Rotten Apples

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘Yup,’ said Willow, taking out her black notebook. ‘Give me a list.’

  ‘Tea a mite strong, is it?’ he said, noticing how little she had drunk.

  ‘It’s fine. But I know you’re in a hurry.’

  ‘Okay. He was a bloody-minded bugger, y’know. Sorry. Bastard.’

  ‘Bugger’s fine,’ said Willow with a smile.

  ‘And he lied. That’s what really got up my nose,’ said Wraggeley, scowling at his memories.

  ‘What do you mean lied?’

  He looked at her, took a moment to focus on the present and then smiled. ‘Well, we’d have one of those meetings and he’d say something then that he’d deny when I quoted it back at him later.’

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  Wraggeley shrugged and picked at his left ear with his little finger, examining the nail when he had withdrawn it. Willow could see a gout of sticky brownish wax.

  ‘One day I told him he was daft to think I owed so much—or could pay it. I’d never seen so much money together in my life. I told him he’d no right to pick a figure like that out of the air. He said he hadn’t done that; he’d used the best of his judgment.’

  ‘Didn’t you agree?’

  ‘Quite frankly I told him what he could do with his effing judgment and then he lost his temper and told me that if, in his judgment, the figure should be doubled then it would be. Later, when I’d thought about it and talked to the wife, I rang him back and told him what I thought of his threats. He slagged me off and said he’d never threatened me at all. See what I mean?’ He extracted the wax from under his nail, rolled it into a neat little ball and dropped it on the floor.

  ‘Yes,’ said Willow, writing busily, ‘I think I do. And what about the surveillance?’

  ‘That made me bloody mad, too, I can tell you. But there wasn’t a lot I could do about it, was there? They’d got all the evidence they needed, and pictures of me taking a ton in notes. I told them it was going through the books and I couldn’t help it if punters liked to pay in cash, could I? Old Scoffer laughed like a drain and asked me to show him where cash payments had ever been entered in my accounts. I’d have looked a proper Charlie if I said there’d never been any before. That’s when we came to our agreement. See?’

  ‘Right, And were you happy with it?’

  ‘Bloody unhappy, to be frank with you. But like I say, not a lot I could do about it and, between you and me and the gatepost…’ He caught himself up as though he had suddenly remembered that Willow, too, represented officialdom. He gave her an ingratiating smirk. ‘That’s about it then. Got enough for your report, have you?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Willow, joining him in the fiction that she could not possibly have known what he had been going to say. For the first time she had some sympathy for Jason’s cynicism about the honesty of his taxpayers. ‘Thank you for your time.’

  Driving through the back streets of Battersea towards the hospital, she got lost in a vast one-way system and found herself trapped on the wrong side of the main railway line into Waterloo. She had to drive nearly all the way to Clapham Common to find a familiar road back towards the river. But she got to Dowting’s eventually, and she went to talk to the nurses who were looking after Tom about his condition. They greeted her with well-practised smiles, but they could not tell her anything new. She thanked them and went to sit with him.

  BACK AT THE HOUSE two hours later, she found Mrs Rusham alone and asked where the others were.

  ‘Ms Fydgett has gone to her chambers, and I persuaded Robert that he’d be better off in school.’

  ‘Goodness! That was brave.’

  ‘Not really.’ Mrs Rusham smiled, but there was a look in her eyes that surprised Willow. It was wistful, almost vulnerable, and quite unlike anything Mrs Rusham had shown before, even the night when Tom had been shot. She had never looked less like a robot. Willow suddenly felt unsafe. It was as though she needed Mrs Rusham to be wholly impregnable.

  ‘He’s just a frightened boy, you know,’ the housekeeper went on earnestly. ‘All he wanted was someone to tell him what to do. He’s not gone back to board yet; he’ll stay here with us, but he’ll do full school days and bring his prep back here. I told him you wouldn’t mind that. He can do it in the kitchen with me if he’s in your way.’

