Bloody Roses Read online

  The first peaty, familiar taste of it steadied her and she lay along the sofa. By the time she had finished the drink, her muscles were beginning to relax and the cold sweat to dry all over her body. She lay for a few minutes more, enjoying the flame-coloured flowers that Mrs Rusham had arranged in the glass cylinders that were temporary substitutes for a matching pair of black Ming vases she had once owned. Calmed and feeling more tired than anything else, Willow went to run a bath.

  While the hot water was pounding the scented oil into foam, she remembered that she had seen some paper protruding from the fax machine while she was searching her writing room for an intruder and went to fetch the message. She refilled her whisky glass and took it with the fax into the bathroom. While the scented steam curled the edges of the thin, shiny paper of the fax, Willow read what her accountant had to tell her.

  Re your tax-fraud story, my information is that it is based on fact. An extended family called Bicklington-Heath (if you can believe it!) owned a business. The family members who actually ran the company wanted to sell it, making themselves a great deal of ready money. Some of their older relations who had plenty of cash wanted to keep the business for sentimental reasons. Eventually they were all persuaded to agree to sell their shares – except for one elderly single aunt of the chairman.

  Without her agreement nothing could be done and the chairman would have been in a very nasty situation without his share of the cash (he had some vast personal tax bills he’d deferred for five years that had become inescapable). He persuaded a married cousin to invite the aunt to move from her lonely ‘retirement’flat to the big, jolly family house. The cousin and her husband promised to take care of the old girl. It’s said that she was happier than she’d been for years with all that friendly company and family food.

  ‘And sold the shares in gratitude?’ said Willow aloud, picking up the clean flannel that Mrs Rusham had left on the table by the bath. Willow reached forward to rinse it under the cold tap, wiped her face with it, took a long swig of whisky and went back to her letter.

  The chairman reported her dead, got probate and took over her shares in the company. He and the cousins kept her well supplied with money and she was happy. They voted her shares, sold the company and pocketed their rewards. It turned out that they’d anticipated nature by only four years; she died of a massive coronary.

  The fraud was discovered by an idiotic mischance, which I suspect you will sympathize with.

  Willow raised her own eyebrows at that and read on with an added spur of interest.

  Unknown to the family that was caring for her, the aunt wrote one day to her old tax office to say that she had not had a tax return for the past two years and was getting worried about her undeclared income.

  Reaching for her glass, Willow smiled. Her accountant had often suffered from her demands that her tax returns be filed within the statutory thirty days, despite the fact that the Revenue did not actually want them so soon and applied no sanctions and charged no fines unless the returns were not filed by the end of six months. She looked back at his letter.

  The man who had perpetrated the fraud – the chairman – hanged himself, leaving a typed note confessing to everything and exonerating the rest of the family, who, he wrote, had believed he wanted them to house his old aunt in gratitude for her agreeing to let him vote her shares. I hope that this is of some use. Yours, Peter.

  Willow shuffled the three sheets back into place and put them on the table. She lay back against the curved enamel of the bath, sipping her drink and trying to decide whether any family could be so innocent of such a fraud. She fell to wondering, too, about the pronunciation of Bicklington-Heath and whether it could be contracted in some way, as Cockburn, Featherstonehaugh and Cholmondeley are contracted to Coburn, Fanshaw and Chumley.

  There were a great many questions that needed answers, but in the aftermath of terror and relaxation, Willow felt far too sleepy to do any more that night. Her doors and windows were all securely locked; her body was warmly comfortable for the first time in hours; and there was at least a quarter of a pint of whisky seeping into her bloodstream.

  She tried to calculate how much pure alcohol that signified and as she was multiplying five fluid ounces by 43 per cent, she fell asleep in the bath.

  When she woke in bed the following morning she could hardly remember having got herself out of the bath, dry and into bed. Various of her muscles ached badly and she had a headache, but she felt better than she had any right to expect. Checking her clock she saw that Mrs Rusham was due to arrive in about ten minutes and decided to get up.

