Festering Lilies (6 page)

For the moment, she put the knowledge of Algy's death out of her mind and let herself sink back into irresponsible comfort. Gino's receptionist took her bag and jacket and handed her a pink wrap, which shrieked at Willow's red hair, and ushered her through to the salon. Willow smiled at one or two other regular Thursday-evening clients, who were already sitting facing the tactfully bronzed mirrors, and then greeted Gino's chief apprentice. He sighed when he saw the condition of her hair and clicked his tongue as he ran his fingers through it. She grinned at him and patted his stalwart shoulder.

‘Never mind, John. Do your best with it,' she said cheerfully.

‘You'd better have conditioner, don't you think?'

‘All right, John. Whatever you think best,' said Willow, settling her neck in the least uncomfortable position against the hard edge of the basin.

He bent forward to start ridding her hair of the accumulated grime and dryness, massaging her scalp with such thoroughness that she was about to protest when she became aware of a hardness against her left shoulder. The young man seemed to be pressing himself against her in a pulsating rhythm with a disturbing effect. Could he possibly, she asked herself, have seen Warren Beatty in
Shampoo
and be imitating him for amusement? There could be no other explanation. Mentally shrugging the offending shoulder, she closed her eyes again and let him wash, rinse and condition her hair. But when he had tenderly wrapped her head in pink towels, she did cast a sideways and downwards glance, only to burst into real laughter. There was an immensely long hairbrush stuck into his trouser pocket, handle down. ‘Mae West, eat your heart out,' said Willow to herself as she was handed into Gino's chair.

‘The writing must have gone well this week,' said Gino, massaging her neck.

‘Why?' said Willow, amused by the new opening gambit.

‘Because you look so happy – I've never seen you laugh out loud before. And because your hair is even more terrible than usual, Miss Woodruffe,' he said. As so often before, Willow was childishly pleased to hear her invented name; it seemed to be part of the ritual of switching from one life to the other. She glanced at the hairdresser in the mirror and smiled at him.

‘Good one, Gino. But, no, I'm not going to come in twice a week. I've told you before that I make such a mess of my hair when I'm writing that it's not worth it. Just be thankful that I come every week, rain or shine, and do your best.'

He laughed, too, and seeing that for once she was in the mood to talk, he allowed his practised easy patter to flow out. Willow listened, occasionally asked a question and answered the few he asked her, and by the time he had started to blow-dry her hair, she had begun to relax properly. They could not talk comfortably while the dryer was roaring in their ears and so Willow amused herself by watching her fellow customers in the mirrors. There was the stringy old woman who was always there at that time on a Thursday, having her toenails painted. Who, Willow wondered, could possibly want to look at the old girl's feet? Next to her was a thin, dark woman, who always looked as though she were longing for a cigarette and picked at the slightly yellowed skin around her fingernails as her hair was teased into shape. Then there was one empty chair. Gino switched off the dryer just as Willow noticed that, and she said straight away:

‘Gino, what's happened to the pretty blond woman who usually sits there?' She pointed rudely, looked at him in the mirror to make sure he knew what she meant and was surprised to see an expression of sympathetic excitement enliven his swarthy face.

‘Mrs Gripper?' he said, flicking a long, thin comb through Willow's half-dried hair.

‘Is that who she is? Not the wife of the
Daily Mercury
Gripper?' Gino nodded and looked sly. Willow waited, knowing that the hairdresser was a repository of gossip and secrets from almost every one of the women who came to him. At last he gave in a little.

‘She probably feels she can't face anyone yet. It only happened on Monday,' he said. Willow's mind raced: Monday; Algy; seduction; jealousy and lust; revenge. A motive! But wouldn't it be too much of a coincidence?

‘What happened on Monday?' she asked aloud.

‘A very good friend of hers was killed. She rang today to ask if I could go to their house to do her hair, because she was not feeling strong enough to go out.'

‘Perhaps she was just ill,' suggested Willow, thinking that the friend in question must be Algernon Endelsham, but that however close a friend he had been, there must have been something more than the fact of his death to make a grown woman unable to leave her house for an hour. Such an exaggerated reaction would be excessive in anyone, even if she were newly and passionately in love. Gino shook his head decisively.