  ‘You’ve obviously managed to get on the right wavelength very quickly,’ said Willow, trying to contain her peculiar uneasiness. ‘His aunt’s been terribly worried that she can’t understand him at all and keeps putting her foot in it whenever she tries to suggest anything.’

  ‘Well, she’s never had children, has she?’ Mrs Rusham’s face tightened and she turned away, saying over her shoulder, ‘I’ll bring your breakfast to the dining room now.’

  Willow could not help staring at her back view, trying to decode the comment about Serena’s childlessness. When they had first met, Mrs Rusham had told Willow that she had no children. That now sounded unlikely, but Willow was not going to ask any questions. Quite apart from needing the ostensible coolness of their relationship to continue, Willow had guarded her own privacy for so long and with such ferocity that she would never willingly violate someone else’s for anything less than a murder enquiry.

  She collected the newspapers and took them into the dining room.

  A few minutes later, Mrs Rusham brought her cappuccino and a small, perfect omelette. ‘I can’t talk about it,’ the housekeeper said.

  ‘You must know that I’m not going to start asking you questions about your private life,’ said Willow as gently as she could. ‘After all, we’ve worked in close proximity for several years now.’

  ‘Yes, I know you’re not the prying kind.’ Mrs Rusham nodded and disappeared back to the kitchen. Willow ate the omelette and drank the delectable coffee, leafing through her letters in a hopeless attempt to stop thinking about Mrs Rusham’s uncharacteristic behaviour.

  There was nothing of much interest to divert Willow’s mind, except for a scribbled note from Chief Inspector Harness. Peering at the clenched handwriting, she eventually made out the words:

  Dear Mrs Worth, I see I owe you thanks and an apology. Ms Fydgett’s alibi has been on to me and we’ve been able to eliminate her. Good of you to take the trouble. Hope the news of your husband is better soon. In haste,

  Stephen Harness

  She finished her coffee and was about to go into her writing room to ring him up when Mrs Rusham came through from the kitchen. Her face was unbecomingly flushed, the usually pale cheeks mottled dark red.

  ‘You always have two cups of coffee,’ she said gruffly. Willow obediently turned back from the door.

  ‘Yes, I know. Thank you. You do make delectable coffee. I’Il take it with me to the study.’

  Mrs Rusham opened her mouth, shut it, looked down at her shoes and then deliberately said, ‘I had a son once. Richard. He’d have been thirty this September. He was killed on his motorbike on his seventeenth birthday. I’ve always liked boys, you see.’ She shook her head angrily and did not wait for Willow’s comment, which was lucky because she did not have one ready.

  That explains a lot, Willow thought as she walked slowly, cup in hand, to her study. Poor Mrs Rusham. To bear a child and watch him grow, nurse him through babyhood all the way to adolescence, see him on the verge of adulthood, only for him to the for something so stupid, so unnecessary as a road accident… No wonder she’s never talked about herself or her family. No wonder I’ve treated her like a robot. That must have been what she wanted, too. And no wonder that we’ve always got on so well, however limited the way we’ve done it. Will it change now? What with that revelation and the feelings she couldn’t hide when Tom was shot…

  Willow stopped her internal conversation with herself. Her mind was suddenly full of Tom. There was no more room for Mrs Rusham or her dead son or her unhappiness. Willow leaned forwards until her head touched the desk. She tried to force away the mental pictures of life without him.

  It was
several minutes before she could regain control of herself, but eventually she managed it and pushed all her anxieties and her own feelings to the back of her mind. Then, in an attempt to do something useful, she tried to ring up Chief Inspector Harness. She was told that he was unavailable.

  ‘What a pity,’ she said to the officer at the other end of the line. ‘He’s written me a note. Um. I wonder…will he be in later?’

  ‘Yes, I expect so.’

  ‘Could you ask him to give me a ring? I’Il be here,’ she broke off, looking down at her watch. ‘I’ve probably got to go out over lunchtime, but I’ll be here until about twelve and then again after, say, three.’

  ‘I’ll tell him. What’s the number?’

