Rotten Apples

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

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  Contents

  Natasha Cooper

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  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

  Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Natasha Cooper

  Rotten Apples

  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.

  Acknowledgments

  Many people helped me while I was writing this novel, and I should like to thank them all, in particular:

  Patricia Millbourn, Mary Carter, Owain Franks, Jennifer Kavanagh, Lucy Ferguson, Gerald Johnson, and the Press & Public Relations Department of the London Fire Brigade.

  David Canter’s Criminal Shadows (HarperCollins, 1994) was extremely helpful, as indeed was Tolley’s Guide to Inland Revenue Investigations.

  Prologue

  He nearly went away when he found the front door bolted against him and saw that her bedroom curtains were shut. It was the middle of the afternoon and there was only ever one reason why she wanted that sort of privacy. He hung about for a minute or two until the thought of the match got him going again. Someone had nicked his good racket and he had to get the old one.

  He went round the back of the house, climbed over the garden wall and let himself in through the back door. Seeing hard little clumps of dry earth from the flowerbeds clinging to his trainers, he wiped them carefully on the hairy mat. She always nagged if he walked dust or mud into the house. He crept as quietly as possible up to the attic, where all her old junk was kept. A disgusting snorting sound came from inside her bedroom as he passed the door. He tried to block his ears.

  Searching the box room, he did his best not to think about what might be happening downstairs or who the snorter might be. Eventually he saw the racket, wedged between the guitar that she hadn’t played in years and a rickety wardrobe full of clothes that he’d told her were too gross to wear. He grabbed the racket, tucked it under his arm and went downstairs, keeping to the outside of the treads so that the boards did not creak too much.

  As he got to the first-floor landing, he stopped and listened at the door of her room. Slowly he realised that the continuing, rhythmic sound could not be made by someone having a bonk after all. On the other hand it was not exactly like snoring, either. He found that he had to know what was going on and silently opened the door.

  His tense muscles let go at once. She was alone, lying on her back under the dark-blue duvet. He’d only ever heard her snore once before, and that was after a boringly long lunch with a lot of wine one summer in Italy. She had stretched out on a long chair by the pool and slept her way through the afternoon, snuffling and groaning in a way that was really embarrassing. Luckily it also embarrassed the Italian who had brought the wine. He had gone long before she woke up. Which was great, even if it did get up her nose when she found out.

  She looked as though she must have had another good lunch, but he did not mind that so much since she was alone. And he thought she looked quite pretty, even though her mouth was open and she was dribbling. He stored that bit of information to remind her next time she had a go at him for breathing through his mouth.

  Her skin was much paler than usual and her wavy blonde hair was spread out over the blue pillow. She looked just like one of Botticelli’s angels. It usually annoyed him when one of her men said that, but for once he saw what they meant. His face started to hurt again as he thought of them all.

  He had never told anyone how much he wanted her to love him; he’d rather have died. And he’d never told anyone, least of all her, that there were times when she took him to hell and back. He whispered her name and then said it again, louder. She did not even move, let alone open her eyes and talk to him. He hated her.

  His hands closed into fists and his eyes screwed up as he fought for self-control—and lost.

  It seemed hardly more than a minute before he left her room, and he had no idea of the time until he reached the hall and happened to look at the clock. Then he knew he’d have to run all the way back if he weren’t to get caught.

  They made a great fuss about the ease with which he broke out of the school buildings, and they blamed him for going to her house whenever he needed anything. They seemed to want him to suffer for the way he kept on losing stuff, instead of just getting replacements from her. There were times when he thought that they were mad.

  Something made him look back when he was half-way to the back door, and he saw an envelope addressed to him in her writing. He made a face and stuffed it in his pocket without opening it. Once he had got over the garden wall again, he ran like hell. No one saw him.

  Chapter One

  Willow acquired a third name just at the moment when her fragmented life seemed to become whole. Willow King to her civil service colleagues, and ‘Cressida Woodruffe’on the jackets of her novels, she was Wilhelmina Worth on her marriage certificate.

  Looking across the sunny breakfast table at her husband about fourteen months after the wedding, she decided that they had done pretty well by each other. Tom glanced up, as though he could feel her satisfaction, and grinned at her over the top of his newspaper.

  She pushed up her smooth red fringe and held it in a bunch on the top of her head in a gesture that was becoming familiar to him. She looked so different from the woman he had first met that he almost laughed. In those days she had veered between utter dowdiness and exaggerated glamour. In the first guise she had worn spectacles, tight hair and no makeup; in the second she had hidden herself behind expensive designer clothes, clever cosmetics and a riot of cascading curls.

