Bloody Roses

by Natasha Cooper

  A hand descended on her shoulder close to her neck and tightened. Still holding a questionnaire in her left hand, Willow turned and saw Beeking grinning at her. She shivered.

  ‘You startled me,’ she said, hating both her breathlessness and his obvious pleasure in it.

  ‘I know. I wonder why? Should I apologize?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. What can I do for you?’ Willow wondered whether he could possibly have overheard her being indiscreet.

  ‘I was just going to ask whether you were planning to lunch in the canteen,’ he said with a charming smile and an inclination of his blond head.

  Willow smiled as kindly as she could. He could hardly do her any injury in the bank’s canteen and she still had questions to ask him.

  ‘Actually, I was just thinking of getting some lunch. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t go together. Come on.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was not until they were settled in their dark-red chairs with their chosen lunch in front of them that Willow said casually, as though it did not matter at all:

  ‘What was it you did that made Sarah Allfarthing stop talking to you, William?’

  He looked up from his cheese salad as blood rose unbecomingly in his tanned cheeks. He shrugged and his lower lip pushed up the top one into a pout. For once Willow saw him not as sinister but as unhappy, even perplexed.

  ‘I’d worked out how she’d managed to get her career here off the ground and I tried to do it too,’ he said at last. Then he shrugged. ‘I thought she might be amused and help me, but she …’

  He dug his fork into a piece of cheese and lifted it. The cheese crumbled and fell back to the plate. He dropped the fork and put his hands in his lap.

  Willow glanced round to see whether anyone else was watching them, but the rest of the lunchers appeared to be absorbed in their own affairs.

  ‘Blackmail, you mean,’ she suggested.

  He looked up and Willow saw a sickening mixture of resentment and misery in his hazel eyes.

  ‘She told me I was a stupid mischief-maker,’ he said sullenly. ‘And when I pointed out that it was exactly what she did, she laughed at me and said if I couldn’t tell the difference between a joke and a piece of despicable manipulation then I needed to see a psychiatrist.’

  ‘That was cruel,’ said Willow lightly, wondering whether she was wrong in her certainty that the Bicklington-Heath fraud was at the root of Sarah’s death. Had the humiliation she had inflicted on Beeking tipped him over into violence? Willow made her voice as kind and firm as she could.

  ‘I never knew that she could be unkind. People keep telling me how wonderful she was.’

  ‘She could be a bit sharp sometimes.’ Beeking tried to eat his piece of cheese again and was successful.

  Willow watched him carefully. She did not want to propel him into making a scene. Deciding that he seemed well in control of himself, she risked another question.

  ‘What did you use to blackmail her? I know that you watched her. What was it that you had seen?’

  A satisfied smile banished some of the resentment and most of the unhappiness from his face.

  ‘I told her that if she didn’t include me in all the deals she got through Certes then I’d tell Mrs Biggleigh-Clart about the time Sarah and Biggles made love.’

  Willow sat up straight and stared at him as though she were trying to see through his fleshy face to his brain.

  ‘But they didn’t,’ she said, her green eyes narrowing. ‘Mrs Allfarthing was sexually cold and refused all advances from everyone.’

  ‘Oh, but they did: just the once. That’s why Biggles was so keen for her to go to America.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Willow, who had given up all interest in her heap of cottage cheese and tinned pineapple, put down her fork. ‘America?’

  ‘She wished that she’d never done it and told him that it was all over. He was so desperate for more that he told her that if they couldn’t be lovers, she’d have to go to the States to work in our office there.’

  ‘How on earth do you know all this?’ Willow was so surprised by what he had said that she had no idea whether he was telling the truth, lying to persuade her of his innocence of murder, or merely fantasizing.

  Beeking looked stubborn, and pleased to be stubborn, as he ate some more of his salad.

  ‘I’m afraid that I don’t believe you,’ said Willow with a superior smile before she fell to pretending interest in her own lunch.

