Bitter Herbs Read online

  ‘But then, presumably, it was diluted for her by all her other work,’ said Willow. ‘She must have been dealing with other writers, too.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Patty so quickly that it seemed she must be afraid of being punished for the tiniest disagreement. ‘How silly of me!’

  ‘Not really,’ said Susan, once more touching her shoulder. ‘Even during the weeks I’ve been here, Gloria did seem to monopolise Vicky’s attention.’

  ‘And what about Gloria’s friends?’ Willow asked when that topic had been exhausted. ‘Did she see them often?’

  ‘Quite often. She’d really given up having big parties,’ said Patty, ‘but they came to small lunches and things still.’

  ‘What about dropping in?’ Willow hoped that she was sounding appropriately casual. ‘For instance, did anyone come to see her on the last day of her life?’

  ‘There was only Mrs Guy and me here that day,’ said Susan, looking surprised. ‘Patty was still laid low in the flat.’

  ‘Isn’t that sad?’ said Willow. ‘She had a lonely death.’

  ‘Perhaps, but there was nothing strange about it. Lots of her days were like that. She often didn’t leave the house if it was as cold as it was last week and she certainly didn’t have visitors every day. But she wasn’t exactly alone. Marilyn spent the day at her beck and call as usual.’

  ‘But no visitors?’ Willow risked arousing their suspicions in her need to establish exactly who could have had the opportunity of tampering with Gloria’s medicines or in some other way hastening her death.

  ‘Well, there was a delivery of something that Mrs Guy took in; wine, I think. But that was all.’

  ‘Surely Peter Farrfield came across,’ said Patty, laughing. She turned to Willow. ‘He was always wheeling himself over or ringing up for one of us to help him if he couldn’t get his chair up the slope. Some days he was better than others.’

  ‘No. For once I don’t think he was here at all,’ said Susan, frowning. She shook her head. ‘No, I’m sure he didn’t come over, but you could always check with Mrs Guy if it’s that important. Though, come to think of it, I’m not sure that he’s been in the house at all since I started working here. But I could easily have missed him.’

  ‘Oh, it isn’t important,’ said Willow hastily. ‘I’m just trying to get a picture of her last day. It really does seem sad to me.’

  Susan raised her eyebrows and tightened her lips, but she said nothing.

  ‘Could you have missed anyone else?’ Willow asked, trying to sound wistful. ‘I’d like to think she had had at least one friend.’

  ‘No,’ said Susan abruptly. ‘I didn’t go out to lunch on her last day. Mrs Guy made me a sandwich and a cup of tea, and I’d have heard the front door bell. I always do. I suppose someone might have come after I’d gone back to Patty in the flat, but Marilyn never mentioned anyone.’

  ‘I’ll ask her. But there is one thing I don’t want to ask her about in case it upsets her,’ Willow said in order to divert any suspicion of her reason for wanting to know such trivial details. ‘Did her daughter spend much time here in the house?’

  ‘Oh, she was never allowed in the house at all,’ said Patty, apparently oblivious to anything odd about Willow’s questions or Susan’s reaction to them. ‘Gloria loathed children, and she found the whole idea of Sarah disturbing. Marilyn used to hope things would change, but she never dared actually bring the child over here without permission and she never got that.’

  ‘She did come once, though,’ said Susan more readily. ‘Just after I’d started here. Gloria was unbelievably angry. It was quite the most exaggerated thing I’ve ever seen. Sarah had come across to see her mother about something urgent one afternoon when she’d got back from school. Gloria was in the hall when she came through the garden door and even I could hear the vituperation from down here. She said some shocking things. Sarah burst into tears and a door banged and that’s all I heard. Marilyn was obviously upset when I next saw her, but she never mentioned it and so I didn’t either.’

  ‘Do you get on well with Marilyn?’ asked Willow, waiting to see which of them would answer.

  ‘Fairly well,’ said Patty, shrugging, ‘but I don’t think we’d ever be friends or anything. We did try not to work each other up when Gloria was being difficult.’

  ‘How admirable,’ said Willow with some sincerity. Patty smiled at her gratefully and seemed to relax. ‘And Mrs Guy?’

