Poison Flowers (29 page)

At that moment Willow gave up any attempt to like Miranda Bruterley.

‘Well, never mind; it was a long time ago. Presumably your husband shared your views?' said Willow.

‘Jim? Oh yes, poor old Titch had rather a passion for him, you see, just like everyone else in our year, and she did tend to follow him about a bit and insisted on inviting him to things in the holidays. In the end,' her voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper, ‘he had to write her a letter. Our group heard about it, and we did feel a bit sorry for her then.'

‘Really?' Willow hoped that her one word did not sound quite as antagonistic as she felt.

‘Yes,' said Miranda. ‘It was a very cruel one, but it did the trick. She never spoke to him again. I say, what did happen to Titch in the end?'

‘She has become a very successful patent agent – earning a great deal of money,' said Willow with enormous pleasure, ‘and is about to get married to a kind and very intelligent man.'

‘Golly! How unlikely. Still I am glad, especially about the money,' said Miranda. ‘It just goes to show, doesn't it?'

‘And,' said Willow, yielding to temptation, ‘she's not in the least fat now, has a markedly good complexion and dresses very well.'

‘Perhaps it would have been better for us all if she had managed to get Jim,' said Miranda. Willow remembered that the woman had just lost her husband and deserved sympathy for that, whatever her values and views on other women.

‘I do feel for you,' said Willow. ‘I hope that his partners are helpful.'

‘Oh yes. John Swaffield is being absolutely sweet.' Onto Miranda's pretty tear-stained face there slid a secret smile. ‘You could stay and meet him if you like. He always drops in around four – before evening surgery – to see how I am.'

‘I'd better not,' said Willow. ‘I've taken up far too much of your time. But can I ask you something else before I go?'

‘What's that?'

‘Not to tell anyone about my idea that your husband's death might be connected with Simon Titchmell's? I really don't want to cause any fuss or persuade the police into asking any more questions. You've been bothered enough – and so has Caroline.'

‘All right. But can I tell John? I tell him everything; I really do. He keeps me going,' said Miranda with a wistful little smile on her swollen lips.

‘I expect he'll understand the need for discretion to stop you being bothered any more,' said Willow. Miranda nodded.

‘Well I must go. Thank you for being so frank. If you do think of anything that might have connected the two of them, will you give me a ring or drop me a note? Here's my address.' Willow scribbled it on a page from her notebook and gave it to the reluctant Miranda. She accepted it with another shrug and escorted Willow out of the room.

As they walked through the hall, Willow stopped in front of a painting that looked like a Stubbs.

‘This is lovely,' she said, turning to smile at Miranda.

‘Yes, isn't it? It was one of Jim's better buys. Luckily the beastly burglars weren't interested in that sort of thing.'

‘Oh, have you been burgled?' asked Willow, delighted that the subject had introduced itself. ‘I was quite recently. It's vile, isn't it?'

‘Horrid!' said Miranda. ‘And this was worse than usual.'

‘Really?' said Willow picking her coat up off the chair where she had left it. ‘What happened? You weren't here when they broke in, were you?'

‘Oh, no, thank God! But after the last one the insurance company had insisted that we have an alarm installed,' said Miranda and then put her index finger in her mouth and worried at the edge of the nail with her teeth. ‘Jim was absolutely livid with me, but I had to tell him …' Her voice broke off. Willow thought that she could hear both resentment and exculpation in it.

‘After all,' said Miranda, ‘I'd only just popped out to collect the children from school. I'd sort of forgotten that it was Maria's day off.'

‘And you didn't set the alarm?' suggested Willow.

Miranda nodded.

‘It was foul of Jim to be so unkind. And so bloody unfair! After all, I told him that I'd pay for the broken window and replace everything that had been stolen. It wasn't going to cost him anything.' Her eyes filled with tears again and Willow felt some sympathy for her once more. Bruterley really did sound as though he had enjoyed tyrannising his wife. Perhaps, Willow thought, he had minded the fact that she was so much richer than he and was trying to get his own back. She also began to wonder whether perhaps Miranda's fury at the memorial service was directed more towards her dead husband than his killer.

