Poison Flowers Read online

  ‘I have done, but you may find that one a little hard to get hold of,’ answered Ben. ‘I think it sold about three hundred copies five years ago, desite remarkably good reviews, and was remaindered by the publishers as soon as my contract allowed them to do it. They’re not like your books.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Willow. ‘Mine are never reviewed at all.’

  ‘But they sell,’ said Ben with a laugh. ‘How they sell!’

  ‘Oh yes, they sell,’ Willow was beginning when Richard interrupted.

  ‘Books, books, books,’ he said, from Willow’s other side. ‘I should never have sat you two together, but I thought you were such different sorts of writers that you’d manage to avoid the subject.’

  ‘Never,’ said Ben. ‘We’ll be on to royalties in a moment.’ Willow watched Caroline’s rather intense, serious face light up and half turning back to Ben saw an extraordinarily affectionate expression on his face. On the face of it they seemed a rather surprising couple. Caroline was exquisitely neat in her clothes and hair, whereas Ben’s floppy brown hair was untidy and his corduroy jacket rubbed and creased. There was a small round patch of dark blue in the corner of one pocket, as though he had let a pen leak, and the cuffs were frayed.

  Willow wondered how they had met and what it was they had found in each other that they had not found elsewhere. That there was something was obvious, because of the way they caught each other’s eyes even when they were talking to other people and looked every so often to see that the other was content. She rather envied them their obvious certainty of each other.

  ‘I think it’s wonderful,’ said Emma Gnatche from the other end of the table, where she had been monopolised by the young man from Richard’s office who, in Willow’s eyes, was simply a junior banker without a thought or expression of his own. ‘To be a published writer!’

  There was so much innocent awe in her voice that both Ben and Willow laughed. Mrs Rusham removed their fish plates then and returned to offer them a casserole of guinea fowl with prunes and port, which was another of her specialities. When she had gone Ben turned back to Emma Gnatche.

  ‘You mustn’t mind, Emma,’ he said kindly. ‘We’re not mocking you; we’re only envious of your innocence.’

  Willow let them get on with it and talked idly to Richard while eating her guinea fowl and keeping half an ear on Ben’s conversation. When she realised that it was all about Jonson trying to stage one of his namesake’s court masques and reproduce the Inigo Jones design for it in miniature, she ceased to pay attention.

  Much later, when she and Caroline had gone upstairs to find their coats, Willow said:

  ‘Ben seems an unusually kind man. You are lucky.’

  ‘I know,’ said Caroline with a sigh. ‘Finding him is really the thing that’s kept me sane recently.’ Willow must have looked completely blank as she tried to think of something to say, for Caroline went on: ‘I thought Richard might have told you that my brother died recently in rather horrible circumstances. Without Ben I’m not sure how I’d have coped.’

  Willow was distressed to see that there were tears in Caroline’s eyes.

  ‘How frightful!’ she said. ‘You must … I mean it’s no wonder you value his kindness.’ As she spoke, Willow knew that neither her surprise nor her attempt at comfort had been at all convincing. Caroline did not seem to have noticed, absorbed as she was in her memories.

  ‘He was really rather wonderful,’ she said, blinking them back. ‘He let me talk about Simon and what happened for hours on end, which must have been very difficult for him and dull, because they’d hardly known each other. I think it’s got to him a bit in the last week or so, because he’s been rather tense, but he always listens and is kind.’

  ‘What did happen?’ said Willow, ignoring Ben Jonson’s feelings as she sat down on Richard’s plump, blue-covered bed.

  ‘He was poisoned,’ said Caroline, still standing, both hands on the buttons of her coat. ‘He and his girlfriend. She was a sweet girl, but I didn’t really know her all that well and so her death doesn’t seem to … I’m sorry.’

  Willow got up and went to Richard’s blue-and-white bathroom, coming back with a handful of tissues, which she offered to Caroline. After a short, silent mopping Caroline faced Willow again.

  ‘I’m sorry, it keeps happening. It was just all so frightful. Not only his dying, but knowing that he’d been killed, murdered, and all the fuss with the police.’

