Poison Flowers (18 page)

Willow heard her front-door bell ring. Running her hands under the kitchen tap and drying them on the thick clean towel Mrs Rusham had laid out, she went to open the door.

‘Did you really mean me to come?' asked Caroline Titchmell like a child uncertain of her welcome.

Confronted with the sensible, unaggressive charm of the woman herself, Willow almost laughed at her unfounded and half-formed suspicion. The murderer must be able to present an acceptable face to the world, but even so Willow did not believe that anyone could behave as Caroline did if she had murdered her own brother. Besides, she thought, as she searched for a reason to support her intuition, Caroline probably had keys to her brother's house and would never have had to break in to plant the poisoned cereal in his cupboards.

‘Of course I meant it,' she said, smiling. ‘Come on in and we'll decide what to do. Would you like some coffee?'

‘No thank you. I've just had some,' said Caroline. That afternoon she was dressed in jeans and a navy-blue jersey patterned with tulips. There was the frill of a red-and-white striped shirt poking out above the neck of the jersey. She looked just as sensible and attractive as she had at Richard's dinner and less intense.

‘What would you like to do?' Willow asked, leading the way back into the warm, sunny kitchen. ‘I'm afraid that the drawing room isn't really habitable. I had a rather bad burglary a few months ago and I haven't got round to replacing everything they damaged yet.'

‘Poor you. I've always thought it must be foul – really one of the worst things – to come back and find your home ransacked,' said Caroline, dropping into a chair by the scrubbed table. ‘It's never happened to me, but Simon … A while before Simon died it happened to him, and he was more shaken by it than he'd have expected, he told me. It … That was the last time I saw him, and I think I'll always remember him unhappy and even afraid instead of the way he usually was.'

‘How was he usually?' asked Willow as she leaned against the sink. Caroline looked at her speculatively.

‘You don't have to listen to my outpourings about him, you know,' she said a little stiffly. ‘We could just go to an exhibition and …'

‘I know,' answered Willow, ‘but I'm interested – although the last thing I want to do is to pry.' Caroline shook her head, and looked away from Willow's face.

‘He never seemed afraid of anything,' she said at last. Willow was distressed to hear a quiver in her voice. ‘Until then. He passed every exam with ease. He had hosts of friends. He worked astonishingly hard, although he …' Caroline's voice broke completely then.

‘He sounds remarkable,' said Willow. ‘Did you get on well?'

Caroline looked directly at Willow.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘we were inseparable as children. What about you? Did you get on well with your siblings?'

‘I never had any,' said Willow, making the corners of her lips turn down in a rueful grimace. ‘I often wished I had and assume – probably irrationally – that if I had we would have been friends.

And yet I know lots of people who hardly ever see their brothers and sisters.'

‘We were friends,' said Caroline sadly. ‘Not particularly close ones, but we usually saw each other every week. The only reason I didn't see him after the burglary was that I had to be in the States for a fortnight, and then he died. It seems so unfair …'

‘I'm so sorry,' said Willow.

‘Yes,' said Caroline drearily. ‘The most difficult thing is knowing that there is nothing – absolutely nothing – to be done about its hurting so much except to wait until it hurts less.'

‘I suppose,' said Willow trying to pick her words with extreme care, ‘that there must be a certain consolation in knowing that at least he is not hurting now.'

‘You're right of course,' said Caroline, trying to smile. ‘But it's not wholly selfish to mind that he died …'

‘I didn't mean to suggest that,' said Willow quickly.

‘There are so many things he would have – could have – done. He had so many talents and he was so much loved by so many people. My mother's been almost broken by his death. She absolutely adored him, you see.'

Willow stood up straight. There were a lot of questions that she wanted to ask, but could not without sounding as though she suspected Caroline of something and was trying to interrogate her.

‘Now, what would you like to do? It's a glorious day. We could go anywhere,' she said instead of asking anything about Simon's relationship with his mother.

‘Do you know Ham House?' asked Caroline. Willow shook her head.

