Bloody Roses Page 3

  ‘I saw that you were back, Miss Woodruffe. Is everything all right?’

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Willow and, as gently as possible, told her housekeeper what had happened.

  The shock in Mrs Rusham’s eyes and the uncharacteristic quiver in her voice made Willow urge her to sit down.

  ‘No. I’m perfectly all right,’ she said, drawing herself up to her full height of five foot three inches. ‘But how is Mr Lawrence-Crescent?’

  Mrs Rusham, whose devotion to him was of such long standing that it would probably not change even if he were to admit to murder, was almost the only person who ever used Richard’s full surname.

  ‘I know very little yet.’ Willow wanted to be kind, but she had nothing reassuring to say. ‘I shall be seeing him this afternoon and things ought to be clearer by then. I must change. Do you think you could manage some kind of lunch by half past twelve?’

  ‘Certainly, Miss Woodruffe. Perhaps this is the moment to tell you that I’ve made no arrangements for the next two weeks and I should like to work as normal.’

  ‘Are you sure? I know how inconvenient my return must be to you.’

  ‘I am perfectly certain. No inconvenience could possibly matter compared with what may be happening to Mr Lawrence-Crescent.’ She gasped, recovered herself and retreated to the kitchen. Willow watched her go, and then shrugged and turned into her bedroom.

  It was a big, light room, decorated in cool ivories and grey-greens with small touches of pink to set off a frivolous eighteenth-century painting of a French fête champêtre she had bought a few years earlier. There was an Irish lace counterpane on the bed, and on the pink-clothed circular tables at each side were French porcelain lamps, new books and matching cream-ware vases filled with identical arrangements of dark ivy and pale-pink roses. There were ivy and roses printed on the pale chintz curtains that hung in heavy swags at the windows.

  Willow, who usually spent a few minutes admiring the room each time she went into it, ignored all the possessions and arrangements that she had chosen with such care over the past nine years. She did not even notice the newly arranged flowers as she went to fling open the doors of one of her big wardrobes.

  There were lots of designer suits and dresses hanging there, each one swathed in a linen bag to keep the dust and moths away, but she pushed them aside and found a plain, relatively inexpensive navy-blue linen suit, which a solicitor’s clerk might well have worn. Choosing a blue-and-white-striped shirt and a pair of low-heeled black court shoes. Willow dressed and then made up her face again with no mascara and a much paler lipstick. With her hair tied back into a simple knot, she looked quite different from the rich, elegant woman who had been sitting in the solicitor’s office. Her nose looked bigger without the counterweight of blackened eyelashes and her eyes much paler. When she had taken out the big gold earrings she had been wearing, her transformation was almost complete.

  She went to a small safe hidden at the back of the wardrobe, in which she kept some of her jewellery and all the official documents that confirmed her life as Willow King. Taking out a pair of pale-rimmed, unfashionable spectacles, she slipped them into her handbag.

  When she walked into the small dining room at precisely half past twelve, Willow saw Mrs Rusham looking at her in some surprise and said with a self-conscious smile:

  ‘Do you think this is suitable dress for a police cell?’

  The housekeeper’s face cleared at once.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ she said and placed in front of Willow a delicately arranged salad of grilled goat’s cheese with rocket and radicchio.

  There was a chilled bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water and a new loaf of olive bread, which Mrs Rusham had baked that morning. She retired to the kitchen and Willow ate, making a list of all the things that she wanted to ask Richard. It would be frustrating to leave him and realize too late that there was one vital question unanswered.

  The questions all seemed irrelevant when she found herself face to face with Richard across the grey plastic-coated table in the stuffy green prison interview room. She had known that he would look tired and distressed, but she had not imagined anything like the defeat or the desperation she saw in his grey-blue eyes. He had not shaved and as he sat slumped in his chair, running his long fingers through his greasy hair again and again, she saw that the nails were cracked and dirty. There were bags under his eyes and the eyes themselves were red with sleeplessness and pain. But they looked straight at her and never slid away as he answered her questions, and that alone gave Willow some comfort.