  ‘Were they unpleasant?’

  ‘No more than they could help. Half the time they were actually quite sympathetic. But it was perfectly obvious that they suspected all of us. It’s really been pretty grisly. That part is over now, but Simon is still dead. I can’t really get used to it; that’s why I seem to need to talk and talk about it. I can’t go on loading it all on to Ben now that it’s started to worry him, and yet I still have this compulsion to talk.’

  ‘Then talk to me,’ said Willow. ‘I don’t mean now. He must be wanting to get home. But why don’t you and I meet and you can talk or not talk as you please? We could meet on Sunday and go for a walk or perhaps an exhibition, depending on the weather? What about it? Would you like to?’

  ‘I’d love to,’ said Caroline after a moment’s obvious surprise.

  ‘Good,’ said Willow. ‘What about coming to my flat after lunch on Sunday? Come at twoish?’

  ‘Thank you. That’s really kind,’ she said. Willow dictated her address and telephone number and they went downstairs again.

  When everyone else had gone Willow thanked Richard.

  ‘Did you get what you wanted?’ he asked.

  ‘A bit of it,’ said Willow. ‘And I may get the rest later. Thank you for arranging it.’

  ‘She’s a nice girl, Willow.’ he said. There was a hint of warning in his voice.

  ‘I know. I liked her a lot, and I feel very sorry for her indeed,’ said Willow with genuine sincerity. ‘I’m not about to exploit her,’ she added, and when she saw Richard looking doubtful, went on: ‘Did I harm Emma Gnatche? You were worried about her last time this arose.’

  ‘No, I have to admit that you’ve done Emma nothing but good. I like the fact that she’s off to university.’

  ‘Do you, Richard? I’m glad,’ said Willow, reaching up to kiss his cheek. ‘You’re a sweet, kind man when you’re not too busy. Good night.’

  Chapter Eight

  The next morning Willow was wakened by the shrilling of the telephone near her bed. Feeling as though she had been dragged forcibly out of a thick bog, she tried to focus on the table where the telephone stood. At last she pulled herself together enough to pick up the receiver.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Willow,’ came the vigorous voice of Tom Worth.

  ‘Yes. What time is it?’

  ‘Seven o’clock. You’re usually up by now. What’s the matter?’

  Willow noticed that there was no apology for having woken her up, but all she said was:

  ‘Nothing. I was heavily asleep, that’s all. What do you want?’

  ‘There’s been another poisoning. It ought to be in your paper this morning. That’s how I learned about it. I’m going to find out more, but from what I’ve read it sounds horribly as though it’s another of ours. I’ll be in touch as soon as I’ve talked to the people in charge of the case in Cheltenham. By the way, I’m sorry I woke you.’

  ‘It’s all right, Tom,’ said Willow, mollified as much by his news as by his belated apology. ‘My papers aren’t delivered for another half hour, but I’ll scour them as soon as they arrive.’

  ‘I love you, you know,’ he said and put down his receiver before she could say anything.

  ‘What a man!’ muttered Willow as she got out of bed and walked slowly to her yellow-and-white bathroom. ‘But at least he doesn’t cling,’ she added to herself.

  She had had her bath and dressed before she remembered that she had given Mrs Rusham the day off so that she could tidy up Richard’s flat. Not at all sure that she
could manage the cappuccino machine. Willow made herself a pot of filter coffee and toasted two slices of the previous day’s bread. Just as she was sitting down at the kitchen table, she heard the newspapers arrive and went out to the hall to pick them up. Buttering her toast, she scanned the front page of The Times and found nothing. But she discovered the small paragraph on the last page of home news:

  ‘A Cheltenham doctor was found dead in his home last Monday evening. The post-mortem found that he had been poisoned and the police are interviewing all the patients he saw before he left his surgery that evening.’

  Turning to the Daily Mercury, Willow found stronger meat. Averting her eyes from the oddly posed teenage nude on the third page. Willow’s eye was caught by a moderately sized headline: ‘Gynaecologist poisoned. Patients being questioned by police.’

