Bitter Herbs Read online

  The doctor nodded. She wondered what he would have said if she had told him she was gathering evidence to prove that his late patient had been murdered.

  ‘I understand that she became increasingly difficult during her last years and I assume that that must have been because of her state of health. Can you confirm that?’

  Willow sat with her pen held ready on a clean page of the notebook, like an efficient, old-fashioned secretary.

  ‘Not really,’ said the doctor through a mouthful of pasty. He swallowed and collected the crumbs that clung to his lips in an immense white linen handkerchief, which he then thrust into his pocket.

  Willow thought of pointing out the flowered napkin that had been laid beside his plate but decided against it.

  ‘She’d suffered from angina for some time, but it did not give her permanent pain – nothing like patients with arthritis, for example – and it hardly inhibited her from doing anything she wanted since she was not a particularly active woman.’

  ‘Then how do you account for her behaviour?’ Willow smiled as though in eager expectation of a medical lecture.

  ‘Young Marilyn could have given you just as good an account of that as I. There was no medical reason whatsoever for her aunt’s temper and intolerance. She was probably the most selfish woman I’ve ever come across, and that’s saying something I can tell you.’ He stopped and drank. Then he added: ‘If you ask me, her problem was that she had far too high an opinion of herself.’

  ‘Goodness me! Do you talk about all your patients so frankly?’

  ‘Certainly not. Miss Grainger’s dead. And her relatives are fully aware of my views. Indeed, so was she. I often told her that she should control her temper for the good of her health if not for the happiness of her household. If you want to know, I think that young Marilyn has had hell’s own delight between her aunt and that wretched young man of hers. She’s too good to live.’

  ‘I see. Yes, I thought she seemed rather put upon.’

  ‘Put upon!’ The doctor seemed to explode and the crumbs from another mouthful of pasty flew across the polished wooden table. Willow moved backwards, out of the line of fire, wondering how far the doctor’s devotion to Marilyn might have taken him.

  ‘That’s putting it mildly,’ he said when he had restored his crumby handkerchief to his pocket once more. ‘She spent her days and much of her nights running between the two of them, taking orders, cooking meals, clearing up after them, soothing them when they couldn’t sleep. She was permanently tired, I suspect, and her aunt’s death has been a mercy for her, whatever does happen about the will.’

  Willow looked at the big man opposite her. His reddened face and his bulging eyes showed how angry he was. She could not decide whether his feelings had got the better of his discretion or whether he was so unsuspicious and innocent that he did not see the construction that could have been put on his comment about the will.

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she said, attempting a soothing voice.

  Motives for wishing Gloria dead were two-a-penny, but there was still no hard evidence to prove that she had been killed.

  ‘What was it that actually killed her aunt?’ asked Willow in search of it.

  ‘Heart failure. Haven’t they told you that much?’ The doctor sounded thoroughly impatient.

  ‘Yes, but I never know quite what it means. Did you do a post mortem?’

  ‘My good woman, when you’ve a patient of her age with a history of angina, a gross appetite for all the wrong kinds of food, a violent temper, and a refusal to take any kind of exercise, you do not bother with an autopsy. The cause of death is perfectly obvious.’

  Willow crossed her legs and finished her pudding.

  ‘Yes, I think I see,’ she said with a deep frown. ‘It’s just all so difficult for a lay person to understand. Were you surprised at her death?’

  ‘I’ve just answered that question.’

  ‘Oh, yes of course. Silly me. You said she over-ate, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, and whenever young Marilyn attempted to feed her less dangerous food – cut back on the cream and butter and so forth – there was the most terrible scene. I’ve had that poor child on the telephone to me in tears more than once, asking what to do.’

  ‘She certainly seems to have relied on you a great deal,’ said Willow, remembering what Marilyn herself had said about the doctor.

  Willow wrote down a précis of everything he had said and then put away her notebook, intending to show him that she had finished asking questions about Gloria Grainger.

  ‘Can I get you some pudding?’

  ‘Not for me, thanks, although the buns here are some of the best in London. But I need coffee. I expect you do, too?’ asked the doctor, beckoning to the waitress.