  With the solicitor at her side, she asked Richard to tell her precisely what happened when he arrived at the office from Tokyo on the night of the murder. In a voice as hard and expressionless as the sound of a machine, Richard told his story.

  ‘I got to the office at about ten past eight. There’d been an appalling snarl-up on the M4 so that the drive from Heathrow took twice as long as it ought,’ he said, scratching the side of his nose.

  ‘Why didn’t you take the tube?’

  ‘I had two enormously heavy pilot cases of documents,’ he said, shrugging and transferring the scratching finger to his ear. ‘I’d done a damn good deal for the client and I was bloody tired. Oh, God!’ he said and stopped scratching so that he could cover his face.

  Willow laid one long white hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Come on, Richard. We haven’t all that long. If I’m to help, I must get through these questions.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, pulling up his head and straightening his shoulders with a visible effort. ‘After all the scandals of the last few years I’d sort of accustomed myself to the thought that I might one day be a witness in a fraud trial, but this has thrown me completely.’

  ‘I know.’ There was real sympathy in Willow’s voice, but it grew brisker as she went on: ‘So, you decided against the tube, although you knew that it would be quicker than a cab.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Richard took a deep breath. ‘I staggered up the steps at the bank, let Bert (one of the security men on the evening shift that week) open the main doors for me, because of the two bags, and he summoned the lift. I got in, went up to the fourth floor, got out … Do you really need this much detail?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Fine.’ Richard rubbed his eyes. ‘Then I walked across to the doors to Corporate Finance. I had to put down the bag in my right hand then in order to punch in the code that opens the doors.’

  ‘Punch in?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, sounding impatient. ‘The doors are electronically operated. There’s a keypad to the right of them. We all have to use the code to get the doors open.’

  ‘I see. Thanks. Then?’

  ‘Then I picked up the case again, walked through, kicked the door shut with my foot, and walked round to my cubbyhole. There seemed to be no one else in the place. It’s hardly ever like that. I had been going to change in the bog, but since I was alone I dumped the bags of documents and dropped my trousers.’

  That was the first time Willow had heard Richard use the crude slang of his schooldays. She let it pass without comment.

  ‘Where was your dinner jacket?’

  ‘Hanging on the edge of the partition. I’d left it there in the cleaner’s bag before I went to Tokyo, because I knew I might not have time to go home to change.’

  ‘Why not? Wouldn’t it have been better to go straight home?’

  ‘Oh, God!’ said Richard again. ‘Don’t you think I wish I had? But the documents in those cases were highly secret. I couldn’t risk it. I knew I’d have to get them back to the bank before the weekend. My flat just isn’t secure enough. I –’

  ‘All right, Richard. Forget about the papers. What happened? You’d just changed when I interrupted.’

  ‘N’yah,’ he muttered, taking hold of his wits again. ‘My tie caused the usual trouble, but I’d got it done and just realized that my hands were filthy. So I dashed out to the bog, after all, washed, combed my hair a
nd was just about to leave the building, when I noticed I’d left my wallet in the pocket of my suit. So I had to go back, you see, into Corporate Finance. As I was shutting the doors behind me, I heard something, some slight sound, and so I called out.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t remember.’ The impatience was back in his tired, hoarse voice. ‘I suppose I called out something like “Hello! I thought everyone had gone.” But no one answered me and so I went round to the other side of the office and then I saw it.’

  He broke off again and covered his face, but he was not quick enough to hide the mixture of terror and disgust in his eyes. Willow waited, all her attention on the humbled figure of her one-time lover, asking herself why he was quite so distraught. Shock and sympathy for the dead woman and dislike of the blood would all be readily understandable, but Richard was displaying something more than all those.

  Martin Roylandson had been sitting absolutely still and silent throughout the interview and she had forgotten that he was there.

