Tigerlily's Orchids

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘Where’s all this water come from, then?’

  ‘The flat above,’ said Marius.

  Richenda nodded. ‘There was bound to be a disaster sooner or later but I never would have thought water’d be involved.’

  She mopped the kitchen floor, pronounced on the damage and said that Marius would have to get the builders in before he could show the flat to any prospective buyers. ‘You remember that do poor Stuart had?’

  ‘Well, I was there.’

  ‘You called the police, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did.’

  Richenda said no more but she gave herself up to some serious thinking while plying the vacuum cleaner. Was looking at dirty pictures all they wanted Wally for, or did they have him down as a suspect in Stuart’s murder? She would be quite happy never to see Wally again and she intended to divorce him as soon as she could, but murder? That wasn’t on. Wally hadn’t killed anyone. Hadn’t the nerve, Richenda thought spitefully, and she remembered what she had once heard someone say about a timid person: got a serious stomach complaint – no guts. That made her laugh to herself as she dusted Marius’s aunt’s sideboard.

  ‘Did you call the police because that chap threatened to kill Stuart?’

  Marius had just come back from consulting Rose about local handymen. ‘Probably.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ said Marius and shut himself in the bathroom.

  Richenda was due to clean the girls’ flat next. Well, Noor’s. It was she who paid. The place was always a mess, dirty dishes not only in the sink and on the draining board but in the bath as well, clothes on the floor and on every chair, make-up everywhere. Richenda often helped herself to a lipstick or a jar of moisturiser. They had so much they never noticed.

  The others were out but Molly was at home. Since Stuart’s death she had dressed herself entirely in black every day. And she was losing weight.

  Largely because she knew Molly wouldn’t care to be complimented, Richenda said, ‘You’re looking good.’

  ‘I’m feeling horrendous. My heart is broken. I was totally in love with him – did you know that?’ Richenda made no reply. ‘He’d given up that Claudia, you know. He was getting to love me, I know he was, and then some monster killed him.’

  ‘Claudia – yes, that was the name. What was her husband called?’

  ‘Freddy something. Some place in Italy. Florence? Positano? I don’t know. I don’t care. Knowing what he’s called won’t bring Stuart back.’

  ‘I’d know it if I heard it,’ said Richenda.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The only person in the flats likely to have an atlas (as against looking up everything on a computer) was Marius. He was out, so Richenda let herself in and examined with some pleasure and a lot of interest the water damage. Then she spent a few minutes on the map of Italy, and when she had finished her afternoon’s work, walked across to the murder room in the Bel Esprit Centre.

  Blakelock was there but not Bashir. He was in Flat 5 questioning Molly. Richenda had led him to believe that Molly was another of Stuart’s women (as he put it to himself) and might therefore know what enemies he had. She would have liked the police to believe she was having a love affair with Stuart, that she had been a rival to Claudia or even her successor. But Sophie was in the room while Bashir was talking to her and as soon as the suggestion was made and not denied, she chipped in with, ‘Oh, Moll, who are you trying to kid? You never came near having a relationship with him.’

  ‘I never said I had!’

  ‘I mean, come on, after that Claudia? Get real.’

  Molly decided to forgive Sophie on the grounds that the poor thing hadn’t got a boyfriend while she at least had Carl who had reappeared in her life.

  ‘We were very close,’ she said to Bashir, ‘but it wasn’t a physical relationship.’ And she told him about Martin and Jack and Hilary and the people in Chester House, all friends of Stuart’s who might equally have been his enemies.

  It was strange and perhaps rather unpleasant, Duncan thought, the way a murder in the neighbourhood, a murder of someone everyone knows if only by sight, brings people together. Of course, he had known Jock and Kathy Pember before Stuart’s death but not to the extent he knew them now. Moira/Esmeralda and Ken, the woman who wore the patchwork fur or had done in the winter, and the man she lived with – Duncan rather disapproved – had called and asked him if he was going to the funeral and could they go with him. He asked them in for a coffee and Kathy popped in while they were there and it was all very friendly.

