Bitter Herbs Page 8

  ‘Miss King?’ he said politely.

  ‘Yes, but do please call me Willow,’ she said, shaking his hand. ‘And this is Raymond Beete.’

  ‘Excellent. I have had good reports of both of you from Elsie, so I’m sure we’ll get on all right. She’s told you about the people I’ve got to serve on the committee?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Willow, who approved of the chairman’s directness and refusal to waste time.

  ‘That tone sounds as though you don’t like all of them,’ said the professor, looking at Willow out of the corners of his grey eyes. He took off his overcoat and added it to the scarf he had draped over the back of a chair. Willow was amused to see that he had not bothered to put on a suit, but was wearing old corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket over a woollen waistcoat.

  ‘Not necessarily, but I skipped through Harriet Stabe’s book a while ago and I can’t help thinking that her rage may make her a tricky member of the committee – possibly even uncontrollable.’

  The professor grimaced and looked much younger.

  ‘That’s rather why I want her. It’s easy for these commissions and committees to become too cosy together and never produce anything worth while. I expect ours will have some lively arguments, but I’m hoping that out of the irritation will …’

  ‘Come a pearl?’ suggested Willow as he hesitated. He bowed slightly and she could not be sure whether he had heard her sarcasm or not. Just in case he had she went on quickly to report what Raymond and the others had been asked to do and that she proposed to visit a prison as soon as her staff had selected one and made an appointment with the governor.

  ‘That is,’ she added politely, ‘if you have no objection. I won’t talk about the committee.’

  ‘I don’t think it would matter much if you did,’ he said.

  ‘Good. Now if Raymond can sort out some coffee, perhaps we can settle one or two fundamentals. Is that all right with you?’

  The professor nodded and sat two chairs away from Willow. He put his hands on the table and looked expectant. She took him through a possible plan of work, with suggested meeting dates, designed to achieve a draft report within six months. He listened, commented and eventually nodded.

  ‘That sounds very sensible. Of course it can’t become a strait-jacket. Until we’ve started, we won’t know how much time we’ll need.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Willow, ‘but without a firm timetable things tend to get very slack and committee members do sometimes let their other work get in the way.’

  ‘I can see you’re a hard woman.’

  ‘Just used to government committees,’ she said with a faint smile.

  After an hour’s concentrated work, she felt reasonably sanguine about Professor Misterton’s chairmanship and, looking at Raymond, saw that he too was displaying qualified approval. She asked the professor whether he needed anything else and, when he shook his head, said:

  ‘You’ve clearly had quite a lot of experience of the effects of prison on lifers. Do you know much about what got them into trouble in the first place? I mean what caused them to kill?’

  The professor looked more interested than he had during their discussions of the hazards of committee work.

  ‘Anger, misery, drink, testosterone, crack, greed, fear or stupidity,’ he said. ‘Not necessarily in that order.’

  ‘I actually meant the more immediate cause – the motive, if you like.’

  ‘It’s sometimes hard to disentangle the motive from a motivator like alcohol, but it’s usually: she slept with the other bloke; he insulted me (in some way); he was in my way; I don’t get enough respect; it was the only way out; I wanted a new car and it was the only way to get the money. That sort of thing. Mean, stupid, greedy and a hellish waste of two lives.’

  ‘I see. Depressing.’

  ‘It’s certainly that. If Elsie’s plans can do anything to make ex-inmates think long enough to stop them killing again I’m all for it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Willow, ‘I agree. Will you let Sandra know if you need me before we next meet? She’ll keep us in touch.’

  Professor Misterton got out of his chair, and they shook hands.

  ‘You’re right. Time to be getting on. I’m due to lunch with Elsie. I’ll see you the week after next.’

  The two civil servants waited until he had gone before turning towards each other.

  ‘I think we’ll be able to cope with him, don’t you?’ said Willow.

  ‘I think so, although I’m not too impressed with his memory,’ answered Raymond.

  ‘I don’t see how you can judge that already.’

