Poison Flowers Page 8

  ‘That’s right,’ said Tom. ‘And I’m sure that there is some connection between Titchmell and Commander Bodmin.’

  Willow thought of her researches in the London Library and told him of Titchmell’s firm’s work for the police. Tom thought it unlikely to have anything to do with Bodmin, but he promised to check for her.

  ‘Good,’ said Willow calmly. ‘And while you’re doing that, all I have to do is to find out what connection there is between the poison victims and leave it to your undermanned force to arrest the killer.’

  ‘Yes. Your difficulty is going to be that there is no obvious connection. It’s possible that they merely reminded the killer of specific people who have frustrated him, in which case you’ll never find the link. Or perhaps the poisoner just likes killing and chose them quite at random,’ said Tom, looking as nearly defeated as she had ever seen him.

  ‘I find that hard to believe,’ said Willow in a judicious voice. ‘I don’t know much about serial killers in general, but this one seems too clever, neat and cool to choose victims except for some real purpose. After all, whoever it is is bright and controlled enough to find out about the poisons, collect the necessary plants, extract a fatal dose from them and get it into the food and drink of the victims. If the killer spent that much time and effort it suggests that the victims must have been chosen for some quite powerful reason: after all, it’s not as though they were simply strangled or shot.’

  Tom got up from the table and strode up and down the long kitchen as though the act of sitting still would make it even more difficult for him to contain his frustration. He reached the window, looked out for a moment over the dustbins ranged in a small yard behind the tall house, and then wheeled round to face Willow again.

  ‘And yet it is difficult to see what possible connection there could be between a young architect, an almost middle-aged actress, and an elderly retired nurse,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ said Willow, leaning forward to pour more coffee into both their cups. ‘Presumably you – or your opposite numbers in Newcastle – have already eliminated the obvious motives in each case?’

  ‘Oh yes. There are no jealous lovers, blackmailers or anything like that in any of the cases,’ said Tom.

  ‘Or individual grudges? I’ve heard of lots of people feeling nearly murderous towards their architects.’ Tom shook his head, but he smiled too.

  ‘We’ve got to start somewhere,’ said Willow, ‘and the things I want to know are: whether they had ever lived in the same place at the same time; shared the same doctor, shared the same bank, worked together in any circumstances whatever, been in the same hospital at the same time…’

  ‘We’ve been through all the obvious questions and the rest would be almost impossible to establish,’ said Tom gloomily. ‘It’s just those sort of enquiries that take an enormous amount of time and produce nothing very useful in the end. No, I wanted your help for something different.’

  ‘Come and have some more coffee,’ said Willow, ‘and try to explain what you think I can do if I’m not to ask those sorts of questions.’

  He came back to the table, pulled out his chair and sat down. He picked up the cup she had filled with coffee and sat, holding it to his lips, with both elbows propped on the table.

  ‘I suppose that I thought you’d be able to see some link that never occurred to the rest of us,’ he said rather hopelessly. ‘I can’t imagine what.’

  Willow saw that his face had taken on the tight unhappy look she had first noticed in the Pimlico restaurant. She was surprised by how personally he was taking the case and she wondered whether there was something he had not told her.

  ‘Well, I’ll just have to find something a bit more subtle then. We agree that there’s too much coincidence in so many deaths from plant poisons. That being so, there must be a link.’

  ‘May I make some more coffee?’ Worth asked, pushing himself up off his chair. ‘This is cold.’

  ‘Yes do,’ said Willow, pleased with his informality and his refusal to assume that as a woman she would make the food and drink available for him. ‘I’ve already put some ferrets down various holes, but I doubt if I’ll get any rabbits for a few days.’

  ‘Ferrets?’ repeated Tom, turning to watch her face. His voice sounded amused again, which pleased her. ‘Such as?’