  The weather had turned warm, quite a heatwave for May. Although his French windows were wide open, as were all the windows in the house, Duncan had to apologise for the place being so hot. He had bought a couple of fans but they made little difference.

  ‘Those things just move the hot air about,’ said Kathy. ‘Our place is freezing summer and winter.’

  Out of politeness Duncan asked Moira and Ken about the temperature in their house, and Moira said she hadn’t noticed but then she was ‘a cold mortal’. Perhaps Duncan hadn’t realised that because the Springmead people cultivated exotic house plants they had to keep the place hot and maybe this also affected Duncan’s home.

  ‘Our house is detached, you see,’ she said with conscious superiority. ‘That’s why we don’t feel it.’

  Stuart’s funeral was to be in the middle of the following week. ‘When the forensic people have finished with the body,’ said Ken, rather relishing the whole thing, Duncan thought.

  He poured more coffee, said that the murder was a tragedy for Stuart’s parents. They would be holding a small gathering of Stuart’s friends at Flat 1 after the funeral. ‘I expect we shall all go, won’t we?’

  ‘It’s the least we can do to show respect,’ said Ken, momentarily closing his lineless eyelids.

  ‘Do you think the Springmead people would like to come?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, Duncan. They’re not what I would call antisocial but they’re not sociable. There is a difference, you know.’

  ‘But they’re very charming people,’ said Moira. ‘Those girls have lovely manners and Mr Deng is a real gentleman. And they’ve all got degrees in horticulture, Mr Deng told me. He’s their uncle.’

  ‘I thought he was their father,’ said Duncan. ‘That’s what poor Stuart said.’

  ‘Oh, no. He was wrong there. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but he was wrong there. He’s their uncle and the boy is his son. Do you know what Mr Deng told me himself? That they supply orchids to the royal family.’

  She had no interest in Wally’s fate. Prison, a huge fine, even the death penalty (if only they’d reintroduce it), any of those would be fine as far as Richenda was concerned. They could do what they liked with him. All she was troubled about was not to be known as the wife or ex-wife of a murderer. Wives of murderers got unpleasant treatment by the press, she had noticed, unless of course they were the murder victims, in which case they became saints.

  ‘His name’s Livorno,’ she said to the big-bellied moon-faced detective inspector. ‘Freddy, I think, but I couldn’t swear to it. It was his wife Font was having a fling with. She’d been round the block a few times, you could tell. Livorno came to Font’s party and said he’d kill him. You ask anyone who was there, they’ll remember. That’s not the kind of thing you forget.’

  Richenda knew nothing of where Livorno lived or what he did for a living, but DS Blakelock did. In the course of his work he had frequent dealings with solicitors, or the suspects he interviewed did. He remembered that no more than a couple of weeks in the past, a man up for causing actual bodily harm, taking advantage of the legal right to call a lawyer, had phoned solicitors called Crabtree, Livorno, Thwaite. It was surely the same one.

  Many people lead virtuous lives not because they resist temptation but because temptation never comes their way. Until now, no one had given Sophie Longwich the chance to be dishonest, or else the chances that
came her way were not attractive. At school most of her friends had occasionally shoplifted, taking sweets from Woolworths or Maybelline eyeshadow from Boots. Her pocket money was adequate and the idea of stealing frightened her. She was sure she would be caught.

  But now her pocket money, or what her father called her allowance, seemed pitifully small. In Noor’s company she understood for the first time that her own parents weren’t rich, as she had believed, but, with five children and the recession getting worse, less than comfortably off. Her university loan allowed for no buying of clothes, meals in good restaurants, expensive electronic devices. Now Noor was gone, moved in with the prince, all those treats she and Molly had enjoyed, Mexican lunches with tequila sunrises, drinks in that Hampstead club, loans whose repayment could be indefinitely postponed, had come to an end. Flat 5 might even be sold, Noor had intimated last time she visited. And where would she find somewhere else as good and convenient as this to share at only £50 a week?

