Festering Lilies (22 page)

‘Fine. Look, Emma, your brother kindly took me out to dinner last night and I ought to drop him a post-card to thank him, but absurdly I never asked for his address. Could you give it to me?'

‘Oh, of course,' said Emma, sounding relieved. She dictated it, and then said curiously: ‘Did you enjoy the dinner, Cressida?'

‘Well,' said Willow, drawing out the vowel sound. ‘The food was delicious.' Emma laughed, and Willow was emboldened to embark on the question she had really rung up to ask. She had spent some time trying to invent an excuse but in the end had decided that Emma would probably not ask her for one.

‘Emma, I've been wondering: do you know who poor Algy's solicitors were?' she said rather tersely, hoping to jolt Emma into answering.

‘But why…?' said the nice child, before breaking off. After a moment's silence, she went on: ‘Yes, actually; I sometimes had to write to them for him. They're Feathers, Fox and Co.'

‘Marvellous, Emma. Thank you,' said Willow, preparing to ask which partner of the firm dealt with Algy's affairs when she heard the sounds of Roger's return.

‘Cressida? Are you still there?'

‘What? Oh, yes, sorry, Emma. There's someone at the door. I'll have to go. See you soon. ' Bye.'

She put the telephone down just as Roger reappeared in the doorway. He gently laid the thick white office cup and saucer on her desk, murmuring:

‘It's Earl Grey, Miss King: I thought you ought to have a proper cup of tea. Is that all right?'

‘Very kind of you, Roger,' she answered, apparently immersed in a file that lay on her desk beside the telephone. He tried again to put off the dreadful moment when he would have to get back behind his keyboard.

‘The poor minister always used to say that I made a better cup of Earl Grey than anyone else he'd ever met.' The hint of real sadness in his voice reached Willow's concentrating brain even before the sense of what he had said. Leaving the file open, she pulled down her spectacles and looked across the desk at him.

‘Of course,' she said. ‘I'd forgotten how often he happened to be passing this office at tea time when he first came here. You must have got to know him quite well.'

‘He always had time to pass a friendly word; not like some I could mention, who seem to think one's no more than a piece of furniture just because one's only a clerical officer.'

‘There, there,' said Willow lightly, knowing full well that Roger enjoyed a moan about his status almost as much as the opportunity to pass on gossip. She pushed the spectacles back up her big nose with one unpainted fingernail. ‘I hope my differences with him didn't mean that you were too badly deprived of his company.'

Willow was repaid for her moment of sarcasm when Roger gave her a pitying little smile.

‘Oh,' he said happily but with a self-conscious shrug of his plump shoulders, ‘I still managed to get my fair share of him. Didn't you know? He occasionally used to drop in for a cup of my tea on the days when you were with your poor aunt. He'd send Barbara off for something and we'd settle down to a cuppa and a little chat as often as not.'

‘Goodness,' was all Willow could think of to say, remembering Roger's earlier blushes – and the scratches on his face.

‘In fact, he was here the afternoon before it happened. That's why the terrifying inspector said he'd probably have to send for me again. But,' he added with a sure instinct for a good exit line, ‘I've far too much typing to do and you're far too busy to listen to chit-chat, so I'd better leave you to it.' He walked to the door and Willow smothered a smile of appreciation at his tactics.

‘Oh by the way, the T. A. stands for Thomas Angus, always known as Tom. Tom Worth – the inspector, you know… worth a lot I'd say, wouldn't you, Miss King?' Roger threw artistically over his shoulder as he reached the door.

‘Be off with you,' said Willow laughing out loud at last. It dawned on her that perhaps it was Roger's facility for amusing her that had made her like him and put up with his maddening dilatoriness and sloppiness for so long. That and his basic kindness, she added more charitably to herself. Perhaps it had been the same things that had drawn Algy to him, she thought. The minister had clearly valued the kindness in Emma Gnatche. Unfortunately, Willow could not entirely suppress the far less charitable – and perhaps more realistic – thought that Algy might have enjoyed basking in the uncritical admiration of people so far subordinate to him that they would never to able to constitute a threat to him.

