Rotten Apples Read online

  ‘I’m not surprised. But just remember, you’ve written-a terrific book.’

  ‘Thanks, Eve. I’ll be a bit more enthusiastic about it when Tom’s…’ Her voice broke again and she hastily said goodbye, furious to have exacerbated her own weakness and misery.

  I mustn’t crack up, she thought, staring down at her bandaged hands. Work’s the only thing that’ll help. I must concentrate and not waste time anguishing about Tom. That won’t help him. He’s either going to live or not. Nothing I do can affect it. It’s better if I don’t even think about him. How can I persuade Serena Fydgett to co-operate with the police? Between us all, we must find out who killed Len Scoffer. And there’s the report for the minister, too. Will he still want it, now that Scoffer’s dead? Did Fiona Fydgett really kill herself or was someone else involved? Was that someone trying to kill me? Have I asked too many inconvenient questions about her?

  Could it have been Serena after all? No, it couldn’t. Unless it was someone else who persuaded her to protest about the Revenue, someone whose suspicions she did not want to arouse by refusing. Any such person would have to have been pretty influential.

  Willow’s mind went almost at once to Malcolm Penbolt.

  ‘No,’ she said aloud. ‘It’s absurd. Byzantine layers of suspicion and conspiracy. It must be something much simpler.’

  Perhaps the police were right, she thought, and it really was Fiona’s son who torched the building. He might have been capable of it. The police had interrogated him for three hours, and from everything she had ever heard from Tom and others, they did not do that sort of thing for nothing.

  ‘Am I going mad?’ she said.

  The telephone rang again, shocking her out of her disordered thoughts. It was Black Jack, saying, ‘You’ll be glad to hear we’ve got them, Will. The scrotes who shot Tom, and they’ve nothing to do with any of your murder cases, nor the fire.’

  Willow leaned back against the squashy chair and let her eyelids droop over her eyes.

  ‘Are you still there, Will?’

  ‘Yes. Just beginning to breathe again after the terror you and Harness drilled into me the other day. D’you know if he ever found out whether any of our four murderers are out of prison?’

  ‘None of them. All safely banged up for years to come.’

  ‘I see. Well, it was kind of you to let me know. Good work.’

  ‘I told you, you’re family now. We take care of our own. The papers have gone to the Crown Prosecution Service, and we should hear from them pretty quickly.’

  ‘Then it’s not certain yet?’

  ‘Virtually.’

  ‘What’s the evidence?’

  ‘God, you sound suspicious! We’ve got the gun, matched the bullets, got the right prints on the gun.’

  ‘Have they confessed?’

  ‘Not yet. But it’s clear enough. Don’t you fret. We know we’ve got the right bunch.’

  ‘But why did they shoot him?’ asked Willow. ‘He wasn’t in uniform or anything. Did they know him?’

  ‘Don’t think so. It looks like the usual, I’m afraid, Will. Tom was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He stumbled on a bunch of young men crazy with crack and high on the thrill of having a gun. I don’t suppose they even knew he was a copper. They’re not dealers, just petty crooks. We’ve checked the records, of course, and Tom had never arrested any of them. I suspect it was just bad luck that he was there.’

  What a waste! Willow thought. What a hideous, cruel waste! Then she took herself to task. It was no worse for Tom to have been shot for nothing than it would have been if he had been on the track of a master criminal. He would have been shot just the same.

  ‘Will, are you there?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry. Nothing to say really, is there?’

  ‘Not really, no. But I thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘Yes, thanks. Jack, while you’re on, d’you really think that the fire could have been caused by Robert Fydgett? He’s only fifteen.’

  ‘Unfortunately they get younger all the time. You ought to know that. But what makes you think Fydgett’s a suspect?’

  ‘His aunt told me. But it seems extraordinary. You can’t have any evidence that he did it or you’d have arrested him.’