  It was when Noor had gone off in the prince’s white Lexus that Sophie found the Visa card Olwen had given her. Well, had let her use to get money for Olwen’s drink. Olwen was in hospital now or hadn’t someone told her that she was out of hospital and living permanently elsewhere? And that she hadn’t long to live? Using the card, Sophie thought, wouldn’t help with finding somewhere nice to live but it would buy her some good clothes and get her hair cut by a good hairdresser and buy her an iPhone, all purchases which would cheer her up. Perhaps to console her for being the only one of the three girls not to have a boyfriend.

  Of course she could have used that card at any cashpoint. Some superstitious feeling, not amenable to reason, sent her back to the Tesco beyond St Ebba’s and the green, to use the machine she had used before for Olwen and draw out all the money that had come into Olwen’s account at the end of April.

  Reading of Stuart’s murder in the Daily Telegraph had shocked Claudia but not had the effect she might have expected. It hadn’t plunged her into misery, it hadn’t broken her heart. But for Freddy’s behaviour she might have felt almost relieved. ‘Behaviour’ wasn’t quite the word perhaps. Though he must have read about it, must have seen it on London TV news, he hadn’t mentioned it to her, had apparently ignored it. This she felt was unnatural and it made her uneasy. She saw him sitting there with the open Daily Telegraph on his knees, Stuart’s handsome face staring up at him from the page, his own impassive, mildly interested.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ he said, ‘if we had a general election in the autumn.’

  Her thoughts went back to the party. She hadn’t forgotten, would probably never forget, how Freddy had burst in, uttering threats and brandishing a cudgel. Claudia didn’t exactly know what a cudgel was but it sounded more fearsome than a stick. He had threatened to kill Stuart but that was nonsense, that meant nothing, it was just the kind of thing an angry man said. It was a pity newspapers and the Internet didn’t tell you a bit more about the circumstances of a murder. For instance, though Stuart’s body had been found on Thursday, 21 May, it seemed he’d been killed on the evening of the 20th. It seemed. No one had actually said so. Claudia knew exactly what she had been doing on that Wednesday evening. She had been attending a book launch at the Ivy. But first she had phoned Stuart to remind him that he hadn’t booked a table for their dinner on the Friday. That was when she still thought their affair was on. What happened at the Ivy changed all that.

  The book was a designer’s memoirs, as much glossy pictures as text, and for the greater part of the evening she had been enjoying a heavy flirtation with the photographer. Stuart had gone out of her head and what with the photographer inviting her out to dinner, she hadn’t thought of him again until she read that he had been killed. But where had Freddy been that evening?

  She hadn’t got home herself until almost eleven. Freddy had fallen asleep, watching TV. But had he been there all the evening? She didn’t know and she couldn’t exactly ask. They spoke to each other very little these days and hadn’t shared a bedroom since the night of Stuart’s party.

  The police came on the Sunday. Both she and Freddy happened to be at home. It was seven in the morning, an unbelievable time to call on anyone, as if picking Sunday itself wasn’t bad enough. Claudia had never been to church in her life, unless it was to her own christening, but still she thought it positively wrong to disturb people at home on a Sunday. And she said so, when, inadequately clothed in a transparent robe, she answered the door to two police officers, a man with a huge belly and a fat woman. Claudia categorised any woman as fat who took a size bigger than a 14. They were, they said, Detective Sergeant Blakelock and DC Fairbairn. Could they speak to Mr Frederick Livorno, please?

  Of course it was a command, not a question. Claudia left them on the doorstep while she went to summon Freddy but, though uninvited, they came in and shut the front door behind them. Freddy put some clothes on before he sauntered down and when Blakelock asked him what he had been doing on the evening of Wednesday, 20 May, he said he had been murdering a shit called Stuart Font.

  ‘That’s not funny, sir,’ said Blakelock. ‘This is a serious matter. Perhaps we may sit down?’

  ‘You can as far as I’m concerned.’

  Marilyn Fairbairn asked him about Stuart, if he had struck him, breaking his arm, and if he had threatened to kill him. Freddy nodded in an offhand sort of way, and when she asked him why, he said, ‘Because he’d been fucking my wife.’ He added, ‘I wouldn’t use this sort of language to everyone but you police are used to it. I know you’ll understand.’

