

  After several false starts the key turned and it was only as Willow was actually stepping across Sarah’s threshold that she realized there might be a burglar alarm. When Willow heard neither warning beep nor the shrilling of an alarm bell, she relaxed, pulled the door shut behind her and locked it, pocketing the key. She took a few moments to calm herself before she started to look round.

  For a while she wondered whether she had made a disastrous mistake and forced her way into a mill belonging to some quite different village. There could have been no greater difference between the house outside Epping and the interior of the mill. Its walls were simply whitewashed and the floor covered with the flat, plaited rush matting that comes from Suffolk. The big chairs and sofa looked a lot more comfortable than the original millers would have had but they were simple and rather shabby. There was an old oak refectory table, faded by sunlight, pushed under one of the windows. It held a muddle of papers, two tarnished brass candlesticks, a pewter mug of dried grasses and berries, and a cracked but beautiful old china dish. The curtains at the small windows were unlined rep of a clear, bright red.

  It was not until she found her way across the room to the table and saw a pile of letters addressed to Miss Sarah Allfarthing that Willow knew for certain she was in the right place. She read them all, but there was nothing in them to help her or to embarrass their owner. All of them were concerned with village matters or the house. Willow put them neatly back in their envelopes and went through the rest of the papers. There were several newspaper cuttings, but none of them referred to anything to do with the City. Some were recipes for food or potpourri, others were articles about moral dilemmas of one sort or another rec
ent decisions by appeal court judges, abortion, euthanasia, the allocation of scarce financial resources, the line to be drawn between political interference in distasteful regimes and the protection of the innocent suffering under those regimes.

  Skimming through them, Willow wished once more that she had known Sarah Allfarthing. Burying her sharp regret, she tidied the papers on the table and set about looking for something that might help to find Sarah’s murderer.

  The house was small and contained nothing in the way of secrets. The wardrobe in the bigger of the two bedrooms held one pleasant-looking grey-green dress, trousers, flat shoes, shirts, jerseys and underclothes. All the clothes were well worn and shabby, although there were signs that each small tear or lost button had been carefully repaired and replaced. The room itself was as simple as the ground floor. Once again the walls were white, and the high soft-mattressed bed with its blackened brass bedstead was covered in a beautiful but tattered red-and-white patchwork quilt that hung to the ground. There were small unmatched oak tables at either side of the bed. One was empty; the other held a lamp, a cheap quartz alarm clock and a copy of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, which interested Willow, but did not seem particularly significant.

  It must, she thought, have been part of Sarah’s flight from the successful life that had threatened to imprison her. Perhaps it had helped her to read of the ways in which the doomed young men in the trenches had been immortalized; or perhaps she had simply wanted to soak herself in an experience as unlike her own as she could.

  Willow, remembering how moved she had been when she had read the book, picked it up and flicked through its pages, reminding herself of it. As she laid it carefully back in the dustless space it had left on the table, she thought with a rueful smile that it ought to have held in its pages a letter or even a photograph that would have given her the necessary clue for which she was searching.