  ‘He was my supervisor for my thesis,’ said Raymond. ‘I often used to wonder whether he was paying me any attention at all. Now I know he wasn’t.’

  ‘Perhaps he was merely being tactful. If Mrs Trouville approves of him, I can’t imagine him being fuzzy-minded, can you? One thing I had meant to talk to him about is whether his understanding of her agenda is the same as mine.’

  ‘Surely it must be. She wants everyone coming out of prison to have the education they refused or were denied in childhood.’

  ‘That’s certainly what I gathered, but it’s possible that there are other aspects to what she wants. Knowing her as a friend, he may have picked up more than we did. I’ll take him out to lunch after the next meeting and grill him then.’

  ‘Poor man,’ said Raymond and then hastily corrected himself. ‘I mean the grilling not the lunch.’

  ‘That’s quite all right.’ Willow felt her face and voice growing cool.

  ‘Well, I’d better get on,’ said Raymond, clearly having registered her withdrawal. ‘I’ll let you know when arrangements have been made with a suitable prison.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Willow with a vivid memory of the few times she had crossed the threshold of a prison. She slapped her papers into order and put them away in a folder. ‘I’ll see you next week. I rely on you to haul me in here if anything crops up before then.’

  He left her alone with her thoughts about violent crime and the people who commit it. There was obviously anger. That went without saying. But there had to be more to it. A great many people suffered ferocious rage without resorting to violence. Someone had once written about the vanity of criminals who believed that the satisfaction of their feelings was an adequate reason to kill, while Elsie Trouville believed that they lacked the imagination necessary to understand what they were actually doing to their victims.

  Both could be true of the sort of men Tom had talked about on Saturday evening, but Willow thought that there must be something more, some kind of panic, perhaps, that drove them to believe the only way out of their difficulties – or fear – was to kill.

  Leaving the building, Willow once more acknowledged her private gratitude for her seduction by the Home Secretary. She crossed the park and walked up Piccadilly to look in at Hatchards and buy a selection of psychoanalytic books about the formation of criminals and about the therapies that might prevent recidivism. Selecting them almost at random on the basis of their titles and blurbs, she took ten to the cash desk and paid by credit card.

  Back in her flat, much later than she had expected, she discovered that Mrs Rusham had not thrown away the lunch she had cooked but merely put it in the bottom oven of the Aga. Willow ate it, hardly noticing what it was, as she flicked through each of the books in turn. As she did so, she felt renewed in her longstanding mistrust of psychology and longed for something with harder edges and more testable hypotheses.

  According to the blurbs on the back of the books, each had been written by a leader in the field, and yet many of them were wholly contradictory, and others made great leaps from one fact to another unconnected by anything Willow could recognise as logic. To her the most convincing of the theses was one about cycles of deprivation and adults’compulsion to recreate the situations in which they themselves were damaged as children.

  Prepared to accept the theory and at the same time depressed, Willow drank a c
up of coffee. Memories of the emotional coldness that had been imposed on her own childhood danced into her mind before she could stop them.

  Shutting the last of the books with a snap, Willow refused to think about herself and decided to concentrate on Gloria Grainger’s life and character instead. She picked up the telephone receiver and dialled.

  ‘Eve? It’s Willow here,’ she said as soon as her agent’s secretary had connected them.

  ‘Excellent. How’s the synopsis going?’

  ‘Slowly. But it’s about that I want to consult you. Posy Hacket.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You know she was being sued by Gloria.’

  ‘Yes. It was I who told you that.’ Eve’s monosyllables were becoming impatient.

  ‘So you did. How did Posy’s career begin?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Why? What relevance has that got?’

  ‘None, unless she was once employed by Gloria, say as a secretary? Gloria seems to have treated all her staff quite roughly and the article might have been a long-delayed act of revenge.’

  Eve laughed and there was the familiar sound of a lighter’s click.

  ‘No. Gloria’s secretaries have rarely progressed beyond that role, apart that is from Samantha Hooper.’

