Bitter Herbs Read online

  ‘Okay, if you’d rather. But I could take you all the way to wherever it is and save you risking the glad rags on the street. I’m parked up here.’

  The late rush-hour traffic was even heavier than it had been earlier and after fifteen minutes Posy decided that it would be quicker for her to take the tube than to sit in Willow’s car and then wait for a taxi. She asked to be dropped at Camden Town station. Just before they got there, Willow said casually:

  ‘You dropped in to see her, didn’t you, just before she died?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Someone suggested to me,’ said Willow, improvising madly, ‘that Gloria had told her that the case would probably be settled after all. That made me think you must have been to see her and sorted something out with her at the last minute. Everyone’s told me that she didn’t leave the house at all in the last week of her life, so I thought you must have been to see her.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Posy through clenched teeth, ‘that I would rather have died than settled that libel case and apologised in open court, which is what she was demanding. I don’t know where you got this stupid story from, but it has nothing to do with me. I wouldn’t have gone near her for anything in the world. I went to her house once to interview her and that is the only time we ever met.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Perhaps it was your lawyer then. Or perhaps someone else advised her to drop the case. I know that at least one of her influential friends thought she was mad to be suing you at all.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Posy, sitting back and breathing more calmly again. ‘Perhaps that was it. Sorry I shouted at you. I’m still not quite sane on the subject of Gloria Bloody Grainger, despite your various bombshells. Look I must go, but don’t let’s lose touch. I’ll ring you some time when things are less harassing. Okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Willow, pulling up outside the tube station. She was almost convinced by Posy’s violent outburst, but not quite.

  Alone in her car again, Willow let her mind play around the other suspicious figures who had circled around Gloria. Pictures of the candlelit dinners Marilyn had had to serve to her own boyfriend and her tyrannical aunt filled Willow’s mind as did memories of Peter’s charming smile and lovely deep voice. He must have cut a highly romantic figure in his wheelchair as he sat at the beautiful mahogany table Willow had been shown in the panelled dining room between Gloria’s private study and the garden.

  ‘And how Marilyn must have hated watching them lord it over her!’ Willow said aloud as she eased her foot off the brake again to drift a yard or two further down the congested road. ‘But was that all that Marilyn felt? She let me see that she was angry about it, but what else was there that she hasn’t let me see?’

  The emotions swirling around the Kew Green house must have been horrible, Willow thought once more, and it ought not to have surprised anyone that they had got out of hand. But who was it who had finally lost control?

  The suspects processed through her mind like the ghostly kings that tormented and excited Macbeth after he had first seen the weird sisters. Posy, Marilyn and the doctor, Peter Farrfield, the powerful Sue Robinson, who was so obviously her weaker friend’s champion, and indeed Patty herself.

  Weak people had killed before, Willow reminded herself, only just managing not to push her hand hard down on the horn as the car in front of her stopped unnecessarily at a traffic light that had barely turned orange. And Patty had a key to the basement. Surely she could have let herself in on the night before Gloria died, assuming that her so-called illness would be enough of an alibi?

  At that point Willow stopped thinking about anything but the road ahead. Rain splashed heavily down on to her windscreen, making it almost impossible to see the rare gaps in the traffic. Pushing her wipers on to the fastest speed, she concentrated on her driving.

  She did not see any clear road in front of her car until she had inched round Trafalgar Square and under Admiralty Arch. There, as the traffic thinned out into the wider road, she breathed a sigh of relief and put her foot down, knowing there could be no obstruction until the traffic lights half-way along. Even the rain cleared as suddenly as it had begun.

  Willow was admiring the perspective of the narrowing red road, the muddled lines of the fountain and the cold discipline of the floodlit palace behind it, when two women stepped off the pavement into the road about two feet in front of her car. Stamping on the brakes and cursing loudly, she heard a squeaking sound and a hoarse human scream, but she just managed to stop without touching either of the women.

