Poison Flowers (11 page)

‘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.

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.

It was easy to distinguish the chairman of the board, one of the senior Civil Service Commissioners. His fine-boned face suggested enough intelligence to give Willow some hope of sensible decisions. She went up to introduce herself to him. He shook her hand firmly.

‘William Westover,' he said. ‘And this is Mrs Culmstock, headmistress of St Cecilia's Kensington, Jonathan Silverthorne of ABX International, and Michael Rodenhurst of the Department of Prisons and Rehabilitation.'

‘Aha,' said Willow, identifying him immediately, ‘the psychiatrist.'

‘That's me,' he said, cheerfully, and then added in answer to a small stiffness in her voice: ‘Don't tell me that in common with a vast proportion of our colleagues you disapprove of psychiatry and think that it is wholly misconceived as an academic discipline.'

‘Something like that,' said Willow, smiling slightly and thinking that he must be as bored by the prospect of the next three days as she was if he plunged so quickly into such friendly badinage. She decided to prolong it. ‘But I'm quite good at keeping my ideas to myself, so you need not be afraid of arguments about such things. Besides, since DPR was hived off from the Home Office after the riots, I think you've all been doing a good job, which will no doubt outweigh my unfair prejudices.'

‘That's a relief,' he said, and she was not too entrenched in her Civil Service character to wonder whether he were deliberately trying to provoke her. ‘I can see that you would be very good at suppressing your feelings – and indeed your anger.'

‘If you …' she began furiously and then belatedly remembered the gleam in his grey eyes. ‘If you are going to tell me that I need to find my anger in order to become a whole person,' she went on much more moderately, ‘then we will fall out.'

‘I promise not to do that,' he said. The gleam in his eyes brightened.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,' said the chairman. ‘I think we should begin.' He led the way to the large round table and sat down. There was a blotter, a glass water carafe and tumbler in front of each place, together with a folder.

Opening the one in her place, Willow began to read the lists of the candidates'backgrounds and achievements, together with the results of their earlier tests and interviews. By the time she had finished she was fairly certain which of the candidates she would be prepared to fight for, and she was absolutely certain that the others had decided too. Only an outstandingly frightful or impressive performance could change those first assessments.

The commissioner began the day's proceedings with a little speech in which he explained that they were there to select candidates who would be leaders of the service over the next twenty or thirty years, people of intelligence, obviously, but also of professionalism, steadiness and above all loyalty. The service needed people who could faithfully carry out the polities of whichever political party was in power, whether or not they personally thought the policies correct. Willow had heard it all before and let her attention wander. She vaguely heard the commissioner pay tribute to the headmistress's long experience of judging the potential of her pupils and the industrialist's knowledge of modern management techniques and talents. Her own encomium and the psychiatrist's were short but fair, and Willow acknowledged hers with a tight smile.

The first candidate was summoned, questioned and quickly dismissed. Her departure was followed by an admiring chorus from the entire board, all alike impressed by her mixture of brains, culture, good record and admirably expressed views on the future of the civilised world. Only Willow voiced a small objection, that it was hard to see why such a paragon should want to join the service. Her caveat was dismissed and the second candidate summoned.

He proved to be a young man who had done well in one of the northern offices of Willow's department as a Senior Executive Officer. She had been impressed by the account of his achievements in his home town and thought he would make a good administrative officer at the DOAP tower, but as soon as she heard his unconfident voice and saw the damp marks his hands left on the glossy table she knew that she would have trouble persuading the rest of the board.

While they were asking their questions and apparently trying to increase the poor man's nervousness, Willow started to concentrate on the questions she would ask when the chairman had finished his. She made notes of the candidate's answers to the other selectors' questions and jotted down her immediate impressions so that she would have plenty of ammunition in any conflict that followed. When the frightened man had been sent out of the room, Willow listened with interest to the other selectors'views.

They were fairly evenly divided between those who liked his brains and good academic record and those who found his presentation of himself lacking in confidence and his voice too ‘regional'for their taste.

The argument went backwards and forwards, with Willow several times wanting to tell the representatives of ‘the great and the good' on the panel that their expectations of the candidates were too high, until the selectors were freed for lunch.

In the dining room Willow was gratified to see that she was to be seated beside the psychiatrist, partly because he had been the only other member of the panel unequivocally in favour of the nervous man from Manchester, but also because she thought he might be useful to her. Having tasted her soup, she turned to him.

‘I hardly remember anything of my Fiske. Do you?' she asked.

‘Virtually nothing,' he said, shaking his head, ‘but the mind does tend to blank out particularly stressful memories.'

‘Yes, I'm sure it does,' said Willow, sounding as though she did not believe it. Then she corrected herself. ‘Sorry, that was probably a Pavlovian reaction of mine to that wretched word “stress”. It's so fashionable. I sometimes think that if one broke a leg there would be people around to say that it was stress that had cracked the bones.'

‘I doubt if it was a Pavlovian reaction,' he answered, but there was a smile in his eyes.

‘Never mind. I wanted to ask you about something I read recently.

It's this new discipline called “Psychological Offender Profiling”. Have you come across it?'

‘Of course,' he said. ‘Well developed in the States; not used so much over here yet. The police do tend towards conservatism in such things.'

‘I'm sure they do,' answered Willow. ‘But how can I find out about it? It sounds thoroughly interesting.'

‘There have been one or two papers in the journals recently, but not an enormous number of books. Why are you interested?'

Finishing a mouthful of tomato soup, Willow looked speculatively at the young man. It was obvious that he might be very useful to her, if she could confide in him, but she had no way of knowing whether he would treat any confidences as privileged.

‘It simply struck me,' she said when she had swallowed her mouthful, ‘that a skill like that would really justify the existence of psychiatry. If you were able to look at police notes of cases for which they had good reason to think there was a connection, and tell them what kind of person to hunt, you would be worth having. “You” in general, I mean.'

‘There are a great many skills psychiatrists have that are of considerable use,' he said with more seriousness than he had shown until then, ‘but I agree about offender profiling. The difficulty is that it is still relatively new and there aren't enough people with enough experience over here to persuade the police to use them much. And …'