Poison Flowers Read online

  At twenty-past nine she heard sounds of movement in her outer office and got up to greet her new typist, an intelligent nineteen-year-old called Marilyn, who got through her work at least three times faster than her predecessor had ever done.

  ‘Good morning, Willow,’ she said, turning from the curly coatstand where she was hanging her pale-grey coat. Her skin was pale-grey too, and her hair a dull blonde. She was fanatically neat in her dress as well as her work. Willow admired the neatness, the efficiency and the girl’s lack of interest in office gossip, but she wished that she could like her too. There was no reason not to like her, Willow often told herself, but she could not do it. There was a machine-like quality in Marilyn’s accomplishments, and the only emotion she had ever shown was pleasure in other people’s failure and mistakes.

  ‘Marilyn,’ said Willow, making herself smile a little, ‘when you’ve had time to settle down would you bring your notebook?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said the girl.

  Before Willow had dictated more than three letters the red telephone on her desk rang. Irritated with the interruption, she gestured to Marilyn to answer it.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the girl after a moment. ‘Yes, I’ll tell her. Thank you.’ She put the receiver down on the telephone with all her usual precision, cleared her throat delicately and looked at her chief. ‘That was the Permanent Secretary’s secretary, Willow. He would like to see you at a quarter to eleven this morning.’

  ‘You might have found out whether that was convenient for me before you agreed on my behalf,’ said Willow moderately, considering the unreasonable rage that seethed in her mind at her secretary’s assumptions.

  ‘Oh, but I knew you were,’ answered Marilyn without discernible emotion or excuse in her voice. ‘I always check your diary with Barbara last thing on Monday night.’

  ‘I see,’ said Willow, trying to admire the efficiency and ignore the impertinence. ‘Well, we’d better get on.’

  By twenty-to-eleven, she had dictated all the urgent letters and minutes and planned to deal with the PS as soon as she possibly could, see the rest of her staff and then continue drafting her part of the new White Paper. On her way out, she said something pleasant to Barbara, her Administration Trainee, who appeared to be working busily.

  All ability to say anything pleasant to anybody disappeared as soon as she discovered what the Permanent Secretary wanted to tell her. She was often annoyed by his patronising bumbling, but on that particular morning he made her even angrier than usual. The recently appointed Establishments Officer had told her that she was to serve on a selection board for the next two weeks and she had protested about it, eventually insisting that her case should be taken to the Permanent Secretary. Unfortunately the PS had been infuriated that he was being bothered with so trivial a matter and had decided to side with the Establishments Officer.

  ‘You must admit, Willow,’ he said in a voice of exaggerated patience that grated on her nerves, ‘that the mere fact that you are allowed to work part-time cannot excuse you from the onerous and tedious duties that your colleagues shoulder faithfully.’

  ‘My reluctance has nothing to do with that, Permanent Secretary,’ said Willow, sounding annoyingly patient herself, although she did not realise it, ‘but with the White Paper. Of course I am willing to serve on selection boards; it is merely that at this particular juncture, I am needed here.’

  ‘I am afraid that you must let your superiors be the judge of that,’ said the Permanent Secretary. There was plenty of synthetic kindness in his voice, but his pale, bloodshot eyes looked hopeful and Willow wondered, as she had often wondered before, whether he might be deliberately trying to provoke her.

  ‘Does the Minister know what you’re doing?’ Willow asked abruptly.

  ‘Despite her feminine desire to be involved with minutiae, Mrs Trouville is quite wise enough not to interfere with my running of this department,’ he said through his teeth. Willow shook her head so vigorously that one of the hairpins slipped out of her hair. Furiously, she shoved it back so hard that one of the ends dug into her neck, making her eyes water slightly. She saw an interested expression cross the Permanent Secretary’s face and realised that he might suspect her to be weeping. With a voice as cold as snow-buried metal, she said:

  ‘I was not suggesting any such thing. But she is most anxious to ensure that the new legislation gets through during the life of this Parliament. If the White Paper is held up because of this board …’

  ‘Important though you are, Willow, you are not the only member of this department to be involved in the new legislation. Mrs Trouville will not be disappointed. Now, I am afraid that I shall have to ask you to leave. I’m rather busy. Bob will give you any details you need of the Final Selection Board.’

  ‘Thank you, Permanent Secretary,’ said Willow, determined not

  to give the man the satisfaction of hearing her being rude to him.

  By the end of the day she was asking herself bitterly why she continued to put up with the trials and tedium of her job at DOAP when she could be spending her entire time as Cressida Woodruffe, surrounded by every luxury, with enough money to work or not as she chose, and with no one in a position to give her orders or to question hers. But even as she let the question form in her mind, she controlled some of her feelings. Whatever she had thought that morning while she was still half in Cressida’s life and however frustrating the day at DOAP had been, she knew perfectly well that there were several reasons why her double life suited her, just as she knew that to spend all her time as Cressida would eventually bore and stifle her. The contrast between her two characters was in itself a pleasure and she would be prepared to put up with a lot more than the Permanent Secretary’s tiresomeness to keep it.

