Festering Lilies Read online

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  Contents

  Natasha Cooper

  Dedication

  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

  Epilogue

  Natasha Cooper

  Festering Lilies

  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 Gerald, with love

  and many thanks for the scam

  Chapter One

  Willow King learned to lie in 1983. Her first attempt being successful, she started to work at her new talent for deceit, refining and polishing it until it had brought her most of the things she had ever wanted – and a lot of other things she had never even suspected herself of wanting. As the years passed, her talent also brought her amusement and no small degree of happiness. By the end of the decade she believed that it had made her impregnable to misery or disaster. But then chance, and someone else’s tragedy, showed her how wrong she was.

  When she arrived for work one icy morning in November, quite unaware of the storm that was about to break over her head, she was pulled up short by the sight of the office forecourt. Instead of the usual trickle of Civil Servants parking their cars or chaining bicycles to the railings, there was a positive phalanx of policemen drawn up ahead of her. Six white police cars, the first with its blue warning light still flashing, were parked in front of them. Willow’s first sanguine thought was that there must have been a bomb scare, or perhaps some threatened riot. But even as the thought formed in her mind, she knew that those crises could not have drawn so many – and such senior – policemen to the Department of Old Age Pensions.

  Willow was shocked by the instinctive fear induced in her by the sight of such immense police strength. Reminding herself that despite her facility for deception she had done nothing actually criminal and therefore had no need to fear any policeman in the world (and particularly not in London), she walked firmly towards the constable who stood nearest the main door. She was almost as tall as he, which helped her to control the instinct to cringe before him.

  ‘Yes, Miss?’ he said as she made to sweep past him.

  ‘My name’s King,’ she answered crisply, flashing her pass at him, and waiting for him to open the door for her. ‘Assistant secretary (finance).’

  ‘Thank you, Miss,’ he said, making no move to open the door. Instead he held out his hand for the pass.

  Blinking a little, Willow handed it over and watched him as he carefully examined it. For the first time in years she found herself embarrassed by the dreadfulness of the photograph that had been embedded in the plastic rectangle. She knew that it made her look older than her thirty-eight years and even more dowdy than usual. The photograph being black-and-white, there was not even the colour of her dark-red hair to give any kind of distinction, and her spectacles had caught the camera’s flash, reflecting it so that her, eyes looked like liquid egg white.

  ‘Miss Wil-hel-mina King?’ asked the young officer, pronouncing her impossible name as though it were three separate words. It must have been about thirty years since anyone had used anything but her nickname and Willow was disconcerted for a moment. Then she nodded, she hoped with the requisite dignity and coldness.

  ‘Report to the officer inside, Miss King,’ said the policeman.

  Willow did as she was told, asked fruitlessly what was going on, and then made her way to the lifts. For one absurd moment she wondered whether this police operation could be some frightful new economy drive, designed to frighten the Civil Servants into working harder, arriving on time, or ceasing to use the photocopying facilities for their own private affairs. But even as she allowed her imagination to quicken, she knew that she was being unsuitably frivolous. There was an air of drama and even of suppressed violence about the place that morning, which did not square with any government-inspired efficiency drive.

  Working on her self-control and reminding herself that her part-time job at DOAP required a degree of seriousness foreign to the other side of her life, Willow took the lift up to the eighth floor. The lift was old and inefficient and so Willow was accustomed to read something during its jerky ascent to stop herself exploding at the waste of time. On that particular morning she took from her briefcase a minute from the under secretary about an esoteric pensions problem. As the lift arrived with a bump on the eighth floor and the doors swished open, Willow walked forward still immersed in her memorandum and almost collided with the heavy blue-clad figure of one of the department’s drivers. Raising her head in order to deliver a nicely judged apology, she saw the ugly face and angry brown eyes of Albert Dagnan, the minister’s personal chauffeur.

  ‘What are you doing up here, Albert?’ she asked genuinely surprised. He might perhaps have legitimate business on the tenth floor, where the minister’s offices were, but otherwise his place was in the canteen, the garage or the drivers’room on the ground floor.

  ‘I didn’t know I was answerable to you, Miss King,’ he said with all the truculence for which he was notorious in the offices of DOAP and shouldered his way past her into the lift.

  Willow blinked and made a mental note to have a quiet word with the establishments officer next time she ran into him. Lack of polish was one thing but gratuitous rudeness to a senior Civil Servant was another and could not be allowed to pass uncensured.

  Righteously indignant, she walked briskly into the anteroom of her office to find her administration trainee, Barbara, and her typist, Roger, both working hard.