  Willow gave it and then cut the connection, flexing her fingers. There was no doubt that the burned skin was healing at last and it did not feel as though she had lost any of the movement in her hands. She thought that she might even be able to operate the keys of her word processor and turned it on.

  Finding that although she was still clumsy she could type, she started to rough out her report for the minister. As she worked, she came up against all sorts of gaps in her knowledge and told herself that even if her fingers were on the way to recovery her brain was still not operating at full throttle. The telephone rang before she could lose her temper with herself.

  ‘Mrs Worth. Stephen Harness here. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well, I really just wanted to thank you for taking the trouble to write.’

  ‘Good of you. I am in a bit of a hurry, so if that’s all…’

  ‘It isn’t quite,’ said Willow, smiling at his Tom-like efficiency. ‘Look, now that you’ve eliminated Serena Fydgett, I take it that you’ve lost interest in her nephew as well…?’

  ‘I hear you’ve got him staying in your house,’ said Harness, sounding more like the man who had questioned her straight after the fire. ‘What gives, Mrs Worth?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve got them both here because her house was flooded after the cold water tank exploded while I was there. It was the least I could do, and I must admit that I thought it might be useful to get to know them both better. The boy’s in school again during the day, but I’m worried about him and the effect that your questioning might be having.’

  ‘Not you too! I’ve had half the establishment on the phone bending my ear about that boy.’

  ‘Maybe, but there is no evidence against him, is there? Come on: it can hardly harm whatever case you’re building to tell me that.’

  ‘All right,’ he said after a sigh-filled pause. ‘I see what the superintendent meant. No, there’s no actual evidence against Fydgett, but he’s hiding something and we need to find out what it is.’ Harness laughed. ‘Perhaps you could work another of your little miracles for us, or…’

  ‘Or what?’

  There was a pause before Harness answered, sounding reluctant. ‘I wouldn’t be doing my bit by your husband if I didn’t warn you. I’m not sure that it’s altogether wise to have a boy like that in your house.’

  ‘You can’t think he’s likely to set fire to my house,’ said Willow, disliking the way he had activated her own suppressed fears, ‘whatever you think he did to his mother’s tormentor.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Harness slowly. ‘But he’s either a destructive little beggar or at the very least accident prone.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Willow felt surprisingly cold, considering the heavy sultriness of the weather.

  ‘Don’t you? Look what you’ve just told me. How many houses do you know that are flooded by their cold water tanks exploding?’

  ‘None,’ said Willow, annoyed with herself, ‘but the plumber had clearly seen it more than once before. You’re not really suggesting that the boy engineered the flood are you?’ As she spoke she remembered her surprise that he knew all about ballcocks and indeed that he was agile enough to get up into the roof space while water was still flooding down through the broken trap door.

  ‘It’s a ludicrous proposition,’ she added in an attempt to persuade herself.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘What else has happened in buildings where he’s been?’

  ‘Mrs Worth, I really am very busy. I have to go.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Willow and banged down the receiver in a rage. It was short-lived and had been born, she knew perfectly well, from anxiety.

  Trying to dismiss Harness’s warnings, she concentrated on what else she needed to find out. The most comforting thing would be that Scoffer, and he alone, had been the target of whoever had set fire to the offices and that it had had nothing whatever to do with Fiona Fydgett, her tax affairs or her death. To establish that, Willow thought, she needed to confirm her picture of him and the way he had operated.

  Having rung the temporary tax office, she asked to speak to Kate Moughette.

  ‘Yes, Willow, what is it?’ asked Kate with her old briskness.

  ‘I’m almost there with my report, but there are some more things that I do need to ask you. Have you any time for me to come and talk today?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Kate. ‘I’m hellishly pushed.’ There was a pause and then in a reluctant voice, she added: ‘But if it would help you finish what you’ve got to do here and leave us to get on with our work, I could give you a lift to Croydon tomorrow afternoon. We could talk then.’

  ‘Croydon?’

  ‘Yes. Len’s funeral. You said you wanted to come. Have you changed your mind?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Willow, thinking of Mrs Scoffer’s fury. Well, she would hardly recognise a woman she had never seen. ‘No, indeed. That would be fine. What time?’