  Reading the article, Willow discovered that a youngish doctor, James Bruterley, had died at his home in Cheltenham soon after he had finished that evening’s surgery. His wife, referred to by the newspaper as ‘the sad, beautiful, young, blond widow’, had arrived back home from ten days away and found him dead in his study. She summoned one of his colleagues in the practice, who quickly discovered that Doctor Bruterley had died of acute poisoning. There were no details of what kind of poison had been used.

  In default of facts, the article gave its readers to suppose that there was a scandal as well as a death in the full story, which could not be told ‘for legal reasons’. According to the Mercury, the police were anxious to talk to a young woman with a history of mental disturbance, who had been ‘close’to the dead man.

  In an apparent non sequitur the article informed its readers that it was a striking-off offence for a doctor to have ‘an intimate relationship with a patient’. References to the sad, beautiful widow, to the doctor’s many devoted patients, to his youth and his extreme good looks all tended to suggest that he could have been the victim of a designing woman. The slightly muddy photograph; obviously blown up from a small print, supported the paper’s contention that he was handsome. He had sharply defined cheekbones and large dark eyes set under slanting brows, and he looked both intelligent and desperately romantic. Willow thought that if she had had to pick a model of the perfect romantic hero, a little cruel perhaps but even more irresistible for that, she might have chosen Dr Bruterley.

  As she sat staring down at the photograph and wondering whether, there could be any connection between him and the elderly spinster nurse in Newcastle, the telephone rang again.

  ‘Tom?’ said Willow as soon as she had picked it up.

  ‘Yes. Willow, it looks as though this really is another of ours. I’ve been on to the Cheltenham police discreetly. They’re willing to consider anything, but expressed the usual doubts that this murder could have anything to do with the others.’

  ‘How was it done?’ Willow asked.

  ‘Nicotine in his private bottle of malt whisky,’ said Tom. ‘Apparently they’re inclined to the suicide theory. It seems that he had been having an affair with a woman – rather disturbed apparently – who was a patient of his practice. She’d apparently only been to the surgery twice in the last five years and never seen him, but strictly she could be said to have been his patient. He was trying to end the affair, either because he was bored or because of his belated discovery that she was a patient; it is thought that she was trying to blackmail him into keeping it on by threatening him with the General Medical Council or even the police.’

  ‘But a man as ruthless as he looks – and sounds – isn’t going to be driven to suicide by something like that, surely?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Tom. ‘Loss of livelihood, loss of social status, power over patients, that sort of thing – it might drive a highly-strung man off his rocker.’

  ‘Goodness, how scientific you sound!’ said Willow in a voice of wholly synthetic admiration. Tom laughed.

  ‘No, I can see that if he really were highly strung, suicide might seem to be an option for a man like that, but I can’t see him boiling up a box of cigarettes, distilling the resulting liquid and pouring the poison into his bottle of whisky. Why not just a single dose into his glass and then add the whisky …?’

  ‘In any case,’ said Willow quite sharply, ‘he was a doctor with access to every drug in the entire pharmacopoeia. Why bother to make his own poison? And he’d have risked killing his wife or guests by poisoning the whole bottle.’

  ‘Apparently not,’ said Tom. There was an unkind note in his voice for which Willow could not account until he told her the rest. ‘He was particularly partial to a very expensive, single malt whisky. But he thought it too good for either his wife or guests, who had to make do with a supermarket’s own brand of blended whisky.’

  ‘What a shit to be so selfish – and so self-regarding!’ exclaimed Willow.

  ‘Yes, despite the glamour of that photograph and the sorrow of the “lovely young widow”, he doesn’t sound an attractive sort of man,’ said Tom. ‘By the way, I heard that there is to be a memorial service in Cheltenham tomorrow.’

  ‘Odd!’ remarked Willow. ‘Why no funeral? Memorial services are usually held about a month after the funeral, I thought.’

  ‘You can’t bury a body like this until the police are satisfied that it can’t tell them any more. Presumably the family want to do something now. I can’t possibly show up at something like that, but you could.’