  Beeking’s eyes lightened and his lips curled into the old smile of boyish charm. He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out his wallet.

  Just like Little Jack Homer, Willow thought.

  He abstracted a handwritten letter on thick white paper. He read it, looking happier than ever, while Willow sat like Tantalus under the fruit trees of Hades. At last he offered it to her. Remembering Tantalus, Willow was reluctant to reach out for it.

  ‘Go on. Read it.’

  She took the letter, noticing that it had once been crumpled into a tight ball and that the handwriting looked very like that which she had seen at Biggleigh-Clart’s desk.

  Sarah, life is becoming intolerable. I know that none of what has happened is your fault and it’s therefore unjust that I am asking you to go away, but in this case justice has to take second place to expediency. I cannot go to New York. You could – and it might help you too. It’s the only way I can see us ever being able to get back to normal. It won’t hurt your career here. Just give me six months to get myself in order and you can come back with all your promotion prospects intact, even enhanced. I am not trying to blackmail you into parting with sexual favours. But I am asking you to help me help myself get over you.

  You have told me often that you trust me. Trust me in this: I would not ask you to go if there were any other way.

  This was supposed to be a love letter, but it’s a poor effort – and that in itself is a measure of how badly I need to be free of you for a time. It’s not a long time: only six months. Please, Sarah, think again. I am fighting for my sanity.

  RB-C.

  So that was why she wanted to talk to Richard, Willow thought. She looked up to see Beeking watching her.

  ‘Why didn’t she shred it?’ she asked.

  ‘She probably would have,’ said Beeking, showing no signs of the bad conscience Willow thought he should have. ‘But I saw her crumple it in her fist as she read it. I suppose she was angry with him. And then Jeremy yelled for her and she had to rush away.’

  ‘And you picked it up, didn’t you? And she knew it had to have been you. And that’s why she wouldn’t speak to you again when you refused to admit that you had it. You’re a proper masterpiece, aren’t you, William? And what about that other one?’

  ‘What other what?’ Beeking seemed puzzled.

  ‘There was another handwritten note in your wallet. What’s that?’

  ‘Nothing very interesting,’ said Beeking, shrugging.

  ‘William,’ said Willow, making her voice as authoritative as it had ever been in her civil-service days, ‘let me see it.’

  And so he handed it over and Willow started to read. When she had discovered that it was no more than a shopping list, she looked up to see Beeking laughing at her.

  ‘You’re all the same, you managerial women,’ he said. ‘You think that you own the world and can make the rest of us do anything you want. But you’re wrong; just as she was wrong. People won’t stand for it.’ He held out his hand.

  ‘Why do you keep an old shopping list?’ asked Willow, having checked that among the notes about tomato ketchup, pasta, anchovies, olives, detergent, shampoo and tampons was nothing useful.

  ‘It’s all I’ve got in her handwriting,’ he said, still smiling. Something in his face infuriated Willow and she felt all the anger that must have flooded through Sarah as she discovered what had happened to Robert Biggleigh-Clart’s letter.

  ‘Did it please you that she died like that?’
she asked slowly. ‘With her throat slit and her blood pouring out over the floor?’

  The white-clothed table was suddenly thrust into Willow’s stomach. Her glass of water tipped and poured its contents down the front of her jacket.

  ‘You’re disgusting!’ Beeking hissed into her ear.

  Willow recoiled and saw him stalking out of the restaurant. The pretty young waitress ran after him, only to return disconsolate a few moments later.

  Willow pushed the table back, mopped her front with a dry part of the tablecloth and got up, feeling shaken and full of sympathy for Sarah. Between Beeking’s uncontrollable snooping and Biggles’s passion, she must have had a hellish time. Knowing that she would have to talk to him about that passion, Willow began to dread her meeting with the chief executive.

  When it was time to go up to his office she did what she could to tidy her damp suit, brushed her hair and presented herself at Annabel’s desk. The secretary got up at once and ushered Willow into the main office.