‘And they didn't come back again, the burglars?' Willow asked, hoping to discover an unreported break-in when the whisky might have been poisoned. ‘When you were away?'

‘Not as far as I know,' she said drearily. Willow thought that she ought to go, but before she said goodbye finally, she had one more question to ask.

‘At the funeral I talked quite a lot to Andrew Salcott. He …' Miranda made a face. ‘Don't you like him?'

‘Not really. He was one of those coarse, rugger-playing medical students and he's never grown out of it. Although in fact it was always mountaineering rather than rugger. But he's so … huge and obtrusive. No, I've never liked him,' said Miranda, actually shuddering.

‘He spoke very well of you,' said Willow rather mischievously. Once again Miranda smiled her secret, self-admiring smile.

‘Well he would. He kept saying he wanted to marry me, for years really. When I wouldn't he took up with Agnes to spite me. Only he was spiting himself, wasn't he? Because it hasn't worked out.'

Willow left the house. As she was pulling out from the kerb, her car was almost hit by the wing of an enormous dark blue Volvo swinging across the road as though its driver owned the whole town. Swerving and braking sharply, Willow avoided a collision and looked curiously at the driver. He was a large, dark man, perhaps about forty, looking furiously angry.

Willow reversed to the gateway and watched in her rear mirror as the Volvo took its place in the drive. By reversing further, she could see right up the drive to the front door, and she watched the Volvo driver get out of his car and enfold the grieving Miranda in his arms.

Willow drove back to London with a lot on her mind.

As soon as she reached the flat she rang Tom Worth. As usual he was out and she was forced to leave another urgent message on his answering machine. That done, she listened to her own messages. There was an almost hysterical one from Richard Crescent, who had heard of her illness from Mrs Rusham and was desperate to know if she was all right and where she was and who was looking after her.

Willow dialled his number, touched that he should mind so much but irritated too by his apparent assumption that she was incapable of looking after herself and that there was no one else in her life who might be concerned enough to care for her.

Unlike Tom Worth, Richard answered the telephone himself and Willow did her best to allay his anxieties.

‘It was only a bad oyster, Richard,' she said. ‘Terrifying at the time, but ifs all over now. Thank you for ringing. How did you know?'

‘Mrs Rusham told me.'

‘I see,' said Willow, the annoyance taking precedence over the gratitude again. ‘But why did you telephone her?'

‘Oh I didn't. She rang me in a terrible fluster because you'd disappeared and it was obvious that you had been … er …'

‘Sick,' said Willow too crudely for Richard. They talked for a few more minutes, before Richard invited her to dinner.

‘I'm sorry, Richard,' she said without much real regret, ‘but I'm dining with a doctor tonight.' She agreed to telephone him on Thursday evening when she got back from the hairdresser and then rang off. She was beginning to suspect that Mrs Rusham might not be the wholly incurious, wholly discreet paragon she had always seemed.

Trying not to think of the damage an inquisitive, talkative housekeeper could do to her double life, Willow played the rest of her telephone messages, learning that Martin, her interior designer, had ordered the materials, agreed a schedule of work with Mrs Rusham, and was ringing to alert Willow to a wonderful bureau-bookcase in a shy little shop off Bond Street. Amused as always by Martin's phraseology and pleased to be distracted from her personal relationships and her investigation alike, Willow wrote down details of the piece and the dealer and then continued playing the rest of the messages.

There were only two more. One from her poor agent, who was still desperately trying to get Willow to disgorge a synopsis for the new novel, and the other from Tom, saying that he hoped her expedition had not worn her out, that she was feeling as well as possible and explaining that he had to go out on a case that afternoon but would call her at about eight to see how she was.

Smiling a little, Willow went to have a bath before changing to go out to dinner with Andrew Salcott.

It did not have the usual calming effect. As the scent from the bath oil filled the lovely yellow-and-white room, Willow was confronted once again with her mental picture of the murderer. She wondered, feeling slightly sick, how much she had already betrayed herself. Three times already she had been been afraid that the killer had found her and each occasion had been a false alarm, but at moments like this, when she had nothing else to occupy her mind, the murderer seemed to taunt her with the ability to lie in wait for the victims and poison them probably before they were even afraid.