  ‘I’ve arranged to meet the architect’s sister; so that I can find out more from her about him and the girlfriend. I’ve sent a trace in to find out about Miss Fernside’s previous employers – information which I suppose you might well have already, now I come to think of it – and…’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we have. But I haven’t got it here,’ said Tom.

  ‘But at your flat?’ asked Willow.

  ‘No. I’d have to get it from the office. The earliest I could get it to you would be Monday evening.’

  ‘In which case I might as well wait for the trace. Tom, you are a bit tiresome: you might have thought I’d need to know that,’ said Willow mildly. ‘Will you at least try to get answers to my other questions?’

  ‘Very few murders are caused by events or emotions from the distant past. Willow,’ he said, and then added a little crossly: ‘What are you smiling at?’

  ‘I didn’t realise that it showed,’ she said.

  ‘Well it did. You looked transformed by it,’ said Worth, as though the compliment was being dragged from him. ‘It made you look happy.’

  ‘I am, except when I think about the murderer, the victims, or you as the victim of your colleagues’malice,’ she said, smiling more openly at him. ‘I was just thinking that you are the only man I know who could say something like that – about murders not being caused by things from the past – without sounding patronising or contemptuous.’

  As she spoke, Tom Worth’s craggy face also relaxed into a smile, and his right hand stretched out towards her. Willow put her own into it.

  ‘Well, Will? What about it?’ he asked, as though he were suggesting a walk in the park. Willow was not deceived, but she was not pressed into a decision either.

  ‘Why not?’ she said at last.

  As he was shutting the door of her bedroom, Willow turned back, suddenly aware of the risk he represented to her peace of mind.

  ‘Don’t say it, Will,’ said Tom, gently brushing one hand across her lips, leaving a trail of sensation where he had touched her. His certainty and the feel of his skin on hers made her breathless.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I remember, too. Come to bed.’

  She put out both hands and he gripped them, leaning forward to kiss her. His hands left hers and she felt him pull her closer until she was leaning against him. Her muscles seemed to have turned to jelly and something had happened to her mind. She could think of nothing but him and the dizzying sensations that his hands and his lips and his body sent through her.

  By the time they were lying on her huge, soft bed; she knew that any risk was worth taking and reached for him, to take and to give.

  Two-and-a-half hours later Willow got quietly out of bed to run a bath. When she went back into the bedroom she saw that Tom was still asleep, flat on his back, his dark hair falling over his forehead and his right hand lying on top of the linen-covered duvet, palm upwards. He looked vulnerable and almost unbearably attractive as he lay against the brilliantly white linen. Willow stood, clutching the primrose dressing gown around herself and looking at him.

  Love had not been an element in either of her lives before Tom had appeared to smash through her self-sufficiency and the perfect arrangements she had made to keep herself protected from difficult and frightening emotion. Looking back to her peculiar childhood, she understood why her parents had treated her as they had, but having discovered how completely incompetent she was in the real world of feelings she found it hard to forgive them.

  Richard, who had his own distaste for emotion, had been the first person in whom she had ever confided or for whom she had allowed herself to feel any affection at all. Now she was
confronted by feelings that were far stronger than that and she was terrified. She did not know how she would read or what she would do, whether she could survive a real passion and whether she could give enough. It was obvious that unless she sent Tom Worth away her life would change, and yet the idea of its changing worried her still. Nothing could be clear-cut any more; everything seemed dangerous and frightening in a world where she cared so much for someone else.

  A changing note in the sound of the bathwater rescued her from her introspection and she went to turn off the taps. Lying back in oiled and scented water wrought its usual calming influence over Willow’s mind and by the time Tom appeared in the doorway, she was able to smile at him with some of her self-protection back in place.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked. He nodded with a schoolboy grin.

  ‘Did you mind my going to sleep?’

  ‘No, Tom,’ said Willow. ‘It is, I understand, a normal physiological reaction to … you know.’

  ‘I love your primness, Will,’ he said, laughing and coming to sit on the edge of the bath. ‘It seems so out of character.’

