Bloody Roses Read online

  ‘I know. But it helps me to worry about him.’

  There was a short laugh from Tom and he leaned across the table to touch her hand lightly. ‘I’ve always thought it strange that someone who has lived a double life like yours for so long should be so honest,’ he said and then stood up. ‘I’ve got an errand to do this morning in Siena; I assume you won’t want to come, too?’

  Willow shook her red head. ‘I must stay and wait for the telephone.’

  ‘Okay. But don’t forget that you can hear it out here just as well as indoors. You might as well benefit from the fresh air while you can. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Keep yourself together.’

  With his usual unhurried ease of movement, Tom collected his car keys, money, sunglasses and battered panama and drove away. Willow carried the breakfast dishes into the kitchen to await the attention of Paola, the daily maid, and brewed another pot of coffee to drink on the terrace.

  It was half past eleven before the telephone rang, and there was still no sign of Tom’s return. Willow dropped the book she had been pretending to read and ran into the sparsely furnished drawing room to seize the telephone.

  ‘Emma?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ There was a gasp in Emma’s voice and a roughness that suggested she was working hard to control herself. All at once Willow felt calm and in charge. Pulling a pad of paper and a pencil towards her, she said:

  ‘Did you get the solicitor?’

  ‘Yes, after quite a lot of trouble. He was a bit reluctant to go out in the middle of the night, but I did manage to persuade him and he’s just rung with news. Oh, Cressida!’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He’s been accused of cutting the throat of a woman called Sarah Allfarthing, who worked at the bank.’

  ‘But why, Emma?’ Willow’s voice was sharp once more. ‘How could anybody imagine Richard doing something like that?’

  ‘Apparently he was found, covered in her blood, beside the body. And there was no one else at the bank except for the security men on the door and a man in the computer room downstairs, who couldn’t have done it.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ said Willow at once. ‘From all Richard’s said, there are always people there practically all night. It’s part or their Battle-of-Britain fantasies to work ludicrous hours.’

  A small flying creature landed on her bare arm and she swotted it angrily, slapping her own flesh hard enough to make her wince.

  ‘Not last Friday,’ came the rueful answer. ‘It was the bank’s annual summer dinner dance. Everyone had gone. Richard was due to be there, too, but he’d just flown back from Japan and was late.’

  Willow thought for a few seconds, absent-mindedly stroking the reddening patch on her arm.

  ‘There’s obviously some other explanation. You and I both know that he couldn’t have done it. Hang on to that. Do you know who is handling the case for the police?’

  ‘A woman called Jane Moreby, Chief Inspector Moreby.’

  ‘Thank heavens it’s a woman,’ said Willow without thinking. ‘Give me Mr Roylandson’s office number and I’ll ring him up tomorrow.’

  Emma dictated the telephone number and added: ‘Aren’t you coming back? Richard needs you. They let me see him when I took him some clothes this morning and he’s desperate.’

  Willow thought of Tom and his enthusiasm for their long-awaited, holiday. All possibility of pleasure in it had been destroyed for her by Richard’s predicament, but she could not force Tom back to London early. And yet the thought of Richard’s anguish pulled at her, like barbed wire catching on loose knitting. Immensely competent in her civil-service work, highly successful in her life of fantasy, Willow found that the business of caring about other people, on which she had embarked only in the last year or so, was proving endlessly difficult.

  ‘I’ll come back as soon as I can,’ she said at last. ‘Please ring me whenever there’s news.’

  ‘All right,’ said Emma with noticeable coldness just before she rang off.

  Paola appeared in the doorway, plump and bustling, to ask Willow something in Italian. She shook her head. After much sign language it became clear that Paola wanted to know whether to prepare lunch.

  ‘Si. Grazie, Paola,’ Willow managed to say.

  Tom drove up on to the gravel sweep a little later and came round the house to find Willow sitting at the table once more. He held out a flimsy, red-covered folder.

