Bloody Roses Page 11

  Surprised herself, Willow glanced at her watch and saw that it was only half past seven.

  ‘It will be ready in ten minutes,’ Mrs Rusham promised.

  Willow finished her list and, deciding to breakfast in her dressing gown, went straight to the dining room, where Mrs Rusham had already laid out the newspapers. Only a few minutes later, she brought in coffee and a plate of grilled bacon, field mushrooms and tomatoes.

  Willow started to eat with pleasure, but halfway through her plateful she remembered the photographs of Sarah Allfarthing’s body and swallowing became almost impossibly difficult. Determined not to be beaten by such weakness, Willow forced herself to finish the food. She reminded herself that the oozing saltiness of bacon mixed with the yielding slither of the mushrooms constituted one of her favourite breakfasts and that tomatoes looked no more like blood than Mrs Rusham’s red shoes. By dint of describing to herself the tastes and sensations of swallowing to herself as though she were writing about them, Willow managed to eat the lot. The effort was exhausting.

  Mrs Rusham brought her a second cup of cappuccino, which Willow drank with relief, enjoying the bitterness that underlay the richness of the frothed milk. When it was finished, she went to bath and dress. For once she did not linger over her bath and was back in her writing room fifteen minutes later. There, after some thought about the best way to approach him, she telephoned Mr Allfarthing and explained simply that she was a friend of Richard’s who was working to help his lawyers sort out their defence.

  ‘I see,’ he said unhelpfully. Willow waited, but when he stayed silent she went on:

  ‘You see, we do not believe that he could have killed your wife,’ she began and then paused, waiting for an explosion of rage or invective.

  ‘No,’ said Mr Allfarthing. ‘I don’t suppose that you do.’

  ‘And I should… I know what a dreadful time this must be for you, but I was wondering whether I could come and talk to you, if it would not upset you too much.’

  ‘When do you want to come?’

  ‘As soon as possible, really.’

  ‘All right. Come now,’ said Allfarthing.

  ‘You mean at once?’ Willow could not believe that breaching his defences was going to be that easy.

  ‘Well, do you want to talk to me or don’t you?’ he asked with the first hint of impatience.

  ‘Very much. I’ll come straight away. It’s good of you to be so… so very cooperative,’ said Willow.

  There was a pause and then the sound of a cough before Allfarthing said drily: ‘As it happens, I share your belief that Crescent did not kill my wife. Unfortunately the police won’t listen to me.’

  Willow took a moment to order her thoughts into coherent words.

  ‘Mr Allfarthing,’ she said when she could speak rationally, ‘that helps me enormously. Thank you. Richard will be as grateful for your faith in him as I am. Shall I come to your office?’

  ‘No. I’m not working at the moment. I find… I find it hard to concentrate, and so I’m at home. Do you mind coming here?’

  ‘Not at all. It’ll take me a while I suspect.’

  ‘Come by tube. It’s quicker than any car. Get off at Epping and take a taxi.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  During the long, dull journey out to Essex, Willow discovered that there had been benefits to the unspeakable, hot rush-hour trip she had made the day before. At least with her body squashed between those of all the other travellers, she had not been afraid. It was a different matter, she discovered as the train left central London, to sit alone in a long, scruffy carriage and wait at each stop dreading the arrival of more passengers.

  An unwashed drunk shared the seat with her for three stops, before lurching away. Apart from an unhappy girl crying silently in one corner, Willow was alone for the next four stops and then three young men got in wearing multicoloured, shiny track suits and accompanied by a large rottweiler. They could have been entirely virtuous, but their raucous laughter and their knowing yet unintelligent faces seemed as threatening as their unleashed dog. The tearful girl got out, still sniffing.

  Willow pushed her open newspaper higher so that she could neither see nor be seen and counted off the stations until Epping. It seemed paradoxical that the very things that had given her security had taken away various kinds of confidence that she had never noticed while she had them. In the old days she would not have thought twice about making any kind of tube journey, and would merely have been irritated by the drunk and dismissive of the young men.