  ‘Good idea.’

  Willow spent the short interval before his attention returned to her phrasing and rephrasing her next question.

  ‘Tell me about Marilyn. She seemed so overshadowed by the idea of her aunt that I didn’t really feel I got to know her.’

  The waitress came back with their coffee and the doctor waited until she had gone.

  ‘She’s had bad luck,’ he said and poured cream into his coffee. ‘Her mother died when she was fifteen and, reading between the lines, I don’t think she got much comfort or support from her father. He may simply have been devastated by his wife’s death. It happens. And hers was pretty long, drawn out and painful, I understand. Well, poor little Marilyn got her comfort the only way she could and fell pregnant. Hence dear Sarah.’

  ‘Poor child,’ said Willow with only moderate sympathy, drinking her coffee black.

  ‘As you say,’ he said looking at her with slightly more approval. ‘With typical guts, she refused either to have an abortion or give the child for adoption and set about trying to find a residential job that would permit her to have the child with her. She spent a couple of terms at a boy’s prep school, where she was wickedly exploited, until her father wrote to his sister asking for help.’

  ‘So he did have Marilyn’s interests at heart,’ said Willow, who had been imagining another violent and difficult man.

  ‘Presumably. He was just not a very adequate parent for a teenage girl without a mother. But in this case, he persuaded his sister to give her niece a job and a home. Marilyn has always been aware that she owes the old girl a lot, but I keep telling her she’s paid it back with interest. I suspect she arrived in Kew hoping for a bit of the mothering she’d lost and found she’d stuck her nose in a viper’s nest.’

  ‘It must have been awful,’ said Willow kindly.

  ‘You’re right there. Her aunt believed that she’d kicked the dust of Reading off her feet, but she still had enough resentment and spite to take it out on her niece once the girl was in her power.’ He finished his coffee, withdrew his huge handkerchief, shook crumbs all over his tweed trousers and wiped his mouth. ‘Resentment is the most destructive of human emotions.’

  ‘More so than ordinary hate?’ asked Willow, interested and thinking about both Posy Hacket and Patty Smithe.

  ‘I’d have said so. Hate is hot and straightforward. Resentment is more like dry rot: eating slowly away at the fundamental fabric, destroying everything but the surface, which is left looking quite sound. Horrible!’

  ‘I must think about that.’ Willow was intrigued by the glimpse of an offbeat imagination she would never have suspected in so conventional a man. ‘It’s an interesting proposition. Perhaps you’re right and her aunt’s death has really been quite a mercy for Marilyn.’

  ‘I hope she gets her just reward.’ The doctor looked at the large watch on his broad, hairy wrist. ‘I must go. Good of you to give me lunch. I hope I’ve told you what you wanted to know.’

  ‘Yes, I rather think you have,’ said Willow, rising to her feet and holding out a hand. The doctor shook it.

  ‘The only other thing I wanted to ask is are you Mr Farrfield’s doctor as well?’

  ‘No, thank t
he Lord. Watching one selfish bloodsucker drain young Marilyn was bad enough. Two would have been intolerable.’

  ‘Is he really as bad as that?’

  ‘Well, he’s a selfish young bugger anyway. Sorry. Forgive my language. Selfish young rascal. He treats her as though it was her fault he’s in a chair, but she was nowhere near the crash. He was driving the car himself, they tell me, and he owes her a lot for taking him in. Why she puts up with him, I can’t think.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s the father of her daughter.’

  ‘Perhaps he is.’ The doctor looked disapproving. ‘In which case, I’d have said she had even less reason to put up with him. None of our business though if he is or if he isn’t. Good day to you.’

  ‘Good bye.’ Willow sat down, interested in his clumsy but clearly deep admiration for Marilyn.

  Looking through her notebook for what Marilyn had said of him, Willow wished that she had taken her dictating machine to all her interviews so that she could have had a record of the precise words people had used. She had left it behind because of the inhibiting effect it tended to have on people unused to being recorded, but it would have helped.