  ‘Richard,’ she said, more gently than she had ever spoken to him in the old days, ‘try to tell me.’

  He raised his head and she was distressed to see tears hanging clumsily about his eyelashes and sliding down the sides of his strong nose.

  ‘Did you like her?’ Willow asked slowly, moving her tongue gingerly, almost as though she were tasting some unfamiliar and disconcerting food. She had been thinking for forty-eight hours about his troubles, but it had not occurred to her that bereavement might have been one of them.

  ‘Christ!’ he burst out and banged his clenched fists on the table.

  Willow flinched, but Roylandson sat like a rock.

  ‘Of course I bloody did! Sarah was … She lit up the office.’

  ‘I hadn’t realized. I’m so sorry.’ Willow knew it was not the moment to remind Richard of the things he used to say to her about women bankers. Loosely translated into the sort of schoolboy slang he had started to use, they might have been summed up as ‘if God had meant women to work in Corporate Finance, he would have given them willies’. She also suppressed for the moment her questions about the meeting at which Richard had shaken his paragon.

  ‘Tell me what you saw.’

  Richard gulped, uncurled his hands and laid them in his lap.

  ‘She was lying sort of suspended from her chair. Her skirt was hooked over it somehow, so that her head was hanging down. Oh, God! Willow, must I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was hanging, you see, because of the cut, and the veins in her neck were like bloody rubber tubes. She must have knocked over her keyboard. There was blood all over the desk, and there were flowers, too – roses, I think – all mashed and bloody. She was still bleeding.’

  He broke off and looked at Willow, silently pleading with her to let him off. She could not.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I knew she couldn’t be dead, because bodies don’t bleed after the heart stops pumping. I’ve read that thousands of times in detective stories. Of course she looked dead with that great slash across her throat, but I thought by some miracle she couldn’t be, and so I tried to straighten her up. She felt warm still. But she was too heavy and ungainly. I’d never realized how heavy she might be, she was so slender and …’ He took out a grubby handkerchief from his trouser pocket, wiped his eyes and then blew his nose.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, beginning to sound slightly more like himself, ‘I tripped as I was lifting her and she fell right off the chair then and I realized that despite the blood she must be dead. I was trying to hold her head up with one hand while I switched on her speaker phone with the other and punched in 999. When they answered I told them what had happened and they said they’d send people. Then they asked if I could see a weapon.’

  Willow took a leather-backed pad out of her handbag and wrote herself a note.

  ‘Was there one?’

  ‘Yes. It was obvious, because it was covered in blood. A paperknife, but wickedly sharp. They asked what it looked like, you see, and so I picked it up. That’s why my fingerprints are all over it.’

  ‘Did you tell them that?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ Richard sounded thoroughly in charge, but his shoulders sagged again as he went on: ‘But they clearly didn’t believe me. Before they got to us, Steve Draycott – one of the computer boffins – came steaming in demanding to know who was buggering about with the computers.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Apparently the blood – or the water from the flowers, or both – had short-circuited the electrics in Sarah’s keyboard and it had shown up on his monitor in the basement.’

  Willow wrote herself another note.

  ‘And then they arrested you?’

  ‘After a bit. They wouldn’t even let me wash. I was lugged back to the police station and they took away my clothes and scraped out the blood and fluff from under my fingernails and took all kinds of swabs. And all the time Sarah was lying there in the morgue, and … Christ! It was unspeakable.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you? No one could imagine what it was like who wasn’t there. Willow, you must get me out of here. No one else can.’

  ‘Hush, Richard. I’ll do my best.’ Willow pushed back her chair as though to get up. His panic horrified her even as she sympathized with it. ‘Will you tell me one more thing?’

  Richard simply nodded as he stuffed the handker-chief back in his trouser pocket.

  ‘If you were so fond of her, why did you shake her? I’ve been told that you took hold of both her shoulders – in public – and shook her until her teeth rattled.’