  ‘Lack of practice,’ she muttered to herself as the train pulled into Woodford Station. Two middle-aged women got on, talking happily to each other, and Willow felt herself relaxing.

  Fourteen minutes later they reached Epping and a loud speaker ordered everyone off the train. Waiting until the youths and their rottweiler had left, Willow made her way out of the station to look for a taxi. She found one without difficulty, gave the driver the Allfarthings’ address, and sat back waiting to see what kind of house they owned.

  The taxi drove through Epping and out into the country, which surprised Willow, who had assumed with unthinking northern snobbery that the whole of Essex was carpeted with housing estates. Eventually the driver pulled up outside what had once been a row of three grey-stone cottages. Knocked into one and wreathed in roses, they looked like the illustration on a biscuit tin.

  Startled, Willow paid the taxi driver the ten pounds he charged her and added another as a tip.

  ‘Will I be able to get hold of you later?’ she asked.

  He felt in the glove compartment and handed her a small cream-coloured card. ‘Just ring that number. Or I can arrange to come back and pick you up if you know when you’ll be ready.’

  ‘I’m afraid I have no idea how long I’ll be. I’ll telephone if I need you.’

  She got out, pushed open a rustic gate, walked up a short flagged path between well-kept, multicoloured borders and knocked on the front door. It was opened almost at once by a man who looked a great deal older than Willow had expected. Sarah Allfarthing had died three weeks short of her fortieth birthday, but her husband looked as though he must be well into his fifties.

  He was a tall, slender man with brown eyes, a well-shaped nose and full, almost sensual, lips. The first thing that struck Willow was the obvious fact that he had been weeping. His eyelids were swollen and the whites were streaked with pink.

  ‘Miss Woodruffe,’ he said in greeting and held out his hand.

  Willow smiled as she shook it and noticed that there were already a few brown spots on the back of it and that the skin had the loose look of approaching age. He might be nearer sixty than she had at first thought.

  ‘It is good of you to let me come,’ she said, sounding absurdly like Eliza Doolittle.

  He shook his head and ushered her in through the front door. There was no hall: they walked straight into the drawing room. The whole width of the cottage, the room had windows on both sides and was full of wonderfully kept but, to Willow’s eyes, ugly furniture. There was a thick, fitted carpet in a careful grey-green colour; the walls were pale grey; and the spindly benchlike Edwardian sofa and matching chairs, which looked out of place under the cottage’s low ceiling, were upholstered in dull turquoise velour. Occasional tables from the same period stood about the room, holding silver boxes, photograph frames and lamps made from converted silver candlesticks with turquoise shades.

  There was a florid marquetry desk to one side of the wide stone fireplace, which held an incongruous gas-log fire in a brass grate. Balancing the desk on the other side of the fireplace was an enormous television trolley with a video recorder on the lower shelf. An Indian rug with a shriekingly turquoise background lay in front of the fireplace and on the walls hung a series of unremarkable flower prints expensively framed in faux-marbre.

  Everything that could be polished gleamed and the glossy white paintwork of the doors and skirting boards glisten
ed with recent washing. The expensive magazines that lay on one of the tables were neatly aligned and the cushions arranged in little groups that looked as though no one ever leaned against them.

  There were no flowers and no books, there was no dust; and nothing out of place. Willow had seldom felt so uncomfortable in any room she had ever known. Her intermittent feeling of identification with the dead woman dwindled into nothing and she mocked herself for the overactive imagination that had led to it.

  ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

  Willow tamed to her unhappy host, feeling guilty at disliking his house so much, and nodded. ‘Thank you. If it’s no trouble. May I help?’

  ‘Don’t bother. I had to get used to the kitchen once Sarah started at the bank and the last five years have taught me how to cope with it,’ he said with would-be lightness. ‘Sit down and make yourself comfortable.’