  When they met half an hour later, Willow was dressed in the dark-blue linen suit with a cream-and-emerald striped shirt. Her face was discreetly made up and she had put a pair of modest emerald studs in her ears in place of the plain gold knots she had previously worn to the bank. She felt reasonably well in control.

  Willow thought that Mrs Rusham looked ill, but she said that she was perfectly all right and quickly presented her employer with an impeccably cooked omelette flavoured with chives, parsley, tarragon and chervil from the jug by the sink.

  ‘I must apologize for the mess we made yesterday,’ she said as she brought Willow a second cup of cappuccino.

  Willow smiled and shook her head. ‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘You were helping. We all want Richard safe and anything is justified if it gets us any nearer.’

  Mrs Rusham nodded. It occurred to Willow that her housekeeper hated looking a fool almost as much as she herself did.

  ‘I disposed of that mackintosh; I hope that’s all right?’

  ‘Fine. Don’t you worry. I think we’re nearly there, Mrs Rusham.’

  The frown on the housekeeper’s heavily modelled face lessened but she did not smile. She thanked Willow and retreated to the drawing room to relieve her feelings by restoring it to its customary pristine order.

  Willow drank the coffee slowly and tried to concentrate on The Times until it was late enough to begin making telephone calls.

  The first was to her accountant, whom she thanked for all the work involved in his fax.

  ‘I’m sorry to ask for even more,’ she went on, ‘but do you know the name of the chairman’s cousin? The married one who looked after the old lady?’

  ‘Cressida, what is all this about?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. Do you know? Or shall I try someone else?’

  The accountant sighed, obviously reminded himself that he was talking to a good client who always paid his fees on time, and said:

  ‘I don’t know, but I can probably find out. I’ll ring or fax you when I know.’

  ‘Thank you, Peter. Goodbye.’

  She was about to ring Martin Roylandson when she heard the sound of her own front-door bell. Mrs Rusham went to answer it and Willow waited in her writing room, listening.

  ‘If you will come into the drawing room, I shall see if Miss Woodruffe can see you,’ she said, giving no clue to the visitor’s identity.

  A few moments later, she came into the writing room, shut the door behind her and said: ‘It’s that policewoman again.’

  ‘Chief Inspector Moreby?’ said Willow.

  Mrs Rusham nodded.

  ‘Thank you. Would you tell her that I’m on the telephone and will come as soon as I can? Perhaps you could offer her some of your coffee, too?’

  The expression on Mrs Rusham’s face suggested that she would rather provide prussic acid. Willow grinned in private sympathy and waited until she was alone again to telephone the solicitor.

  ‘Mr Roylandson? Cressida Woodruffe here. You’re going to disapprove of what I’ve done.’

  ‘Good morning, Miss Woodruffe. What is it that you have done?’

  Wishing that he would occasionally use some everyday slang or a few sloppy elisions, Willow told him how she had proved the existence of Sarah Allfarthing’s cottage and what had happened there.

  ‘I do not know that I particularly disapprove of that – a
lthough I might wish that you had seen fit to include a witness to your outing.’

  ‘There’s more,’ said Willow.

  ‘I see.’ Mr Roylandson sounded grim and Willow made herself smile so that she did not sound accusatory.

  ‘When I failed to get hold of you last night I told Chief Inspector Worth what I had discovered and he has passed the information on to Chief Inspector Moreby.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ said Roylandson coldly after a short pause. ‘You were correct, Miss Woodruffe; I am angry. You really ought to have confided in me before telling all to the police. I might remind you that they are on the opposite side to you in this case, whatever your private relations with them.’

  ‘My private affairs are nothing –’ Willow began, but Roylandson carried on as though he were a steamroller and she a newly tarred stretch of road.

  ‘Even if you have no evidence, your suppositions could have been helpful in court. What you have done is to give the police plenty of time to collect the evidence that disproves them.’