  But for the past year or so she had worn her hair simply in a long gleaming bob. Her clothes were calmer, too—still well cut to show off her tall, slim figure, but less absurdly extravagant than they had once been. There were even days, when they were alone, when she was prepared to let him see her bony nose and pale eyelashes undisguised by makeup.

  ‘What are you looking so pleased about?’ he asked cheerfully.

  ‘I was just thinking that we’ve probably beaten the odds already.’

  ‘What, in still being married after such ages?’

  ‘Not quite.’ Laughing, she let her fringe flop down again. ‘I think it’s more that we’ve got this far without rows. I’m not sure that I ever believed that would be po
ssible.’

  Tom leaned forward to take another warm croissant from the napkin-lined basket between them. ‘What about that time I forgot to tell you I had to go to Paris and you were consumed with wrath?’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Tom. That was only irritation; not real wrath,’ said Willow, doing her best to make light of an episode that had been difficult to forget.

  Anger was something she had found easy to accommodate in the old days when she had lived alone. Since taking up with Tom she had come to feel wary of it in either of them.

  ‘And it’s long gone, as you very well know. I think we’re safe enough now. Don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ he said, smiling at her with warming approval. ‘And I know what you’re talking about, too. But I find I’m a bit superstitious about saying that sort of thing and…’

  ‘You, superstitious? You’re the most rational man I know.’ Willow blew him a kiss. ‘It’s one of the things I love about you.’

  He bowed graciously, the effect only slightly marred by the fact that he had just put a large piece of well-buttered croissant in his mouth. She watched him with amusement and then suddenly sighed. He swallowed quickly and asked her what the matter was.

  ‘Nothing important. I was just wishing that I’d never accepted this wretched job. What with you on the second shift and me having finished the book, we could have had some time to play.’ She shook her head, making the hair fly across her face.

  ‘You’d have hated it,’ he said, picking up his cup to drink the last of the coffee in it. ‘Having nothing to do while your agent reads the new novel? You’d be climbing the walls.’

  Willow nodded. She knew that Tom did not need to be told what she was thinking. Then her green eyes began to sparkle once more. He looked wary, recognising mischief.

  ‘This may sound like a line out of one of my early books,’ she said, ‘but there are times when I begin to think that you might really know me better than I know myself. And that’s an appalling admission.’

  ‘Shocking!’

  There had been occasions during the past fourteen months when his own reactions and behaviour had surprised Tom into thinking that he knew his wife a great deal better than he knew himself. He decided not to bother her with that idea just for the moment and reverted to the previous—easier—subject.

  ‘You’ve always been a sucker for secret worlds, Will. How could you of all people have resisted the chance to suss out the Inland Revenue?’

  She smiled at him, enjoying the incongruous mixture of his sloppy dressing gown and the immaculate breakfast table. With his unshaven face, broad shoulders and broken nose, he looked intensely masculine—almost dangerous—in the midst of their highly civilised dining room.

  The walls were painted a pale apricot colour that made it look bright even on grey days. When the sun was sparkling through the two long windows, as it was that morning, the effect was of sizzling light. There were still a couple of croissants in the basket on the pristine white damask table cloth. The breakfast service was of French flowered porcelain and the butter lay in a silver dish. A posy of mixed pinks was casually arranged in a low glass bowl, clashing with the burnt-orange colour of the home-made marmalade and Tom’s plum-coloured dressing gown.

  ‘I think you’re probably right,’ she said.

  ‘About what?’ He grinned, and added quickly: ‘Not that I’m ever wrong, of course.’

  Willow made a face. ‘I only meant that you’re right about the irresistibility of spying on the Revenue, but I probably shouldn’t have admitted it. You’ve been right about too many things recently and I don’t want you getting delusions of infallibility.’

  ‘That could never happen in this house.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Willow, sounding less amused than she had been a moment before.

  ‘Mrs Rusham makes it perfectly clear that she can only just tolerate my presence. That keeps me nice and humble,’ he said drily.

  Willow’s relief that Tom had not been nursing a secret sorrow emerged as a burst of laughter, and she swiped at him with her napkin, forgetting that it was full of croissant crumbs. ‘You’re not unique in that. Disapproval comes naturally to her. I’ve been paying her wages for years and she still hasn’t started to approve of me.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Tom as he put his hand up to feel his hair. He examined the crumbs sticking to his hand and wiped it on his napkin. ‘But she’s a lot cosier with you than she is with me. There are times when she looks at me as though she’s about to sentence me to bread and water for a week.’

  ‘Idiot,’ said Willow, laughing again just as the door opened to reveal Mrs Rusham, looking as forbidding as usual in the white linen lab coat she wore instead of an apron.