As soon as Roger had shut the door behind him, she stopped pretending to read her file and swung her swivel chair round so that she could look out of her window across the common. It looked an innocent place in all the clarity of the winter sun, full of children and nannies, bicyclists, solitary but perfectly respectable-looking men, young blond women (all looking rather like Emma Gnatche and Mrs Gripper) dressed in wellingtons and waxed cotton jackets pretending they were in the country as they walked their black labradors, and a few mysteriously hurrying figures.

Where could they be going? Willow asked herself. She got out of her chair to have a better look down at them all. Perhaps a few of them were walking from offices on the southside of the common to restaurants in Lavender Hill or Battersea Rise, but surely such business lunchers were more likely to drive? It would be a longish walk to cross the common. Yet again she asked herself what on earth the immaculately dressed minister could have been doing picking his way across the muddy grass in the pitch dark coldness of that November evening. The bland, innocent-looking grass and trees and paths and ponds could tell her nothing and after a few minutes'staring, she sat down again and reached for the large-scale London map she always kept in the bottom drawer of her desk.

The paths that criss-crossed the common were clearly marked and, she remembered, as clearly lit at night. If Algy had been seized with a sudden desire for air after the stuffiness of the office tower, he could perfectly well have stuck to the paths and been reasonably safe. Or, safer still, he could have walked along the pavements that circled the common. As she stared at the black-and-white patchwork of roads, open spaces and railway lines, her eye was caught by the black mass of Clapham Junction railway station on the left of the double-page spread and she remembered what the tramp had told her about the washing man.

Could anyone who had just battered a man to death walk through the lit and crowded streets to a bustling railway station undetected? Willow wished that she had been able to ask the inspector about the body. Would there have been much blood? Would the assailant have been badly marked? Could a man of Algy's height and bulk have succumbed to such a battering without at least bruising his attacker? Surely not. For a sickening moment she thought again of Roger's scarred face, the scars freshly pink on the day after the murder; but then she consoled herself with the conviction that Roger would never knowingly hurt a fly – and in any case must have weighed at least three stones less than the magnificent Algy. Surely, if Roger had launched some maniacal and frenzied attack on the minister, Algy would have been able to deflect it like a schoolboy swatting a fly, she thought.

No, decided Willow turning back to the real investigation, Roger could have nothing to do with the solution, but she would definitely have to go back and talk to the tramp again and somehow force him to tell her more about the man he had seen. She might even be able to discover the tramp's name and finally put to rest her utterly absurd idea that he could have been the minister's unsatisfactory brother.

Suddenly she sat up straighter and pulled her internal telephone forwards. Discovering what the tramp was called might be no help at all if she had been right in her suspicion that the minister's brother had actually changed his name.

Having dialled the number of one of the department's lawyers, she said as soon as the telephone was answered:

‘Robert? Good. Willow King here. I need a bit of background information.'

‘Yes?'

‘Tell me, if someone changes his or her name by deed poll, is there any way that one could find out what the original name was?'

There was a short pause at the other end of the line and Willow hastily assured Robert that she knew this was not the sort of question he was employed to answer. He laughed.

‘Thinking of changing yours, Willow?' he asked. ‘Well, I think if it really was done by deed poll, your best bet would be to go through back numbers of the
London, Gazette:
all deed poll changes have to be advertised in that, if I remember my Josling on
Name Changes
correctly.'

Willow digested that piece of information, thinking that it would take a week of constant work to look through the possible years' issues of the newspaper.

‘But you just said, that “if it really was done by deed poll”: is there some other way?' she asked.

‘Oh, yes. It's much cheaper and easier to do it by stat. dec.,' said Robert cheerfully.

‘Tell me more.'