  ‘You haven’t much faith in my discovery,’ said Willow drily. ‘I rang you this morning to tell you that Chief Inspector Moreby is sitting in my drawing room now, waiting to question me about it.’

  ‘What a fortunate circumstance it is that I have no urgent meetings first thing this morning! I should be with you in fifteen minutes. Can you confine your confiding impulses until then?’

  ‘I expect so. Goodbye.’

  Willow thought that she heard Roylandson laugh just before he put down his telephone. She walked quickly and quietly into her bedroom to comb her hair and check her make-up. When both were flawless she went to face Jane Moreby, who was sitting in one corner of the big sofa reading the Independent.

  At the sound of Willow’s step, the policewoman looked up and put her newspaper on the table at her side. She stood up and formally shook hands with Willow.

  ‘Tom Worth wanted to come with me this morning, but I thought that you and I would do better alone,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘You may be right,’ said Willow, ‘although that does sound as though you think we should be facing each other with drawn swords on some blasted heath at dawn.’

  Jane Moreby frowned.

  ‘This isn’t a game, you know,’ she said after a pause. ‘I can understand your impulse to dramatize everyday life into the sort of thing you put into your novels, but –’

  ‘It may be the stuff of everyday life to you,’ Willow answered with deliberate coolness, ‘but it is entirely strange for me to have one of my best friends unjustly in prison, and I have not the slightest intention of dramatizing anything. By the way, I have asked his solicitor to come here.’

  She looked down at the gold Cartier watch.

  ‘He should be with us in about ten minutes,’ she said, and thought she saw contempt in Jane Moreby’s eyes.

  ‘Tom says you took photographs of the mill house before the alleged planting of evidence,’ she said. ‘May I see them?’

  ‘I haven’t had time to have them developed,’ said Willow, ‘and I think I’d better ask Mr Roylandson’s advice before I hand over the film to you.’

  ‘May I sit down?’

  ‘Oh yes, please do,’ said Willow, speaking more naturally. ‘I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to keep you standing like a candidate for a domestic job. Is Mrs Rusham making you coffee?’

  Jane Moreby suddenly smiled and revealed herself as a younger, more appealing woman than she had seemed in all her severity.

  ‘I declined, which was … silly. If it’s not too much trouble I should love a cup.’

  ‘Good,’ said Willow, also relaxing. ‘I won’t be long.’

  She waited in the kitchen while Mrs Rusham made a pot of strong coffee and heated a jugful of milk. By the time it was ready and she had laid a tray with crockery and a plate of biscuits, Martin Roylandson had rung the doorbell.

  Willow let him in herself and took him to the drawing room, where Mrs Rusham had carried the tray of coffee.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Willow poured out three cups of coffee and offered one to the police officer and another to the solicitor. They helped themselves to milk and sugar and both avoided the biscuits.

  ‘Chief Inspector?’ said Willow, sitting back and waiting.

  ‘You do understand that this is all quite irregular, don’t you?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Martin Roylandson, straightening his tie, which had been so tightly knotted that it protruded from his shirtfront in a stiff arc.

  ‘Chief Inspector Worth has persuaded me that although there is no admissible evidence of what Miss Woodruffe has told him about her investigation of Mrs Allfarthing’s cottage, he believes her account is truthful. I have been down there this morning and seen what little evidence there is.’

  ‘Which is?’

  Willow was about to answer the solicitor herself, but Jane Moreby was quicker.

  ‘A collection of items that are readily identifiable as belonging to Richard Crescent. I have a list here which I can copy for you later. According to Miss Woodruffe’s story none of them were in the cottage when she first arrived. There was undoubted evidence that a car different from hers had recently driven up to the locked gate in front of the mill. The tyres are standard and used on a variety of middle-sized cars.’

  ‘Hm,’ muttered the solicitor, ‘nothing much there. It could have been anyone’s.’

  ‘Precisely. But it is enough to make me reconsider my earlier certainty about your client’s guilt. I am not convinced, but I am willing to listen to what Miss Woodruffe has to say.’