  The chief executive rose as Willow walked into the room. He looked as impeccable as ever, but the skin around his eyes was tightly stretched and there were shadows in them that she had not seen before.

  ‘Miss King,’ he said without smiling. ‘What can I do for you this time?’

  Willow smiled at him deliberately and took the chair opposite his desk. He sat down. Annabel closed the door behind her.

  ‘I asked for this meeting because I wanted to know various things about Sarah’s cottage,’ Willow said, starting with the easiest question.

  He shrugged. Once again Willow noticed the breadth of his shoulders and the tautness of his figure, a tautness that could only have been the product of well-conditioned muscles.

  ‘There’s not a great deal I can tell you. I’ve never been there, and as far as I know no one else has either. Sarah rented it so that she could be entirely alone. That’s all she told me, except for giving me the address.’

  ‘And you’ve never told anyone else?’

  ‘No.’ Biggles’s well-shaped head drooped slightly. He sighed. ‘No doubt it’s sentimental, but I had promised her that I’d keep her secret and her death did not seem to be a good enough reason to renege.’

  ‘Not even by telling the police?’

  ‘You sound appalled,’ he said with a faint smile. ‘What good would it have done them? She was killed here, not there. If I’d told Inspector Moreby about the cottage, she would have passed it on to Allfarthing. Since Sarah always went to such lengths to keep him in contented ignorance of her own unhappiness, I thought that I had better do the same.’

  ‘Was she so unhappy?’ asked Willow, passing over his extraordinary assumption that Sarah’s secret cottage would be irrelevant to the investigation of her death and his ruthless decision to edit the truth he told the police.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And was that why you fell so badly in love with her?’

  At the sound of her deliberately quiet voice, he looked furious.

  ‘Come on, Mr Biggleigh-Clart. I have come to understand a great many things during the last few days, including that. Don’t bother to deny it – or to accuse me of impertinence. It is a material fact.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t be obtuse. You know it is, which is why you didn’t want me here: not because of the sensitive information about your clients’ affairs but because you dreaded anyone finding out about you and Sarah. You knew that if the police found your last letter to her they’d have thought you had a pretty strong motive.’

  The chief executive’s façade remained impeccable, but his eyes looked tormented.

  ‘So she didn’t destroy the letter,’ he said, his voice sounding quite detached.

  ‘No. She would have, but something got in the way and it was retrieved.’

  ‘I see. You’re partly right about her unhappiness, I suppose,’ he said, swivelling his chair so that he could look out over London.

  Willow watched the back of his silver head.

  ‘I’ve never talked to anyone about this before.’

  ‘I’ve been listening to a great many people talking,’ said Willow drily, ‘and few of them have been wholly truthful. Nevertheless I make a good listener.’

  ‘I’d always liked her and thought her attractive,’ he went on, ignoring Willow’s interruption. ‘And I respected the work she did, but it wasn’t until we talked in here late one evening that I really began to know her. All we did then was talk, but we found that we were more alike than I could have believed possible.’

  He swung his chair round to face Willow again. ‘Can you understand that?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘But she had more guts than I. I suppose I’ve abdicated from the struggle at home and just ignore it. She tried – really tried with that dull stick of a husband of hers.’

  He fell silent and turned back to stare out over the office towers and the few delicate spires of the post-Plague churches.

  ‘And then?’ asked Willow just as the telephone buzzed, breaking into his confessional mood.

  ‘Yes, Annabel?’ he said into the receiver. ‘I’ll tell her.’

  He looked up at Willow.

  ‘Apparently your solicitor has something he needs to discuss urgently before some meeting or other. The message wasn’t very clear, but he’s in his car in the car park downstairs.’

  Willow looked down at her watch. It was half past three. She could not think what Roylandson might have discovered that was so urgent. Biggleigh-Clart’s face had closed up again and it was dear that all his defences were back in place. There were still a lot of questions that had to be asked.

  ‘I suppose I’d better go down. It can’t take long. Will you be here if I come back?’

