Fruiting Bodies Read online

  She wanted to let him have his triumph for as long as possible and listened admiringly as he told her that he had got hold of a copy of the drivers’rota and so knew when his targets would be visiting houses that might prove tempting for their burgling accomplices. Unfortunately part of the drivers’shift would coincide with various classes that Rob could not miss. However, he assured Willow, outside those hours he would be listening as hard as possible. He said he was sure he could get her something useful.

  ‘Oh, Rob, I’m not sure this is such a good idea,’ she said, biting her lip.

  At once his face took on a familiar mulish expression. She reached out to touch his hand, but he snatched it away and turned sideways in his chair, crossing his arms across his chest.

  ‘I’m more impressed than I can say by what you’ve found out,’ she went on as warmly as possible. ‘Of course I am. But I’m also appalled at the risk you’re taking.’

  Rob half turned back towards her.

  ‘I’m worried because I care what happens to you. I’m sorry if that makes me seem clucky, Rob, but I can’t help it; I also care a lot about whether you stick to the right side of the law.’

  He took a quick look at her from under his fringe, trying to smile.

  ‘I know scanners aren’t legal,’ he muttered, ‘but I thought it’d be sort of worth it to know whether your man was right to be suspicious.’

  ‘It would be worth a lot,’ she assured him. ‘But your safety is worth much, much more. Rob, don’t think I’m trying to interfere, but could you bear to take care? Quite apart from what might happen to you if you were to cross anybody ruthless enough to kill a man like Mr Ringstead, Tom would be so hurt if you got into trouble with the police.’

  Rob frowned but he did not say anything.

  ‘You’ve made such a difference to our lives, you know …’ Willow said quietly and then lay back, watching Rob and not bothering to finish her sentence.

  ‘I just wanted to find out,’ he muttered. ‘That’s all. I thought you’d be pleased.’

  He looked as though he might crack under any more pressure, and Willow did not know what to say next or how to deal with what had happened. The responsibility for his feelings weighed heavily on her and then made her angry with him. She knew that she was not being fair – after all, Rob had never asked her to worry about his feelings – but she could not help it.

  Ideas about Lucinda and her right to be loved began to hover at the edges of Willow’s mind and she could feel her skin tightening around her face like a cold, wet, clay mask.

  ‘Has Will been involving you in one of her nefarious plots?’ said Tom quietly, making both of them jump. There was a lightness in his voice, but when Willow looked at him she saw that there was absolutely no amusement in his eyes. She wondered how long he had been standing there and how much he had heard or seen.

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Rob at once, but his deep blush gave him away.

  ‘Don’t worry, Rob. It’s my fault for encouraging you.’

  ‘No, Willow. You …’

  ‘Yes. Now, hadn’t you better get on back to school? Isn’t it chemistry this afternoon?’

  ‘Yeah. Right. Sorry. Thanks.’ He seized his book bag, looked at Willow in dumb gratitude and gave Tom a half-hearted wave.

  When he was well clear of the ward, and the doors to the passage had stopped swinging behind him, Tom looked at his wife:

  ‘Well?’

  ‘You’re right, and I’d just been trying to explain to him that I should’ve stopped him sooner. I don’t terribly want to tell you what …’

  ‘Will, you’d better tell me the lot.’ Tom did not sound angry or even critical, and she had long ago given up trying to imagine what he was feeling when he made his face and voice blank like that. It only led to trouble.

  ‘Okay. Rob has been asking around the hospital canteen in case he could pick up anything about Ringstead. He, Rob I mean, was bothered that Ringstead might have killed himself and I think he wanted to get proof that he’d been murdered.’

  She bit her lip and then added: ‘He also knew that I very much want to find out exactly what happened and am frustrated because I can’t get about the hospital to ask questions.’

  Tom sighed, but he did not say anything. Willow was shocked to discover just how much she wanted him to absolve her from what she was coming to think of as a serious crime. She noticed that she was not angry with Tom for his as yet unspoken criticism and filed away a faint sense of progress in herself.

