Bloody Roses Read online

  ‘All right,’ said Tom when he had asked how she was. ‘I’ll get hold of Jane and persuade her to come with me. If I can find her, we should get to you in a bit less than an hour. Emma and I’ve been looking at the map for the last forty minutes. See you.’

  Willow put down the receiver and then, leaving her book and drink on the table, walked back to the bar to ask whether there was any food to be had. The publican, a cadaverous man with a straggly moustache, offered her shepherd’s pie, fisherman’s pie or ham sandwiches. Attracted by the simplicity of the sand-wiches, Willow instead ordered shepherd’s pie with vegetables on the grounds that it would take longer to produce and eat and therefore give her an excuse to wait until Tom appeared.

  He came at last, when she had finished the pie, which turned out to be rather good, some commercial ice cream and a cup of stewed filter coffee. He stood in the doorway looking reliable, tough, intelligent and almost unbearably welcome. Willow despised herself for having sent for him, but she still could not think what other action she could sensibly have taken. She got slowly up off the hard chair that seemed to have cramped all the muscles on either side of her spine and went to greet him.

  His hand lightly brushed her cheek but he did not smile.

  ‘You look all right,’ he said. ‘A bit pale and harried, but all right.’

  ‘I am. Now.’ Willow flushed and looked down at her watch. It seemed absurd to find his very presence comforting. ‘D’you want something to drink?’

  ‘No. We both gorged on your food and drink before you rang. Let’s get on with it. Presumably you don’t want to talk here.’

  Willow collected her bag and book and accompanied him outside to the big, dark Saab he always drove when he was off duty. She saw the slight, fair-haired figure of Emma Gnatche sitting in the front seat and stopped.

  ‘Where’s Jane Moreby?’

  ‘Out on a case. I got through to her, but she can’t come.’ He looked slightly embarrassed. ‘She asked me to have a look at what you’d found and said – promised – to listen in the morning.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound very hopeful. And why on earth did you bring Emma?’

  ‘Because she was sensibly worried for you and because I could see no good reason to refuse what she desperately urged,’ said Tom in his normal voice. ‘Come on. Where is this house?’

  ‘You’re turning this whole thing into a family picnic,’ said Willow crossly, ‘a farce.’

  ‘It may have its farcical aspects,’ said Tom in a hard voice, ‘but that’s just too bad. Now stop worrying about your dignity or letting Emma too far into your life and tell me what’s really happened.’

  Willow winced slightly as she heard his accurate analysis of her objection to Emma’s presence. She told him in minute and exact detail everything that had happened since she had arrived in Blewton.

  ‘D’you want to follow me or shall I come in your car?’ she finished.

  ‘Let’s go in mine. The less disturbance of the ground the better if it really is the victim’s house.’

  Willow opened the door to the back seat of the Saab, got in and answered Emma’s touching but intrusive questions about her wellbeing. She gave Tom directions to the mill and at his request stopped him just before the wood where she had hidden the Metro. He drove up on the verge and said:

  ‘You two had better wait here while I go and investigate, but before I go I want you to tell me again exactly what you did, where you went and what you saw. First of all: how did you get in?’

  ‘I found the key hanging on a hook inside the mill itself.’

  ‘All right. What did you do when you got in?’

  ‘I searched the house for any signs of anyone else having been there. There weren’t any. She obviously used it to get away from people.’

  ‘Sounds familiar.’ There was enough expression on his face to tell Willow that Tom was momentarily diverted from the investigation. She saw Emma looking from one to the other of them in surprise. Ignoring her, Willow said directly to Tom:

  ‘Yes. That’s exactly what it felt like.’ Willow shook her head as though she had been swimming under water and needed to clear her eyes and ears. ‘But there were no clues to anyone else’s presence at all. Everything I saw pointed to Sarah’s having been alone.’

  Willow tried not to feel – or sound – defensive.

  ‘Then, after I’d taken the photographs, I heard a car. I’d parked mine well away from the house and locked the door behind me and whoever it was must have thought the house was empty.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I … It’s … Oh, damnation. I was too much of a coward to do anything but hide,’ said Willow, staring out at the dark windscreen between their two faces, which were turned uncomfortably towards her. ‘Until whoever it was had got back into the car and started to drive off.’

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Tom once more, frowning through the windscreen. Willow looked at the back of his head and her lips twitched into an involuntary smile of acknowledgement. He turned back and nodded at her to continue.

  ‘When I had failed to get the number of the car, or even see what kind it was,’ she said, ‘I went through the house again and saw what he or she had done. It’s foully inconvenient that I have no witnesses to the fact that the stuff wasn’t there before, but at least it proves to us that Richard really is innocent.’

  Emma’s face hardened into an accusing mask as she spoke for the first time since they had reached the mill.

  ‘Do you mean that you thought for one minute that he might not be?’

  Willow thought of the horrors through which her imagination had put her, of the disgust she had felt of her own suspicions, and the terror that had lain over her life.

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘I’m sorry, Em.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘All right,’ said Tom when he came back to the car. ‘I believe you, although there’s not enough evidence to convince a picky court. It doesn’t get us far. I’m damned glad that you didn’t try to tackle him, but it’s a pity that you didn’t get a look at his face.’