  Black Jack sighed. ‘Look, it’s not my case. Nothing to do with me. All I’ve heard is that Fydgett was devoted to his mother in a rather creepy way and hated the men in her life. And there were plenty of those, I can tell you. He knows a lot about electricity. There’s no alibi and he’s altogether a bit dodgy: child of a single mother, low achiever at school although he’s known to be bright, a trouble-maker. And he climbs like a cat. All in all, he fits the profile. No more than that but if it’d been me, I’d have had to look into it. And then I gather that in the interview he exhibited all the classic signs of guilt’

  ‘What are they?’ asked Willow, both interested and unconvinced. She could not help thinking that Black Jack must know a great deal more than he was admitting if he had told her that much.

  ‘Body language. Very defensive: blushed a lot; held his arms across his chest whenever questions got tricky; turned sideways; lowered his chin. You know the score. And he got angry when he was cornered.’

  ‘Oh. Still, I can’t believe he had no alibi. He was at boarding school.’

  ‘It’s only a London boarding school,’ said the superintendent impatiently. ‘They think it’s possible the arsonist set everything up the previous night with the timer or photo-electric cell or whatever. Fydgett’s been known to abscond from school before and play the goat. He was caught putting the Welsh flag on the top of the school chapel’s steeple one night at the end of last term, I understand.’

  ‘That’s hardly criminal, even if it is against the school rules.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what are you suggesting? That he climbed out of school, got to the tax office, climbed the walls, broke in and fiddled about with the wiring and no one even knew there’d been anyone there?’ Willow’s voice was full of incredulity and contempt. Blackled reacted to it at once just as she had hoped.

  ‘It’s not so unlikely, you know. After his mother died, the school gave him a bed in the sanitorium so that he’d have some privacy to cry over her if he wanted to. There was no one else there to say where he was at any time between lights out and the rising bell. He could easily have got out. It’s not far to the Vauxhall Bridge Road. Scoffer’s window overlooked the car park, and there’s only other offices behind. There’d have been no one to see an intruder in the middle of the night. But I’m not suggesting anything at all. It’s not my case—or yours, I may say. Leave it, Will. Harness is a good bloke. He and his team will crack it—and the less they’re interrupted by irrelevancies, the sooner they’ll do it.’

  ‘Jack, I was almost killed in that fire. I need to know who did it and why. Can’t you give me a bit more?’

  ‘You know I can’t Shouldn’t have told you even that much, but I trust you. I must go now. I’ll look in on old Tom tonight. Perhaps I’ll see you then. ’Bye for now.’

  ‘Goodbye.’ Willow sighed as she put down the receiver again, but she could hardly blame Black Jack for not telling her everything. He had in fact told her much more than she had expected. She would just have to get the rest some other way.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘You ought to lie down and rest for half an hour,’ said Mrs Rusham, bringing Willow a cup of coffee. ‘You’re not as strong as you think you are, and you’re doing far too much. You haven’t stopped since before I got here this morning, and it’s your first full day out of bed.’

  ‘The last thing I want is rest,’ said Willow frankly. ‘It just gives me too much time to worry. Work will keep me going better than any amount of sleep.’

  Mrs Rusham raised her thick, dark eyebrows, but she went away without saying anything more.

  Willow drank her coffee and tried to organise her mind for the meeting with George Profett. Not wanting to waste her time wi
th him as she had wasted the first meeting with Serena, she set about trying to make sense of all the hints, suspicions, fears, and bits and pieces of information she had collected.

  Normally she would have scribbled ideas, key words, and meaningless doodles on a large pad of lined paper until her ideas began to gel and she could draw herself up a systematic list of questions and things to do. As it was, the state of her hands made any sort of writing or even typing too uncomfortable to contemplate.

  At the end of half an hour’s concentrated thought, her ideas were beginning to sharpen. With her mind working almost normally again, she could see the absurdity of a lot of her earlier fears. No one who had wanted to harm her would have gone to all the trouble of attacking the Inland Revenue office. It would have been far more sensible for an arsonist to set fire to her home. She did not advertise her private address, but it was hardly secret, and anyone could have tipped a molotov cocktail through her letter box late at night with less risk of discovery and far greater certainty of success.

