Bitter Herbs

by Natasha Cooper

  Tom stood staring at her as though he had not actually seen her for a long time. Willow raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Did you get a vehicle examiner to deal with the car?’

  ‘My chum has had it towed away and will deal with it. No results are expected for some hours. Do you seriously think your brakes were maliciously damaged?’

  ‘They were certainly not generously damaged,’ she said, laughing at him.

  ‘Oh Christ! Willow, I wish you’d be serious. And I wish you wouldn’t do stupid things. One day you’re going to get killed. You’ve … No,’ he said in answer to the expression on her face. ‘If it’s true about the brakes, then I admit it’s partly my fault for not taking your intuitions seriously. I ought to have had the sense to lock you up days ago.’

  ‘Well, then it’s a good thing you didn’t or a murderer would have got away with it.’ She looked at her watch, not even noticing how casually she had taken what he said. ‘And I’m damned if I’ll let you lock me up now. I’m off to the funeral in ten minutes.’

  ‘I’m coming with you. But we’ve got time to go through precisely what you think has happened.’

  ‘All right. Go and ask Mrs R. to make you some coffee or a sandwich or whatever you want and then come back here.’

  ‘I don’t want anything,’ said Tom.

  ‘Fine,’ she said and proceeded to explain to him once more exactly what Andrew Salcott had told her and what she had seen in the chapel of rest, why she had taken the photographs and what she had said and thought since then.

  ‘Willow.’ Tom sounded wary. ‘You haven’t noticed the crucial flaw yet, have you? What’s happened to your mind?’

  She stiffened at once. Her mind had never been available for criticism. There might have been changes to her emotions but some things were still sacrosanct.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he went on. ‘Just think. If someone stabbed Gloria Grainger twenty-four hours before she died, or even twelve, four or thirty-six, don’t you think she would have mentioned it to someone? However little apparent damage it might have done at the time, she would have known that someone had stabbed her – or at least hit her. Even the Empress of Austria knew she’d been hit.’

  ‘I know that.’ Willow sounded desperately tired but there was anger in her voice, too. ‘There must have been something that prevented Gloria from knowing what had happened. She was asleep or drunk or something. I’m sure I saw sleeping pills on her bedside table: it could have been them. There was no post-mortem and so she could easily have had too many barbiturates or alcohol. Tom, take it seriously. I know that someone killed her – and tried to kill me.’

  ‘Will, I know that you’ve been badly shaken up by the crash and by your fall at Kew, and I’m not surprised that you think someone was involved in what happened to the car. But there are all kinds of other reasons why your brakes might have failed. I heard the other day about someone backing his car out of its parking space and discovering that the brakes didn’t work at all. It turned out that the entire cable had been removed some time in the night, not deliberately to cause an accident, it was decided, but simply because another driver needed a new cable for his own car.’

  ‘That certainly didn’t happen to me,’ said Willow, showing more impatience than fragility or stress. ‘My brakes worked perfectly well between here and the motorway. It was only when I tried to stop at great speed that the cable snapped. I know it was attempted murder. I’m going to call a taxi to get to Kew. Are you really coming?’

  ‘Yes. I’m worried that … I want to see all these suspects of yours.’

  Wary of his apparent capitulation, but glad enough to have his company. Willow got out of her chair, with some pain, and ordered a taxi. The controller told her that there was one two minutes’ drive from her front door. Willow decided to fetch her hat after all in case there were any press photographers at the church, who might produce useful publicity for her books. She returned to the drawing room pulling on her gloves.

  ‘Ready?’ she said. Tom nodded and they left the flat together.

  The taxi drove out through Kensington to Hammersmith, and was forced to wait in a traffic jam outside Olympia for ten minutes. Even so, they reached Kew with half an hour to spare. Willow allowed Tom to help her down from the high step of the cab, paid the driver and then set off for the church. She noticed that round the outside of the apse at the East end had been carved:

  WHAT MAN IS HE THAT LIVETH AND SHALL NOT SEE DEATH

  Tom followed her and watched her reading the inscription, a small smile on his lips.