  Finding her written account of her first conversation with Marilyn, Willow did notice one direct quotation. Deciphering her own scrawl with difficulty, she read:

  ‘I don’t know what I’d have done if I hadn’t had him to help me when Aunt Ethel became too difficult.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Having rung the doorbell of Gloria Grainger’s house ten minutes later, Willow was disappointed to be faced once more with Mrs Guy. Aware that the cleaner left the house every day at half-past five, Willow knew that there was no point in asking her any of the questions that might elicit the truth about Gloria’s death.

  It was clear that whatever had been done to her must have happened after she had gone up to her bedroom on the night she died, unless someone with the freedom of her room had previously tampered with the last pills she took. No one would admit to doing that, however skilfully the questions were put to her.

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss King,’ said Mrs Guy with a cheerful smile, not looking at all like a killer.

  Willow smiled back in what she hoped was an encouraging fashion.

  ‘Hello. I’m sorry to disturb you again, but I was passing and I dropped in on the off-chance that I could have a word with Marilyn, but I take it she is out. Do you know when she’s expected back?’

  Something moved behind Mrs Guy’s eyes and her mouth tightened into an angry rosette.

  ‘She’s not out at all. She’s upstairs on the telephone. Will you wait in the drawing room?’ There was so much emphasis on the last two words that Willow laughed.

  ‘I knew that you weren’t minding my kitchen, whatever she said. Come along in.’

  ‘Thank you. I didn’t mind it at all. It was warm.’

  Mrs Guy laughed as she showed Willow into the bitterly cold drawing room and then stopped. Her face suggested that she was struggling with a desire to say something.

  ‘Can I help at all?’ asked Willow.

  Mrs Guy looked carefully up the stairs and came back into the drawing room, shutting the door behind her.

  ‘We’ve had a terrible scene here today,’ she said, her eyes bright with interest, ‘and I’d never mention it except that I think you ought to know.’

  ‘I?’ Willow was torn between intense curiosity about anything that went on in the house and anxiety that Mrs Guy might have somehow divined her daily increasing suspicions.

  ‘Marilyn found Peter over here this morning, going through her aunt’s papers,’ said Mrs Guy impressively.

  ‘He wasn’t?’ said Willow, genuinely shocked into an interrogatory protest.

  ‘He was,’ answered Mrs Guy at once. ‘And what do you think of that now?’

  ‘But how did he get down to the basement? Did one of the secretaries help him?’ Willow thought of Susan’s powerful shoulders.

  ‘Oh, no. He wasn’t after any of the office papers. It was her own ones he wanted, that she kept in the study.’

  Willow could not remember being shown anything like a study on her first tour of the house.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘It’s the door just across the hall.’ Mrs Guy pointed at the closed drawing room door as though they could both see through it.

  ‘Oh, I see. Marilyn didn’t show me that. And what did Peter find?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Guy sadly, but she cheered up as she added: ‘but Marilyn caught him at it and she gave him what for all right. They started going at each other hammer and tongs. Hammer and tongs.’

  ‘But what do you think he was trying to find?’

  ‘A copy of her new will of course.’

  ‘New?’

  ‘The one she only changed a while before she died.’

  ‘And how do you know she did that?’ Willow could not help remembering the secretaries’accusation of spying.

  ‘Didn’t she tell me so herself just before Christmas?’ said Mrs Guy with dignity. ‘When she said she’d be leaving me the twenty-five thousand pounds.’

  Before Willow could apologise for her doubting tone of voice or ask any more, the drawing room door opened to reveal Marilyn, her face flushed and pretty.

  ‘Mrs Guy,’ she said with even more authority than she had shown the previous day, ‘you have plenty to do downstairs.’ The charwoman left the room, obviously not as surprised as Willow was by the change in Marilyn.

  ‘Forgive me for disturbing you yet again,’ said Willow as the door shut behind Mrs Guy. ‘I was lunching with Doctor Trenor at the Maids of Honour and I felt I couldn’t simply leave the area without seeing how you were.’