  ‘It’s the first flight with a spare seat: tomorrow morning from Pisa.’

  ‘Oh, Tom. I …’

  ‘Never mind. I went to buy you a cordless telephone so that at least you could lie by the pool while you waited, but halfway to Siena I realized that you’d have to go back and so I bought the ticket instead.’

  ‘Won’t you mind doing that long drive back on your own?’

  Tom shook his head and then grinned. ‘Your sitting beside me in a state of suppressed hysteria would make it much more difficult.’

  ‘That’s playing dirty,’ said Willow with a grimace. But when she took the ticket from him she was much kinder.

  Later that afternoon, as they were lying side by side at the edge of the swimming pool with Tom’s body in full sunlight and Willow’s in the heavy shade of a canvas awning, she asked him about Chief Inspector Jane Moreby.

  ‘You’d like her,’ he said, propping himself up on one elbow. His shaggy eyebrows contracted over his broken nose. ‘Is she handling Richard’s case?’

  ‘According to Emma Gnatche.’

  There was a silence that filled Willow with foreboding until Tom said again:

  ‘You’d like her. She’s remarkably intelligent and thoroughly sensible. I’d be surprised if …’

  Willow looked at him, the recent trust and affection fighting with the coldness that had always been her refuge.

  ‘You sound as though you think she must be right about Richard,’ she said at last.

  ‘Occasionally she does let her prejudices get the better of her reason,’ he answered slowly. ‘But then that is true of us all. I’d be surprised if she were ever badly wrong. There must be a reason, Will.’

  He looked down into Willow’s face and she saw that his eyes were hard.

  ‘The only consolation I can offer you is that she is far too sensible to get things badly wrong. If you are right and there is some evidence that Crescent is innocent, she will be easily convinced by it.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound as comforting as it ought,’ said Willow slowly.

  ‘No.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘Miss Woodruffe, if you really wish to help Mr Crescent, I suggest that you write him cheery letters and send him one of your books to read,’ said Martin Roylandson.

  ‘And knit socks and perhaps bake a rabbit pie,’ Willow answered tartly. She was in a state of such anxiety that her powerlessness to do anything for Richard was causing her acute distress, which as usual took the form of anger rather than tears.

  If it had not been for Tom’s recommendation of Roylandson, Willow would have taken an instant dislike to him and tried to find someone else to represent Richard. The solicitor was a short, stout man with pale-red hair that looked so dry that she expected a shower of dandruff to fall out of it whenever he moved. Like his mincing manner and his virtually rimless round spectacles, the unattractive hair made her think he must be both old-fashioned and unintelligent.

  He was wearing a pinstriped suit of a particularly dark blue cloth and across his rounded waistcoat hung a gold watch chain, as though he wanted to be thought an old man. In fact he could not have been more than fifty, if as much.

  It shocked her that she could be so swayed by something as silly as a man’s physical appearance, but she found it hard to believe that anyone who looked as he did could be both perceptive and hard enough to fight Richard’s case as it should be fought.

  ‘The patronage was unintentional,’ he said in answer to her small outburst. He bowed slightly as he spoke, but there was no snowstorm of white
flakes from his head. Willow accepted the apology.

  ‘I have had a certain amount of experience of murder cases,’ she said, forbearing to remind the solicitor that she was paying his bill and therefore planned to force him to accept her help, ‘and fully intend to do what I can to get Richard out of prison. It would seem sensible as well as economical of effort if we were to cooperate.’

  ‘Very well.’ There was resignation as well as a certain grudging respect in Roylandson’s high, dry voice. ‘What is it that you wish to do?’

  ‘Discover enough to prove that Richard did not commit the murder,’ Willow’s pale-green eyes narrowed into the first hint of a smile that morning. ‘To do so, I need to know exactly what it is the police have on him.’