  Willow could feel herself blushing and hoped that he would put it down to the steam from her bath, but was fairly sure that he would not.

  ‘You know an awful lot about women,’ she said irrelevantly, washing her right foot. ‘I suppose that just means that you’ve had a lot of experience.’

  ‘I like women,’ he said, and she believed him. ‘I really like them. Can I have that bath after you?’

  ‘Why not have a new one?’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of hot water.’

  When they were both dressed again. Willow asked him about his talk with PC Leathwaite, adding:

  ‘I know you’ve given me those notes, but tell me what you remember. It’ll be fresher like that.’

  ‘He’s a bright lad,’ said Tom, leading the way out of Willow’s green-and-white bedroom towards the kitchen. ‘D’you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Willow. ‘But do help yourself.’

  Tom went to switch on the kettle, while Willow sat in her old chair at the kitchen table.

  ‘So? What did he tell you?’ she prompted.

  ‘He said that Titchmell struck him as being thoroughly sound, what he called a “solid citizen”, and perfectly responsible.’

  ‘What did that mean? Responsible for what?’

  ‘I think he meant that Titchmell had done everything he could, short of installing a burglar alarm, to make his house burglar-proof, and when asked why he didn’t have an alarm, he explained that he thought they were anti-social and in any case did very little good.’

  ‘Do you agree with that?’ asked Willow, diverted into leaving the investigation.

  ‘No, on balance I think they are worthwhile,’ said Tom.

  ‘How did they get into Titchmell’s house?’

  ‘Chucked a brick through the kitchen window,’ said Tom. ‘And no locks are going to protect anyone against that sort of thing.’

  ‘But didn’t anyone hear anything? Breaking glass makes a hell of a racket.’

  ‘No one’s admitted to it, but you know the great British public. They hate reporting anything. Besides, most people who live in those streets work all day, and it seems likely that the window was broken at about half-past three in the afternoon.’

  Willow got up as soon as he had finished speaking and went into her writing room to fetch her notebook.

  ‘What’s so important about that?’ asked Tom, fishing a tea bag out of his mug.

  ‘Do you really want that sort of tea?’ asked Willow. ‘There’s plenty of China tea in the cupboard, and about six tea pots.’

  ‘Yes, my dear Will, I do. I need the oomph of an Indian tea-bag. Now what is so important?’

  ‘Obviously the break-in must have been when the murderer put the poison in the museli,’ she said. ‘And…’

  ‘Not obviously at all,’ said Tom, sipping the scalding tea and wincing slightly. ‘Do you know how many afternoon burglaries there are every week in bits of London like Fulham and Clapham?’

  Willow shook her head.

  ‘Nor do I, but there are plenty, believe me. It could have been the murderer, or it could have been truanting schoolchildren or professional thieves from the area, or from outside it … could have been anyone. And if it had been the murderer, he or she would have taken an unnecessary risk of getting done for burglary by lugging away a video and all the rest,’ said Tom.

  ‘I think it would just have shown that the killer was intelligent,’ answered Willow, beginning to form a mental picture of her quarry. ‘A bit elaborate, I agree, but clever. How long before the deaths was it?’

  ‘Two weeks,’ said Tom, ‘give or take a day.’

  ‘Then a poisoned packet of muesli must have been substituted for the spare in the store cupboard,’ said Willow. ‘Do we know whether Titchmell was a good housekeeper?’

  ‘No, we don’t,’ said Tom, raising his left eyebrow.

  Willow suppressed her envy of his skill and scribbled down a question to ask Caroline Titchmell if she got the chance.

  ‘And what about Claire Ullathorne and Edith Fernside? Were they burgled in the weeks before their deaths?’

  ‘No. I did check that, you see,’ said Worth with a smile that turned to laughter as he saw her expression.

  ‘I don’t see why you were so sure that I could help you,’ said Willow with mock crossness, ‘when you’ve already thought of everything I’ve come up with and when you’re so certain that you’re cleverer than me.’