  ‘What I didn’t realise was that Rob has a friend who has some kind of scanner. Rob’s borrowed it and is intending to listen in to mobile-telephone conversations between some possibly dodgy ambulance drivers and their probably burglarious accomplices. Apparently Ringstead thought they’d been doing over empty houses of patients the drivers had brought in here. But I had no idea Rob would …’

  ‘You needn’t tell me that. I know you’d never have encouraged the boy to break the law. Or anyone else for that matter. But, Will, I wish you’d nipped his interest in the bud. He shouldn’t be playing around with something like this. It’s far too dangerous.’

  Hating the knowledge that she wanted to excuse herself and apologise to Tom, Willow explained with as much dignity as she could collect that she had not wanted to upset Rob by criticising what he wanted to do. Tom came to sit at the edge of the bed. He stopped her in the end by telling her that he knew exactly what she was talking about, adding: ‘It’s hellishly difficult to find the right line between protecting him against his wilder instincts and humiliating him by treating him as a child, which he isn’t. Heavens above, legally he’ll be an adult next year, and he could be married already. We do tend to forget that.’

  Willow nodded.

  ‘Precisely. But don’t worry about this – I’ve told him about scanners and …’

  ‘I know. I heard. And I’ll have a word with him later. Although, in fact, you know, he couldn’t have heard anything very significant. The sort of scanner a schoolfriend might have can only pick up random frequencies. Rob wouldn’t be able to listen to calls from a specific number, and even if he did hear something interesting, he’d lose the call as soon as the phone changed cell, which they do frequently.’

  ‘I hadn’t realised you knew such a lot about it,’ she said, not pleased to have been made to feel such an ignoramus.

  ‘It’s my job, ducky.’

  ‘I suppose so. But you’re not really telling me that mobile calls can’t be listened in to, are you? What about those various royal scandals? Someone was listening to their telephone calls.’

  ‘Of course it’s possible,’ said Tom, sitting more comfortably at her side. ‘But you’d need an expensive piece of kit called a cellular telephone intercept.’

  ‘How expensive?’ There were several boys at Rob’s school who had access to what Willow thought were startling amounts of money.

  ‘Twenty grand or so.’

  ‘Ah. Unlikely then that Rob’s mate has one of those.’

  ‘I should damn’well hope he hasn’t,’ said Tom, looking grim. ‘I must have a word with the boy.’

  ‘But you won’t say anything to Serena, will you? After all, it was my fault that Rob ever got interested in scanners, and it’ll only worry her if she starts thinking he’s got criminal tendencies again as she did when he kept truanting and no one could work out what he was up to.’

  ‘Sure. Now, more importantly, Will, how are you and Lucinda?’

  ‘We’re fine. She’s starting to feed really well and she doesn’t sleep at all badly.’

  ‘And what about you?’

  ‘I sleep; not perfectly, but well enough, and I can always snooze in the day.’

  Tom frowned. ‘That sounds as though you’re worrying about something.’

  ‘Only about four hundred and ninety-nine different things,’ she said, pretending to find it funny.

  ‘Anything I can help with?’

  She shook her head, feeling asha
med of most of her anxieties.

  ‘Don’t keep me out, Will,’ said Tom after a long silence. ‘I know I’m not particularly relevant to you and Lucinda just now, but I hate it when you make me feel quite as spare as this.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ she said at once, appalled at his misunderstanding. ‘I am bothered about Lucinda and whether she’ll be healthy and happy and all that sort of thing, of course. But I’m also worried that I seem to be so stupid.’

  ‘You must know that’s nonsense. You? Stupid? What on earth do you mean?’

  Seeing that all the professional coldness had gone out of him, Willow gave in and told him about her incompetent investigation into the possible motives of people who might have wanted Alexander Ringstead out of the way. Tom’s face began to relax as he listened to what she had actually been doing. At the end of her story he even laughed.

  ‘Well, if it’s been keeping you happy, I suppose it’s no bad thing.’