  ‘No! I never knew that. Gloria must have been sick with rage as she saw Hooper climbing the bestseller lists just as she was beginning to descend.’

  ‘I know. She stayed just long enough with Gloria to learn how not to do it, disappeared from the book trade’s sight entirely for a few years and then emerged to all that glittering success.’

  ‘Clever old her. I wonder,’ said Willow, half to herself, ‘whether that was why Gloria was so keen to stamp on Marilyn’s ambitions.’

  ‘Is that all?’ The impatience was back in Eve’s voice.

  ‘Yes, I think so. Perhaps I ought to try to work something into the memoir about Gloria’s having given Hooper her first lessons in writing.’

  There was a short bark of laughter from the other end of the telephone.

  ‘She wouldn’t thank you and you might need her one day for a selling quote on one of yours.’

  ‘Cynic,’ said Willow.

  ‘I’ve always thought that was a necessary qualification for a good agent. I hope the synopsis goes well. Let me know if you need anything. Good bye,’ Eve put down her receiver too smartly for Willow, who said her farewells into an unresponsive telephone.

  She was impatient to get to grips with Gloria’s real character and found herself wishing that she could consult her subject. Willow could not forget her first, immediate identification with the dead writer and wanted to know what she herself had thought about her subordinates and why she had bullied them so badly.

  Remembering reports of various police forces employing psychics, Willow had a mental picture of herself surrounded by ectoplasm and spirit voices giving her the longed-for clues, and she laughed. There were still plenty of earthly sources of information to be tapped and she decided to tackle the nearest.

  Ann Slinter had invited her to look through the old files of Gloria’s dealings with the firm during her heyday and so, having checked that there was still enough time that day to make the expedition worthwhile, Willow summoned a taxi to take her to Weston & Brown.

  Chapter Six

  A gloomy man called Toby was in charge of the post room at Weston & Brown. To Willow’s surprise it was he who came to fetch her from the small reception area after she had given her name to the receptionist. Toby escorted Willow into the big basement post room, where he pointed to a large heap of dusty files that had been laid out on a waist-high table.

  ‘Shall I get a stool for you?’ he asked. ‘There are some.’

  ‘That might help,’ said Willow, looking at the long packing tables, the piles of books, grey woven plastic mail sacks, rolls of corrugated cardboard and heaps of used padded envelopes. The whole depressing scene was lit by horrible flickering fluorescent lights that hung from the ceiling in long, dusty tubes. ‘Is this really the only place in the whole building where I can read the files?’

  ‘They’re short of space upstairs, you know, since they rented out the top floor last year. Mrs Slinter told me to give you the files here.’

  ‘I see,’ said Willow, taking off her overcoat and reluctantly hanging it on a hook on the back of the door. ‘The recession must be worse than I thought.’

  For the next two hours she read through the files, discovering nothing very much except that the copies of royalty statements proved that Gloria’s sales had once been truly enormous. Her letters showed that bad temper and ferocious demands had been characteristic throughout her dealings with the firm. Willow’s sympathy for Ann’s original reaction to the news of Gloria’s death waxed with every letter she read and her identification with the dead novelist waned.

  In the middle of reading a long diatribe about the abysmal quality of the proof-reading of her latest book, Willow became conscious of an altercation behind her. She swivelled on her uncomfortable stool and saw a gangly, dark-haired woman in her late thirties standing before Toby and holding out a pile of padded bags.

  ‘But they have to go out tonight,’ she said and flinched as Toby banged his fist down on the packing table. ‘I’ve done them all up and stuck the labels on. Honestly, all they need is weighing and franking. I’ll take them across to the post office myself if you haven’t time.’

  ‘I’ve told all you girls before,’ said Toby furiously, ‘that nothing gets posted that comes in here after four-thirty. You all know that. How am I expected to do everything? My life is hard enough without you lot always being late. I’m due off in half an hour. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow.’

