Bitter Herbs Read online

  Bello:

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  Contents

  Natasha Cooper

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Natasha Cooper

  Bitter Herbs

  Natasha Cooper

  Natasha Cooper lives in London and writes for a variety of newspapers and journals. She was Chairman of the Crime Writer’s Association in 2000/01 and regularly speaks at crime-writing conferences on both sides of the Atlantic. N. J. is the author of the Trish Maguire series and has also written psychological suspense novels as Clare Layton.

  Dedication

  For

  Dione Johnson,

  who was there when it mattered.

  Epigraph

  ‘Better a dinner of herbs where love is,

  than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.’

  Proverbs 17

  Chapter One

  ‘She’d been naging me and so I hit her and she wouldnt’stop moneing and so I hit her till she dide I did’nt want to kil her but I no I did.’

  Willow King looked up from the pathetically unformed scrawl and faced the new Home Secretary.

  ‘I understand exactly why you want to make education in prisons compulsory. I didn’t need to see this,’ said Willow, handing the botched plea for parole back across the desk. ‘I sympathise with what you’re trying to do, and I hope you succeed, but it’ll have to be done without me.’

  ‘Why? Are you one of those people who think that forcing literacy on prison inmates infringes their civil right to ignorance?’

  ‘I could make out a case for it,’ said Willow slowly. ‘After all, I’m a civil servant: I could make out a case for anything. But my reluctance is more selfish. I want my own freedom. Before I took the sabbatical last summer, I had done eighteen years’hard labour in the civil service – longer than your illiterate murderers spend in prison – and I want out. I really do.’

  ‘I know,’ said Elsie Trouville, accepting the smudged paper. ‘You wouldn’t have worn those clothes if you hadn’t already left in spirit.’

  Willow looked down at her Yves Saint Laurent suit and Ferragamo shoes and then back at the Home Secretary, unable to conceal the first, reluctant, smile of the morning.

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ she admitted. ‘I hadn’t thought it through, but I see that I have presented myself as the successful novelist rather than the spinster civil servant.’

  She glanced around the big, light room in the fortress-like building by St James’s Park, and smiled more easily.

  ‘It feels most uncomfortable to tell you the truth.’

  ‘What? Wearing expensive clothes in the Home Office?’

  Willow, who had spent so long concealing her emotions from everyone around her that she often found it hard not to hide them from herself as well, screwed her courage to the sticking place and said:

  ‘No: trying to combine my two lives. It was hard enough even before your intervention.’

  Mrs Trouville stared down at her very short, very clean fingernails and seemed to make a decision.

  ‘I need you,’ she said as she looked up again. ‘I need your stringent intelligence, your determination, your refusal to take any nonsense from anyone, your …’

  ‘You’re flattering me,’ said Willow severely.

  ‘Yes,’ answered the Home Secretary with all the amused frankness that had so appealed to Willow when they had first met at the Department of Old Age Pensions. ‘It usually works, even with people as acute as you.’

  Willow had to laugh.

  ‘I hate being managed into things,’ she said and noticed that there was a gleam in the Home Secretary’s eyes that made her look almost malicious.

  ‘All right, then I’ll put it more honestly. I want you on this committee and I know that you could fit it into your life if you tried. Writing those novels of yours can’t possibly take up all your time. I’ve been reading them, you know.’

  ‘Home Secretary,’ said Willow, taking advantage of what was beginning to feel like her last moment of freedom, ‘you are a monster.’

  ‘No doubt. But even monsters need feeding. Won’t you postpone your resignation for a year or so and take on this last – very important – job?’

  As Willow still hesitated the Home Secretary added one more goad:

  ‘Think what good copy the committee could give you. It might even add some realism to your books.’

  ‘That would probably be the kiss of death,’ said Willow, still fighting her doomed battle. ‘They’re bestsellers, you know, as they are.’

  Mrs Trouville stood up and held out both her hands.

  ‘Come on, admit defeat and let me get on with the day’s work.’

  Willow stayed in her chair, scowling. The Home Secretary said nothing, merely picking up a discussion paper from her desk and starting to read the first page.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Willow said eventually.

  ‘Excellent.’ The Home Secretary took a grey folder out of the middle drawer of her desk. ‘These are the people who have been invited to serve on the committee. Oh, and there’s a list of the civil servants you’ll have in the secretariat as well. I’ll see you first thing on Monday. Good morning.’

  Willow grimaced, silently apostrophised herself as a fool, accepted the file, and shook hands with her brisk conqueror.

  ‘Cheer up,’ said Mrs Trouville, ‘you’ve hardly ever had to surrender to anyone in your entire career.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s bad for me,’ answered Willow from half-way across the threshhold. ‘But it’s an interesting sensation.’