  They were shown into a pew on the right-hand side about half-way up the well-lit church. As she sat down, Willow felt his hand on her knee.

  ‘Who are they all?’ he whispered.

  She looked around, identifying as many people as she could. In the front pew on the left was Marilyn Posselthwate, wearing what Willow at least recognised as an exceedingly expensive black coat. Her hair had been well cut, too, and there were fat pearls in her ears and round her neck. But the most telling difference in her circumstances was the way in which she held herself. Once more Willow acknowledged what a lot money could do for a woman’s confidence.

  There was a man beside her, who turned his head as though he could feel the strength of Willow’s interest She saw that he was in his sixties or seventies, grizzled and lined. He looked not only tired but also defeated.

  ‘That must be her father,’ she whispered to Tom. ‘Gloria’s brother. He doesn’t get anything from the will as far as I know.’

  ‘And the smooth man in the front pew on our side?’

  Willow switched her attention away from Gloria’s relatives and saw Gerald Plimpton leading the friends’ pews. Dressed with old-fashioned formality in black morning coat and striped trousers, he bowed to an elderly woman in dark-grey silk and an enormous feathered hat, who was being assisted into the front pew by one of the young ushers. Willow saw him take a black top hat from the seat to his left and get it out of her way.

  ‘I don’t know who she is,’ said Willow, ‘but in the pew behind the Posselthwates are the two secretaries and Mrs Guy. She’s the one in the black Persian lamb. They’re all beneficiaries. Presumably that’s why they’re over there – and to disguise the fact that there are so few relations.’

  ‘What about your chief suspect, Farrfield?’

  Willow looked round as discreetly as she could and then shook her head.

  ‘No sign of him, but presumably it would be too embarrassing to appear with his legs working and even worse to be back in a wheelchair. Besides, if he really did damage my brakes he’s probably keeping out of the way deliberately.’

  A rush of new arrivals diverted her attention from Tom and she watched them being distributed among the pews. She began to recognise various luminaries of the book world. Among them were one or two literary editors of national newspapers, which surprised her; the secretary general of the Society of Authors; a very famous libel lawyer and his wife; a member of parliament who had recently been knighted either for his many years’service on the back benches or for his few highly acclaimed literary novels. There was also Samantha Hooper, just as Marilyn had promised, looking the acme of glamour and not at all sad.

  Willow pointed her out to Tom, who claimed never to have read any of her books.

  ‘Too loyal?’ Willow said, rather touched.

  ‘I just don’t like that sort of thing,’ he said, too honest to pander to her vanity.

  She leaned against him for a moment in acknowledgment and pleasure, and then straightened up to look back at the new arrivals.

  Almost everyone was wearing black, although there were one or two excursions into grey for the men, dark blue or violet for the women, but there were very few hats. Willow began to think that both she and the woman beside Gerald Plimpton were overdressed.

  Feeling a push beside her, she looked round and saw Evangeline Greville.

  ‘Move up a bit, Willow. Is that your pol
iceman?’

  ‘Yes. I’m surprised Samantha Hooper has actually come here; aren’t you?’

  ‘Presumably she came out of curiosity. Or a desire to make sure Gloria’s really dead. Or perhaps even a smattering of gratitude. It undoubtedly helped her to get an agent to be able to say she was once Gloria’s secretary. How are the fallen mighty, eh? Publishing’s wheel of fortune is particularly instructive to watch.’

  There was a movement at the back of the church and almost every head swivelled round. The vicar emerged from the porch in full black vestments richly adorned with silver embroidery. The congregation stopped chattering in their sibilantly low voices and stood to watch him process slowly up the aisle followed by the coffin, draped in embroidered and heavily fringed black velvet, carried on the shoulders of six stalwart, black-uniformed men of military bearing.

  A huge suck of air presaged the first notes of the organ as it began to play the ‘Dead March’from Saul. The vicar bowed to the black-veiled, flowerless altar and turned. The coffin was laid on velvet-covered trestles at the foot of the chancel steps. The last sonorous notes of the organ faded into heavy silence. In a remarkably beautiful voice the vicar began to recite the words of the 1664 funeral service.