  Quite unable to do that, Willow looked instead at the innumerable photographs in their chased silver frames and saw that they were all of Sarah Allfarthing. As she looked through them, Willow decided that she might have been too critical of her own imagination. There was at least one thing that she shared with the dead woman. Sarah Allfarthing, too, had set out on adult life looking gauche and badly dressed; she, too, had changed as she had grown older and learned to achieve an elegant sophistication.

  There were photographs of her in her gleaming satin wedding dress, with her dark hair elaborately bunched up to support a crown of white flowers and a long tulle veil. She had looked only mildly pretty then, and both plump and uncertain as she stood with her shoulders drooping and her chin stuck forward in ungainly eagerness.

  Other photographs had obviously been taken in hospital as she lay proudly holding a shawled bundle in her arms. Her face had already slimmed a bit and her hair had been cut short, looking roughly unkempt after the ordeal of her daughter’s birth. She was on her feet again a short while later, standing outside a small country church with a slightly larger and lacier bundle in her arms.

  Her progress through married life was spread out before Willow’s eyes, and she saw pictures of Sarah in evening dress, in a long-skirted suit and unbecoming hat, in tennis dress, looking unhappy on skis, collecting a prize at what looked like a village fête, and eventually in one of her banker’s suits. In the last photograph she looked as Richard must have known her: slender, long-haired again, and wonderfully confident in her elegance. Her eyes, as dark as her hair, were beautifully shaped and once they could be seen without the distracting plumpness and unbecoming make-up they looked calm and intelligent.

  Willow picked up the photograph and stared through the glass, as though the very effort would elicit some useful information from the coloured card. In her mind she could hear Richard saying again: ‘You’d have liked her, you know. I’ve sometimes thought the two of you were rather alike.’

  ‘They don’t usually live down here.’ Allfarthing’s voice so startled Willow that she almost dropped the framed photograph as she turned to look over her shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry. I… I never met her,’ said Willow, realizing too late that there was no graceful way of tackling the subject.

  ‘They used to stand on a chest of drawers in our bedroom, but I wanted them about. It bothers my daughter Jeanine, I think, but she’s too concerned about me to object. Milk?’

  Willow put down the photograph frame and turned to face her host. He was carrying a chequered plastic tray.

  ‘Ah. No, thank you, I’d prefer it black,’ she said.

  He took the tray to an empty table, poured out the coffee and brought one cup to Willow. When he had fetched his own, he asked her once again to sit down and, as she did so, lowered himself into one corner of the hard sofa and sat waiting for her to start.

  ‘You said that you did not believe that Richard could have killed your wife,’ she began, not wanting to weary him with condolences that could mean very little from a stranger.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘May I ask why? It might help me to convince his lawyer.’

  ‘Sarah liked him,’ he said simply, ‘and she had excellent judgement. She once told me that if she were ever in difficulties at the bank, she would go to Richard Crescent because, of all of them, he was the only one she could trust not to use her own weakness against her.’

  Willow was moved by that posthumous tribute, but she had too much to do to let herself be distracted by her own emotions.

  ‘Your wife was very popular at the bank,’ she said in a cool voice. ‘I find it hard to believe that anyone would have taken advantage of her.’

  Allfarthing gave a short, dry laugh. ‘They were all after her, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t exactly mean that. I was thinking more of one of the secretaries who was clearly devoted to her. But, since you’ve brought up the subject of her male colleagues, can you explain why they were all so…’ Willow hesitated, but he gave her no help. ‘…interested in her?’

  Allfarthing’s expressive lips thinned and made his whole face look disgusted. He shrugged.

  ‘All sorts of reasons: they could have been afraid of her and wanted to seduce her so that they could prove they were more powerful than she. Or perhaps they saw her as a challenge, like Mount Everest. Some of them probably genuinely fancied her. Richard Crescent was different. She looked on him as a friend.’

  ‘Didn’t you mind? Not about Richard, but about all the others?’