  She walked wearily home through the dusty, rubbish-strewn streets of Clapham at seven o’clock, trying to decide whether to cook herself fish fingers or to heat up a frozen pizza for supper, and wishing that there were no dogs in London or at least that they left fewer heaps of excrement on the pavements. As she approached her flat, she saw that there was someone leaning against one of the pillars beside the front door. She recognised him at once and controlled her instinct to run towards him.

  ‘Tom,’ she said quietly when she was near enough for him to hear her. The leaning figure straightened up.

  ‘Willow,’ he said unsmiling, as though he were not sure of his welcome.

  ‘Come on in,’ she said. She felt a little wary of him, but the sanity and intelligence of his familiar face made a welcome change from the hated lineaments of the Permanent Secretary’s and even the neat grey features of the efficient Marilyn. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he answered, following her up the stairs to her flat. ‘I’ve been thinking about the poisoner and – slightly against my better judgment and conscience – I’ve come to ask whether you still want to have a look at some of the reports.’

  ‘Tom,’ said Willow, turning to smile at him in spontaneous pleasure. He stopped on the step just below her and looked up into her face.

  ‘Would you, Will?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d love to,’ she said, turning back to unlock the door for them both. ‘It’s precisely what I need to keep me sane for the next couple of weeks. I’ve just heard that I’ve got to sit on a Fisbe of all exasperating things.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Final Selection Board, FSB, Fisbe,’ said Willow, dropping her briefcase and gesturing to Tom to do the same. ‘No Leapfrog here, but if you’d like some ordinary whisky I have some – or perhaps a glass of Bulgarian wine?’

  ‘Any beer?’ he said, amused by her complete transformation from the glamorous, rich creature with whom he had dined the previous day.

  ‘Snob!’ she said. ‘Yes, I have some rather dull tinned beer, actually. It’s in the fridge: help yourself. I’m going to have wine.’

  When he came back into the living room, Willow had taken off the shapeless jacket of her suit to reveal th
e plain white cotton shirt, open at the neck. Remembering the elegant clothes and the impressive jewellery she had always worn when they dined together during her days as Cressida Woodruffe, he was amused all over again by her appearance.

  ‘Let down your hair, Will,’ he said, before he could censor himself.

  ‘You said that once before,’ she answered, making no move to take out the hairpins.

  ‘I know,’ he said, coming to sit beside her on the old sofa. ‘And I hadn’t meant to make any allusion to that time. You just look a lot more comfortable when your hair is loose. Go on.’

  Shrugging, Willow pulled the pins out of her hair and shook it free. It was much more comfortable.

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to think … I always do unpin it when I come home,’ she said in a voice bristling with defensiveness.

  ‘Good beer, this,’ said Worth ignoring the little scene he had provoked. ‘Now, I couldn’t bring you the actual files about these murders, but I’ve made a précis of their contents. You could probably find out a bit more from the local newspaper reports; and if you’ve any specific questions, let me know and I’ll see if there’s anything useful in the files.’

  ‘Thank you, Tom,’ said Willow, trying to put enough warmth into her voice to show him that she was as grateful for his refusal to pursue the question of her hair as for the information about the murders. ‘I’ll do what I can for you. I’d like to help you give one in the eye to those wretches – “feminine intuition” indeed!’

  ‘It’s not so much for that, Will,’ said Tom seriously, ‘as to stop whoever is doing this before anyone else gets killed.’

  ‘But there’s something else, isn’t there?’ she said, staring at him. ‘You look … yes, shifty, Tom. What is really bothering you so much about this case?’

  ‘Isn’t the thought of a murderer on the loose enough?’

  Willow shook her red head and then had to brush a strand of hair out of her eyes.

  ‘One of the prime movers in the campaign to stop me “wasting time” trying to find a connection between the cases has a personal connection to Titchmell,’ he said at last. His voice dragged as though he were fighting a deep reluctance to tell her anything about it.

  ‘His father, who was once a Chief Constable, was Simon Titchmell’s godfather,’ he said.

  ‘That doesn’t sound too bad. Couldn’t it be simply coincidence?’ asked Willow, trying to understand why he was so worried.

  ‘Possibly. And he is ferociously keen on time-and-motion studies and value for money. And he dislikes me. But his determination to end the investigation into his father’s godson’s murder strikes me as … well, it leaves me uncomfortable.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Willow, her novelist’s imagination flashing possible plots across her mind like trailers across a giant cinema screen. ‘I can see that it might. What’s his name, your policeman?’

  Tom stood up, towering over Willow and her sofa. She quickly got up herself.

  ‘Bodmin,’ he said. ‘Commander James Bodmin. He’s usually so efficient … Never mind that now. I must go.’

  ‘Must you?’ she asked.

  ‘I think I’d better,’ he said, ‘uninvited as I was this evening. Besides, I’ve got work to do before tomorrow. Good night.’

  ‘Good night, Tom,’ said Willow putting out a hand. He gripped it for a moment, kissed her calmly and walked away.

  Willow was left to her dingy flat, the frozen pizza, her briefcase full of work, and her difficult acknowledgment that she minded his going.