  Patty’s face tightened up again and she looked at Susan.

  ‘She tended to act as Gloria’s spy,’ said Susan frankly. ‘They were as thick as thieves, you see, and if one of us was a few minutes late in the morning, Mrs Guy would always notice and go running up to tell Gloria.’

  ‘Gloria wouldn’t necessarily know that you were here then?’

  ‘Oh no. We had to use the basement door rather than the one upstairs to get in and out. I never had any contact with her until she buzzed for me to go up with the post. What about you, Patty?’

  ‘No. She never wanted me until about ten, although I was always here by nine.’

  ‘Who let you in?’

  ‘I’ve got a key,’ said Patty, looking surprised at last.

  Willow smiled and glanced round the gloomy office, with its grey haircord carpet and old green filing cabinets.

  ‘Quite a contrast with upstairs,’ she said, thinking that Gloria had been playing Marie Antoinette to her staff’s sans coulottes.

  ‘Yes,’ said Susan coldly. ‘But that’s the sort of thing she particularly enjoyed.’

  ‘You’re being very frank,’ said Willow to them both impartially.

  ‘I suppose we are.’ Susan was once again their spokeswoman. She shrugged her splendid shoulders. ‘I detest the thought of hypocritical respect just because someone’s dead.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Patty, looking shy. ‘It would be so awfully dishonest to pretend that we liked her just because we’re safe from her temper now.’

  ‘No one has yet done that,’ said Willow, smiling at her, ‘except possibly Gerald Plimpton. Do you know him?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Patty, smiling quite freely. ‘He used to come to lunch a lot, even recently when she didn’t see very many people.’

  ‘Really? When was the last time he came?’

  Patty reached for a large diary and flicked through the pages.

  ‘The Tuesday before Christmas. I remember he brought her a present, quite elaborately wrapped in silver paper and gold ribbons, and stayed to lunch. It was quite a celebration, I think, because she’d ordered champagne.’

  ‘But, Patty, didn’t you tell me that he looked furious when he left?’ said Susan.

  Willow was intrigued to notice that Susan was carefully emphasising the number of people who had been upset by Gloria in her last few weeks. It suggested that Susan might have understood the nature of Willow’s quest and wanted to ensure that no suspicion was attached to Patty. That in itself made Willow wary.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ asked Patty gently. ‘You look as though you’ve got a headache.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Willow quickly, wishing that she could be more open about her suspicions and ask her questions directly. ‘You were telling me about Gerald Plimpton’s rage.’

  ‘Well, yes, we were. It’s true that he did look cross,’ said Patty obediently. ‘She sent for me to see him out and he was quite curt with me, which was odd, because he was usually very kind.’

  ‘I thought he was charming when I met him,’ said Willow, trying to organise her distracting thoughts and concentrate, ‘and he spoke very warmly of Miss Grainger. Are you suggesting that was hypocrisy?’

  ‘No, I shouldn’t have thought so,’ said Patty, for once not looking towards her stronger friend for guidance. ‘He was very fond of her and generous with presents and flowers and things. He brought her a huge bunch of red roses that day as well as the parcel.’

  ‘Was she angry too?’

  ‘She was nearly always
angry.’ Patty sighed, looking very pretty and very fragile. ‘In fact it was the things she said to me that afternoon that made me … I mean, it was after that that I felt so ill.’

  ‘And I’d refused bookings that week because I wanted to do some Christmas shopping and so I leaped at the opportunity of seeing what really went on here,’ said Susan quickly. ‘You know, your memoir isn’t going to please people like Plimpton if it includes all our complaints.’

  Willow produced a fairly convincing laugh.

  ‘This is simply probing for background,’ she said, gesturing to the notebook in which she had been scribbling bits of what they told her. ‘But it’ll come in useful, I expect.’

  ‘Well I hope so. Yes, Mrs Guy?’ Susan’s voice had changed. Willow turned round to see the cleaner holding open the door.

  ‘The kettle’s boiled and Marilyn said I was to give Miss King tea if she wasn’t back from the hospital.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Guy,’ said Patty, making it clear that she thought she was talking to an inferior, which surprised Willow. ‘Is there anything else you want from us at the moment?’

