Rotten Apples Page 22

  Willow thanked him, unfolded the paper and silently read:

  My darling, darling Rob, I am so sorry. I’ve been such a bad mother and made you so miserable. I can’t help you at all. I wish I could. At least this way you’ll be free to find a life for yourself that won’t mean having to see me through any more of these awful times. I can’t bear to go on hurting you like this. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I love you very much.

  Mum.

  Willow imagined some of the thoughts that would have gone through her mind if she had been in Rob’s place. Intelligent as he undoubtedly was, he must have thought about the possibility that he could have saved Fiona. What could it be like to live with the thought that she might still be alive if he had only read the letter at the time or bothered to go into her room to see how she was? No wonder he had looked so guilty whenever questions made him think about that day.

  ‘Thank you for showing it to me,’ Willow said, handing it back to him. At least, she thought, since no one but she had ever doubted that Fiona had killed herself, no one else need see or even know about the letter. She could leave the boy that bit of privacy at least with a clear conscience.

  ‘Can I go now?’ he said, still staring at the table.

  ‘Of course you can. You’re not any kind of prisoner here, Rob. I’m sorry to have put you through so much,’ said Willow. She had not time to say anything else before he was out of the door.

  Having given him plenty of time to get into the sanctuary of Tom’s study, she followed him upstairs to bathe and dress in cool, baggy Chinos and a thin grey-blue shirt. She looked at the John Buchan novel that had kept her company during some of her vigils at the hospital and shook her head.

  With almost all her doubts about Rob banished at last, she hoped that she would be able to think constructively about the fire and her report on Fiona Fydgett’s death—and whether the two were connected—while she waited for Tom to come round. Her hands felt better, too, and so she slid her notebook computer into its carrying case, slung that over her shoulder and set off for the hospital.

  Out in the street the air was even stuffier than it had been during the previous few days, and she was glad that she had managed to leave the car under one of the few trees at the edge of the pavement. The steering wheel was hot even so, but at least her bandages protected her from the worst of that.

  There was not much traffic and she reached the hospital ten minutes later. Since it was Sunday she parked in the main road. Locking the car behind her, she felt sticky in spite of her light clothes, and pulled her shirt away from her sweaty back.

  The main foyer of the hospital was even more crowded than usual and very noisy. Willow made her way through hordes of patients, visitors with little children, and volunteer helpers selling flowers and cards and baskets of fruit from a fancily decorated stall opposite the entrance. She ignored them all and shook her head at a woman with a clipboard, who started forwards and looked as though she wanted to ask questions for some kind of market research. Through the crowds at last, Willow headed for the lifts and the tenth floor.

  The Intensive Care Unit was still and wonderfully cool in comparison with the mayhem downstairs. As usual all the blinds were down across the windows and the light was dim. The nurses moved smoothly past the beds, checking monitors and drips, replacing dressings and talking with soothing efficiency to anyone who was awake and frightened. One of the women nurses saw Willow and smiled at once.

  ‘It is difficult waiting, isn’t it?’ she said, talking quietly but without any suggestion of a whisper. ‘But Mr Richardson is quite pleased with his condition. Come along. I’m just going to check his drip.’

  Willow smiled back, not trusting herself to talk about Tom, and followed the nurse into his room. He looked just the same as he had done on the day of the shooting. His chest was pulled up and down by the ventilator, the drip still fed life-preserving fluids into his bloodstream, and the catheter collected the urine his kidneys produced. But nothing else moved. Willow tried to believe in the encouragement that the doctor had given her three days earlier.

  ‘I brought this word processor to do some work,’ she said when the nurse had finished attaching a new bag of fluid to the frame above the bed. ‘Will it interfere with any of the monitors?’

  The little nurse laughed so loudly that Willow looked at Tom to make sure he had not been disturbed.

  ‘This isn’t the flight deck of Concorde, you know,’ said the nurse cheerfully.