  ‘But they must go out tonight, Toby. I was up till one this morning sorting out most of the queries. I couldn’t do the last few until this afternoon and I couldn’t get them to you any quicker. You …’

  ‘No. I’ve told you I can’t.’ Toby seized the parcels and flung them to the far end of his bench. Willow thought that the woman was about to burst into tears. Instead she gripped her lips together and left the packing room, her shoulders rounded and her neck poking forwards like a dejected turkey’s.

  Willow quickly turned back to her files, reluctant to be seen as a voyeur of Toby’s fury. It crossed her mind that the woman he had vanquished could have been Gloria’s hapless editor. There had been something about her and the way she walked that shrieked ‘victim’and reminded Willow of Posy Hacket’s depressing analysis of the people who had gravitated to Gloria.

  Reaching the end of the last file twenty minutes later, Willow closed it and looked at her grimy hands in disgust.

  ‘Toby,’ she called, ‘I’m filthy. Is there anywhere I can wash?’

  ‘Yes. Through that door … Hello, hello. What’s all this then?’

  Willow stood up and eased her cramped muscles, watching a pretty young woman in jeans walk up to Toby with her arms full of parcels.

  ‘You know quite well I can’t deal with those after half four,’ said Toby in a voice that suggested resignation rather than the fury that had erupted over the earlier visitor.

  ‘I know,’ answered the girl with a sexy smile, ‘but Ann will kill me if they don’t go off. They’re all for the States and they’re overdue as it is. Please, darling Toby, please. Just to save my bacon? You know you like doing it really. And I absolutely depend on you.’

  ‘You make my life impossible,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘Oh, thank you, Toby. You really are an angel. You love it really, don’t you? And me.’ She dumped the pile of packages on his table, patted his arm and danced away.

  ‘There’s a cloakroom through here on the left,’ said Toby to Willow. He seemed to notice some surprise or perhaps criticism in her face for he added: ‘Mrs Slinter’s secretary is always doing that, you know. It’s just bad organisation. She means no harm.’

  Willow removed herself from the sound of his excuses and washed the dust off her hands. There
was a mirror hanging above the basin and she saw to her horror that there was also dust mixed with the makeup on her forehead and down one cheek. Returning to the post room for her handbag, she washed off all the cosmetics, dried her face and started again. Restored to dignity, she asked Toby whether she could borrow his telephone to call Mrs Slinter.

  ‘Hello, it’s Willow here,’ she said when the managing director answered. ‘I’m down in your post room, having been through the files, and I wondered whether I could have a word with you?’

  ‘Yes, do. Come up and have a drink,’ said Ann hospitably.

  Willow, thinking that life in publishing seemed remarkably relaxed and comfortable compared with the real world, took the creaking lift up to the second floor and found Ann Slinter drawing the cork of a bottle of claret.

  ‘Come on in. Glass of wine all right for you?’

  ‘Lovely. It’s jolly civilised to have a cellar in your office.’

  Ann laughed.

  ‘One of the few privileges of running the place. We had an alcoholic editor once and ever since then the staff contract has stipulated that no alcohol may be kept or consumed in the office. But the managing director is above those sorts of rules, and I intend to take full advantage of my new status.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ said Willow, thinking of the immense contrast between Ann’s casually elegant clothes and the harrassed, shambolic appearance presented by the first of the parcel-carrying women, or even her pretty jeans-clad successor. That afternoon Ann was wearing another of her full skirts, this time the colour of redcurrants, and a loosely knitted silk sweater as glossy and smooth as peach flesh.

  ‘Now what can I do for you? Your book or poor Gloria?’

  ‘Poor Gloria,’ said Willow, trying not to smile. ‘Nil nisi bonum, won’t do, you know. I need real information. True information.’

  ‘I suppose you do. She really was the most dreadful woman.’

  ‘So everyone keeps telling me,’ said Willow, thinking of the complaints she had just been reading, ‘although I have yet to be completely convinced. It’s making the direction of the memoir rather hard to work out.’