  Pushing his spectacles further up his inadequate nose, the solicitor grimaced as though he disliked her use of slang, but he pulled forward a file and read out the précis he had made of the police evidence against his client. Willow listened in fierce concentration to a more detailed account of the scene Emma had described to her over the telephone.

  ‘And where was the blood?’ she asked at one moment.

  ‘Everywhere.’ The solicitor’s dry, red eyebrows twitched. ‘His hands, his face, his shirt front, his trousers, his coat, his shoes …’

  ‘But that sounds as though he’d rolled in it. It’s absurd.’

  ‘The severing of carotid arteries tends to produce a considerable quantity of blood, as does similar damage to the smaller vessels in the neck. Besides, my client was in the process of moving the cadaver when he was disturbed.’

  Roylandson pursed his lips in distaste, whether at the thought of the bloody mess or Richard himself, Willow could not decide.

  ‘Have you got photographs of Richard and the scene of the crime?’ she asked as calmly as though she did not even know him.

  ‘Not yet. But I shall have them in due course. The police have promised to send a set of prints.’

  ‘And Richard was really the only person in the building? How can they be sure that she hadn’t been killed earlier when there were more people around?’

  ‘The last people who are known to have left the corporate finance department went at seven fifteen. The condition of the blood suggests that Mrs Allfarthing must have died only a short time before the body was discovered, a suggestion that is confirmed by the short-circuiting of her computer only minutes before the man from the computer room found them.’

  ‘Short-circuiting? I don’t understand.’

  ‘The blood that dripped from Mrs Allfarthing’s severed neck into the keyboard of her computer caused the electricity to short-circuit. The time at which that happened is recorded on the monitors in the basement computer room.’

  ‘Then perhaps she did not die at once,’ suggested Willow. ‘She might have been only wounded and then slowly bled to death.’

  Roylandson visibly controlled himself. In a voice even more precise than usual, he said:

  ‘When the trachea is severed, death is apt to be instantaneous. Besides that does not alter the time at which the computer went down.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Silly of me,’ Willow murmured more to herself than to him. She knew that she would have to study the police photographs for which she had asked, but the very idea of them sickened her. ‘But you were going to tell me about the inhabitants of the office.’

  ‘Apart from Mr Stephen Draycott from the basement and the janitors at the door, everyone else was at the dance. They were all required to identify themselves at the door to prevent gate-crashers and each employee and his or her companion was ticked off the list as they entered.’

  ‘Surely the murderer could have done that to establish an alibi and returned to the bank surreptitiously,’ said Willow, surprised that Roylandson should not have seen that himself. ‘Climbing out of a lavatory window or something.’

  ‘That would seem possible, but they would have had to enter the bank building by the front door, since all the others had already been locked from the inside, and so pass the two janitors, who have reported that no one except my client entered the bank after half past seven when the doors are locked. As you can imagine, I have nothing with which to defend my client except his statement that the woman was dead when he entered his office. There really is nothing that you can do, Miss Woodruffe.’

  Roylandson straightened his right arm and admired the plain gold cufflink that glowed chastely against his faintly striped shirt.

  ‘I refuse to believe that. Richard is the least violent of men, and he –’

  ‘Ah, now we come to a most unfortunate piece of corroborative evidence for the police.’ The solicitor pushed himself further back into his leather chair and looked over Willow’s head to a set of dingy grey-and-white architectural prints that were supposed to enliven the cream-coloured wall opposite his desk.

  ‘Yes?’ Willow’s face was cold and her voice was one that many of her junior civil servants would have recognized.

  ‘Yes. At a meeting three days before the incident, Mr Crescent was seen by several witnesses to take hold of the victim by her shoulders and shake her. He was said by more than one of the witnesses to have been in a violent rage.’

  Willow’s face was blank with a mixture of shock and stubborn disbelief.

  ‘I must speak to Richard himself,’ she said, getting out of her chair and pacing up and down the solicitor’s tidy room.