  ‘Good.’

  The nurse put a chair ready beside the bed and rolled forward a table.

  ‘It’s a bit high for you to work at. Will you be all right? And will you have enough light?’

  ‘You are kind. Yes, I’ll be fine. I can use it on my knees,’

  When the nurse had gone, Willow took the computer out of its case, switched it on, and found the relevant floppy disk from her handbag. She called up the first draft of her report for the minister and cut and edited what she had written as well as she could, but it was not gripping enough to keep her mind off Tom for long.

  When she realised that she had retyped the same paragraph four times without actually changing anything material, she filed that document again and let her mind turn instead to the question of who could have killed Len Scoffer.

  It was clear from Harness’s appearance in Croydon that he, too, was still searching for convincing suspects. Either he had crossed the Fydgetts off his list or he had never wanted anything more from them than background information.

  Tom’s necessarily discreet accounts of some of his cases had gradually taught Willow that a great deal of police work in a murder investigation is like using a shotgun. If you fling enough pellets in the air you are almost bound to hit something. If you interview enough people, talk to enough possible witnesses, ask enough questions of enough people, you are likely to stumble on something useful in the end.

  There was a slight movement somewhere in the room and she looked instantly at Tom. He seemed to be lying utterly still. Her raised hopes were making the waiting even harder than it had been before. She felt as though she would not be able to bear the suspense for much longer.

  Gritting her teeth, aware that she had no choice, she wrenched her mind back to the investigation and ran through the things she still needed to know until she remembered Miss Andrea Salderton. Brian Gaskarth was obviously having trouble tracking her down, but Willow suddenly thought of a way to find out what her connection with the minister might be.

  There was a telephone just outside the Intensive Care Unit. It had no privacy, but on the other hand there was no one else in the shiny, clean-smelling lobby, and anyone using it would be able to see possible eavesdroppers long before they could get close enough to hear anything.

  Willow dialled Jane Cleverholme’s private number.

  ‘Jane, is that you? It’s Willow here.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘So so. My hands are better and my brain’s less fogged, although it’s still pretty slow.’

  Jane laughed. ‘And?’

  ‘And I’ve been thinking about your proposition. I really can’t go poodlefaking in some pseudo-romance with the climber while Tom’s still unconscious, but I am prepared to write a piece for you about what it felt like to be trapped in the fire and helped down by his expertise.’

  ‘That’s great. And I do understand. How is Tom?’

  ‘The consultant says that the… This is off the record, Jane,’ said Willow, suddenly afraid that her friend’s interest might be professional.

  ‘Oh, my wretched job! I know it’s off the record. Don’t be silly.’

  ‘Good. Apparently the signs are encouraging, but I’ve been sitting with him all morning and I can’t see any change. It’s hell waiting.’

  ‘I can imagine. Look, d’you want to come in and have lunch one day next week?’

  ‘That would be nice,’ said Willow, recognising Jane’s affectionate intent ‘It depends on how Tom is. C
ould I ring you next week when I know more? Would that be all right?’

  ‘Fine. Ring any time so long as it’s soon. Oh, I can’t do Wednesday.’

  ‘It will be soon. Thank you. By the way, Jane?’

  ‘I might have known it.’ Jane’s voice was heavy with resignation, but Willow thought that there might be a hint of amusement in it, too. ‘What little titbit do you want now?’

  It was Willow’s turn to laugh. ‘Okay, fair’s fair. But you do it to me, too. I just wanted to know what the buzz is about George Profett, you know, the Minister for Rights and Charters.’

  ‘What d’you mean by “buzz”?’

  ‘Come on, Jane. You know perfectly well. I know you’re not on gossip any more, but journalists always know about cabinet ministers’private lives. What have you heard about him? Does he have a mistress? Is he gay? Does he gamble? What?’

  ‘Sorry. I can’t help you.’