  ‘“Bloody amateurs”,’ suggested Willow, trying to make a joke to make herself feel better.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Tom with a sidelong smile. ‘Why, as a matter of interest, didn’t you tell Jane Moreby about the house as soon as you’d worked out that it existed, instead of coming down here on your own?’

  Willow’s sense of failure dissolved into comforting anger.

  ‘Because she doesn’t listen to anything that suggests she might be wrong.’ Her voice was tight and very cold. ‘She is convinced that Richard is guilty. I doubt if I’d have managed to persuade her to go and look at the house, and if she had it would probably have been too late. The killer would have been there first and all Moreby would have found would be corroboration of her fantasies.’

  ‘Steady on, Will,’ said Tom, forgetting the silent presence of Emma Gnatche beside him.

  ‘I know you like her,’ said Willow more moderately, ‘but I also know that only incontrovertible proof is going to shake her conviction of Richard’s guilt and I don’t want to go back to her with anything less.’

  Tom looked in his driving mirror at Willow’s face. In the thin light of the half-obscured moon, it looked livid and ill. Her pale-green eyes had almost disappeared into the pallid mask.

  ‘You must. I can’t possibly conceal the existence of the house from her now that you’ve seen fit to tell me, or the existence of someone planting clues.’

  ‘Tom.’ Emma Gnatche put a hand on his arm. ‘You mustn’t –’

  ‘He’s got to, Em,’ said Willow. ‘He’s a policeman. But while he’s trying to persuade her that I’m not lying, you and I will just have to get the rest of the evidence.’

  Emma looked slightly comforted until Willow laughed bitterly.

  ‘You’ll have a tough job persuading her, Tom. Your Jane doesn’t like me at all.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed, looking in his wing mir
ror as he swung the heavy car round in a tight turn and drove back to the pub. ‘I know she doesn’t.’

  When he had lined the car up beside Willow’s Metro in the car park of the Goat and Compasses, Emma got out, murmuring something about ‘finding the loo’. When she had gone, Tom turned back to Willow.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Not really. But I’ll survive.’

  ‘You were badly frightened, weren’t you?’

  Willow looked at him in the weird glow of the multicoloured lights that hung along the eaves of the old pub and longed to throw herself on his chest and howl out all the terrors that had tormented her and make him tell her that she had not done badly, that her mistakes could be corrected, and that by her cowardice she had not condemned Richard to life imprisonment. Fortunately for her self-esteem, the interior of the car did not allow any such exhibition. She contented herself with leaning forward until her forehead touched the rough wool of his sweater. One of his hands stroked her short red hair. She drew back from the comfort that she wanted so badly that she mistrusted it.

  ‘I was a little anxious,’ she admitted. ‘But what’s eating me is mainly rage that I was stupid enough to go on lying under that bed when I could have got the evidence that we need.’

  There was a pause before Tom said quietly: ‘If it was the killer, I doubt if he’d have let you live, knowing that you had identified him.’

  ‘I had a spanner,’ said Willow, breathless at the brutality of Tom’s observation. After a moment she changed the subject: ‘I don’t suppose your wretched colleague will believe any of this. She’ll probably assume that I made it all up and planted Richard’s possessions in the cottage myself.’

  A short laugh from Tom dispelled some of the painful tension in the car.

  ‘What, as a diversion? You wouldn’t be stupid enough to do that, Will, would you?’

  There was silence in the car. Willow drew even further back from Tom. She remembered her own doubts about Richard and her conviction that one of the worst fears is the one that suggests the people closest to you are strangers who might do anything.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But there’s nothing I can do to make you believe that. Just because … because we’re friends doesn’t mean that you can actually be certain of the truth of anything I say.’

  Tom turned in his seat so that he could face her fully. There was humour in his eyes and immense affection.

  ‘Don’t agonize, Will,’ he said. ‘There were fresh tyre marks at the cottage, quite different from the ones the Metro made in the wood.’

  ‘Bloody amateurs is right,’ said Willow after a moment of mixed resentment and relief. ‘I didn’t even think of the tyres.’

  A man staggered out of the back door of the pub and stood, with one hand against the wall, peering about in the gloom. After a moment he shrugged slightly, took his hand from the wall, unzipped his trousers and proceeded to relieve himself in the open. Something in his arrogant stance as he planted his legs apart and arched his back made Willow say:

  ‘And Freud believed we envy that. How I sympathize with Queen Elizabeth I!’

  ‘As I once said to you, you and Jane Moreby have a lot in common,’ said Tom with a friendly smile. ‘She’ll need to talk to you about this. Don’t let your antagonism show. It’s going to be hard for her to climb down; try not to make it more difficult than it needs to be.’

  Thinking to herself that she wanted to make everything as hard as possible for Jane Moreby, Willow nevertheless knew that Tom was right.

  ‘That sounds as though you do believe that this exonerates Richard,’ she said, sounding completely reasonable and uncritical. Tom grinned at her in approval.