  ‘That’s really kind of you. I feel so … oh, so many things that I could burst, you know. You wouldn’t come for a walk with me, would you? I don’t think I can stay in the house any longer. Have you time?’

  ‘Well, yes. I’d like that,’ said Willow, surprised by the unlikely friendliness but determined to hear exactly what had been going on. ‘I’m delighted to see you so much happier. What’s happened? Or mayn’t I ask?’

  ‘Of course you can, but wait till we’re out of here. There won’t be any flowers, but why don’t we go into the botanic gardens? I can afford it now.’

  Willow, who had only ever heard the gardens called ‘Kew’was amused at the formality of the title, and nodded.

  ‘My boots aren’t very robust,’ she said, looking down at them and remembering how much they had cost. She noticed with regret that there was already a faint white salt line above the sole.

  ‘Don’t worry. Most of the paths are hard and we can go and stroll in the palm house. They won’t be at risk at all. Come on.’

  She almost waltzed out of the room and reappeared with a heavy woollen coat over her arm.

  ‘Now what is it?’ asked Willow as soon as they were within the great gilded iron gates of Kew Gardens and had paid their entrance fee. ‘I’m consumed with curiosity.’

  Marilyn, who had been walking briskly towards the long, gracefully mounded bulk of the palm house, stopped as though she could not both walk and tell her news. She faced Willow, her eyes blazing.

  ‘Sarah and I are safe now and for ever.’

  ‘I don’t think I understand.’

  ‘Aunt Ethel has left me three hundred thousand pounds and a trust for Sarah that will pay for her clothes and school fees and all sorts of extras until she’s eighteen. Isn’t it amazing and wonderful?’

  ‘Yes indeed. Astonishing after what you’ve told me. But how do you know? I thought you said that neither the solicitor nor your aunt’s executor would tell anyone the contents of the will until after her funeral.’

  Marilyn started to walk again. Willow saw that her eyes were less excited and her mouth turned down once more.

  ‘Yes, but we had a bit of trouble here this morning and I rang Gerald Plimpton to explain what was happening.’ Marilyn stopped talking until they had reached t
he doors to the immense greenhouse. She hauled open one of the heavy doors, gesturing for Willow to precede her.

  The wet heat seemed to hold Willow back for a moment, but she pushed through the barrier it created and sniffed the peculiar, unforgettable smell of warm vegetation, decomposition, damp, and something else she could not pin down. Condensation streamed down the smeared glass all around her, lying in terracotta-coloured pools on the white iron of the ledges and dripping from the floor of the gallery.

  Marilyn followed her in and breathed deeply.

  ‘I love this place,’ she said, her voice gentle for once and her eyes dreamy. ‘When I first came to live with Aunt Ethel I was very unhappy, but I’d bring Sarah in her buggy on my afternoons off and life wouldn’t seem so bad. It was much cheaper then, of course.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ said Willow. ‘You were about to tell me the rest of what it is that’s made you so happy today.’

  Marilyn turned, beaming.

  ‘Aunt Ethel’s left me the house as well as the money. Can you believe it? She’s left me the whole exquisite house as well as three hundred thousand pounds.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks. What’s so marvellous is that now that the house is mine I can decide who stays and who goes. I’ve told Mrs Guy she’s to leave at the end of the month so that I’ll be free of her interfering, inquisitive face at last.’ Her voice was sharpening as she spoke. ‘And I’ve told Peter to get out of the cottage at once.’

  Aha, thought Willow, perhaps the sacking explains the charwoman’s relish for the argument she overheard.

  ‘And so you’ve got it all. I am pleased for you. And Doctor Trenor will be delighted. He was singing your praises all through lunch.’

  ‘Was he?’ Marilyn’s smile was full of affection and gratitude. ‘He’s been very good to me, even before … But you’re wrong.’ A faint shadow dulled her excited eyes. ‘I haven’t got it all, nowhere near, although I’ve got more than I ever dreamed of. Mr Plimpton told me the rest, too. He thought it wouldn’t be fair to make me think I was what they call her residuary legatee.’