Poison Flowers (24 page)

Almost as though her feelings had touched one of them he looked round. In the yellow glare of the streetlights, Willow recognised Ben Jonson and felt a moment's panic. He looked at her without recognition and merely raised his free hand in the direction of all the drivers and riders who had stopped at the crossing. Having recognised him so easily, Willow wondered whether she really looked as different from ‘Cressida Woodruffe'as she had always assumed. Peering at herself in the nearest shop window and seeing a white face, draggled with hair that looked dark brown in the rain, she was reassured.

Cars hooted behind her and she pulled herself up on to the bicycle again and pushed against the pedals. As she rode laboriously back up the hill towards her flat, she tried to imagine what Ben Jonson could possibly be doing in Vauxhall. For a while she managed to persuade herself that she must have been mistaken when she thought she recognised him, but then she remembered that there was a huge adult education building close to the supermarket.

As soon as she had unloaded her shopping and dumped it on the kitchen floor, she went out again and walked to the nearest tube station. At the bookstall she bought a copy of
Floodlight
and searched through the multifarious adult-education courses on offer until she came to the one that explained his presence. Every Tuesday evening during term time, Ben Jonson taught a class of aspiring writers in Vauxhall.

With that small mystery cleared up, Willow unpacked her shopping and started to stow it away in fridge, freezer and cupboard. It was not until she had repacked the small freezer so that all the boxes and packets fitted neatly in that she thought of the dark-red file Tom had left with her at the beginning of her investigation.

Sweating slightly, with a dry throat and empty mind, she fled to her bedroom and pushed the heavy mattress off her bed. There was the file, lying where she had left it. When she flicked it open, she saw Tom's elegantly written notes of the few clues to the murderer's identity. For the first time since she had seen the evidence of the burglary, Willow allowed herself to believe that it might have been no more than that. She could not believe that anyone searching her flat for signs that she might be involved in pursuing a murderer would have missed the file.

With the effects of shock and fear receding from her mind and body, Willow replaced the mattress and walked slowly back into her kitchen to cook and eat a frozen pizza while she waited for Tom Worth to telephone.

By the last day of the board, Willow was pining to get back to her office and do some real work again. She had agreed to have lunch with Michael Rodenhurst in a fish restaurant he knew on the far side of Trafalgar Square instead of joining the other selectors in their official lunch, but when the time came she regretted it.

The last candidate to be interviewed before lunch was a young woman who had explained that her first choice of department would be the DPR, because she was particularly interested in the mechanics and moralities of policing and the rehabilitation of offenders. Instead of listening to the questions put to the candidate by the other members of the board, Willow had uncharacteristically allowed her attention to wander back to her own investigation. When the chairman turned courteously to invite her to put her own questions to the candidate, Willow thanked him and asked:

‘What would you do if, through the “Regional Unsolved Crime Reporting System”, you came across a group of crimes – murders, let us say – that had taken place in quite different parts of the country that seemed to you to have been committed by the same person?'

‘I'd report to my superior,' said the candidate in a soft West-country voice, ‘who would, presumably, contact the relevant police forces if he thought it suitable.'

‘And if your superior or the police sneered at your ideas and told you that you were indulging in nothing more than female intuition?'

Most of the other interviewers looked crossly at Willow, whose questions were not the sort that were usually asked in such interviews. The candidate looked merely puzzled. Eventually she decided on her answer:

‘By informing my superior, I would have done what I see as my duty. I don't quite see what else I could do,' she said, allowing a little sound of injury into her voice. ‘I'm not a police officer. Even if I were working in DPR, I should have no crime-solving responsibilities. If my impression was thought to be wrong by the police …'

‘Then do you believe that the police are always right?' asked Willow in a disinterested but by no means uninterested voice.

‘Not always …' the candidate was beginning, looking hot and flustered.

‘I think we'd all agree that the evidence bears that out,' said the chairman with a reassuring smile at the candidate, forestalling any more eccentric questions from Willow.