  Pleased by the unusual industry, she bade them good morning and was surprised that even then they did no more than look up briefly and acknowledge her greeting. Willow let her pale-green eyes narrow as she looked at Roger, virtuously pounding away at the electric typewriter and occasionally sniffing and blowing his nose with all the theatricality he used to signal his frequent ailments.

  ‘You’re very industrious this morning, Roger,’ she said, allowing the approval to sound more obviously than usual in her chilly voice. ‘What’s up?’

  He turned his head so that she could see the whole of his face and she tried to suppress a gasp as she saw two long scratches down his right cheek and painful-looking bruising around his right eye. Poor Roger had suffered several times from thugs who pretended to take exception to his undoubted campness as an excuse to beat him up on late-night tubes, in dark streets and wherever else his nocturnal life took him.

&nb
sp; ‘Haven’t you heard, Miss King?’ he said hoarsely, as though his throat hurt him too. Despite his ailments, he smiled like someone faced with an unexpected treat. Willow shook her head vigorously, confident that the ‘Extra-firm’ hairpins that skewered her long chestnut hair in place would stay in, whatever she did to them. Roger’s expression changed to one of mingled excitement and sympathy, and for one dreadful moment Willow wondered whether the secrets that underpinned her life had been found out. No, she told herself, that was absurd; the atmosphere in her outer office must have something to do with all the police downstairs. Looking far more censorious than she realised, she said:

  ‘Heard what? Barbara, what on earth has been going on?’

  ‘The minister has been killed, Willow,’ answered the black-haired Scottish girl with an equally sympathetic expression on her round pink face.

  ‘Poor Algy,’ said Willow inadequately. She felt as though she had just been kicked – hard – in the solar plexus. ‘What happened? Was it a car accident?’

  ‘Oh no, Miss King,’ broke in Roger, with the excitement fighting the sympathy all too successfully. He sneezed explosively, but for once he had a real drama on his hands and ignored the minor physical one. ‘He’s been murdered. They found his body on Clapham Common last night. He’d been beaten up and his head smashed in.’

  ‘Roger!’ Barbara’s voice was full of reproach before she turned to the assistant secretary. ‘Why not sit down, Willow, and let Roger get you a cup of tea? It must be a terrible shock.’

  Willow shook her head slightly, but then relented.

  ‘Yes, a cup of tea would be nice, Roger. A strong one, I think. Bring it into my room, will you? Barbara, come to my office in an hour, when I’ve had a chance to sort things out.’

  ‘Yes, of course, Willow,’ the girl answered, efficiently slapping a pile of papers into place. ‘Oh and by the way, the PUS wants to see you as soon as possible.’

  ‘All right,’ said Willow, checking her watch and wondering whether she would be able to put all thoughts of Algy’s death out of her mind for long enough to summon the patience necessary to deal with the permanent secretary. ‘Find out if he can see me at, oh, say half-past eleven.’

  She turned her back on the pair of them and went into her own room, badly wanting solitude in which to deal with the shock of what they had told her. Putting the briefcase down on a side table between the windows, Willow stood staring out over the grubby buildings of Clapham towards the common where Algernon Endelsham had met his end. Still shuddering inside from the shock, Willow found it as hard to blame her staff for their suppressed excitement as it was easy to understand their sympathy. The lives they led were of stultifying boredom, lightened only by the dramas, shifting romances and sexual affairs of their colleagues. The murder of any minister, let alone one as spectacular and famous as Algy Endelsham, would have been the drama to end all dramas, and Willow could imagine how the entire population of DOAP must be longing to discuss it.

  In a way it was hard on her own staff that they felt they had to disguise their interest because of their ineradicable conviction that she had been desperately in love with the minister. She was both touched and a little repelled by their apparent care for her sensibilities.

  About eighteen months earlier, soon after he had been given DOAP (his first ministerial job), Algernon Endelsham, to the astonishment of the entire staff, had started to pursue Willow. The incoming minister was the handsomest thing that had been seen in either House of Parliament since Lord Palmerston, he was sensationally young for his position, well-known on television, apparently rich, famously athletic, brilliantly clever (some people thought he was even cleverer than Willow herself, though that was hotly debated in the office canteen at the time) and with a devilish reputation as far as women were concerned.

  Despite herself, Willow had been half-flattered as well as half-amused by his advances, but she had had enough doubts about his sincerity and motives to ensure that she kept her own genuine admiration of him in check. Besides, she had secrets to keep and they meant that she was never tempted to succumb to the minister’s undoubted charms. Her life was thoroughly satisfactory to her and she would no more have thought of complicating the Civil Service part of it with an affair with her minister than she would have joined an Everest attempt or a space flight to the moon.

  The sound of her office door opening made her turn from her sightless contemplation of the trees of the common. She looked round to see Roger placing a cup of deep-orange-coloured tea on her desk with exaggerated care.