  Willow shook her head.

  ‘You’ve given me useful confirmation of things I’ve already heard,’ she said, very conscious of the presence of one of Gloria’s few defenders in the room with them. ‘Thank you for talking to me.’

  She shook hands with them both and preceded Mrs Guy out of the room.

  ‘Would you like to have tea in the drawing room?’ Mrs Guy asked. ‘Or would you rather come and have a cup in my kitchen? It’s warm there.’

  ‘The kitchen then,’ said Willow with what she hoped was a frank and open smile like the ones Gloria’s heroines always produced in difficult circumstances. ‘I’ve already frozen myself in that drawing room once.’

  Mrs Guy pulled out a chair for her at a traditional wooden kitchen table, scrubbed until it was dry and pinkish white. The units round three walls of the room were covered in shiny yellow Formica, and the floor was of patterned linoleum that looked as though it had been designed in 1951 for the Festival of Britain. But every part of the old-fashioned kitchen was scrubbed clean.

  ‘You do keep this house well,’ said Willow, sycophantically. Mrs Guy turned and shot a look at her that was infinitely sharper than her creamy voice.

  ‘To be sure and wasn’t it a little thing I could do in return for all she did for me?’

  ‘It’s good to hear someone speak of her so kindly.’

  ‘There’s a lot of people owed her a great deal more than they gave, I can tell you.’ Mrs Guy sounded suddenly much less Irish as well as more severe.

  ‘Really? Who?’

  ‘Those girls in there for instance. They never worked hard enough to please madam, but then young people nowadays don’t know what work is, do they, Miss?’

  ‘Marilyn at least seems to be fully conscious of what she owed her aunt,’ said Willow, enjoying the diplomatic ambiguity of the sentence. Another sharp glance from Mrs Guy suggested that she, too, had noticed it. She made tea in a blue pot and when it had stewed for a minute or two poured a cupful for Willow.

  ‘It wasn’t so much her I was thinking of as those girls and Peter Farrfield.’ The Irishness was returning. ‘Wasn’t he living for nothing in the cottage, eating dinner with madam as often as not, and relying on her to see him right if his case went badly for him?’

  Mrs Guy poured her own tea, added two spoons of sugar and sat down opposite Willow, who was looking puzzled.

  ‘You’ll surely have heard about his case?’ said Mrs Guy with the pleased smile of the inveterate gossip who has found an interested and ignorant listener.

  ‘No,’ said Willow. ‘I’ve never met him and Marilyn didn’t mention any case. All she said about him was that he was fond of Miss Grainger and that he was in a wheelchair.’

  ‘Yes, the poor man. He was in a car smash, you know. Terrible it was, but he was lucky: the other driver was killed.’

  ‘I see,’ said Willow slowly. ‘Then it’s an insurance matter?’

  ‘That’s right. The company’s been a long time deciding whether to pay his claim or not.’

  ‘But why? I thought most car accident claims were straightforward. What happened?’

  ‘All I know is that it was on an empty road, in the light and there was no rain or oil to make them skid, and yet the two of them collided face to face. And the other man died. The two companies are fighting about which one will pay the claims, madam said.’

  ‘Claims?’ repeated Willow. ‘Oh, you mean that the other man’s estate is claiming, too.’

  ‘So madam told me. And it could go against Peter if he isn’t very lucky indeed. I think that’s why he kept himself so close to madam. He was going to need her if he got no money.’

  ‘But he would have got it,’ said Willow automatically keeping the conversation going as she registered the fact that Gloria had been surprisingly frank and open with her cleaner. ‘It’s only a question of which company had to pay up. It’s irrelevant to him which, apart from his no-claims bonus, I suppose. Tiresome that he has to wait of course.’

  ‘He had only third-party insurance. Madam told me that, too.’

  ‘Did she?’ Willow’s tidy eyebrows were tucked neatly into her forehead as she frowned. It seemed unlikely from everything she had heard of Gloria Grainger that she would have sat gossiping with her charwoman, however ‘good’she had been, without some strong reason.

  As Willow watched the Irish woman’s sharp dark eyes, she cursed herself for sounding so doubtful. A useful fountain of information should never be capped simply because the source is dubious.