At the end of the interview, when the candidate had been released, the chairman reprimanded Willow for exceeding her brief. Willow smiled coldly at him.

‘With respect, Chairman,' she said, ‘I was trying to find out whether, like some of our other candidates, she had inflated ideas of the powers of Civil Servants; and how realistic she might be about the kind of moral choices that may well face her if she succeeds in her ambitions to join DPR and move up the ladder there.'

‘I see,' said the chairman with slightly less disapproval in his thin, grey face. ‘And what have you learned?'

‘That she is thoroughly realistic, reasonably conscientious and ought to make a good officer,' said Willow to the manifest surprise of the rest of the board, who had clearly thought her antagonistic towards that particular candidate.

The rest of them added their views and at last the chairman released them for lunch, adding that the man they were expecting to interview that afternoon was ill and so the session would be cancelled.

Wishing that she could go straight back to DOAP, eat a sandwich at her desk and get on with some work, Willow instead walked with the psychiatrist to the restaurant where he had booked a table. Just off Piccadilly, it was upsettingly close to the world she inhabited as Cressida and for a moment Willow was worried that she might be recognised. A quick look at her reflection in a big mirror in the ladies'lavatory assured her that no one accustomed to Cressida's luxurious curls and subtly painted face would see anything familiar in the pale, slighty freckled skin, sandy eyelashes and severe hairstyle.

When she went back to the table Michael was tasting a glass of white wine and nodding appreciatively at the wine waiter. As Willow sat down, Michael half rose from his seat, offered her a glass of Chablis and then said:

‘Let's choose what we're going to eat and get it ordered before we relax. I know that we both have an unexpectedly free afternoon, but …'

‘There's too much work waiting in the office to waste it in idle chatter,' said Willow, interrupting without conscience.

‘Precisely,' said the psychiatrist and handed her a large maroon menu. Willow read it carefully and then said:

‘Oysters, I think.'

‘Oysters, and what then?' asked Michael.

‘Grilled sole and some spinach, please,' she answered.

‘How austere!' Michael signalled efficiently to the waiter and ordered himself potted shrimps and then an elaborate lobster dish. When all the questions had been asked and answered and the waiter had eventually disappeared, Michael turned back to Willow.

‘Now, tell me what all this is about,' he said.

‘You sound rather severe,' said Willow. ‘What are you talking about?'

‘Your questions: the ones you asked me last week and the ones you put to that poor flummoxed girl this morning. What is going on?'

Willow took a gulp of the sharp, cold wine to give herself a moment to think.

‘At first I thought that you must be writing – or planning to write – a detective story in your spare time, but after this morning I am beginning to think that you must really be worried about some actual deaths,' said Michael.

Wishing that she could blush to order, Willow put down her wine glass and looked at Michael, making her eyes widen slightly as those of Cressida Woodruffe's heroines tended to do when they were faced with unexpectedly attractive men.

‘I suppose,' she said slowly, lowering her undarkened eyelashes, ‘that being a psychiatrist you are taught to look for unlikely motives.' If she had been a toucher she would have patted his shoulder or hand. As it was, even as Cressida, she never went in for casual touching except with Tom Worth.

‘It is a bit embarrassing,' she went on, ‘and I'll have to rely on your discretion. I'd hate my colleagues to know about my secret ambitions. You could be very useful to me, you know,' she added.

Michael Rodenhurst leaned back in his green leather chair, with an amused and rather knowing smile. Willow was prepared to put up with it to continue her placatory campaign, although she did feel the humiliation of some subordinate member of a tribe of gorillas presenting her backside to be groomed by the silverback chief.

‘You can't really mean that you are writing a murder story,' he said.

‘Well, “trying to write” would be more accurate,' she answered with a deceptively frank smile. ‘And I'm anxious to get as much verisimilitude in it as possible – hence my questions. I have got one or two more; in fact.'