  Willow could not prevent a triumphant smile from stealing on to her lips, but Martin Roylandson looked at her repressively. He took a deep breath through his flexed nostrils and put his coffee cup precisely in the middle of the table nearest him.

  ‘I am naturally relieved to hear you say that, but I need assurances from you about the consequences to my client.’

  ‘Obviously I can’t give you assurances of any kind, except that I will listen,’ said Jane, looking at Willow for a moment as an ally against the solicitor.

  Willow nodded briefly and then turned to him. ‘There are things we need to know that only the police can find out. Are you willing to let me tell Chief Inspector Moreby what I know and what I suspect?’

  ‘I should prefer to hear it in confidence first, but that is hardly practical at this juncture. You had better start on the assumption that I shall stop you if I believe it to be necessary in the interest of protecting my client.’

  ‘Very well. I believe that I now know why Sarah was killed and how it was done; later today I hope to have some evidence to prove who did it, but I am unlikely to get enough to stand up in court. I need you,’ said Willow turning to Jane Moreby, ‘to search Richard’s flat for evidence of the burglary that must have provided the evidence I found at the mill. And I also need you to force the chief executive of the bank to release the tapes of all the telephone calls made to and by Sarah Allfarthing on the last day of her life. He has refused to let me have them.’

  ‘I can try persuasion,’ said the policewoman. ‘I doubt if I could get a search warrant on the basis of your suppositions. Why do you think she was killed?’

  ‘There are two more things that I need,’ said Willow, ignoring the question.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘One is a re-examination of the computer keyboard. Everyone has assumed that it was the blood that leaked into it that short-circuited it, but I think it could have been water from the roses.’

  ‘I don’t see what relevance that could have, but it’s easy to check,’ said Jane Moreby.

  ‘You’ve calculated the time of death on the basis that as soon as her throat was cut the blood leaked into the keyboard and shut down the computer.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But I think that while Richard Crescent was trying to pick up the body he must have tipped the vase of flowers over. I suppose that traces of vegetable matter left in th
e water by the roses might even show up on his dinner jacket. You could get your scientists to check that, too. I am sure that a vaseful of water would have been much more likely to have damaged the electrics than more viscous blood.’

  ‘That’s debatable,’ said Jane Moreby with a slight smile. ‘But I can look into it. What else do you want?’

  ‘The report of your fingerprint expert.’

  ‘The only prints on the weapon were those of the victim and Richard Crescent,’ said Jane Moreby.

  ‘I can believe that, but there must be others on some of the things that were sitting on the desk. Your people took away everything that was there. What did they find?’

  ‘A variety of unidentified prints. But they’re hardly relevant. Why do you think Mrs Allfarthing was killed?’

  Willow considered for a moment and then absent-mindedly took a biscuit from the tray.

  ‘This may be rather longwinded,’ she said when she had swallowed a mouthful of chocolate and ginger biscuit. ‘But I want you to see the steps that have led me to my conclusions. All right?’

  Jane Moreby nodded, but Martin Roy landson abstracted the gold half-hunter from his waistcoat pocket, swung it round on its chain so that he could study the face and then said:

  ‘I have a meeting in fifty-seven minutes.’

  ‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ said Willow. ‘Do help yourselves to more coffee or biscuits. Now, it has become obvious that unless Sarah was killed in some crime passionel, which I consider to be unlikely, the reason she died must lie in the meeting at which she told her story of the tax fraud and Richard shook her.’

  ‘Why?’ As she spoke, Jane Moreby crossed one slim leg over the other. Her face which had begun to show signs of friendliness had returned to its earlier detached obstructiveness.

  ‘Because the meeting is the only thing that could have caused any change in Sarah’s life. You were sure that she was killed because of the tensions she aroused at the bank, but everyone there has had five years to get used to those tensions. I cannot believe that they smouldered for so long and then burst into such violent flame for no reason.’