  Pulling up the handbrake and putting the gears into neutral Willow wiped the sweat off her face and leaned across to open the nearside window.

  ‘What the hell do you think you were doing?’ she demanded furiously.

  In a strong foreign accent one of the women said:

  ‘It is sorry. We are not understanding the traffic.’

  Willow cursed again, using a word that shocked even herself, wound up the window and, as soon as she could, set off once more.

  Later that evening she ate another spectacularly good casserole, which Mrs Rusham had left in the bottom oven of the Aga with a baking potato so perfectly crisp that it must have been cooked for at least two hours, and drank half a bottle of Saint Emilion.

  When she had finished Willow wrote up her notes, trying to work out the ‘who?’ and ‘how?’ and ‘with what?’ of Gloria’s murder. She wished that she could talk to Tom, checked once more that there was no message from him on the answering machine, and dictated yet another request on to his.

  That done, she went back to her notebook and started to list all the questions she still had to answer.

  Eventually one question that affected almost all the others forced her to telephone Marilyn.

  ‘Hello. It’s Willow here,’ she said. ‘I was just ringing to find out how you are.’

  ‘I’m fine. The bruises are fading already into a disgusting yellow colour. How about yours?’

  ‘Much the same. I still ache if I move too quickly, and the effects of the shock seem to play odd tricks with my mind – nightmares and so on – but otherwise I’m all right.’

  ‘Good. I have a vague memory of behaving rather badly when you were here,’ said Marilyn tentatively. ‘I think I swore at you.’

  ‘It wasn’t me you swore at,’ said Willow, laughing. ‘And so there’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Oh, good. I was a bit shaken up – in both senses of the word. Is there something I can do to help?’

  ‘There is actually.’

  ‘What?’ Marilyn actually sounded eager. Willow crossed her fingers like a superstitious child.

  ‘You weren’t really waiting alone all that time in the kitchen on the night your aunt died, were you?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Marilyn’s voice was sharp, suspicious.

  ‘Well, there was something about the way you described that evening originally that doesn’t square with other things you’ve said and the way you’ve said them.’ Willow thought she would not add that Mrs Guy had said Marilyn often skived off and left her aunt alone. ‘I can’t help thinking that if you were cross enough with her you might have gone to your cottage and hoped she’d be ringing her bell in frustration.’

  There was silence for a while before Marilyn said:

  ‘You must be a witch.’

  ‘No, a novelist,’ said Willow, hiding her satisfaction. ‘It’s my job to work out how people would behave in any given situation, even if the characters in my particular sort of book don’t generally behave much like real people. Perhaps that’s why it’s taken me so long to work out what you were doing.’

  Marilyn laughed, too, and said in a confiding rush:

  ‘Well, you see, you’re right. I’d hardly seen Sarah at all that day. She’d had to put herself to bed already and I wanted to see her before she went to sleep. And bloody Aunt Ethel had behaved even worse than usual. Something had annoyed her terribly and she was very breathless all day. Oh, God! Doctor Tre
nor has said it’s not my fault and that even if she did have a heart attack because she was so cross when she rang the bell and I didn’t answer it, it doesn’t count as my fault. I feel awful now that she’s left me such a lot and I’ve had such horrible feelings about her.’

  Could anyone who had deliberately killed an elderly relative be that ingenuous? Willow asked herself. Aloud she said:

  ‘Whatever your feelings now, they can change neither the awful way she behaved to you nor the facts of her life and death. Clearly the doctor is right and you couldn’t be held responsible. How long were you away?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but it might have been an hour, perhaps even a little longer. Well, yes, in fact it must have been longer. I left her with her dinner at seven-thirty and I didn’t actually go back to check until well after nine-thirty.’

  ‘I see. Thank you for being so frank. I’ll see you tomorrow. Good bye.’

  Willow put down the telephone. So, she thought, there had been quite some time when Gloria Grainger had been alone in her house. Despite what Andrew Salcott had told Willow about the length of time it might take for blood leaking into the pericardium to stop a heart, it seemed much more likely that the stabbing had taken place that night. Otherwise, Willow could not see why Gloria had kept quiet about her assailant. Presumably if the spike had been held for long enough the tear would be big enough to let out as much blood as necessary to stop the heart there and then.

  ‘But how,’ said Willow loudly, ‘did the killer keep Gloria still – and quiet – while that was going on?’

  Willow paced about her flat, considering one suspect after another and thinking back over everything they had said and done in her presence.

  ‘Surely,’ she said aloud, ‘it has to have been either Peter or Marilyn, unless the two of them were in it together?’

  Chapter Sixteen

  The next morning Mrs Rusham woke Willow at seven thirty, saying:

  ‘I’ll have your breakfast ready in ten minutes.’

  ‘Why so early?’ asked Willow, who had been heavily asleep and in the middle of a disturbing nightmare, the details of which had already gone from her mind, leaving only a weight of anxiety and a worrying sense of responsibility. There had been something that only she could prevent and she had failed.

  ‘You changed your appointment with the governor of Great Garden Prison to nine o’clock so that you could be sure to be back in time for Miss Grainger’s funeral.’ Mrs Rusham’s voice was as calm and severe as usual.

  Memory began to seep back into Willow’s mind, displacing some of the distress left by her dream.

  ‘I think you’ve far more time than you could possibly need since the funeral is not until three-thirty, but you did ask me to wake you when I arrived.’

  ‘So I did. Thanks.’ Willow noticed that Mrs Rusham was not wearing her white overall. She had obviously only just arrived in the flat. Once more Willow blessed the existence and conscientiousness of her housekeeper. Dismissing the anxiety, Willow pushed back the duvet, and got out of bed.

  ‘I may be a little more than ten minutes,’ she said as she opened the doors of her big wardrobe to select a suit. It took a minute or two to decide against black or grey. Prisons looked miserable enough without visitors adding to the prevailing greyness. She reached for an emerald green suit with large brass buttons on the jacket.

  After a quick bath, she dressed and made up her face, trying not to think of the undertakers performing the same task for Gloria Grainger. As Willow brushed her hair, she noticed that it was time she had it cut. The bluntness of the line had gone, which was always a sign that she had let it grow too long. She suddenly felt as though she had been letting all sorts of things go unchecked. If she did not deal with them quickly something irrevocable was going to happen.

  Mrs Rusham had provided kedgeree for breakfast and Willow ate most of it before clearing the fishy taste away with a tangerine and then two cups of cappuccino.

  ‘No toast, thank you,’ she said when Mrs Rusham offered to make her some. ‘I’d better get off.’

  She cleaned her teeth again, reapplied her lipstick, checked that she had both notebook and tape recorder in her quilted bag before saying goodbye to Mrs Rusham.

  ‘If Tom Worth telephones, would you tell him that I must speak to him, preferably before half-past one today? If he rings before, say, half-past ten, get him to telephone me in the governor’s office at the prison. After that find out exactly where he’ll be when and I’ll ring him back.’

  ‘Very well. I hope you have a good journey. The roads were very icy as I came here this morning.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Rusham,’ said Willow, recognising in the apparently disinterested statement a tactful translation of: ‘drive carefully’.

  The roads were indeed icy and Willow felt the tyres sliding whenever she had to break suddenly or swerve. She drove more and more slowly, relieved that the bulk of the traffic was coming from the opposite direction.

  It seemed a pity that she could not have spent the previous night at the mill, which was only a twenty-minute drive from the prison, but its solitary charms would have to wait until Gloria Grainger’s murderer was safely in police custody. Once that was achieved, Willow thought that she would be able to return to the mill for a few days at least to concentrate on her own work.

  ‘Or perhaps,’ she said aloud, ‘on Tom.’

  The ice on the road was beginning to melt by the time she reached the Hammersmith flyover and she let herself drive faster, hating it when a passing lorry flung up fans of muddy spray that covered her windscreen. Apart from the lorries there was very little traffic until she saw in the distance, somewhere between junctions nine and ten, a trail of red brake lights. At the same time she saw the first flashing signs in the central reservation warning her that the right-hand lane was being closed ahead.

  Checking in her mirror that there were no cars in her way, Willow put her foot down on the brake pedal and switched on her left indicator. That responded as efficiently as ever, but after the first slight slowing down there was a horrible tearing sound under the bonnet, and the car immediately leaped forward. Pushing down harder on the pedal, Willow remembered her emergency stop the previous day, and assumed it must have somehow damaged the brake cable.

  There was no response to her increasingly terrified stamping on the pedal and the trail of almost stationary cars ahead was coming horribly close.

  Having seen on the television news what happens if a handbrake is applied to a car driving at high speeds, Willow knew she would have to rely on her gears. Pulling back from fifth to fourth, she was jolted by the sound of the grinding engine. Mercifully the car was slowing down, but the gap between her and the traffic jam was closing far too fast.

  Her mind was not working properly and it was only as she had begun in desperation to pull up the handbrake, little by little, that she thought to put on her hazard warning lights. They at least should alert other drivers that she was not fully in control. Edging the car towards the left-hand lane, pulling up the handbrake infinitesimally, second by second, she brought the speed down towards 40mph.

  There was a Rolls Royce at the back of the queue, beside a tiny, very dirty orange Deux Chevaux. Willow did not want to crash into the back of either. Pulling up the handbrake more sharply, she felt the wheels spin and lurch and let it go again, instead changing down to third.

  Once more the car jerked and growled as the needle on the speedometer crept down past 30mph. There was a child in the back of the Deux Chevaux and it was waving to Willow. She could see the glee on its face and the blondeness of its curls and even, in her mind’s eye, the blood of its broken body after she hit the car. With her tongue gripped firmly between her teeth and the sweat making her hands dangerously slippery, she pulled the handbrake up again, switched her left hand to the gear lever and changed down to second. With both hands on the juddering steering wheel, she got the car on to the hard shoulder just as she saw ahead of her, instead of welcoming sp
ace, the yellow bulk of a huge steam roller surrounded by traffic cones.

  Pressing the heel of her right hand on the horn and then whisking it back to the steering wheel so that she could once more change down and pull on the handbrake, she had brought the car down to about 10mph when it struck the steam roller.

  She heard and felt an immense bang as a big white bag inflated in front of her, saving her from being crushed against the steering wheel, and she shut her eyes. Shouts sounded and car horns and something in her brain crackled and groaned. Heat and cold mixed and a wave of something rolled over her as she fell into heavenly unconsciousness.

  Rough hands were pulling at her and voices, deep male voices, asked her questions that made no sense.

  ‘Careful,’ said one. ‘She may be injured.’

  ‘Doubt it. She’s got one of them bag things.’

  ‘Could be bleeding inside. What the hell’s she doing careering along the hard shoulder like that? Bloody maniac! Can’t have been in that much of a hurry.’

  ‘Must have been. But it hasn’t done her any good, has it?’

  Willow was aware of the voices but could not make out how many different ones there were.

  ‘Can I help at all?’ A more authoritative male voice broke into the others. ‘I’m a doctor. Is she all right?’

  The great tiredness that had overwhelmed Willow as she fainted seemed to prevent her from forming words, but sound of sort issued from her throat.

  ‘What’s that?’ The commanding voice asked her quite kindly.

  Willow managed to lift her eyelids against the weights that seemed to be holding them down. A pain in her mouth took all her attention until she realised that her tongue was still gripped between her teeth. Deliberately she relaxed and pushed her bitten tongue between her lips, tasting blood. One of her hands seemed to work and she felt about with it, discovering something wet and harsh. She squinted down and realised that she had been laid down on the ground behind her car.

  ‘Brakes,’ she mumbled, trying to focus on the faces that were hanging over her.