  Richard got out of his dark-green plastic chair and stood with his back against the wall. Willow thought that he looked as though he were posing for police photographs. With his haggard face and his dirty hair standing on end he looked hunted and dangerous, almost like a criminal on the run. She had a sudden, frighteningly disloyal surge of doubt, which she suppressed at once.

  Looking round the room, she thought that it was completely unlike the Dickensian gaol that she had been imagining, and yet Richard’s terror of it was easy to understand.

  ‘It was so stupid,’ he said, sighing. ‘I was at the end of my tether; we’ve been appallingly busy for months and that was at the end of a thirty-hour negotiation. Everything had been agreed at last and we were waiting for the lawyers to complete the final documents for signing so that we could all go to bed, and Sarah started a most ill-advised conversation with one of the American lawyers. It so frightened him that they refused to sign.’

  Martin Roylandson, who had clearly not asked Richard for any details, sat up straighter and pushed his little bottom further back into the plastic chair.

  ‘What did she say?’ asked Willow, ignoring him. She was curious about anything to do with Sarah Allfarthing.

  ‘It was a very complicated deal involving lots of small family companies, all of whom had to sell to the Yanks if the deal was to work at all. She told Bob Stonewall (one of the American lawyers) that when she was at the Revenue at the beginning of her career she had heard a story in which most members of a family had wanted to sell their company but one had refused.’

  Richard shook his head and came back to stand with his hands on the back of his chair. Stooping, he looked across the table at Willow.

  ‘I’m so hellishly tired,’ he said. ‘Must I tell you now?’

  ‘Not if you can’t bear it; but why not sit down?’

  Richard obeyed and after a few moments seemed to gather together the remains of his strength.

  ‘According to Sarah’s story, the rest of the family pretended that the recalcitrant aunt was dead, got probate on her estate and voted on her behalf to sell,’ he said with a curious mixture of boredom and residual anger in his grey face. ‘It was enough to put the wind up the Americans and our whole labyrinthine deal was called off until the various firms produced the relevant death certificates to prove that they had the right to vote t
he shares.’

  Willow made more notes before looking up.

  ‘It sounds bizarre,’ she said. ‘How could they have got probate without a death certificate? D’you think Sarah was making the story up?’

  ‘No. You don’t need a death certificate to get probate. But what on earth does all this matter now? Sarah’s dead.’ His voice sounded harsh as well as defeated.

  ‘It probably doesn’t matter at all,’ said Willow, still trying to be comforting. ‘But since your violence to Sarah on that occasion has given the police confidence that you must have killed her, we need to know all the exonerating details there are. That’s all.’

  ‘The most exonerating thing I can think about it is that despite her spanner in the works, the deal was signed two days later. The only costs were several thousand in extra interest for the various firms whose sales did not go through on the appointed day, but that was no skin off my nose. I suppose we lost a little of our American clients’confidence, but it wasn’t the end of the world.’

  Wondering whether the cliches made Richard feel safer, Willow smiled at him and said: ‘We’ll leave you alone now. Keep –’

  ‘Smiling?’ Richard suggested with a faint echo of his old, sardonic self gleaming through the horror. ‘Do my best, Willow.’

  ‘And I’ll do mine. I’ll be back as soon as I’ve got anything to report. Mr Roylandson will keep us in touch.’

  She stood up, walked round the thin-topped table and kissed Richard’s stubbly cheek, hiding her distaste from him, but not from Roylandson.

  ‘By the way,’ she said as the two of them reached the door, ‘who do you think did it?’

  Richard shrugged and the whites of his eyes reddened again. ‘I can’t imagine. There wasn’t anybody else there. It must have happened while I was in the bog, but there wasn’t anybody else there. There wasn’t. And there wasn’t enough time.’

  The rising note of hysteria in his voice made Willow force her voice to sound almost syrupy. ‘Perhaps she killed herself,’ she suggested, having been clinging to that possibility for some time.