‘No. When I got to Graham Terrace, I saw that she must have been crying almost ever since Monday. She looked terrified, too,' said Gino, smoothing Willow's hair preparatory to finishing the drying.

‘Perhaps she was just afraid that you would tell all your other customers that she was in a state,' said Willow drily and closed her eyes. ‘Who was killed, and how do you know she had anything to do with him?' She knew that she had caught Gino on the raw, because she heard the snap as he put down the dryer.

Opening her eyes, she saw him riffling through a heap of dog-eared magazines. At last he found the one he was looking for, and brought it to her. Laying it open in front of her, he picked up the dryer again.

‘There!' he said, dramatically as he pushed up the switch and the machine roared again. ‘It's unmistakable,' he went on above the noise.

Willow looked at the row of four-inch-square photographs, searching for the pretty blonde. But it was Algy who caught her eye first, resplendent in white tie and tails. Suppressing a sigh of regret for the loss of such rare masculine beauty and talent, Willow looked at his companion. Sure enough, there was the pretty, slightly fragile-looking blonde who usually occupied the chair two down from Willow's. ‘Mrs Eustace Gripper', as the caption called her, was wearing an off-the-shoulder ball dress and looked enchanting as she stood confidingly close to her tall escort.

‘What makes you think that there was anything between them?' said Willow, as soon as Gino switched off the dryer. ‘It would be madly indiscreet of them to be seen together like that if there had been.'

Gino shrugged and looked ineffably knowing.

‘You can't mean that she told you,' said Willow, really surprised. ‘Or was it someone else? Some terribly good friend of hers, who just couldn't keep her mouth shut?' She watched the Italian closely, but he was far too experienced to blush or wince. He merely laughed.

‘That would be telling, wouldn't it, Miss Woodruffe,' he said, reaching for the hairs pray to glue Willow's hair in place.

‘Yes,' she said crisply. ‘That's why I'm asking.'

‘People tell me a lot of things,' he said quietly. ‘And I never repeat them. Never!'

Remembering a song from HMS
Pinafore
, Willow smiled to herself and then said aloud:

‘You just hint, don't you, Gino? My goodness, you must have fun with us all. I'm glad I've no secrets.'

‘Everybody has things to hide, Miss Woodruffe,' he said, smoothing her newly curled hair. ‘There, how do you like it?'

‘Very much,' she answered, hoping devoutly that he knew nothing of her secrets.

As she examined her reflection, she thought with affectionate nostalgia of her first physical transformation from Willow King to ‘Cressida Woodruffe'. It had taken place on the morning of her first meeting with Eve Greville, who was to become her literary agent.

Willow had sent Eve the typescript of her first, unpublishable, novel and Eve had suggested that they meet to discuss ‘Cressida's' next attempt. Unwilling to present herself as a severe-looking Civil Servant, Willow had gambled some of her limited resources on an expensive, clinging black jersey dress to wear instead of one of her loose, ill-fitting, neutral suits, and had booked an appointment at a famous hair-and-beauty salon.

There she had given the staff a free hand and watched in amusement and some admiration as they recreated her. Excited by the length, thickness and good condition of her dark-red hair, the hairdresser had released it from its savagely controlling pins and washed and curled it into an artfully tousled mane. So framed, her white face lost its severity and took on a curiously convincing attraction. The cheekbones that seemed almost painfully sharp when her hair was dragged away from them looked dramatic in contrast to the luxuriance of her new curls; her nose seemed much less prominent and as she smiled her lips lost their pinched look.

Later, with subtly graded olive and brown eyeshadows brushed on to her lids and glossy mascara on her pale eyelashes, let alone the carefully chosen blusher warming her skin and coral lipstick emphasising her mouth, Willow was confronted with a reflection she had never expected to see even in her most extreme fantasies. She could not be described as classically beautiful, but the face she saw in the mirror that day looked modern instead of spinsterly, vividly alive and – she could not deny it – thoroughly attractive.