  She took the lift down to the ground floor and walked out of the building to stand, shivering, on the steps as she looked down the street for a taxi. The damp coldness of the air seemed to eat into her, making her bones ache in a way that only happened in London. She had just returned from a small mill house she had recently bought in Berkshire, where the weather had been just as cold but somehow less insidiously revolting.

  The mill house was far less comfortable than her London flat, but already she missed it. The views across the mill pool to the river and the frost-hardened fields beyond were bleakly satisfying in a way that even the most beautiful of London houses could never be. Day after day in the country the winter sun had hung like a huge orange in the clean white sky and for much of the time the scrubby grass had been white, too, so that the only dark things in the landscape were the spiky black hedges and the looming trees at the edge of the road. Nothing had moved except for a few questing birds. Even the river seemed to have slowe
d down to an imperceptible trickle. Looking at it all, Willow had felt blissfully alone and nearly at peace again.

  Trying to mock herself out of her sudden longing to be back in Berkshire, alone and untroubled, she silently noted that there was nothing moving in Queen Anne’s Gate either, not even a taxi.

  Hunching her shoulders against the wind, she set off across St James’s Park to walk to her publishers’offices on the far side of Trafalgar Square. She tried not to think too much about the mill house and failed.

  Its interior echoed the satisfying bleakness of the winter landscape. The walls were whitewashed, the furniture was old and countrified, mostly made of dark oak, and the stone floor was covered with simple matting. Only the orange flames in the cavernous fireplace and the red rep curtains provided any colour.

  Willow had spent her days there enjoying the silence and the solitude, thinking and occasionally pulling up the extraordinarily resilient nettles in what would one day be the garden. The stings she had suffered from what ought to have been only dead stalks provided a nasty parallel with the mental stings that her London life seemed to be delivering every day.

  The first specific blow had come just before Christmas when her agent, Evangeline Greville, had telephoned one morning to announce that Willow’s publishers did not like the plans for her new book. Having had a big success eight years earlier with a wholly frivolous novel written in time taken away from her civil service job, Willow had followed it with equally saleable sequels every year since then and never again contemplated failure.

  The books had brought her not only a lavishly appointed flat in Belgravia but also the power to have two quite separate lives, which she had enjoyed. For half the week she had inhabited her original small, damp flat in Clapham, walking daily to her job as a part-time Assistant Secretary in the Department of Old Age Pensions. Every Thursday evening, she had moved to Chesham Place, a wardrobe full of designer clothes, a supremely efficient housekeeper, a growing band of friends, and a life of pleasant self-indulgence.

  Becoming accustomed to Belgravia luxury, Willow had found herself increasingly at odds with the other half of her life and had taken a six-month sabbatical to see whether she could do without it altogether. Discovering that she could, she had written a formal letter of resignation to the civil service and instructed builders to make the damp and depressing Clapham flat saleable. Two days later Eve had telephoned and Willow had had difficulty in not seeing her publishers’rejection as a judgement.

  Willow was still struggling with the sense of outrage – and ferociously suppressed alarm – that her agent’s news had roused in her.

  Almost worse than that had been the continually draining effect of Tom Worth’s moroseness. Willow had never expected to be given happiness by another person and it was hard not to feel cheated by the fact that Tom had virtually tricked her into being happy with him, only to turn round and start making her miserable.

  Willow crossed the iron bridge over the lake in the middle of St James’s Park without even glancing towards the pretty view of Whitehall’s roofs to her right or the pale solidity of Buckingham Palace to her left. A fat pigeon crash landed in an icy puddle just by her feet, startling her into a sharp curse. She looked up to see a pin-striped professional man staring at her in disdain and felt her cup running over with irritation.

  Glaring at him, she struck off up a diagonal path to the right, planning to emerge from the park just across the Mall from Admiralty Arch.

  ‘Oh, Tom,’ she said aloud, having established that there was no one else within earshot.

  They had met over a murder, when he was the investigating officer and she a suspect, and had become lovers a little later. Part of his tremendous charm for her had always been his detachment, his refusal to invade her private boundaries, and his lack of fear of either her brains or her success. Like her, he had enjoyed the luxurious Belgravia flat and the ministrations of the magnificent Mrs Rusham, but he had been amused by them, too, and had never let the trappings of her life as a bestselling author affect his own habits. Neither of them had been at all dependent on the other, and Willow had liked that.

  But for the past three or four months he had been changing. Where he had once been relaxed he now seemed tense. His amusement at the way she had earned most of her living and all her luxuries had given way to something that seemed horribly like contempt, and the relationship that had once been easy and equal and free was beginning to become a burden.

  Tom had recently started a new job within the Metropolitan Police and was clearly finding it stressful, but Willow could not believe that it was enough to explain his silent anger. She had tried to ask him about it on several occasions, but her attempts to help seemed only to have exacerbated whatever was wrong with him.