  He looked at her, a faint smile tweaking his lips and an almost frightening intelligence showing in his brown eyes.

  ‘All right. I will be here,’ he said. ‘You can take the lift straight down.’

  Willow did as he said and emerged into a low-ceilinged concrete world in which the dim, fluorescent lighting, the weird acoustics and the overpowering smell of dust and engines contrasted strangely with the expensive luxury of the gleaming cars that waited in multicoloured rows. She looked round and, seeing no one, called out:

  ‘Martin? Are you there?’

  She started at the sound of a horn and called again.

  ‘Over here,’ said a voice from her left.

  She walked forwards just as the door of a low red sports car opened and James Certes got out.

  ‘Whom were you expecting?’ he asked with a charming smile as he stood with one foot on the ground and one balanced in the doorway of his car.

  ‘My solicitor, Martin Roylandson,’ said Willow, stopping under one of the few ceiling lights.

  ‘I never said I was your solicitor,’ he said, stressing the pronoun. ‘Some of those telephone girls are aburdly casual about the messages they take. Come and sit in the car. I need to talk to you.’

  It sounded perfectly reasonable, but Willow, who was already cursing herself for her stupidity in going to the car park alone and defenceless, was not prepared to go any closer.

  ‘You can talk to me here,’ she said.

  Certes removed his foot from the car and shut the door. The noise sounded remarkably loud as it echoed from one concrete wall to the next. He strolled towards her, looking trendy in his baggy suit and quite unthreatening. Willow stood her ground.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked. ‘I was in the middle of a meeting with Robert Biggleigh-Clart and he’s expecting me back any moment.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I can easily explain your absence when I go up to talk to him. He won’t be surprised that you’ve fled when he hears just exactly who you are.’

  Willow raised her eyebrows.

  ‘But I think he will be surprised to know that your training consultancy doesn’t exist and that you have consistently lied to him. He might have no difficulty believing that you are the mistress of Richard
Crescent, but it may shock him to discover that the only reason you are here in the bank is to uncover old scandals.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ asked Willow.

  ‘Though how you think any scandal, however dramatic, could help to disguise your lover’s guilt, I can’t imagine,’ said Certes, ignoring her interpolation. ‘I suppose it comes from your ridiculous novels.’

  ‘And what do you know about my novels?’ she asked, wishing that she had a tape recorder up her sleeve.

  ‘Plenty, Miss Cressida Woodruffe. You will never be able to get your lover off, you know. Since I quite like him, even though you make me laugh, I thought it would be only fair to give you a chance to get out before I unmask you.’

  The contempt in his voice acted on Willow’s mind as contempt always did. All doubts about herself were banished in her determination to force him to swallow his insults.

  ‘You’re losing it,’ she said calmly and when he merely looked puzzled, she added: ‘I wasn’t at all sure that it was you at Mill Cottage, but now you’ve given me all the confirmation I need.’

  His fair, beautiful face looked quite blank.

  ‘You saw the photographs of me at Richard’s flat, didn’t you, and took his copy of Mandragora for Amanda then. You know, you’re beginning to panic and it’s having a catastrophic effect on your judgement. I am as little interested in the bank’s scandals as Sarah was in the Bicklington-Heath fraud.’

  Certes said nothing and Willow was not even certain that his expression had changed, but there was a new alertness in his stance that suggested she had shocked him.

  ‘You’ve been dropping hints about what you did all over the place. I suspect a psychiatrist would even say that you wanted to be caught. You even invented the story of the Biggleigh-Clarts’ dinner as a reason for all your favours to Sarah. I know that you never dined there at the same time as she did.’

  ‘Just what are you talking about?’ asked Certes, slipping his right hand into the pocket of his suit.

  ‘Sarah telephoned you that day, didn’t she? Did you forget that the bank tapes everyone’s calls?’

  When Certes said nothing, merely looking at Willow as though she were talking in a code to which he had no key, she went on: