Bitter Herbs Page 26

  There was the sound of a hand smacking into flesh.

  ‘I think perhaps you really should intervene now,’ said Serena, holding out a hand like a twisted claw. ‘Whichever of them it is hitting the other it ought to be stopped.’

  Willow hesitated.

  ‘Go on! I can’t get there in time and it’s not just embarrassment Marilyn’s risking. Go on.’

  Reluctantly Willow opened the communicating door into the panelled dining room at the back of the house to see Peter Farrfield with a reddening mark on his cheek. He stood bunching his hands into fists at his sides. At the sound of the opening door he turned to face her. She took a step back at the sight of the rage in his eyes.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded, apparently not recognising her from their brief encounter in the cottage.

  ‘Control yourself, Farrfield,’ came a commanding voice from the other door into the room. Gerald Plimpton stood there.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked Willow. She nodded.

  ‘Good. Now, please calm down, both of you. You can be heard all over the house.’

  ‘You’re the executor, aren’t you?’ said Peter, his mouth distorted into a sneer. ‘You’re very like your photograph.’

  ‘And what were you ever doing in my aunt’s bedroom?’ Marilyn spat out the words. ‘The only photograph of Gerald is by her bed.’

  The young man flipped his head round to face her again.

  ‘None of your fucking business. Is what she said true, Plimpton? I get nothing?’

  ‘Nothing at all, I’m afraid, out of the last will.’ Gerald stopped for a moment, as though measuring their respective capacities for bad news and then added: ‘And you were never among the major beneficiaries at all, although it is true that her previous will left you a little.’

  ‘Bitch! She strung me along.’ His once-handsome face was so contorted that he looked both ugly and pathetic. ‘And you’re just as bad, Marilyn. If I …’

  He strode across to where Gerald Plimpton was standing, pushed him out of the way and flung himself out of the house, slamming the front door behind him.

  The other three were still standing in silence, looking at each other, when Susan Robinson appeared with Tom at her elbow.

  ‘Will, are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, taking him out of the dining room and into the hall. She explained what had happened as quickly as possible. Tom listened calmly, saying nothing until she had finished.

  ‘And do you still think it was he who did it?’ he asked.

  ‘It must have been,’ Willow said, suddenly discouraged and feeling each one of her bruises and scrapes. ‘But you’re right: there’s no evidence. And he genuinely seemed not to know who I was, so perhaps I’m wrong about it all and he never went near the car after all. Perhaps no one did. Perhaps I really am losing my marbles.’

  ‘That’s absurd,’ said Tom comfortingly. ‘But I think we’d better go, don’t you, before you pass out. You look frightful. Come on, Will.’

  Tom looked hard at Willow as he spoke and she realised that there were several interested people listening to them.

  ‘I must still be suffering from shock,’ she said, longing to be flat on her back in bed and completely forgetting that she had meant to talk to Marilyn’s father about his childhood with Gloria Grainger.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The next morning Willow woke alone, feeling far more confident than she had when Tom brought her home from the funeral and put her to bed. Despite the bruises all over her battered body, she had slept almost uninterrupted for twelve hours. Her brain felt as though it had been cleared of a lot of extraneous ideas and fears.

  Lying against the soft linen-covered pillows, she set herself to work out once and for all what the information she had collected about Gloria and her death really meant.

  It seemed sensible to work backwards from the car crash, which Willow was once again certain could not have been an accident. The car was less than a year old and had shown no earlier signs of brake failure. The emergency stop she had had to make in the Mall had been impeccable and modern brake cables do not suddenly snap for no reason. Someone must have damaged them during the night before her journey down the motorway. Since she had no personal enemies, it could only have been done by someone who wanted to stop her asking questions about Gloria’s death.

  The only people who knew for certain that that was what Willow had been doing were Ann Slinter and Tom. He was obviously not a suspect, and Willow had never considered that Ann might be guilty. However much she had disliked being persuaded to publish Gloria’s books, she was quite powerful enough to stop them coming out without killing their author.

  The scent of grilling kidneys reached Willow before she had even listed the evidence for and against her suspects, and she let her head twist sideways on the pillows so that she could look at the clock. She saw that it was already nine o’clock. Pushing away the duvet, she got out of bed, groaning as the movement stretched all her damaged muscles. There were plenty of painkillers in the bathroom and she got herself there laboriously, leaning on pieces of furniture as she went.

  She took two powerful pills and did not even attempt to dress. Barefoot and with only a soft dressing gown around her nakedness, she walked painfully into the dining room, where Mrs Rusham was laying her breakfast table.

  ‘Good morning. Did you sleep well?’

  ‘Thank you, yes,’ said Willow, pushing her hair out of her eyes. ‘The kidneys smell wonderful.’

  ‘Shall I bring them now?’ asked the housekeeper, pouring orange juice into a heavy tumbler.

  ‘Please.’ Willow laid a napkin across her aching knees and picked up the glass.

  As she drank, she thought about Marilyn Posselthwate. Whether or not she had deliberately pushed Willow down the spiral stairs, she was still the likeliest suspect in the murder investigation and could have sabotaged Willow’s car quite easily. Marilyn had pretended to know nothing about cars, but that could well have been a piece of deliberate misinformation.

  She had seen Willow’s car often enough to be able to identify it, and she could have found out where it would be parked at night. Willow’s address was not in the telephone book, or in any of the writers’directories, but too many people had it for it to be considered at all secret, and she always kept the car in the street outside.

  Posy Hacket had had the same opportunities as Marilyn, but Willow could not help thinking that Posy would have been both more subtle and more efficient if she had decided to kill someone. Damaged brake cables might kill the driver – and any passengers – of a car travelling at high speed, but they might just as easily have caused a tiresome but not fatal accident in the middle of a town.

  Attempting to silence someone like that had been silly, Willow thought, and ill-considered. Someone must have been thrown into a panic by something she had said or done.

  Peter Farrfield might have done it, but if so, he would have needed Marilyn’s help. Even if he had guessed during his short encounter with Willow what she was really doing in Kew, he would have found it hard to track her down. He did not even know her name and had never even seen the car.

  ‘One way or another, it has to have been Marilyn,’ said Willow, wondering why she was still not convinced.

  She smiled at Mrs Rusham, who brought her a heated plate of grilled kidneys and tomatoes. When she had gone again, Willow picked up her knife and fork and cut one of the kidneys in half. Thin blood oozed out of the cut and spread out over the flowered porcelain. Willow laid down her knife, unable to eat after all.

  As she stared at the blood, trying not to feel sick and thinking about the tiny wound in Gloria’s chest, Willow’s doubts about Marilyn began to grow.

  It would have been so much easier for her simply to smother her aunt as she slept than to stab her. Everyone knew that it was possible to kill by suffocation, but comparatively few people would be likely to know about the effects of a small tear in the hear
t wall. Marilyn had had access to her aunt’s house at any hour of the day or night. Why would she have fiddled about with a spike of some kind when a pillow would have done the job for her just as well, more quickly and with less chance of discovery?

  Surely only someone who could not reach Gloria’s bedroom while she was asleep would have risked stabbing her.

  ‘Damn!’ said Willow as she reached that conclusion. She was back with the same problem that had always made nonsense of her deductions. Why had Gloria said nothing about her assailant?

  Having put the question directly to herself, Willow was determined to find an answer. She searched her memory of the things she had been told during the past week.

  At one of their meetings, Marilyn had said that Gloria had complained of a terrible headache on the day she died. It had felt ‘as though she had been hit on the head with a hammer’.

  ‘Are you ready for some coffee now?’ Mrs Rusham’s voice disturbed Willow as she was trying to decide whether a sharp blow to the head might have made Gloria not only lose consciousness but also forget what she had been doing just before she was struck.

  ‘Is there something wrong, Miss King? You’re not eating.’

  ‘What? No, I’m sorry, Mrs Rusham. The accident seems to have taken away my appetite. I’m not hungry, but some coffee would be lovely. Thank you.’

  The housekeeper took away the rejected offal and returned a moment later with a big cup of cappuccino, which Willow accepted with a quick smile. She was still trying to assemble relevant facts from the welter of half-remembered conversations. All the voices of her informants echoed in her mind. Marilyn’s plaintiveness, Vicky’s pessimism, Ann’s impatience, Susan’s practicality, and the Weston & Brown receptionist’s sympathy were carried back to Willow as she ran through the things they had said to her.

  ‘Susan said she’d been typing a whole chapter herself the day before yesterday.’

  ‘I thought it might toughen her up … She’s dealt with the old bag for years now but it hasn’t made any difference.’

  ‘I suppose someone might have come after I’d gone back to Patty in the flat, but Marilyn never mentioned anyone.’

  ‘She’d had a terrible headache the day before. She said it felt as though she’d been hit on the head with a hammer.’

  ‘She’s had one of those burdened, virtuous lives: looked after an elderly parent.’

  ‘Most non-fiction editiors have to tackle everything from self-help to … oh anything.’

  ‘I think she’d had a very minor stroke, too, about a year ago.’

  ‘She’s safe as houses. Pretty secretive actually.’

  ‘It was a couple of days before she died. She wanted Vicky Taffle.’

  ‘Gloria wanted Vicky Taffle,’ said Willow aloud. ‘Could it be?’

  She tried to remember exactly what Vicky had said to her as they parted in the dark outside the restaurant. They had been talking about muggers, and Vicky had said something like: ‘No one’s ever molested me yet and I do have one of those shrieky alarms and …’

  ‘And what?’ Willow said, staring down at her coffee. ‘Was she going to say, “and I’ve never had to use it yet”? Or could it have been “one of those shrieky alarms and a hatpin to defend myself with”?’

  Willow wondered why she had never even considered something that seemed appallingly obvious. She felt as she occasionally did when completing a crossword puzzle: a clue would make no sense at all, even though she had at least half of the necessary letters; she would stare at them, trying to work out what the cryptic clue could possibly mean, testing it for hidden puns or anagrams; and then suddenly the whole word would appear in her brain, making the clue seem easy after all.

  She had been concentrating on who might have gained money or other practical benefits from Gloria’s death, ignoring all the latest statistics that suggested that up to ninety per cent of murders are unpremeditated. Perhaps Tom had been right all along: motive was indeed the least important part of any murder investigation.

  ‘She’d been nagging me and so I hit her,’ the illiterate murderer had written in the letter Elsie Trouville had shown Willow in the Home Office. Surely that was also the likeliest reason for killing an elderly woman with a weak heart who might have died at any time?

  ‘Vicky Taffle,’ Willow said again as she tried to think of something that would blow her new theory away.

  There was nothing. Even Tom’s description of the chief suspect in his murder case seemed to reinforce Willow’s conviction that Vicky must be guilty. He had described the suspect as pretending to be miserable, but being unable to suppress completely a smile of secret satisfaction. Willow thought of the moment when she had watched Vicky sitting at her desk, unaware that she was not alone. There had been a smile then, Willow remembered, unlike any that Vicky had shown other people.

  The front door bell rang before Willow had decided how best to proceed. Looking down at her dressing gown and thinking of her face, pale and undefended without any makeup, she listened warily to Mrs Rusham as she walked to the front door and opened it.

  ‘Is she up yet?’ Willow heard Tom say out in the hall. She relaxed at once.

  ‘Yes. She’s at breakfast.’ Mrs Rusham sounded as though she thought that he ought to wait. Willow could not suppress a smile at the very different welcome Richard Crescent would have received.

  ‘Tom?’ she called. ‘I’m in here. Come on in.’

  ‘Will?’ He appeared in the doorway ‘How are you? Any better?’

  ‘Aching all over,’ she said, ‘but, yes, much better. D’you like kidneys?’

  ‘Love them. Why?’

  He put a hand lightly on her wrenched shoulder and kissed her. Willow noticed that the painkillers had started to work and kissed him back.

  ‘Mrs R. produced them for my breakfast but I found I couldn’t face them. If you’d like them, get her to hot them up for you in the microwave. I think I could just about manage some more coffee while I watch you eat.’

  He looked at her, obviously worried by her loss of appetite, but he did as she asked. Five minutes later they were sitting opposite each other at the round mahogany table in the dining room.

  ‘You still don’t look yourself,’ said Tom when he had finished the kidneys, ‘even if you’re not quite as white as you were yesterday.’

  ‘That’s just lack of makeup. Without mascara my eyes have always looked like gooseberries veiled in raw eggwhite.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ He laughed. ‘I’ve seen you first thing in the morning often enough to know. And it’s not just the car crash either. You look shocked about something. Can’t you tell me about it, whatever it is?’

  She wrinkled up her nose and shook her head.

  ‘I suppose I’m just a bit disgusted with myself about something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re very inquisitive today, Tom,’ she said and then shrugged, deciding to tell him part of it, if only to stop him asking any more questions she was not ready to answer. ‘Oh well, all right. I had been congratulating myself for effecting a useful revolution in someone I thought I quite liked, and …’ She stopped and frowned.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I now realise that I had been completely misreading both the unrevolutionised state and the reasons for the revolution. They were nothing whatever to do with my kindly intervention. I feel a fool: an arrogant, almost dangerous, fool.’

  ‘That’s all extremely cryptic, Will, and I’m not really in the mood for codes this morning. There isn’t time.’ He ate the last piece of kidney. ‘You’re presumably talking about the Grainger murder.’

  ‘Aha,’ she said, producing a smile with difficulty. ‘Can it be that my arguments have at last managed to convince the most sceptical man in the Met after all?’

  ‘Partly,’ he admitted. ‘But I have to confess that it’s more the fingerprints on your car’s engine than your arguments that have convinced me. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had the car serviced by a wom
an, have you? The prints are definitely the size of an adult female.’

  ‘No,’ said Willow. ‘As far as I know, they’re all men at the garage. So, I was right about the brakes after all.’

  The thought of what might have happened to her as she drove down the motorway filled her with cold, implacable anger and a determination to wring an admission of guilt out of Victoria Taffle before the end of the day.

  ‘I’ve sent a woman police constable to Kew to invite Marilyn Posselthwate to come to the station for a chat,’ said Tom. ‘I’m on my way there now, but I wanted to see you first. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t think you’ll find that Marilyn’s fingerprints match the ones on the engine,’ said Willow. ‘Sorry and all that.’

  Tom looked at her across the breakfast table. There was a hint of a smile in his dark eyes.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last, ‘tell me about the latest brilliant deduction.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can yet,’ said Willow, suddenly very glad that it was Tom who was trying to build a shared life with her. ‘I sometimes think,’ she went on, ‘that my amazingly brilliant powers of observation have occasionally let me down and that therefore some of the deductions may have been wrong.’

  ‘Willow, I know I started it, but this is too serious for jokes,’ said Tom. ‘What more have you found out since we last talked?’

  ‘Nothing. I mean, no more facts. But I am inclining towards a different interpretation of the ones I’ve been telling you about for the past seven days,’ she said. ‘I’m still not absolutely sure about it and I need a few more bits of information. Why don’t you go and talk to Marilyn and come back for lunch? I ought to have sorted out my ideas by then.’

  ‘No,’ said Tom. ‘I’m not prepared to stand by and let you do something else stupid or dangerous.’