  ‘How long had you known her?’ Willow smiled as she asked the most anodyne question she could invent.

  ‘Nearly twenty years I’ve been coming here and you get to know a person well in that long. Oh, I tell you I’m going to miss her.’ Mrs Guy’s eyes were softening again.

  ‘She was lucky to have you.’

  Mrs Guy drank some tea, looking almost as though she could not trust herself to say any more. Willow, conscious of time passing, did not want to upset her and turned the conversation back to Marilyn and her relations with her aunt.

  ‘Well all I can say is that madam was very patient with her.’

  ‘Really? I’d understood that Ms Posselthwate did everything for her aunt.’

  Mrs Guy snorted. ‘She took her time about it all and she skimped, too, whenever there wasn’t someone watching her. She was always going off across the garden to see if Peter was all right if he wasn’t over here bothering madam, or to check that the child had been brought back from its school.’

  Willow thought about Marilyn’s shiftiness when questioned about the precise events of the evening her aunt died and wondered if she had just heard the simple, only mildly discreditable reason for it.

  ‘Did Mr Farrfield look after the child then?’

  ‘Well and wasn’t it the least he could do for her? Living free and all?’

  There was a slight sound behind Mrs Guy. Willow looked up and over the charwoman’s head and saw Marilyn, her face white and furious. Willow wondered how long she had been standing there. Seeing the doubt in her face, Mrs Guy turned and Willow watched her shoulders stiffen.

  ‘There was no need to bring Miss King down here, Mrs Guy. Whatever would my aunt have said to you?’ Marilyn sounded infinitely more assured than Willow had heard her at their previous meeting or on the telephone. ‘A tray of tea in the drawing room would have been more suitable, don’t you think? Will you come up now?’

  Willow stood slowly, not wanting to antagonise either woman.

  ‘Thank you for the tea, Mrs Guy. You were most hospitable. And you were right: it’s beautifully warm down here.’

  The Irish woman smiled at her and then raised her eyebrows in an expression of ludicrously exaggerated deference, which Willow assumed was directed at Marilyn’s back rather than at herself.

  Marilyn took her up to the drawing room, which was
just as cold as it had been during her earlier visit, and offered her the same velvet-covered chair.

  ‘How did you get on with the secretaries?’

  ‘Fine, thank you,’ said Willow automatically, wondering how to ask the questions that were filling her mind. ‘Although, I’m still puzzled about a lot of things.’

  ‘Really? Is there anything more that I can tell you?’ asked Marilyn.

  ‘Well, yes, I think there might be. Last time we were sitting here, I felt that you were holding back something to do with the evening your aunt died. Do stop me if I’m intruding, but you seemed to feel as though I was about to accuse you of something.’

  Marilyn flushed and shook her head. Willow was interested to see that she was also biting her upper lip.

  ‘No, it wasn’t that at all. At least, in a way I suppose it was. I feel as though I failed her, you see, although the doctor says it wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘I’ve understood that. Is that all that was worrying you? Surely not?’

  Marilyn’s flush died and Willow thought that there was a hardness about her eyes that had not been there before. It could have been simple obstinacy or a dislike of being cross-examined, but Willow thought that there was more to it.

  ‘Come on, Marilyn. You seem to have looked after a difficult relative with exemplary patience. Can’t you just tell me what was making you defensive? I have heard it suggested that you sometimes went home to the cottage when your aunt expected you to be here. Is that all it was?’

  Marilyn continued to say nothing.

  ‘You’re making me curious, you know. All sorts of ideas are occurring to me, which I’m sure are exaggerated.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Marilyn pettishly. ‘If you must know, I do feel a bit responsible. She did ring once, but I was in the toilet and I wasn’t going to rush out. She’d been difficult all day and I thought she could jolly well ring again. But she didn’t, you see, which made me wonder afterwards if it had been her bell at all. I thought it might have been the front door, but there was no one there. When I didn’t hear another bell at all I waited until half-past nine and then crept up and, like I said, she seemed to be asleep. But, you see, she wasn’t.’ She gasped suddenly and pulled a tissue from her sleeve to mop her eyes.