‘It's bliss,' she said. ‘Simon first took me there when I came to London. It wasn't restored then, but it is now – and the garden's fun, too.'

‘It sounds perfect,' said Willow. ‘Do you know the way?'

‘Yes, but I haven't got my car. Ben drove me here. I hardly ever drive myself.'

‘Why not?' asked Willow. ‘Not that it matters at all,' she added hastily in case she had sounded unpleasant. ‘My car's outside.'

‘I rather disliked the man who taught me to drive and it put me off a bit. Of course I do drive when I have to. One of the perks of the partnership is a good car. Ben loves it. He even chose the colour; he once told me in a rather misguidedly sentimental moment that it matches my eyes.'

Caroline's voice had taken on a warmth of affection that touched Willow.

‘Ben's lucky – and not just in the car,' said Willow.

‘Oh it's two-way luck,' said Caroline softly. ‘He's done … I can't tell you how much he's done for me.'

Her face was lighter and happier than it had been since she had arrived at Willow's flat.

‘So shall we go to Ham?' she said cheerfully. Willow, who did not mind where they went provided that they would be able to talk about Simon there, nodded. Ham sounded as good a place as any.

When they got there, having talked only trivialities on the half-hour drive, she found that it was better than that an enchanting, small seventeenth-century house, built of dark purplish-red brick with creamy stone coigns, set in a garden of charming formality. As Willow parked the car, the sky began to cloud over and so they decided to look at the house first and explore the garden later if the sun came out again.

They walked into a small hall, which was floored with black-and-white marble, and paid for their tickets. A fire was burning in the fireplace and the atmosphere effectively suggested a private house.

‘It's terribly cosy, isn't it?' said Caroline, looking up at the portraits ranged round the double-height hall. ‘Simon always said that this period was the very pinnacle of domestic architecture in England and that this was one of his favourite examples.'

‘Did he take you about much?' Willow asked over her shoulder as she bought a guide book. ‘It must have been very nice to have a ready-made companion when you first arrived in London.'

‘It was,' said Caroline, looking straight ahead of her at a piece of blank wall. Then she turned to Willow with a sympathetic smile. ‘Were you very lonely when you first came here?'

‘Yes,' said Willow honestly. ‘Although I didn't realise it until later. I put my depression down to my gloomy flat, my unexciting colleagues, my dull work and so on. But I think I was – very lonely.'

‘What work did you do then?' asked Caroline. It was a reasonable question, but Willow was not inclined to answer it.

‘A lot of dull, dead-end jobs,' she said. ‘I wish I'd thought of something like patent-agenting. Had you always planned to do that?'

‘Not really. I was simply working to qualify as a solicitor first, but found it dull. Simon suggested I might prefer patent work,' said Caroline. ‘He seemed to think that he was responsible for me, which was sweet of him, because he needn't have bothered.' She walked over to the large white chimney piece and peered at the mouldings. ‘We did grow apart a bit later,' she added, almost as though something had forced the information out of her.

Willow thought that she recognised in Caroline the almost fanatical truth-telling of a person who was terrified of her instinctive desire to cover up unpleasantness and rearrange memories of her own and other people's failings to make them seem less bad.

‘Did you quarrel?' asked Willow, making her voice very gentle so that the question did not sound like an accusation. She followed Caroline, guidebook in hand.

‘Not exactly; but he had his friends and I mine. And we … we both had different ideas about social life and things.' She turned to look at Willow, her heart-shaped face tormented. With obvious difficulty she started speaking again. ‘I suppose that's one reason why I feel so bad about his death.'

Willow said nothing. A simple ‘Why?' would have sounded crass and she could not think of anything else to say. After a long silence, Caroline said in a painful voice:

‘We never had a chance to make peace.'