‘You make a statutory declaration – which involves reciting an oath to a solicitor and paying £3.50; instead of fifty quid or so for a deed poll. And there wouldn't be any record of a stat. dec. name change except possibly in the solicitor's files… if there,' said Robert, blighting Willow's hopes of confirming her suspicions.

‘I see. Thanks very much, Robert. If I ever want to change my name I'll come to you for a nice, cheap stat. dec.,' said Willow. He laughed again and said good bye.

‘Before you go, Robert,' said Willow hastily.

‘Yes?' came the cautious reply.

‘Do you know any of the partners at Feathers, Fox & Co.? They've been recommended to me.'

‘I don't think so. They're reputed to be excessively expensive. Anything I can help with, Willow?' he asked with more generosity than she would have expected.

‘Thank you, Robert. But it's nothing to bother you with. How would I go about finding out who the partners are?'

‘You could always try ringing up their switchboard and asking, but I think there're probably at least eighty, so it might take some time. The alternative is to look them up in the Waterlow diary,' said the lawyer.

‘Thanks, Robert. You've been very helpful.'

‘A pleasure, Willow,' came the answer. ‘Though you are being a bit mysterious. Aren't Feathers, Fox the minister's solicitors? Don't tell me you have expectations.…' There was a note of teasing in his voice, but Willow was too annoyed with herself to hear it. To think that she had bothered to ring up Emma Gnatche when she could have got the same information from someone in her own office! Then she realised what he had said and her irritation was subsumed in embarrassment. That anyone in DOAP should have thought she wanted any of Algy's money was bad enough; that she should have given someone a hint that she expected it was worse. Somehow she managed to laugh and assure the lawyer that she had no such expectations. As she put down the telephone, she realised that she had probably just given substance to the department's assumption that she herself had killed the minister.

‘Ah well,' she said aloud, ‘so long as he doesn't go and confide in the inspector that ought not to matter.' There had been as yet no suggestion that anyone had even tried to check up on her alibi, let alone discovered that Aunt Agatha did not exist.

It was then, just as she was shutting up the map she had been studying, that she began to wonder about the other alibis she had heard, particularly Albert's. She opened the map again and checked what she already knew: that the top of Cedar's Road, where he had been told to wait with the car, was very little distance from the place where Algy's body had been discovered. It would have been so easy for him to leave the car, kill the minister and be back within less than half an hour. The only trouble was that the police had witnesses, all of whom had identified Albert, to prove that he had never left the car until he had gone to raise the alarm.

Having reminded herself of that depressing fact, Willow thought again and remembered that she had mistaken the chauffeur in the diary photograph of Mr and Mrs Gripper for Albert. If that had been so, then why should total strangers hurrying home in the dark not have mistaken some stand-in for him as well? It would have been easy for Albert to have persuaded a colleague – or even a friend or relation dressed in his uniform – to sit in the car under the street lamp while he enticed the minister on to the common and murdered him.

Willow allowed her imagination to roam for a moment or two over the possible reasons for the enticement. The only one she could think of that seemed even remotely possible was that Albert knew someone who had a piece of information the minister wanted. Suppose Albert had been employed by Michael Englewood (or indeed anyone else) to provide bodyguard services and assist in a bit of profitable corruption and had known that the minister was getting too close to the conspirators. Might Albert not have been able to say, ‘Look here, Minister, my friend X can give you all the information you need about Y if you will just step this way and talk to him where no one can see him'? Algy might well have gone with him to the common and met not the informant but his own death.

Towards the end of the afternoon, during which Willow worked like a demon to make up for the time she had spent idling in detection, the delights of assessing the financial implications of a proposed restructuring of the way pensions were calculated and paid began to pall. Roger had brought in another cup of tea and a bundle of letters for signature soon after four o'clock. Willow read through them all and then called him back.

‘Roger, are you all right?' she asked, looking carefully at him. ‘Or is your cold coming back?'

‘Yes, I'm fine, Miss King – apart from having a cruel amount of work to get through,' he answered. ‘Why?'