Willow managed to pull herself together, get out of the bath and dress in a tightly belted black skirt and a grass-green shirt made of heavy silk. She brushed out her damp hair and then took it back from her face in two wings, which she skewered with antique jet combs. With mascara brushed on her pale eyelashes, a little blusher on her cheeks and some pale apricot lipstick, she thought that her face would pass muster. A heavy gold bracelet round her right wrist and a jewelled pin instead of the top button of the shirt added the finishing touches.

The dressing and painting had soothed her enough to appear calmly at the Chelsea restaurant Salcott had suggested. He looked very closely at her as they were sitting down at their table and she wondered whether he could diagnose her state of mind.

‘You look almost as though you've been ill,' he said. Willow laughed in relief.

‘A bad oyster,' she said simply. Salcott's face cleared.

‘Poor you, that can be really unpleasant. What happened?'

‘Oh, I was disgustingly sick, passed out, was sick again and then got an ambulance. They took me to St Thomas's,' said Willow.

‘You were in good hands then,' he said. ‘Well you'd better eat very simply tonight. Shall I choose for you?'

Willow was about to inform him crisply that she was quite capable of selecting suitable food for herself when she remembered that she was going to pump him for information and so she smiled sweetly and waited while he ordered for both of them.

‘As a gastroenterologist, I am qualified,' he said with a smile that suggested he understood her first unspoken protest.

‘I hadn't realised that was your speciality,' said Willow, interested. ‘Presumably if you're doing it at Dowting's you have to teach as well as practise?'

‘Actually I'm more involved in research than in teaching,' he said. ‘Good, here's your soup. Eat up.'

Willow gave him a look from under her eyelashes that made him laugh.

‘I can tell that you must be a tyrannical father,' she began, planning to move the conversation quickly on to questions about Jim Bruterley's paternal capacities.

‘Not at all,' Salcott protested and, forestalling her questions, asked one of his own: ‘Was yours? Is that why you so dislike authority?'

‘I hadn't realised that I did,' said Willow, laying down her spoon and looking across the table at the thick-skinned, square face of her host. ‘I dislike people who have none trying to exercise it, but I don't think I resent the genuine article … much. Perhaps he was.'

‘Tell me about him,' commanded Andrew Salcott, picking up the first of his langoustines.

‘He was a scientist,' said Willow thoughtlessly, ‘at Newcastle University …'

‘Really?' said Salcott with a smile. ‘Perhaps I've met him. I go up there four times a year to lecture.'

‘I doubt it,' said Willow, aware of several dangers all at once. ‘He died many years ago.' She wanted to ask when Salcott was last in Newcastle, but did not dare. Instead, she wrenched the conversation clumsily round to the Bruterleys, hoping that he would accept that she did not want to talk of her father. For once she did not care at all whether he put that reluctance down to an Antigone complex, penis envy or any other Freudian fantasy.

‘Do you think,' she asked slowly, ‘that poor Mrs Bruterley really knew nothing of her husband's love affair? I gather that he was always rather a Don Juan.'

‘It's extraordinary what women will believe if they want to,' he said, as the waiter came to clear away their first-course plates. ‘She's pretty stupid and so it is possible.'

‘You sounded far more sympathetic about her when we talked on the train,' said Willow, really surprised by the venom in his voice. He shrugged his massive shoulders and she wondered whether he still played rugger.

‘I was in a pretty sentimental state then,' he said mildly and then added with a burst of fierce feeling, ‘and I hadn't then read a letter she's written me.' Willow raised her eyebrows instead of actually asking the question.

‘She said that Jim had left me all his books and any of his paintings that I wanted,' he said. ‘That was fine. I was just thinking it was good of her to write instead of leaving it to the lawyers when I got to the next sentence.' He paused as though to control his fury. ‘She said that since she couldn't bear the idea of seeing me would I please arrange to have the books collected and write and tell her which pictures I didn't want.'