  Willow was about to use her possible co-operation with the paper’s romantic feature as a persuader when Jane added casually, ‘In fact we’ve graded him SCDD for the moment at least.’

  ‘That’s an acronym I’ve never come across.’ Willow was interested. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Squeaky clean; deadly dull,’ Jane said, laughing again. ‘It was the most dreary outcome imaginable. Some of us were so unable to believe that of any politician that we wanted to do some really deep digging, but the editor wouldn’t authorise it We couldn’t decide whether he was being hardheaded or sentimental, or,’ Jane laughed, ‘best of all, whether he himself has something to hide in connection with Profert,’

  ‘You journalists are a bunch of paranoid conspiracy theorists, aren’t you?’

  ‘We have to be. Reluctantly, though, in this case we had no option but to drop the whole thing for the time being. I’ve decided since that the killer, as far the editor was concerned, was probably the fact that even Profett’s most disaffected colleagues couldn’t think of anything bitchy to say about him, and so he really may be unassailable.’

  ‘Oh, is that where you usually get dirt from? I’d never—’

  ‘No, no, of course not,’ said Jane in a tone that sounded as if she really meant where on earth did you think we got it?

  ‘Anyone else I can help you with before I get going on cooking my Sunday lunch?’

  ‘Actually, since you offer, I’m also trying to find out a bit of background on Andrea Salderton.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard of her?’ Willow let herself sound surprised.

  There was silence. Jane must have been running all the people she had ever written about through her computer-like memory.

  ‘Can’t say I have. Give me a clue.’

  Willow knew that she had painted herself into a corner. She could hardly tell the truth, that she knew nothing whatever about the woman except for the money she received every month from the reputedly SCDD minister, and yet if Willow gave Jane nothing, she would probably make the connection herself and might cause trouble.

  ‘Just a hot new writer from the States,’ Willow said eventually. ‘Someone was talking about her the other day in such glowing terms that I thought I ought to have heard of her and didn’t want to expose my ignorance. I’m glad it wasn’t just me who didn’t recognise her name.’

  ‘She can’t be that hot or we’d have had something here, and it would have come to me. The Lit. Ed. knows I like to keep abreast of publishing tittle-tattle. Well, I’d better get the beef in the oven or the delectable new man in my life will discover what an undomesticated slut I am and bugger off home to perfect mummy.’

  ‘If he’s like that, he’s not your type.’

  ‘He’s shown no signs of it yet,’ said the journalist, sounding much less tough than usual, ‘but they nearly always turn out to be that sort in the end, however promising the packaging.’

  ‘Not a good picker, eh?’

  ‘Rotten so far. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed this time.’ Jane laughed again, and Willow wished her luck.

  She rang off and went back to Tom’s bedside and leaned over him, trying to see any signs of awakening. Failing again, she sat back in her chair, switched her computer back on and tried dismally to do some more work. Remembering the way John Blackled had talked of Rob Fydgett as fitting the likely profile of a criminal, Willow got as far as typing a few ideas about the characteristics she thought might be likely of an arsonist and possibly deliberate murderer.

  Ten minutes later the words she had typed disappeared in front of her eyes and bright orange fish glided peacefully across the black screen. She tapped a key and her text reappeared. Then, like the fish swimming across the screen, a sluggish thought appeared in her mind and she cursed herself for having wasted so much time on ever less likely suspects.

  If the arsonist had not been a member of Kate’s staff, and Willow had reluctantly come to the conclusion that not even the mischief-making Jason was a reasonable suspect, he or she must have broken into the tax office to damage the wiring and set the timer—or the photosensitive tripswitch—that had triggered the fire. No taxpayer was allowed further into the building than the public parts on the ground floor.

  The fire could have been started simply by pouring petrol through a broken window, but it had not been. It had been started on an upper floor of the building, in a specific office, and it had been started electrically. Whatever that vague description implied, it must have involved personal contact with the wires. Therefore, the person who did it must have got into the building without setting off any burglar alarms or leaving a trace of his entry that would have made the security people call the police.