  ‘It hasn’t really,’ said Willow, wrinkling her nose. ‘It’s vilely frustrating not to be able to find out the sorts of things I could ask if I were in my usual state. All I’ve learned is that his death wasn’t an accident, which you told me. Those wretched colleagues of yours wouldn’t even tell me that much. However, given the fact of the bruises on the back of his neck, it seems clear that he must have been tipped into the pool by someone who hated or feared him.’

  ‘I’d have said that’s a pretty fair assessment,’ said Tom. He was looking quite happy again. Willow made a face at him.

  ‘And therefore he must have been threatening someone, either here in the hospital or in his private life; or perhaps someone he had injured was taking revenge. Although I suppose it is just possible that he could have been the victim of a randomly wandering homicidal maniac, or a murderous Martian.’

  ‘Again, fair enough.’ Tom’s smile showed that he understood that her silly joke was supposed to show that she was trying not to mind having failed to reach a conclusion.

  ‘Well, that’s it. And in this state I don’t see how I can get much further.’

  ‘Thank God for that. Don’t look so cross: I’m not mocking you, Will.’

  ‘Or not much,’ she said and watched amusement switch on lights in Tom’s eyes.

  ‘Fair enough. But this is serious. Listen, Will, irrespective of anything I might feel at the way you take such risks muscling in on cases like this, Lucinda needs you safe and healthy.’

  Willow was silent for so long, staring down at the furry head of her daughter that Tom said gently: ‘Isn’t that fair, too?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘No buts at all.’ She looked up and smiled.

  Tom looked unconvinced by her smile, but he dropped the subject then and they spent the rest of his free time side by side on the bed with the curtains drawn around them. When he got up to go Willow kissed him and almost promised to ask no more questions about Ringstead’s death. But there seemed to be no point in raising the subject just to put it to bed again; and besides she was not sure that she would be able to keep such a promise, however much she might want to comfort him for his feeling of exclusion from her new life with Lucinda.

  Even so, she might have managed to leave it there for good had Rob’s aunt not dropped in to see her and inspect Lucinda the following evening. Serena Fydgett was a barrister and was still dressed in the black suit and plain white shirt she had worn to court. Her hair was dark and her skin very pale. The only real colour about her came from the huge bunch of pale pink roses she was carrying.

  ‘I know it’s absurd to stick to the old superstitions about colours for babies,’ she said, laying the bouquet down on the overfull table beside Willow’s bed, ‘but these just were the best and freshest the florist had.’

  ‘They’re lovely,’ said Willow with a private smile as she remembered reading about the origin of ‘blue for a boy; pink for a girl’. According to the book male babies, being so valuable, had had to be protected from the evil eye with ‘something blue’. The evil eye was apparently quite welcome to do whatever it wanted to girls and so all they got was meaningless pink.

  In spite of her determined clinging to rationality, Willow decided to buy Lucinda something bright blue as soon as she was on her feet again.

  ‘It’s sweet of you to have come, Serena,’ she said. ‘How are you? Good day in court?’

  ‘Not at all bad,’ said Serena before settling down to give Willow an entertaining account of her client’s effective manipulation of his less-than-experienced prosecuting counsel.

  ‘But all that is by the way,’ she said eventually. ‘How does it feel having had a baby at last?’

  ‘I’m still not quite sure,’ said Willow lightly. ‘My emotions are doing the most peculiar things. One minute I’m elated beyond belief and the next pathetic and teary. And terrified. Whenever I remember that I’m easily old enough to be he grandmother, I wonder what on earth I’m doing. In fact, I can help feeling that I’m taunting nature or fate or something.’

  Willow laughed to show that she did not really mean anything so absurd, but something in Serena’s eyes suggested that she was not convinced.

  ‘Goodness knows what’ll be done to me in retaliation,’ Willow went on, still trying to sound frivolous. ‘Or to other people.’

  ‘I suppose it’s not surprising that you’ve been getting fanciful. Giving birth must be the most enormous shock to the system. Did it hurt much?’

  ‘Yes, frightfully,’ said Willow more cheerfully. ‘Still does in fact.’

  Serena laughed nervously and Willow noticed that she was looking at Lucinda with an ambiguous expression, partly wistful and partly wary.