  ‘Where d’you live?’

  Willow gave her the address.

  ‘Why don’t I pick you up at two? It’ll be a slow crawl down the South Circular, but that can’t be helped and I don’t want to find myself stranded down there if there are no trains when I want to get back.’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Willow. ‘I’ll see you then. That’s very good of you. Oh, before you go, could you transfer me to Cara Saks’s phone? I need to talk to her, too.’

  ‘Must you? She’s distracted enough from her work as it is and even more useless than normal.’

  ‘Honestly, I think I must,’ said Willow.

  ‘Well, I can hardly stop you, but I should point out that she was petrified of Len. Please don’t take her exaggerations too seriously, and don’t keep her away from her desk during working hours.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Willow.

  There was a click and then a moment later she recognised Cars’s voice at the other end of the line. ‘Is that you, Willow? Did you want me?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve nearly finished the first draft of my report to the minister but there are some things I need to ask you. Kate says you’re frantically busy, but perhaps we could meet over a sandwich at lunchtime.’

  ‘Why not? Actually, I’m not all that busy at the moment. We’re fairly stuck until the document conservators produce some more results. It does look as though some of the investigation files are going to come out all right, and it’ll be all hands to the pump then, but there’s not a lot I can do yet.’

  ‘That’s great,’ said Willow. ‘I’ll loiter outside your office at one then, shall I?’

  As she put down the telephone receiver, Willow suddenly remembered that there had been no payments to a dressmaker in the details of Kate’s finances. She had spent plenty on couture fabrics, but nothing on fees to anyone to make them up. For a second it occurred to Willow that Kate might make her own clothes, and then she dismissed the idea. The suits looked far too professionally cut and sewn.

  Remembering Scoffer’s suspicions, Willow toyed with the idea that Kate could have been paying some dressmaker in cash, perhaps even cash from bribes she had been handed by anxious taxpayers like the architect, whose case had been settled without penalties.

  ‘It’s not possible,’ she said loudly. ‘An intelligent woman like that, dealing wi
th tax investigations all the time? She’d have to be barmy to think she could get away with it.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Sandwich Bar Cara had chosen for their lunch had a few tables at the back, but the atmosphere inside was so stuffy that Willow suggested they should take their sandwiches and find somewhere to sit outside.

  ‘I don’t think there is anywhere,’ said Cara, ‘at least nothing very nice. It’s quite rough until you get to the National Theatre, and that’s miles.’

  ‘Dowting’s has quite a nice garden with benches. That’s only five minutes’walk from here. Come on.’

  Cara followed her and they found several empty benches among the scented rose bushes.

  ‘I never thought of doing this,’ she said, ‘but it is the nicest place for miles. Don’t you think they might mind? It must be meant for patients.’

  ‘Not many of them are in a fit state to sit about in gardens,’ said Willow, thinking of Tom lying silent and unknowing up in his dim room. ‘No one convalesces in hospital these days, even if they did when the garden was planned. I shouldn’t have thought anyone would mind, but if they do, I’m on my way to visit my husband, so I count, and you can come on my ticket, as it were.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Cara, flushing. ‘How is he?’

  ‘So so.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be all right.’ Cara laid a hand on Willow’s arm. ‘I’m sure of it.’

  All Willow’s mental toughness told her that since Cara had no private line to the deity she could not possibly know what was going to happen to Tom, but she took the reassurance in the spirit in which it had been offered.

  ‘Thank you. Now, tell me about Len. I know he could be a bastard in the office, but what was he like with taxpayers?’

  ‘A bastard with them, too,’ said Cara with a confiding smile. ‘I used to think that he actually enjoyed bullying them, particularly the ones he thought were cocky or even just extravagant He hated that and nearly always thought it was a sign of dishonesty. I sometimes wondered what there could be in him that made him want to make other people even more miserable than he must have been.’ She paused and then added in a rush, ‘It wasn’t unknown for them to burst into tears in meetings with him, even the men.’