  The relief from that anxiety did not lessen her determination to find out who had torched the office and why. Knowing that Blackled would tell her nothing more, Willow decided to talk to the Fire Brigade direct and heaved the heavy business telephone directory up on to her desk.

  ‘Oh, hell!’ she said when she discovered that there was no investigation department listed. None of the offices that were given numbers looked particularly suitable and so she decided that she would have to speak to Black Jack once again, however obstructive he was likely to be.

  ‘Sorry, Jack,’ she said when she eventually got through to his office. ‘I quite forgot to ask you, but how do I get in touch with the Fire Brigade’s investigators?’

  There was a sigh down the line and a peculiar sound, which Willow eventually decided must be grinding teeth.

  ‘Just leave this to the professionals, will you? You’re not yourself at the moment. That’s hardly surprising in the circumstances, but it really would help everyone if you’d keep out of the way. There is nothing you can do. I’ve told you as much as possible—more than I’d have told anyone else. You must leave it at that.’

  ‘It’s not that at all, Jack. I’d never have bothered you if it were. It’s just that I’ve remembered that while I was working on the day of the fire one of my rings kept catching on the papers and so I took it off and put in on the desk beside me.‘ Willow hoped that she was sounding pathetic and feminine enough to arouse Black Jack’s undoubted chivalry. ‘I didn’t remember until just now, but I must have left the ring there. And Tom gave it to me. I don’t think I could bear to lose it, not now of all times.’

  ‘Describe it to me, Will, and I’ll tell the searchers.’

  ‘Couldn’t I just talk to the Fire Brigade themselves? That would be much simpler.’

  ‘They’re not dealing with it any more,’ he said, sounding polite enough but as though he were holding on to his temper with difficulty. ‘Look, the procedure’s quite simple. When a body’s discovered at a fire, a Fire Investigation Team is called in. It consists of the Sub Officer and the Station Officer. They look for evidence of an accelerant—you know what that is?’

  ‘Petrol or something.’

  ‘’Sright. If they find it, they call us and hand over everything. It’s a police matter now, nothing to do with the Fire Brigade.’

  ‘What evidence?’ she said, forgetting that she was pretending to have lost a jewel.

  ‘For god’s sake, Willow! You know I can’t tell you that. It’s under investigation. If you give me details of this ring of yours, I’ll tell them to look out for it.’

  ‘Thanks, Jack. I’ll write you a note about it so as not to waste any more of your time now,’ Willow said as sweetly as she could. She did not think that he had believed in the existence of the ring.

  There was still some time to kill before her meeting with the minister and so she decided to use it up by walking to the Houses of Parliament again. The air was still thick with dust and a sweaty kind of heat, but simply being out in the open without being afraid of watchers was a relief.

  Green Park had a holiday air about it, with people lying on the grass and strolling among the trees. Knowing that Black Jack had Tom’s aggressors safely in cells at Kingston, Willow strolled slowly through the park and even found herself smiling at some of the half-dressed sunbathers.

  It was cool within the vaulted halls of the Houses of Parliament and she managed to feel less irritated with their pomposity than usual. Up in his small but comfortable office overlooking the river, the minister greeted her with apparently genuine concern. As soon as she started to ask questions his sympathetic expression changed.

  ‘I can’t tell you anything more,’ he said with heavy emphasis on ‘anything’.

  Willow glared at him, regretting her spoiled moment of relaxation, and furious that he was still not being straight with her. Tom’s exasperation with people who kept secrets was beginning to seem wholly reasonable. The minister’s eyes did not drop in front of hers as she thought they ought to have done.

  ‘You sent me to that office as your personal representative to investigate a man who might or might not have caused Doctor Fydgett to kill herself. He is now dead and if I hadn’t been very lucky, I’d be dead with him. Doesn’t that suggest to you that there has been something pretty sinister going on?’ Willow’s voice trembled, but, as it was with anger and not misery, she did not mind.