  If he disliked her company so much, she had often said to herself before fleeing to the mill on Boxing Day, then why did he keep coming to her flat?

  One horrible possibility was that he felt himself in some way bound to her and came out of a sense of obligation. As Willow thought about that she came to a standstill, staring at the corpse of a cat that was lying under a dense evergreen shrub in the flowerbed at the edge of the path.

  The cold eating into her flesh brought her back to the present and reminded her of the necessity of getting to the offices of Weston & Brown in time for her meeting with the managing director. She hurried on, trying not to choke on exhaust fumes as she walked through the arch and out into the noisier bustle of Trafalgar Square.

  The traffic lights changed and she crossed into the square itself with a chattering horde of foreign schoolchildren. They surged ahead while Willow picked her way through the litter and pigeon droppings, past Landseer’s lions and Nelson’s phallic column, between the fountains that had been refilled after their New Year’s Eve emptying, past the soaring Christmas tree to the further edge of the square in front of the National Gallery, and up the steps.

  Concentrating on the subject of the forthcoming meeting so that she could ignore the even more difficult ones, Willow crossed the road in front of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields and, resisting the temptation to buy a bag of hot chestnuts from an old man tending a brazier, made her way into the narrow street that housed her publishers’ offices.

  ‘I have a meeting with Ann Slinter,’ she said to the young receptionist who greeted her there. ‘My name’s Willow King.’

  ‘Would you just like to take a seat, please? She’s on the telephone at the moment,’ said the young woman, showing no sign of ever having heard of Willow.

  Obediently, she walked into the small waiting room, where she found her agent sitting with a cigarette in one hand and a bound proof in the other.

  ‘Hello, Eve.’

  Eve Greville looked up, blowing out a cloud of smoke, and got to her feet. She was a short, noticeably thin woman with sharply cut grey hair and pale grey eyes. As always her dark clothes were both unobtrusive and impeccable.

  ‘Willow,’ she said, smiling. ‘You know, I still can’t get used to that. Addressing you as Cressida Woodruffe for ten years makes it almost impossible to switch. How was the country? Inspiring, I hope.’

  ‘Well it was certainly quiet. I’m not so sure about the inspiration. Perhaps it was too cold. I’ve got a few ideas, but I don’t know whether … Oh, I like that!’ She half-turned and pointed to a large, glossy poster for her latest book. ‘I didn’t know they were going to have a new poster. Good quotes!’

  ‘Yes, they’re taking a reasonable amount of trouble to keep the book in the shops for more than the usual month or so. But …’

  ‘Ann’s free now, if you’d just like to go up,’ called the receptionist from her desk at the door to the waiting room. ‘D’you know the way?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Eve, stubbing out her cigarette. She left the room first, looking extraordinarily small in her black suit. Only her sharp eyes and her strong, smoke-filled voice gave any indication of the power she wielded with what her client considered to be alm
ost indecent glee. ‘Come on, Willow.’

  Ann Slinter greeted them at the door of her chaotic second-floor office. In contrast to the room, which was lined with crammed bookshelves against which leaned dangerous looking towers of dusty manuscripts and proofs, jacket artwork, paste-ups, ozalids and photographs, she looked both attractive and in control.

  Her plain dark-green skirt was topped with a loose navy sweater decorated with green suede patches, green-and-blue stitching and a single streak of gold. Her blonde hair was cut to hang an inch or two above her shoulders and her subtle make-up emphasised her large blue eyes. She was two years older than Willow and, having bought her first novel, had always been her editor. It was partly the success of Willow’s books that had given Ann the chance to rise so fast within the firm. Nine weeks earlier she had been promoted from editorial to managing director.

  She had a tray of coffee waiting for them in front of a pink-and-grey sofa that was loaded with papers.

  ‘Push that lot on to the floor,’ she said, pulling forward a grey-seated chair for herself. ‘Now, help yourselves to coffee. Isn’t it a foul time of year? Like a hangover, an emotional and spiritual hangover. Where shall we start?’

  ‘I rather like it,’ said Willow, wanting to gain control of the meeting. ‘Quite apart from the lovely boost of one’s Public Lending Right statement flopping on to the doormat just after Christmas, it’s a chance to begin again. New Year’s resolutions and all that. On which subject, Ann, perhaps you could explain why you think I ought to change tack. My books seem to sell considerably better than most of the other authors I talked to at your Christmas party.’

  Ann laughed, tossing back her smooth hair to reveal her youthfully unlined neck.

  ‘That is perfectly true, but there has been a worrying fall-off in the sales of the paperbacks, subscriptions for the new book were much lower than they should have been and the Christmas sales did not pick up as much as the reps had expected.’