  ‘Yes, I do. But as you told me on the telephone, it isn’t enough; it’s also not my case so what I believe is irrelevant. Here’s Emma. Do you want her to drive you back to London?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Willow, opening her door. ‘I may have scared myself witless, but I am perfectly capable of driving. You can take her back.’

  ‘There are things I must do here, Will. It would be better if she went back with you – and if you stayed at her place tonight.’

  ‘What have you got to do?’ Willow demanded, stung by the suggestion that she needed to be protected by eighteen-year-old Emma.

  ‘I must get the local men to seal the mill and keep an eye on it until Jane can get here.’

  ‘Oh, I see. All right. I’ll see you, then.’

  Tom gripped her wrist as she was leaving the car. Emma was still a few yards away from them.

  ‘You’ve done well and bravely. You’ll get him out, Will. And …’ He looked up at her. ‘You know that I love you, don’t you?’

  Fighting all sorts of emotions and sensations, Willow nodded and turned away. She had joined Emma by the time she decided to turn back.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said, leaning down to speak through Tom’s open window. ‘I am tired and I will get her to drive me.’

  Tom looked at her in silence and then smiled in acknowledgement of all the unspoken messages she had offered him. Willow joined Emma once again and gave her the keys to the Metro.

  They said little on the journey back down the motorway except to agree that Emma would drive to her house and Willow take the car on from there. She was determined to ignore Tom’s suggestion that she should stay with Emma.

  Having seen that Emma was safely inside her small pink-and-white house south of Kensington High Street, Willow got into the driving seat of her car and went back to Belgravia. She paid careful attention to the speed limit, although the roads were not at all full and thirty miles an hour felt like walking pace after the motorway. As she drove through the first section of Eaton Square, she saw lights on in the Biggleigh-Clarts’second-floor flat. The thought of their sterile, civilized unhappiness together made her shudder in the illusory safety of her little car.

  She could not stop herself from thinking of Tom and the awful feelings of dependence that he aroused in her. The events of the day had left her jumpy, exhausted and lonely; and yet the prospect of another person within that loneliness was still daunting.

  Having parked the car, Willow got out and walked up the steps to her front door, wondering if she had been foolish to refuse the sanctuary of Emma’s house. With her hand on the key to the street door Willow remembered what Tom had said earlier about what could have happened if the murderer had seen her at the mill. Her hand shook as she wondered whether she had betrayed herself with all the questions she had been asking.

  The killer had left one of Cressida Woodruffe’s novels on Sarah’s bedside table. Could it have been a sadistic hint that he or she knew who ‘Cressida’was and what she was trying to do? Would there be someone waiting at the top of the stairs for her?

  Remembering the spanner she had left at the mill house, Willow went back to her car and took the biggest of the remaining tools from the box in the boot. With its comforting heaviness in her hand, she forced herself up the stairs to the door of her flat. She stood outside it for several minutes, listening.

  When she was certain that there was no sound at all, she slid the Chubb key as quietly as possible into the lock and tried to tum it. There was some immovable barrier and the key would not turn.

  At that moment Willow almost turned tail and retreated to the flat in Clapham that she had been determined to sell, but she remembered the disaster of her cowardice at the mill and tried the key again, turning a little to the right in case that would loosen the barrier. The key turned right with ease and the lock clicked into place.

  Standing outside her own front door, shaking and breathless, it took Willow some time to remember that the last people to leave her flat had been Tom and Emma and that neither of them had a set of keys. They could neither have double locked the door nor switched on the burglar alarm. For all the time they had been away her flat had been secured only with a Yale. Willow wondered whether it was true that such locks could be picked with any plastic credit ca
rd.

  When she eventually summoned up the courage to open the door and step across the threshold, she found the entire flat in darkness, which was unusual. On the nights when she was expected home, Mrs Rusham had always left on the lights to welcome her.

  With the door open and darkness ahead of her, Willow leaned back so that she could put her finger on the bell. It trilled through the empty silence.

  ‘Hello!’ she called uselessly. ‘Is there anyone here?’

  As her voice echoed in her head, she knew that no one lying in wait would answer. It occurred to her to fetch one of the downstairs tenants, but then she remembered the night she had summoned the police when she was in no danger and decided she could not bear to look such a fool again.

  At last she switched on the hall lights and proceeded to the kitchen. With the spanner in her right hand, she felt for the light switch with her left.

  The light showed her the room, as tidy as Mrs Rusham could make it, and as empty. The big Aga gleamed and the long worktops were clear. The cupboards looked untouched and the luxurious bunch of mixed green herbs stood comfortably in its Italian pottery jug of water by the sink.

  Leaving the light on and the door open, Willow tried each room in the flat, flinging open cupboard doors and bending down to look under the sofas and the bed like some demented spinster half afraid of intruders, half longing for company.

  ‘Which I suppose I am,’ she said to herself when she was certain that she was alone. Then, when she knew she would not have to run from anyone, she bolted and locked the front door.

  The only signs that there had been people in the flat after Mrs Rusham’s departure were the plates and glasses that Emma and Tom must had left in the drawing room. Feeling stupid but still tingling from her self-induced fear, Willow put down her spanner and poured herself an inch of Laphroaig whisky, into which she splashed some water.