  ‘I think, if you’ll forgive my saying so, Willow, that the events of the past week have made you look at things in a rather melodramatic light.’

  ‘No,’ she said, trying to bounce him into telling the whole truth. ‘I won’t forgive it, just as I can’t forgive your not being frank with me in the first place. Don’t you think what’s happened to me gives me the right to all the information you have about Doctor Fydgett and about everyone in Kate Moughette’s office?’

  The minister looked at his surprisingly extravagant watch and then up at Willow again. His lips were very thin and his eyes cold. But he did not look at all ashamed.

  ‘You certainly have every right to know why I wanted you to go there. As I have said before: I needed information about what happened, both in order to provide a basis for new legislation and in case questions should be asked about the cause of Doctor Fydgett’s death. You must know that I am appalled at what you’ve had to suffer—and how inordinately relieved I am that your injuries are not worse.’

  Willow watched him for a moment, trying to decide whether he was sincere. ‘Did it ever occur to you that Fiona Fydgett’s death might not have been suicide?’ she asked bluntly. The minister’s expression of astonishment was all Willow needed, but he gave her words too.

  ‘Certainly not. It never crossed my mind—nor that of the coroner or anyone who knew her. I don’t think you should worry about that.’

  ‘I see,’ said Willow, still trying to find out why the minister was so obstructive. She knew, without being able to say why, that he was concealing something from her. ‘Have the police interviewed you yet about Scoffer’s death?’

  ‘They’ve been in touch with me to confirm your reasons for being at the Vauxhall Bridge Road office, yes.’

  ‘And were they satisfied?’

  ‘Naturally.’ No old-school Tory grandee could have sounded more dignified.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Willow, trying to be offensive in order to provoke him into telling the truth. ‘The police can be intensely irritating, but they’re not generally stupid, at least not the sort who get to investigate arson and murder.’

  The minister crossed his legs, leaned back in his chair and allowed his chin to sink into his chest. ‘I really do think that, understandably, you have let yourself get worked up by all this. Why not take a few days off? I’m sure that when you’ve had a proper rest and recovered, you’ll be able to see things in much better proportion. And the report can wait a few more days.’

  ‘They know that you sent me there to make
investigations,’ Willow went on without listening to his advice. ‘They know that the man I was investigating is now dead. They must have wanted to know more.’

  The minister raised his shaggy eyebrows. ‘But I understood that it’s been sorted out. I suppose the verdict will be manslaughter rather than murder, and, in view of his age and the strain he’s been under since his mother died, he’ll be treated mercifully. Perhaps even a suspended sentence and some psychiatric care. I certainly hope so. After all, he can’t have known that either you or Scoffer would still be there at that hour.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Willow, realising that the minister had more information on Rob Fydgett than she had managed to get. ‘Are you really telling me that you believe them: that you think Fiona Fydgett’s son set fire to the place?’

  ‘Why, don’t you?’ asked the minister in a reasonable voice.

  She stretched her legs, feeling them ache from the first exercise she had taken for days.

  ‘Because it seems ludicrous to suspect a respectable schoolboy of something so destructive,’ she said, ignoring everything she had read about crimes that had been committed by boys during the past few years. ‘And there’s no real evidence as far as I’ve heard. All the police have is circumstantial. As far as I know there’s nothing to put Fydgett at the scene of the fire, no fingerprints, no witness sightings, nothing. There’s nothing more than a vague suspicion based on the fact that he loved his mother and might have wanted to take revenge on the man he believed responsible for her death.’

  ‘I gather there’s a bit more than that,’ said the minister, ‘otherwise they would hardly have brought him for questioning. But naturally I haven’t been given any details. We have to leave it to the police and the courts.’ He smiled kindly and, when she said nothing, added: ‘Is that all you wanted, then?’