  ‘At the memorial service of a total stranger?’ said Willow in outrage. ‘I couldn’t force myself on that poor woman and spy.’

  ‘You amaze me,’ said Tom. ‘I never thought you were so sentimental. You wouldn’t be forcing yourself on her; you wouldn’t need to speak to her and you certainly wouldn’t spy … You just might discover something. Couldn’t you think up an excuse to be there? What about the famous romantic imagination?’

  At that barrage of insults. Willow was almost determined to tell Tom Worth that he could take his investigation and bury it, but she disapproved of people who let their emotions get in the way of work they had undertaken. Besides, the person she was tracking had begun to take on a vague but compelling identity in her mind, and she was becoming increasingly determined to find out more.

  ‘Where was this doctor at medical school?’

  ‘Dowting’s,’ said Tom, ‘in South London.’

  ‘Right. I must go now,’ said Willow. ‘Ring me if you get any more information. Goodbye.’ She put down the receiver with more than a slight snap.

  His suggestion of her going to the memorial service was not stupid, she had to admit, and her instinctive distaste for it was easy to rationalise away. Having explained to the shrinking part of her mind that there were many things she might discover at the service without at all inconveniencing or worrying any of Dr Bruterley’s family, Willow went to sort out some suitable clothes.

  The next day, clad in a straight-cut black coat, thin black tights, black calf shoes, and carrying her gloves, bag and Cossack-style hat, Willow caught the 11.05 am train from Paddington to Cheltenham. As Cressida Woodruffe she always travelled first class, and so she made her way along the dirty platform until she reached the first-class carriages. As usual they were cleaner than the rest, perhaps because the people who travelled in them were less inclined to fling their mess around. The first no-smoking carriage she reached was empty and so she went in, put her hat carefully on the luggage rack, took a slim book out of her handbag and sat down in the window seat facing towards Cheltenham.

  Opening the book, she found that she had picked up the wrong one. She had meant to bring a second-hand copy of one of Ben Jonson’s novels she had bought after her conversation with Tom Worth the previous day. Instead she found herself with an equally battered hardback edition of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Willow could not even remember having bought it, but she was quite certain that she had never read it, and must have had it lying in the bookshelf where she had put Ben Jonson’s novel when she brought it home.

  Like everyone else,
Willow knew about the meditations and had even referred to them in conversation as though she knew them well, but flicking through the pages at random, she was surprised by the simplicity and the common sense of the exhortations the Roman emperor had written to himself. Her eye was caught now and again by ideas that seemed particularly apposite to her condition and she read on and on. ‘If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly … expecting nothing, fearing nothing … thou wilt live happy’, she found at one moment and nodded emphatically as though the Stoic emperor was sitting there opposite her.

  The train stopped at country stations every so often, but Willow hardly noticed as she read, taking more and more time to think about what she was reading. She had just reached the words, ‘Let no act be done without a purpose, nor otherwise than according to the perfect principles of art’, when the door of her blessedly empty compartment was slid open with considerable force. Willow looked up. A very large man in a formal dark suit and black tie stood in the doorway. There was an uncertain expression on his face, and it seemed to Willow that he was not accustomed to feeling any lack of certainty.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said shortly. ‘I thought this one was empty.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Willow, remembering that she was in a public conveyance and not her own car. ‘I haven’t reserved the whole compartment. Come in and sit down.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, lowering himself on to the seat diagonally opposite Willow’s and extending his long legs. He looked at her as she sat there in her black coat and shoes and then let his eyes flick upwards to look at the luggage rack above her head, where she had put her elegant hat. ‘You look as though you are going to poor Jim Bruterley’s service too,’ he said, gesturing to his own funereal clothes and black tie.

  ‘What an extraordinary coincidence!’ said Willow, shutting up Marcus Aurelius. Despite her natural inclination to avoid talking to chance-met strangers, this one offered an unexpected opportunity to hear about the dead man and to pursue her task according to ‘the perfect principles of art’.