‘What is the plot?' he asked, looking even more amused.

When Willow had sucked one of the gelatinous molluscs from its smooth-lined shell, she produced the information she thought necessary to convince him of her own imaginary veracity.

‘The book is all about a woman who poisons the men who have spurned her.'

‘Rather far fetched, I would have thought,' said the psychiatrist, obviously enjoying his potted shrimps.

‘What about all those ancient saws?' asked Willow and was pleased to see his face crease up into a real smile.

‘“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”,' he quoted. ‘Yes, but you and I know that that is long out of date even if it ever held true.'

‘Well never mind that,' said Willow before swallowing her last oyster and laying its heavy, gnarled grey shell back onto the seaweed-decorated ice on her plate. ‘What has been bothering me particularly is that from the only useful book I've managed to find it seems that most serial murderers are male, and I particularly want to have a female killer in my book.'

‘I wonder why,' said Michael. ‘You know, Willow King, you interest me very much indeed.'

‘A case study?' she suggested, sounding coldly dismissive. ‘A case study in repression, perhaps,' she added, remembering all the snide comments and jokes she had ever overheard about her undoubted virginity, her sexlessness, her joyless life, her unattractiveness and the terrible deprivation of living life without a man. For years she had persuaded herself that she was entirely indifferent to them, but recently she had been beginning to consider the possibility that she had actually minded being so despised. Perhaps her determination to make more money than her colleagues could ever earn had been her way of taking revenge for their contempt.

‘No,' he said, drawing out the vowel to what Willow thought excessive length. ‘But you are not at all what I expected from what I've heard about you in the department or from my observations of you on that first day; you present yourself as one sort of person when you are quite obviously very different.'

Willow turned her face away, suddenly stricken by the thought that the two characters she inhabited so satisfactorily – and separately – might be drawing closer together. No one who had met her as Willow King had ever suspected that she was not altogether what she seemed until she had been confronted with Chief Inspector Worth. Somehow he seemed to be having a discernible effect on her. That worried Willow considerably.

Damn Tom Worth, she thought bitterly, and then remembered how much she liked him.

‘Perhaps,' she said carefully, having schooled her face back into chill formality, ‘you were simply guilty of judging by appearances – and of prejudice.'

‘Perhaps,' said the psychiatrist, nodding to the waiter who was hovering near the table with their main courses. When everything was arranged and Willow was already calmly eating her sole and spinach, Michael went on:

‘What …?'

‘Michael,' said Willow, using his name for the first time, ‘I can't stop you speculating about whatever neuroses and unreconstructed complexes you think I may suffer, but I'd rather you kept your conclusions to yourself. Whatever is wrong with me – and I am quite prepared to believe that there is plenty – I am a functioning human being and I'd rather not investigate the aspects of my character that might make me stop functioning. Do you understand what I'm talking about?'

He nodded, ate some lobster drenched in rich, dusky-pink sauce, and when he had swallowed said:

‘All right, no questions from me. Why don't you ask the rest of yours? Or shall we merely talk about the last time we went abroad?'

Wanting to kick him, but determined to take his suggestions at face value, Willow asked him everything else she wanted to know about the tracking down of killers through psychological assessment. Unfortunately she learned nothing that gave her any clues.

When they had finished their fish, Willow declined both pudding and coffee and insisted on paying half the bill. Gracefully accepting her contribution, Michael asked her whether he had offended her.

‘You've given me a good deal to think about,' she said accurately. ‘It would be pleasant to continue the discussion, but I've too much work waiting.' She stood up, collected her bag and held out her hand. ‘I've enjoyed our various talks,' she said, shaking his hand.

‘So have I,' he said, holding on to her hand for longer than necessary. Willow could feel it sweating slightly. ‘I hope that we can have more – and that if you need any more copy for your detective story you will ring me. Here's my extension number,' said Michael, offering her a small piece of paper. Willow took it, thanked him and left the restaurant without reciprocating.