  They put up with a good deal of this and then they took Freddy away with them to the police station. There was a bit on the London regional news that evening about a man helping the police with their inquiries. Claudia began to wonder if Freddy really could have killed Stuart. But Stuart had been stabbed and Claudia couldn’t imagine Freddy wielding a knife. Knives seemed to her like teenagers’ weapons.

  Lichfield House was half empty. Stuart was dead, Olwen was in hospital being treated for alcoholic poisoning, Noor had moved in with the prince, and Wally Scurlock, released on bail and finding Richenda gone, had resigned before he could be sacked, and had gone to stay with his sister in Watford. After his sister had seen in the papers that he had appeared in court, charged with possessing indecent photographs of children, she hadn’t wanted him, she had wanted never to see him again, and at first she turned him away. She looked out of the window and saw him sitting outside the front door on the wall between her garden and the one next door. Then she hunted out the newspaper cutting she had taken of his court appearance with the picture of her brother being hustled into the court with a blanket over his head while a baying crowd shook their fists and screamed abuse at him.

  Her name was also Scurlock, Ms Diane Scurlock, for she had never married. The name was uncommon. Her neighbours must know already or guess. They would soon identify the miserable figure sitting on the wall, his head in his hands. She opened the door, said, ‘You’d better come in.’

  ‘You’re a good girl, Di. I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  The door was closed behind him. ‘You can have the spare room,’ she said, ‘but I’m not feeding you or doing your washing or all that. And I’m not speaking to you. I mean it. These are the last words I’m going to say to you. What you’ve done, it turns my stomach.’ He put out his hand to her but she recoiled. ‘I’d rather touch a slug,’ she said.

  Wally had been convicted of nothing. He had only been charged with an offence and remanded. Officially, legally, he would have done nothing until he appeared in court again in three months’ time and a jury decided on his guilt or innocence. But everyone who associated with him, the howling crowd, his sister, her neighbours, those residents of Lichfield, Ludlow, Hereford and Ross Houses he had encountered before he left, all of them took his guilt for granted. In child pornography cases, Wally realised, it was always so. And it was worse than that. From what Diane’s next-door neighbour said (before
she spat at him) when he emerged fearfully next morning, these people – for why would she be alone? – believed he hadn’t just been looking at pictures of men and women doing things to children but had actually been doing the things to them himself.

  Stuart’s funeral was to be in the middle of the week, but Annabel Font and her husband Christopher had quietly moved into Flat 1 on Monday evening. It was theirs now, or soon would be. The sun didn’t set till after nine but it was dark before they came, Christopher parking his car, without thinking much about it, on the single yellow line. In the absence of a porter or caretaker, Rose and Marius let them in.

  Once they were back in Rose’s flat, Marius said, looking out of the window, ‘Springmead is always in total darkness by night. They never put a light on once it gets dark. I suppose they all go to bed early.’

  ‘I suppose they do, darling,’ said Rose.

  At twenty past eight in the morning, just in time as he said, Duncan came over the road and rang the bell of Flat 1 to introduce himself and tell Christopher Font that if he left his car where it was he would certainly get a parking fine within the next half-hour.

  ‘But help is at hand. Mrs Pember that’s at number 1 says you can put it on her drive as they haven’t got a vehicle of their own.’

  Later in the morning Annabel walked up to St Ebba’s Church where the service was to be held on Friday. The melodious clock struck eleven as she entered but after that there was silence, deep and cool. The pews were made of oak, very ancient, black and shiny, and the hassocks were covered in gros point, a yellow fish on a green ground, a red cross on a black ground, a white dove on blue, all worked by the few very old parishioners who still went to church. These same elderly women, the last of the faithful, had filled two vases with white lilac and placed them on the chancel steps. Annabel sat in a pew, thinking about nothing much, until she was sickened by the heavy scent of the lilac. She got up, went out into the sunshine and back to sort out Stuart’s clothes and find someone who might like to have them.