  ‘I thought you might like some more coffee,’ she said as she laid two clear cups of foaming cappuccino on the table and removed the empty ones.

  Willow was amused to see that Tom was flushing slightly as he started to pick the rest of the crumbs out of his hair. As soon as the housekeeper had left the room, Willow drank her coffee and then walked round the table to pat her husband’s crunchy head.

  ‘You needn’t be afraid of bread and water while I’m alive,’ she said, giving the announcement its maximum drama.

  ‘Ah, Will,’ said Tom, reaching up to hold her face next to his own, ‘my champion!’

  ‘Take care today, Tom,’ she said as she pulled herself away from him.

  ‘I always do,’ he said, raising one hand to wave her off while he picked up the newspaper with the other.

  Willow collected her handbag and the jacket of her bright-green linen suit, made up her face and put a pair of small but richly dark emerald earrings into her earlobes. She grimaced at herself in the mirror, enjoying the lavishness of her jewels and yet amused by her own pleasure. Once, things like the emeralds had provided her with a hedge against reality, but those days were gone. Now, she just enjoyed the way they looked.

  Pleasurably satisfied with herself and her life, she went to the kitchen to say goodbye to Mrs Rusham, for whom she had considerable if unexpressed affection. They had always respected each other’s privacy, and, never trying to become friends, had achieved a relationship that succeeded in spite of its apparent lack of warmth.

  ‘It was a good breakfast. Thank you.’

  ‘I’m glad you liked it,’ said Mrs Rusham, smiling tightly. ‘Will the chief inspector be in to dinner tonight?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. Pretty late. If you could leave us both something in the fridge, that would be splendid.’

  Willow knew that she was smiling in memory of Tom’s bread-and-water fantasy, but she could not help it. Mrs Rusham’s housekeeping had always been as lavish as her show of feelings had been meagre.

  ‘I must go or I’ll be late. See you tomorrow.’

  The other woman nodded, and Willow left the house. As always, she turned at the corner of the street to look back.

  She and Tom had sold their flats before the wedding and pooled their resources to buy the long, low house, which had been built across the front of a mews on the edges of Belgravia at the beginning of the last century. By the time they found it, the fabric had become dilapidated, the stucco had been falling off the three small Dutch gables in chunks, the paint had been peeling everywhere, and the glass in two of the circular windows in the gables had been badly cracked. But with money, care and an excellent builder, they had transformed it. Restuccoed and painted cream, with a new roof, new drains, wires and pipes, it had become a comfortable house with a kind of eccentric charm that suited them both.

  Leaving it all behind her, Willow walked through the hot, white, tidy streets of Belgravia to the messier environs of Victoria Station, through the tatty edges of Pimlico and so to the broad, thunderous artery of the Vauxhall Bridge Road. It took her nearly twenty minutes, but after eating two of Mrs Rusham’s croissants, even without the quantities of butter Tom liked to spread on his, she thought that the exercise was no bad thing. As she walked sh
e considered the job she had been asked to do.

  A week earlier, only a little more than a month after the General Election had ushered in a completely new government, she had been summoned to Whitehall to see George Profett, who had been made Minister for Rights and Charters. Never having encountered him before, either in the flesh or in any of the media, she had gone to his office full of curiosity.

  He had surprised her. With his worn clothes, thin, lined face and very straight, untidy, blond hair, Profett looked quite unlike the archetypal politician, and Willow could not imagine what had attracted him to the life in the first place. But there was no doubt that he had been a clever choice for the job of being seen to protect citizens’rights.

  Having been brought to believe that they had been manipulated by a bunch of arrogant muddlers and amoral chancers for the past few years, a large part of the electorate had given voice to a longing for government by figures of undeniable probity and firm principles. George Profett’s very lack of suavity made him look as though he had plenty of those.

  As Willow watched him, wondering whether he would be able to stand up to the rough and tumble of ministerial life, he recited a hesitant little speech about the new cabinet’s concern that the rights of individuals might have been eroded during the long stint of the previous government.

  It had been decided, he told her in conclusion, that he should collect a team of civil servants to look into certain specific cases of suspected abuse. From their reports decisions could be taken on what needed to be done to beef up the various citizen’s charters.

  ‘And you seemed just the type of person I have been looking for to investigate a case at the Inland Revenue,’ he said, watching her through his thick spectacles.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. I gather that you’ve been part-time for some years now, are considering early retirement and have an income that does not depend on your civil service pay, all of which suggest that you will be wholly independent. Your experience as the Assistant Secretary (Finance) at the Department of Pensions helped put you at the top of my shortlist, as indeed did your investigative experience.’