In order to protect the secret of her double identity, Willow had never returned to that particular hairdresser, but Gino had proved an efficient successor whenever Willow needed to appear anywhere as ‘Cressida'. As the advances and royalties she earned built up into what seemed to her to be a fortune, she learned to enjoy the transformation process for its own sake rather than for the disguise it gave her. The spending of money on glamorous clothes and hairdressing gradually stopped seeming either wasteful or extravagant and, by the time the murder shocked her out of her easy security, it had become a positive pleasure.

‘Thank you, Gino,' she said, smiling at his reflection as he held up a hand mirror so that she could judge his handiwork at the back of her head as well as the front.

‘As always: a pleasure, Miss Woodruffe. I'll call the manicurist now, and I'll see you next Thursday.'

‘Yes indeed. Good night, Gino.'

When the manicurist had finished and Willow's nails were as clean and gleaming as her hair, she paid the relatively enormous bill and walked slowly back towards Chesham Place, where she had her other flat, revelling in the contrasts of her existence. Now that she had left Willow King behind, and had become ‘Cressida Woodruffe'once more, she felt less bothered about all the lies she had had to tell at DOAP.

After all, without that first one to Michael Englewood, she would never have discovered the pleasures and luxuries that ‘Cressida Woodruffe'had brought her; she would still be frustrated, bored, and unhappily wedded to the department because of the index-linked pension that would come to her when she retired at the age of sixty. And she would still be lonely.

Reaching the house in which she owned the second floor, she let herself in and went upstairs, knowing that the flat would have been impeccably cleaned and supplied in her absence by Mrs Rusham, her daily housekeeper. When Willow walked into the drawing room she was greeted with the sweet fresh scent of about five dozen freesias, which Mrs Rusham had arranged in a pair of black Ming vases on the chimneypiece.

Heaving a sigh of relief, Willow took off her jacket, flung it over the back of a sofa and poured herself a modest glass of Palo Cortado sherry, not even noticing that the ache in her throat had gone.

Glass in hand, she pottered about the large elegant room, taking renewed pleasure in the walnut bureau bookcase she had bought at Sotheby's four years earlier, in the Chinese embroideries that hung in the embrasures on either side of the fireplace, in the thick pale silk carpet that covered the polished parquet and the soft plumpness of the handmade sofas. When she had begun to write the first book, one of her ambitions had been to generate enough money for just such a room, in which she could try to create an atmosphere of peaceful luxury. Looking around on that Thursday evening, she considered that she had succeeded. There was space, there was warmth and there was a delicate concentration of colour and light.

The panelled walls had been painted in a pale duck-egg blue, which set off the golden wood of the furniture as well as the old French chintz curtains and flattered almost every kind of flower that was placed in front of it. The sofas were loose covered in thick twilled silk of a colour somewhere between silver-grey and pale olive-green, and the two Louis XV elbow chairs in a muted stripe that combined all the other blues and greens in the room. The chimneypiece was white marble and over it hung an oval Chippendale looking glass, which reflected the pride of her collection, a blazing Turner watercolour of sunrise over Durham Cathedral. Celadon lamps with cream-silk pleated shades cast an easy mellow light over the room, and the rose and violet colours on the cream background of the glazed chintz warmed it.

Relaxing into the pleasure of her ritual inventory of the ravishing things her novels had bought her, Willow wandered over to the Pembroke table on which Mrs Rusham always arranged her post and messages. There was the usual collection of bills, fan letters, letters from her publisher and agent, proofs of other people's novels with requests for comments, and a message written out in Mrs Rusham's laborious hand:

‘Mr Lawrence-Crescent telephoned to say that he will be held up at his office this evening, and so he won't be able to arrive until about nine-thirty. Unless he hears from you to the contrary, he will still come to take you out to a new restaurant he has discovered.'

Willow smiled as she thought of the pleasure Mrs Rusham must have had in talking to Richard Crescent on the telephone. There must be something about his very restrained good looks and well-mannered Englishness that strongly appealed to the housekeeper, for she was devoted to him and obviously considered that Willow herself treated him with far too little care.