  ‘You will find that he won’t deny that he shook her,’ said Mr Roylandson, taking off his spectacles and laying them on his desk precisely equidistant between his telephone and the wire tray that held his incoming letters.

  ‘Nevertheless I must see him,’ said Willow, finding herself infected by Roylandson’s pompous phraseology and clear articulation. ‘Will you please arrange it for this afternoon? You can presumably identify me as one of your temporary clerks.’

  ‘That may be difficult.’ Willow looked up and was disconcerted by the sight of a prim face suffused with laughter. ‘I’ve never had a clerk – temporary or otherwise – who dressed at Yves Saint Laurent.’

  After a moment in which she was too surprised to speak, Willow looked down at her plain suit and then smiled with equal amusement. There was also relief in her face.

  ‘I’m quite used to disguising myself,’ she said, thinking of the ill-dressed, severely coiffured spinster she had been before she had invented Cressida Woodruffe. Until she had taken her six-month sabbatical from the civil service, she had turned herself back into that much-despised figure for the three days every week that she had worked as an assistant secretary at the Department of Old-Age Pensions.

  Leaving behind not only her expensive clothes but also the luxury of her Belgravia flat, she would return to the small flat in Clapham that she had bought when she had first been promoted to principal. It was only ten minutes’walk away from the dull modern tower block that housed the department, and the mortgage that she was still paying was well within the means of a part-time assistant secretary. But it was damp and depressing.

  Her growing confidence in herself and the life she had built with Cressida’s royalties had begun to persuade her of the absurdity of retreating to Clapham every week and she had decided to try life without the civil service. Too cautious to resign before she knew what it would be like, she had told her establishments officer more of the lies she had always used to conceal her days as Cressida Woodruffe and been given six months of unpaid compassionate leave.

  ‘And I have plenty of other clothes,’ she added with a smile.

  ‘I see. Then perhaps we’ve both been guilty of judging by appearances.’

  Willow met his eyes and thought that she saw the ghost of a very different man looking out of them: a man of wit and intelligence and all the sharpness she could have wanted. She could not imagine why he assumed such an absurd part and made himself appear so foolish, but since she had played her own, not dissimilar, games for years she was prepared to believe that he had a reason.

  Martin Roylandson r
eached for the telephone and made an appointment to see Richard at the prison at half past two that afternoon.

  ‘What about suicide?’ Willow asked as he put down the telephone receiver. ‘That sounds the most likely alternative explanation.’

  ‘Suicide will undoubtedly be our best defence, but it is nevertheless going to be difficult to prove.’

  Willow raised her eyebrows.

  ‘There was no suicide note. The police checked all the desks in the department and all the wastepaper bins in case it could have been misplaced, and there was nothing.’

  ‘Presumably not everyone leaves a note,’ Willow suggested, not convincing even herself.

  ‘I cannot recall hearing of any woman who could bear to take leave of this life without leaving an essay in explanation.’

  Willow’s lips tightened. Roylandson allowed himself to smile at her expression.

  ‘In addition to that, the nature of the wound suggests it was not self-inflicted. Very few suicides have the resolution to kill themselves that way without several unsuccessful cuts. There was only one slash across Mrs Allfarthing’s throat.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘There is also the condition of the victim’s, scalp, which apparently suggests that her head was held back with enough savagery to pull some of the hairs out of her head.’

  All Willow’s frustrations and anxieties were taken over by a single surge of sympathy for the dead woman. The imagination that allowed Cressida Woodruffe to capture the interest of hundreds of thousands of readers across the world made it impossible for her not to understand something of the pain and terror Sarah Allfarthing must have suffered before she died.

  Somehow Willow buried the sensations deep enough to allow her to thank Roylandson and get her out of his office. She went straight back to her large flat in Chesham Place intending to change out of the green suit into something less obviously expensive. Her housekeeper, who had promised to look into the flat every few days while Willow was on holiday, came into the tiny, polished hall just as she was shutting the door behind her.