Willow wandered away towards the main staircase to give Caroline time to recover. There had obviously been some serious falling-out between them even if Caroline had said that it did not really constitute a quarrel. But Willow could not imagine anyone with any intelligence killing her brother because as young adults they had liked different people and had disagreed – or even quarrelled – about their opposing ideas of how to spend their spare time. Besides, no one who had been involved in a murder would lay bare her own motive even to someone as apparently uninvolved as Willow.

‘Isn't it amazing?' said Caroline, staring up at the portraits that lined the staircase walls. She had mopped her tears, restored her eye makeup and was apparently determined to entertain Willow. ‘But let's go up and see the State apartments. They're a charming mixture of cosiness and stateliness.'

‘That sounds contradictory,' said Willow, following her across the hall in the opposite direction from the main stairs.

‘Wait and see,' said Caroline over her shoulder. She even had a little discreet mischief in her bright, blue eyes and Willow liked her more and more. It seemed admirable that despite her recent collapse she could take the trouble to entertain someone else as she was doing, and that she could apparently enjoy herself. Willow was interested in a way beyond her investigation: having for years avoided being contaminated by her own or anyone else's emotions, she was beginning to want to know more about other people's.

‘Caroline,' she said as they climbed the dark, narrow back stairs.

‘Yes?'

‘What did you quarrel about? You and your brother, I mean.'

Caroline was silent for so long that Willow thought that she might not answer.

‘It was so silly really,' she said eventually. ‘Although it seemed desperately important at the time. At university Simon had got in with a rather druggy crowd and thought them sophisticated and fun. Even after they'd all come to London they carried on with it and when I was in a state about some of my exams, he took me to one of their parties to distract me.' She stopped and brushed the back of her small hand against her eyes.

‘What happened?' asked Willow, sounding gentle but feeling quite remorseless.

‘It's probably quite a common story,' Caroline said, shrugging her plump shoulders. ‘Someone thought it would be funny to put LSD in Simon's prissy, dull, little sister's drink. I had a bad trip and was affected by it for ages. Quite unfairly I blamed Simon, although he knew nothing about it beforehand and was furious when he discovered what had happened.'

‘I think your fury is understandable,' said Willow. ‘You mustn't blame yourself for it now that he is dead.'

At that piece of attempted comfort, Caroline turned her face away from Willow, but not quickly enough to hide the expression of intense, bitter disagreement. Willow was momentarily shocked by the power of the emotion she saw in Caroline's face.

‘It seems so petty now,' she said calmly after about three minutes, in which she had obviously wrestled to hide her resentment. ‘Letting an old grievance like that spoil what Simon and I had had together as children … What must he have thought of me?'

‘Perhaps part of what made you so angry was his having turned away from that to waste his time, his money and his health on drugs,' suggested Willow. When Caroline did not answer, she half changed the subject.

‘He was lucky to get away with it. The few people I've come across who've been involved with drugs have all been in trouble with the police at some time or another,' said Willow not altogether truthfully.

‘Simon did have one narrow escape,' said Caroline, ‘but yes, I suppose he was lucky. I didn't know much about it at the time, but my mother discovered what he was up to soon after the awful party and engineered a meeting between him and his godfather one Christmas. Uncle Tom was a policeman, you see, and he gave Si the most dreadful rocket and threatened him with prison if he didn't swear to give up. I think Si was quite frightened, because he seemed to have dropped it after that.'

Willow thought that at last she understood exactly why Commander Bodmin had believed the aconitine in Simon Titchmell's muesli might have been self-administered and changed the subject again by suggesting that they look at the rooms they had come upstairs to see. Once more Caroline buried her emotions and reverted to the charmingly instructive guide she had been earlier.

They walked all over the house, admiring and criticising as they went. Willow enjoyed Caroline's measured enthusiasm as much as the pleasures of the house and, finding herself unable to put any more of her questions, she tried to banish the investigation from her mind. When they reached the Queen's Bedroom, Willow stood entranced in front of the bed. A very grand four-poster upholstered and curtained in pale-blue brocade, it was tiny; yet even so, each of the four posts was topped with a pot of fluffy white ostrich feathers.