  Willow could not imagine why she had fiddled about trying to uncover evidence of corruption in the office, and searched Len Scoffer’s home and worried about Kate and Cara and Mrs Scoffer and the minister, when there was such an obvious line of enquiry. She looked at Tom’s unconscious face and blew him a kiss as she remembered, all too late, one of his precepts: ‘Never ignore the obvious. In most criminal investigations, the “obvious” means motive and suspect are the right ones. Check those out first and then let your imagination fly free. Otherwise you’ll only waste time.’

  ‘As I have been doing,’ she said to her unconscious husband. ‘Time and terror. In this case the most obvious suspect is someone with experience of breaking and entering. All I need to know is which of the people who had a reason to hate—or fear—Len has a criminal record for burglary, and Bob’s your uncle.’

  Since it was Sunday, there seemed little hope of getting hold of Brian Gaskarth at his office, but even so she went back to the telephone outside the ward so that she could at least leave a message on his answering machine.

  To her delighted surprise, he answered the telephone himself and made no difficulty about checking her list of names against the police computer. He told her that he would try his contacts there and then, but that if none of them was on duty he might not be able to get back to her until Monday.

  Chapter Seventeen

  That night Willow was so tired when she went to bed that she fell asleep within a few minutes of turning off her bedside lamp. One moment she was thinking about Tom, and the next she was unconscious, only to wake, sweating and terrified, from a nightmare in which she was trying to reach him through a burning, noisy, stinking barrier of flame.

  Although she could not get through it, she could see everything that was happening to him on the other side of the fire, and it was terrible to watch. Eventually, sobbing in her sleep, she came near enough to waking for her brain to tell her that she could pull herself right out of the dream if she would only make the effort. She opened her eyes.

  It took several minutes before she could free herself of the effects of the dream and even then the smell of the imaginary fire seemed to stay in her nostrils. She pushed herself up the bed, propping her back against the headboard and switched on the light so that she could pull a paper handkerchief from the box on her table. When
she had wiped the sweat off her face and poured herself a glass of cold lemonade, she began to feel slightly better. Having drunk it, she turned off the light and let herself slide down the bed again until she was lying flat.

  She wondered what was happening in Tom’s brain and whether he might have been suffering foul and terrifying nightmares since the shooting. That was something she had never thought of until then, and she longed to be able to save him from being trapped in terror. Her hand reached towards the telephone before she even realised that she wanted to ask the nurses caring for him whether he was dreaming. Feeling foolish, she put her hand back under the sheet and tried to go back to sleep.

  It was then, as she was trying to make herself relax, that she heard the quiet footsteps in the passage outside her bedroom door. At first she laughed at her fear, assuming that the footsteps were Serena’s as she went to the bathroom, creeping as quietly as possible in order to let the others sleep. But there was no sound of the bathroom door opening or any running water.

  Straining to hear what was happening, Willow thought that she could hear someone breathing fast and nervously just outside her bedroom door. All her own and Stephen Harness’s doubts about Rob rushed back into her mind. She remembered his unexpected dexterity, his anger and unhappiness, the questions she had asked him, and the fire.

  The smell of it seemed all around her again and she silently slammed her hand across her mouth to stop herself making a noise. She thought that she heard the handle of her door begin to creak. Peering through the thick darkness, she saw a faint greyness around the door and knew that someone had opened it. She bit into her bandaged fingers and felt saliva soaking through the gauze. Her mind seemed suddenly clear and her imagination was working furiously.

  She felt as though a whole troop of facts was being reviewed in front of her. Rob had been to his mother’s house on the day she died. He climbed like a cat. He hated his mother’s lovers. No one had seen the suicide letter except for him. He had shown Willow a letter, but it could easily have been a forgery for all she knew. The handwriting was like that on the letters she had seen in the tax file, but Rob might well have been able to copy it.