  Willow felt her skin shiver as all memory of Gloria’s actual death was subsumed into a recognition of the power carried by the ancient traditions of the English Church. She felt absorbed into it, disbelieving still but full of admiration and a certain envy for the glory of its language.

  Later only small things stood out from the rest: a fair, sturdy boy singing Pie Jesu; a young woman with an icily precise soprano singing a short and wholly unexpected song about ‘cold, cold despair’; a magnificent Libera Me; Gerald Plimpton ascending the pulpit to talk with generous diplomacy of his dead author; and the sudden, unexpected, sound of tears from someone in the pews ahead of hers.

  ‘No wonder the funeral took so long to arrange,’ hissed Eve in Willow’s direction. ‘Collecting all these singers in itself is a coup. Who fixed it?’

  ‘Plimpton, I understand,’ said Willow, aware once again of Gloria’s tragedy.

  The thought of her planning such an elaborate funeral while ensuring that no one could have any kind of equal and affectionate relationship with her seemed heartbreaking in its utter perversity. Presumably she had wanted to make sure that she impressed the world in death as she had always tried to do in life. No wonder she had surrounded herself with the weak, the miserable and those who could be relied upon to behave like courtiers. No wonder Peter Farrfield’s chattering of Gloriana had pleased her so. No wonder someone had lost control and killed her.

  Willow’s attention sharpened as the vicar stood at the head of the coffin, saying:

  ‘Go forth, oh Christian soul.’

  ‘Are you going on to the cemetery, Willow?’ asked Eve as they were politely waiting for the family and most important supporters to leave their pews. Ann Slinter swept past wrapped in a huge black cashmere serape with Victoria Taffle in a grey coat and an extraordinary woollen bonnet hurrying along beside her and not looking at anyone.

  ‘No. That’s private. But we’re all supposed to go for tea at the house until Marilyn and co. are back. Coming, Eve?’

  ‘It seems a bit hypocritical.’

  ‘Hardly more than coming to the service. Besides, someone will have to entertain Tom here while I talk to Gloria’s friends and relations.’

  Eve reached round Willow’s tall figure to shake hands with Tom.

  ‘We haven’t met, but I’m her agent. Eve Greville,’ she said.

  ‘Tom Worth.’ He shook her hand briefly. ‘Hadn’t we better get going? We do seem to be almost the last. Willow, are you sure you’re up to standing about with a teacup in your hand?’

  ‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘Come on.’

  They emerged into the light and cold and saw the black procession crossing the Green to Marilyn’s house.

  ‘Hurry up.’ Eve was pulling on her gloves. ‘It’s too cold to hang about. I need some tea. I hate funerals.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Willow. ‘I thought it was magnificent.’

  ‘The chill factor was certainly high,’ said Tom.

  Willow looked at him and suddenly recognised something in him that she had never understood before. Her eyes met his and after a moment he nodded.

  ‘We do, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do what?’ said Eve, who had not noticed their expressions. ‘Come on, hurry up.’

  Tom said nothing, leaving Willow to laugh with assumed lightness.

  ‘Share the odd idea,’ she said casually and felt his hand gripping hers before he set it free again.

  Four icy minutes later they were inside the house being offered thin white china cups of tea and plates of sandwiches by uniformed waitresses. Willow saw that the two secretaries were in charge and slipped away from Tom and Eve to talk to Susan.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You’re doing wonders.’

  ‘It’s easy enough,’ answered Susan. ‘Patty and I have often organised things together. And without Gloria to criticise her every move and word, Patty is enormously capable. You know, I don’t think I shall ever be able to forgive Gloria for what she did to Patty. She took a perfectly intelligent, reasonably happy woman and systematically reduced her to a terrified, incompetent wreck.’

  Willow looked at her critically. ‘You really hated her, didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Susan without any hesitation at all.

  ‘You’re very frank.’

  ‘Why not – now? You can’t libel the dead.’

  ‘Slander,’ said Willow automatically. ‘Libel’s written, you know. Tell me, Susan, what did you do before you started to temp?’

  ‘I was a skeboo nurse until the deaths became more than I could bear and I decided to learn to type.’