  ‘Thank you, Roger,’ she said in a dismissive tone. Ignoring it, he lingered by the door for long enough to say:

  ‘I am sorry, Miss King. It’s terrible enough for us all, but for you…’ The dying fall on the last word was masterly and he could not quite resist waiting to see how she took it. Disconcertingly, she laughed.

  ‘Yes, Roger. Thank you very much. Don’t forget to find out from Barbara what the permanent secretary wants me for and get all the files I’m likely to need in here half an hour before I have to see him.’ This time Roger accepted his dismissal and left her alone.

  Willow took a sip of the tea, winced as the violence of the tannin hit her palate, but then drank thirstily. She had planned to get straight down to work, but found that she could not: the news she had just heard seemed to have driven all thoughts of work out of her mind. Sitting at her desk she tried to translate the physical shock she had felt at the news of Algy’s death into appropriate emotion.

  The thought of it made Willow feel sick; imagining his pain and terror dried out her mouth and made the palms of her hands sweat; and yet she could not find any tears for him. Throughout her austere childhood, crying had been forbidden, and she had always been encouraged to rationalise away or deeply bury any feelings that were strong enough to threaten her stability. As a result she had grown into a woman whose immense competence was never spoiled by recognisable anguish, passion or even anxiety.

  It had been her parents’nightmare that the child they had brought into the world so late in their lives might be unable to look after herself when they died, or be dangerously unhappy without them. To preempt either eventuality, they had straggled all her life to teach her to be self-sufficient emotionally as well as in every practical way. They had succeeded all too well, and when they did die within six months of each other, Willow was well able to live without them. She was also quite unable to grieve properly for them.

  The shock of that inability had shown her what their wholly altruistic training had done to her. Willow was far too rational to blame her parents for it, and she had set about trying to learn to allow herself feelings. But not all the rationality and determination in the world could make good the lack of thirty years’ natural experience of strong emotion. She was deeply shocked by the death of Algernon Endelsham. The horror of it would, she told herself, remain with her for a long long time. But she could not cry for him.

  There was another horror, too, and perhaps a worse one: someone had hated or feared her old suitor enough to batter in his skull until he was dead. The thought of that hatred was stifling.

  Without even realising what she was doing, Willow applied the old recipe for self-control and tried to find other ways of thinking about Algy’s death in order to rationalise the horror she had felt.

  Subconsciously searching her frugal northern mind for some distraction, she started to think about the waste his death represented. There were very few politicians of such talent, let alone such aesthetic appeal, on either side of the House. Algy had had a fine brain, and a quick wit that turned the dullest DOAP meeting into an entertainment for anyone who could keep up with him. Willow had been one of the few and had greatly enjoyed the sparks that their minds had struck off each other. The vivid memory of some of those meetings made her smile in the solitude of her office;

  DOAP had been a safe if dreary place before Algy’s advent. He had done much to remove the complacency and the safety, but he
had lightened the dreariness too.

  Willow knew that she would miss his incisive intelligence and his sometimes cruel wit. She heard someone coming in to her outer office and made certain that her face showed no sign of the turmoil in her mind. Whatever her reservations about her tendency to rationalise away emotion, she had absolutely no desire for her staff and colleagues to see evidence of any of her feelings.

  At that thought she even laughed a little bitterly. The news that she had seemed at all distressed at the announcement of Algy’s death would have fled round DOAP in an instant and would have confirmed her colleagues, seniors and subordinates in the universal view that she had succumbed to Algy as soon as he had so inexplicably tried to seduce her.

  Willow knew quite well that as a spinster in her late thirties, with apparently only an aunt to love, unbecomingly dressed in her neutral suits and low-heeled shoes, she was considered to be an object of half-pitying derision by a large section of the office. At the time of Algy’s pursuit she had even overheard a conversation between two arrogant young principals from another division saying patronisingly how sensible it was of estabs to have put poor Willow into an innocuous department like DOAP instead of Defence or the FO where she’d have been easy meat for any Russian-lover trap.

  The object of their scorn had laughed at the time, and she wished that she could not laugh any more. Algy, who had said that he loved her – although she had never been able to believe him – had been beaten to death. Willow put down her cup and rested her face in her hands. To know that any human being had suffered like that was horrible, but a man she had known and liked.… What could he have thought in that split second before unconsciousness, when he must have known that he would die? Her mind flinched at the thought.

  In order to distract herself from it, she tried to imagine what sort of person could have killed him like that. Willow was slightly appalled to discover that her mind was thoroughly intrigued by the identity and motivation of the killer and not at all interested in wreaking vengeance on him – or her.