  Allfarthing shrugged. He picked at a piece of loose skin that hung from the corner of his lower lip, and Willow winced as she saw how painful it must be when he tugged it and how unhappy he must be not to feel that pain.

  ‘To be frank, I hated it,’ he said at last. A tiny smile twitched at the edges of his mouth. ‘Although I was pretty sure they’d get no change out of Sarah. Sex did not appeal to her as a game, and she’d never have told me about their antics if she had had any serious interest in them.’

  ‘No,’ said Willow slowly. ‘I don’t suppose she would.’ She was finding it remarkably difficult to ask questions that might upset him and yet those were the only ones that could be useful. ‘What was she like?’

  The brown eyes narrowed and the wide mouth relaxed as Allfarthing let some of his memories out into speech.

  ‘Wonderful. She was gentle and funny; kind… so kind; lovely to look at; no trouble.’

  Willow’s eyebrows twitched. There might be similarities between Sarah Allfarthing and herself, but no one would ever describe her as gentle or kind.

  ‘I don’t quite understand what you mean by “no trouble”,’ she said, trying not to sound critical.

  Allfarthing’s face changed from nostalgia to very slight amusement. ‘I’ve friends down here who have a lot of difficulties with their wives,’ he said. ‘Some of them drink; others nag; some of them chase young men; and lots of them live their whole lives on a switchback of emotions. One of my clients can leave his wife perfectly serene and content in the morning and when he gets home for dinner she’ll be either a nervous wreck or hysterically angry with him for no known reason. Sarah wasn’t like that. She was always the same.’

  ‘That’s a little hard to believe,’ said Willow slowly. She looked around the immaculately controlled living room and suppressed a shudder. ‘Did she really have no moods?’

  ‘Of course she had moods.’ He sounded thoroughly impatient. ‘Every human being does. But there was usually a reason for them and she tried to explain them before I could worry.’

  ‘She sounds very sensible.’

  Allfarthing’s eyes narrowed as he nodded and his full lips quivered slightly.

  ‘Can you tell me anything about her last few days?’ asked Willow, as much to distract him from the emotions she had aroused as for the information her question might produce.

  He turned to look out of the window or to hide his expression from Willow. Looking carefully out at the neatly mown garden with its immature weeping willow, symmetrically positi
oned sundial and bright bedding plants, he said:

  ‘There wasn’t anything different. I’ve thought about it often since then. She got home relatively early with the usual briefcase full of work. We ate dinner in the kitchen and talked. She started to work in her study (it used to be the nursery) at about half past nine. I went up to bed a couple of hours later and listened to the radio for a bit. She joined me soon after twelve. There wasn’t anything unusual. It was all routine. The same ready-prepared meals went from the freezer into the microwave. We talked as usual.’

  ‘Did she seem anxious at all – or afraid?’

  The dry, unhappy laugh sounded again and he looked back into the room. His eyes seemed damp and Willow disliked herself.

  ‘She was often anxious. When there was a big deal she was worried that something might go wrong and when she wasn’t working on big deals she was bothered that her reputation would sink and she’d be a candidate for redundancy. It’s no fun earning money like that – or being a lone woman among so many ambitious men.’

  ‘You didn’t envy her the glamour of the City?’ Willow was pretty sure she knew the answer to that, but she wanted to give him a chance to get his eyes under control again.

  ‘Certainly not. I couldn’t have stood it, but she liked most aspects of it: the buzz and the terror of deals, and all the people. Peacefully auditing local businesses and running my own little firm suits me, but when Sarah left the Revenue to join me, we both realized that it bored her to d– it bored her.’

  ‘I hadn’t realized that she had ever worked with you,’ said Willow, suddenly discovering something she could ask without risking his bursting into tears. ‘Did she ever tell you a story she’d heard at the Revenue about a family who kidnapped their own aunt so that they could vote her shares and sell the family business?’

  Mr Allfarthing smiled and looked suddenly much younger. He reached forward for the coffee pot and refilled their cups.