  ‘Do you want to hold her?’

  ‘Would you mind?’

  ‘What, in case she gets infected by lawyerliness? Not at all. I can’t think of anything better for her. So profitable!’

  Willow put her daughter into Serena’s arms and saw tears gathering in her eyes, just as they had in Mrs Rusham’s. They did not leak over her eyelids and Willow was not sure that Serena herself was even aware of them. Eventually even the fascination of Lucinda’s changing facial expressions seemed to pall, and Serena looked away, saying: ‘Rob told me you wanted to talk about poor Alex Ringstead. Wasn’t it dreadful?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I knew him a bit, you know.’

  ‘Did you?’ Curiosity got the better of Willow’s uncharacteristic yielding to Tom’s wish to protect her from herself. ‘Yes, of course, you did. Rob said. I’d forgotten. My brains really have gone squashy. What was he like in real life? He was wonderful as a doctor, but what was he like as a friend?’

  ‘Pretty good company, I suspect. I didn’t know him well enough to claim him as a friend, but I met him at quite a few fundraising dos for the hospital and he was always good fun.’

  ‘How on earth did you get involved with them?’ said Willow, trying to pretend that she was not full of glee at the possibility of learning something useful at last. Her doom-laden fears of nature’s revenge on her and her child had disappeared for the moment. ‘You’ve never acted for the hospital, have you?’

  ‘No, never. But the campaign is being run by Mary-Jane Roguely.’

  Willow looked puzzled.

  ‘You know,’ said Serena impatiently, ‘the wife of Sir George Roguely, the chairman of Thoms and Timpson.’

  ‘That rings a bell, but not a very loud one. Who are they?’

  ‘You must know: they’re that conglomerate that started as some kind of mining company at the turn of the century and has been swallowing up smaller firms ever since.’

  ‘And they’re not in mining at all any more. Yes, I do remember. There was a big article about them in one of the Sundays recently, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Probably. Anyway, Mary-Jane wrote to me just after she took over the hospital appeal committee. She decided to get in touch with every professional woman who’s ever had a particular reason to be gratef
ul to the hospital and ask us all for money.‘

  Willow was surprised; as far as she knew Serena had always had enviably robust health.

  ‘They were very good to my sister,’ Serena said quietly, reminding Willow that Rob’s mother had been in and out of the psychiatric wing of Dowting’s for several years. ‘I felt I owed them something for that and so I sent Mary-Jane a cheque. She wrote personally to thank me for it and added an invitation to a fundraising concert. I wasn’t doing anything and, as I’ve been rather feeling the need of company these last three months or so, I decided to go. She took the trouble to seek me out.’

  ‘It must have been some cheque.’

  ‘It was fairly substantial,’ Serena admitted before Willow could ask why she had been in such need of company recently. ‘Anyway, I liked Mary-Jane and we got on well. She’s sent me invitations to all her fundraising beanos since then and I’ve been to several.’

  ‘I’m quite surprised that Ringstead went to any of them,’ said Willow. ‘He seems to have disliked the managers here so much that it’s hard to believe he wanted to help raise money for them.’

  Serena smiled, looking almost sly.

  ‘I think it was more Mary-Jane than the financial crisis that got him involved.’

  ‘Aha,’ said Willow, at last remembering the cufflinks and the new, exotic silk ties Rob had heard about in the canteen. ‘Were they, er … an item?’

  ‘I think so. He was clearly besotted and she seemed quite keen too.’

  ‘But she’s married.’

  ‘So?’ said Serena, looking obstinate.

  ‘It just surprises me that a married woman should have paraded her lover at such public functions,’ said Willow hastily, remembering that for some years Serena had been having an affair with a married Member of Parliament. ‘I’d have thought that the wife of the important Sir George Roguely might have wanted to keep it all more discreet.’

  Serena shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose George minded much. He’s madly busy, always flying off around the world. I should think he was pleased she had the Friends of Dowting’s to keep her happy and wouldn’t have minded that she was indulging in a little romantic fling as well. He’s pretty sophisticated.’