  Pulling herself together with an effort, she cooked and ate her pizza, drank another glass of wine and then turned to the dark-red manilla folder that Tom had left for her. Opening it, she saw a pile of sheets of lined paper covered in the neatest, blackest, most elegant handwriting she had ever encountered.

  It was strange, she thought, but she had never seen his writing before. All their arrangements to meet had been made by telephone. If anyone had asked her what she expected it to be like, she would have unhesitatingly said ‘schoolboyish, like the writing of someone who doesn’t put much on paper and isn’t very interested’; yet she was confronted by a hand infinitely more sophisticated and attractive than her own. It gave her a most peculiar sense of disadvantage and stopped her actually reading what he had written for at least five minutes.

  When she did eventually make herself concentrate on the content of his notes, she became more and more absorbed in them. By the time she had read the last page, she could understand both why Tom had believed that there must be a connection between the killings, and why some of his superiors had been just as certain that there could not.

  As Worth had told her, the victims were quite different from each other, lived in quite different parts of the country, and had no apparent connection between them at all. The first was a sixty-five-year-old spinster, Edith Fernside, who had been living in sheltered housing in Newcastle. Willow saw with a slight chill in her mind that Miss Fernside’s address had been only streets away from the red-brick house where she herself had been brought up. She had never been back to Newcastle since the death of her parents some years before and she had hoped never to go there again or even think about it. There had been no actual cruelty or conscious deprivation in her childhood, but it had been bleak enough for her to want to forget it.

  According to Tom’s notes, Miss Fernside had retired to Newcastle after working as matron in a famous girls’school in Berkshire. She suffered from a weak heart, which was presumably why she had chosen to live in a ‘retirement complex’with a warden on call.

  ‘Most doctors,’ Tom had written, ‘would simply have certified the death as having been caused by cardiac arrest and left it at that, but Miss F. was on the list of a particularly bright – and conscientious – young GP. The symptoms were thought to have arisen very suddenly. She appears to have fainted before the warden could reach her. There had been some vomiting and diarrhoea, but she had lost consciousness fast and her heart had stopped beating before the doctor could get to the house. He noticed various oddities about her condition and refused to sign the death certificate.

  ‘Post-mortem findings included the fact that her blood was a peculiarly dark colour and more liquid than it should have been. There were a few hyperaemic points (excessive amounts of blood in organs) in the mucous membrane of the stomach, intestines and right ventricle of the heart. The GP told the police of his suspicions and with the police surgeon pursued an investigation into every cup and glass in the house for signs of poison. They found a trace of digitalis in the glass from which she had drunk her nightly tot of sloe gin, tested the bottle and discovered an enormous quantity of digitalis in it. They are cumulative poisons and so although each dose in itself would have done her no harm, a week or two of drinking the contaminated stuff killed her.’

  Willow looked up from the report, as impressed by the GP as Tom had clearly been, but with other, less comfortable feelings worrying her. To live alone had never struck her as either unpleasant or odd; indeed, from her small involvement with other people, it had seemed infinitely more sensible to live by herself. But the thought of dying alone at sixty-five, after a solitary drink of sloe gin, because some warden could not answer her distress signal quickly enough, was unpleasant.

  ‘But still,’ said Willow aloud, searching a rational way to calm herself, ‘at least the warden would have been less miserable at what he found than if he had been any child or spouse or lover or friend of Miss Fernside’s.’

  It was clear from Tom’s account of the next deaths that living with a lover was no protection, and Willow read it with care.

  Simon Titchmell, a successful architect of 35, and his girlfriend Annabel Wilna, a designer of fashionable gold jewellery, had died on 25 February from eating muesli that had been adulterated with dried and powdered aconite root. The two of them had not known each other long and were not living together although they often spent nights in each other’s houses. According to their friends they shared a
n exemplary devotion and were expected to marry or at least move into a single house. They had apparently had no real enemies and certainly no reason to form any kind of suicide pact. They owed no more money than their large mortgages and monthly credit-card bills; both of them had better than average career prospects and high incomes for their ages. No one could imagine how the aconite had got into Titchmell’s breakfast cereal unless either some lunatic had put it in during the packaging or storage of the cereal, as various people had put ground glass and pieces of metal in babyfood a year or two earlier, or the victims had done it themselves.

  Neither had come to the attention of the police except after a burglary at the Fulham house two weeks before the murder, when some of Titchmell’s cufflinks (made by Ms Wilna) had been stolen, together with a CD player, the video and – of all things – the electric toaster. The junior police officers who had interviewed them had reported later that both Titchmell and Wilna were intelligent, sensible and thoroughly approving of the police. It was thought unlikely by PC Leathwaite that they would have tried to drug themselves with anything, let alone a deadly poison.

  Clearly, thought Willow, PC Leathwaite had not been believed. Reaching for a notebook, she scribbled herself a note to remind her to ask Tom Worth whether she could meet PC Leathwaite.

  Those of Titchmell’s clients who had been interviewed by the police reported that he was an excellent architect, very sensitive to the needs of people living in beautiful seventeenth-century houses (in the restoration of which he specialised), and at least three of them claimed him as a friend. Their names, addresses and occupations suggested that Titchmell had chosen his speciality wisely or at least profitably.