  ‘You’re slipping, Ms King,’ said Tom, draining his mug, ‘it’s “I” there, not “me”. I suppose that it was your novelist’s imagination I wanted,’ he went on. ‘Ordinary policework can’t help in a case like this with no physical evidence, no apparent motive, and no pattern to the murders. I thought you might be able to pick out something none of us pedestrian thinkers has considered.’

  Willow almost laughed at that. For years her pride had been in academic brilliance and intellectual rigour. Now she was being applauded for intuition and imagination by a man who apparently despised the sort of books that had made her fortune. It was both funny and oddly heartwarming.

  Chapter Six

  The following Tuesday Willow was at her desk at DOAP at six-thirty in the morning, determined to get through her baskets of papers before she had to leave for the Selection Board, which was to be held in a building just off Trafalgar Square. There were all the usual constituents of her working day and she ploughed steadily through them, leaving notes on most of the letters and minutes for Barbara, and eventually making a small pile of things for Marilyn to type. When she had finished all the urgent work she allowed herself to pick up the result of her trace request on Edith Fernside.

  Before she started to read it, she looked at the plain gilt watch on her left wrist and saw that it was already half-past eight. Stuffing the papers into her black handbag, she collected her mackintosh in case it rained and set off to catch a bus up to Whitehall.

  When she was standing uncomfortably in the third bus that had drawn up at the stop, trying to balance against its bumping and swaying, she thought about the miserable specimens of humanity who had to travel to work by public transport every day. The frustration of seeing two buses drawing up at the stop and being unable to get on because the bus was already packed to bursting point was intense. As well as making her head ache with fury it drove all thoughts of Edith Fernside out of her mind.

  Enough people got off the bus at Vauxhall to allow Willow to sit down. By then there was an ache in her back and she was sweating from the stuffiness and the energy she was using to control her frustration. Sighing as she leaned back against the back of the seat, she fished in her bag for the trace papers.

  There was a certain satisfaction on her pale, unpainted face when she reached the end of the report. Edith Femside had once been matron at the Hampshire girls’school where Claire Ullathorne had been educated.

/>   ‘So that’s the connection,’ she said, looking straight ahead of her and trying to imagine where the architect fitted in.

  ‘Sorry?’ said the burly man at her side, who was taking up far more than his fair share of their double seat.

  ‘For what?’ asked Willow vaguely.

  ‘I thought you said something,’ said the man, beginning to sound aggrieved.

  ‘No, nothing,’ said Willow with a frosty smile. ‘Ah, this is my stop. D’you mind?’

  He heaved himself out of the seat and she squeezed past him, clinging on to the handrail and wondering how many other dirty, sweaty hands had fingered it before she had to use it. When the bus stopped and its pneumatic doors had sprung back with an enormous hiss, like the sigh of some quite vicious animal, Willow stepped decorously down on to the pavement and made her way to the forbidding Civil Service building. Once, nearly eighteen years earlier, she too had been a candidate, waiting in nervous silence for the final interview to begin. It had seemed desperately important, then, to succeed.

  Like so many earnest others from the world beyond the service. Willow King had thought of the solidity of the job and its index-linked pension, of the responsibility Civil Servants carried and the power she believed they had to change the administration of the country. She had known or suspected nothing of the boredom she had discovered in DOAP, or the frustration of being held back and snubbed by those superior in office but not in brains, or of the malice and triviality engendered in some of her colleagues by the narrowness of their world. It struck her as she gave her name to the uniformed man at the reception desk that the kindest thing she could do during her stint in the interviews would be to warn the brightest of what was in store for them and shepherd the dullards through the interview, knowing that they would probably be happier than the rest if they actually made it into a department.

  She was given directions to the selectors’ room and made her way upstairs to meet them. A quick look around the room told her that none of them was familiar, which was not strange given the size of the service but was a considerable comfort.