  ‘What on earth is a skeboo?’

  ‘Sorry. One forgets that the familiar acronyms of everyday can be quite foreign to other people. SCBU. Special Care Baby Unit.’

  ‘That must have been heartbreaking, but I understand now why you’re so protective of Patty Smithe.’

  ‘I don’t quite see the connection unless you mean that I’m used to looking after helpless, desperate beings. Patty’s tougher than that. She just lets herself be bullied. Good Lord!’

  ‘What?’ asked Willow, looking behind her. She saw Peter Farrfield standing in the doorway, a shy, delightful smile on his good-looking face. She put out a hand so that she could lean on a chairback for support.

  ‘I’d better get him out of here before Marilyn gets back. She’d go absolutely ape,’ said Susan. ‘I’ll be back.’

  Willow watched as the tall, broad-shouldered young woman moved across the crowded room. She was almost exactly the same height as Peter Farrfield. She spoke to him. He shook his head, smiled again and reached out to the tray of a passing waitress to take a cup of tea. He said something that Willow did not catch and Susan glared at him.

  ‘The little tick!’ she said when she reached Willow’s side again. ‘He told me Gloria always said she wanted him at her funeral and he felt obliged to obey her wishes, despite the embarrassment it causes him. I can’t think of any way of removing him. I hope there won’t be a scene.’

  Willow knew that she ought to talk to Peter, to test his reaction to her presence and trick him into an admission of guilt, but she felt too weak and stupid to get it right. Feeling feeble, she looked round for Tom, but could not see him.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Susan, looking at her carefully. ‘You’re very pale.’

  Willow made herself smile. ‘Yes, I just feel a little faint. I was in a car accident this morning. Can you see the man I came with anywhere? He’s called Tom Worth. Tall and a broken nose.’

  ‘No,’ said Susan after a moment, ‘but I think you ought to sit down while I try to find him. Come on through to the study. You can be quiet there and recover.’

  Willow allowed herself to be le
d out of the crowded room and across the hall to Gloria’s study. There she found the elegant, elderly woman who had sat beside Gerald Plimpton in the church.

  ‘Hello,’ she said in a deep voice as Susan pulled forward one of the wing chairs for Willow. ‘I’m Serena Marker.’

  ‘Susan Robinson. I worked for Gloria Grainger. And this is Willow King. She’s not feeling well.’

  ‘I’ll take care of her if you want to go back to the crowd.’ Serena Marker smiled at Willow and explained that she had been the editor of one of the women’s magazines that had regularly serialised Gloria’s novels in her heyday.

  ‘I had to sit down, too,’ she added. ‘Arthritis, you know.’

  Willow, who was feeling better, explained herself and the reason for her own infuriating weakness. A little later she asked what the other woman had thought of Gloria and her books.

  They were soon deep in a discussion of changing tastes in popular fiction when they were interrupted by the sound of Marilyn’s voice, angry and shrill, coming through the wall:

  ‘How dare you come here?’

  ‘Gloria always said she wanted me here,’ came Peter Farrfield’s cocky answer. ‘She cared for me, even though you clearly never did.’

  ‘She didn’t in the end,’ said Marilyn spitefully. ‘I used to despise her for her lack of perception sometimes, but I was misled. She was clever enough to see through you, you utter … toad.’

  ‘She hasn’t got her aunt’s facility with words,’ said Serena Marker, smiling at Willow. ‘I used to think it a pity that Gloria used her talents so much more effectively in furious letters than in her books. Do you think we ought to warn Marilyn that she can be heard?’

  ‘No,’ said Willow at once, far too interested to mind compromising Marilyn’s reputation.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Peter did not even sound worried.

  ‘You didn’t believe me, did you? But, like I told you, she changed her will. Isn’t that why you really came? Because you knew the beneficiaries were to be told what they’d inherited after this wholly enchanting party and you didn’t believe you were getting nothing? Well, it’s true. Like I said, she cut you right out. All those months of sycophancy and pretence were for nothing. You’ll just have to work for your living now, or prey on some other stupid cow like me.’