Festering Lilies (15 page)

He must have been taking a bit of a risk that Algy would sue, Willow thought, although the articles that had appeared before his death had been much less explicit that the latest one; and yet would a man like Algy have bothered to take any kind of legal action? There must have been so many women who could have given him a testimonial of bedworthiness that he might have decided to brush off the whole campaign as part of the occupational hazard of public life; and presumably Gripper had never mentioned anything so crude as rent boys until his enemy was dead and outside the scope of the libel laws.

What a shit the man must be, said Willow to herself, draining her coffee. He couldn't keep his wife happy and so he had to resort to tactics like that to smear the character of the man she preferred. What else might Gripper do to assert his own superiority?

Remembering the heavy handsomeness of the florid man who had accosted her, Willow thought that if she had been Amanda Gripper, she would have chosen Algy over Gripper every time, even if she had discovered Algy's tendency to bully and mock the weak.

Willow read her way through the whole of the
Daily Mercury
and when she had finished even the sports pages at the back, she dropped the paper on to the table and retreated to the ladies'room to wash her hands. Seldom had she felt so grubby. The whole tenor of the paper was a kind of sanctimonious delight in all the pathetic squalor of human folly. As she rinsed the soap off her fingers, Willow wondered what kind of person made up its immense readership: they must be people of so little confidence or achievement that their only pleasure could be in
Schadenfreude.
What hope was there for a world where people felt like that? she wondered.

Going to bed that night, Willow promised herself that she would work seriously on her novel for the whole of Sunday. Important though it was for her to discover the identity of Algy's murderer before she returned to DOAP and the investigations of Inspector Worth the following Tuesday, it was also important for her to fulfil her contract and get the current novel finished by the end of December. She had already been paid a third of the generous advance and she had no intention of welching on the deal.

The Sunday newspapers thudding through her specially wide letter box as she was drinking her coffee the next morning heralded a tempting distraction, and Willow had to struggle hard with herself not to succumb. But she succeeded, finished the coffee and retreated to her writing room without even picking up the papers from the hall. Her work went reasonably well and, indeed, she found that the short break had helped her to sort out a particularly knotty problem with one of her characters. By two-thirty, she realised that she was both hungry and very tired, and decided that she deserved an interval for lunch.

She found a mixture of delicacies in the fridge and picnicked on them happily in the kitchen with the newspapers spread out on the big table in front of her. Having done nearly six hours' real work, she felt that she could allow herself to return to the subject that had threatened to take over her mind whenever her concentration had flagged. Ignoring the magazines and book reviews (which she usually read first), she concentrated on any sections that might contain anything about Algy. There were plenty of relevant articles and she read every word conscientiously.

By the time she had finished her lunch she had confirmation of much of the DOAP chatter: that Algy had died between six and nine o'clock the previous Monday from blows to his head; that his body had been found soon after ten o'clock that night in the middle of Clapham Common; that there was no sign of a weapon by the body and so far no physical evidence of his attacker.

There was also an article in each of three papers about the incident in the Clapham Junction pub, but none of them suggested any connection between that and the murder. Each piece ended with the same words the
Daily Mercury
had used, that ‘a man is helping the police with their enquiries', but the Sunday newspapers made no suggestion that the enquiries had to do with anything except the criminal damage to the pub and the various charges of assault against its patrons.

Even so, having read to the end of the last article, Willow retrieved her list of motives and added under the heading ‘Other', vigilante killing. As she wrote, she wondered whether there were any law under which Gripper could be indicted if the gay-bashers did turn out to have murdered Algy. Without his decoy innuendo, no one in the world would have thought that Algy was a homosexual.

Willow also wondered whether she would dare to talk to Roger about the vigilantes. There was no doubt that he might be able to throw some very useful light on the murky subject, but Willow did not know whether she had the moral courage to ask for it. Having sedulously avoided any intimacies with her staff for years, she could hardly justify cross-examining Roger about his private life.

But still, she told herself, there was little point in worrying about that until she returned to DOAP on Tuesday. There were plenty of other things to occupy her mind; not the least of which was the fact that she was half-way through her allotted time away from DOAP and had discovered nothing of any consequence. She looked down again at the list of possible motives.

After a few moments'thought, she added to the ‘Other'column, ‘Political assassination?', and then crossed it out; it really did not seem possible. So far the only plausible motives she had accumulated were Gripper's rage at his wife's infidelity, the unknown brother's desire for any inheritance he might gain from Algy's death, and the vengeance of the vigilantes. Willow found that the least convincing, despite (or perhaps because of) Gripper's having seized on it.

Before she could work out precisely why she was not disposed to believe it, the telephone bell interrupted her. Assuming that it would be Richard demanding tender-loving-care, she almost left her machine to answer, but in the end did pick up-her receiver and repeated her telephone number. A vaguely familiar male voice said:

‘Might I speak to Miss Cressida Woodruffe?'

‘This is she,' said Willow properly.

‘Ah, good. Hello, Cressida; Anthony Gnatche here.'

‘How nice to hear from you,' said Willow with more sincerity than she would have expected when she had last spoken to him. Since then her opinion of him had risen considerably. Stupid he might be, but he had diagnosed the state of his young step-sister's heart and been determined that it should not be exploited by the experienced charm of his old school friend.

‘I was wondering whether I could tempt you out for some dinner, tomorrow evening,' he said. ‘Emma told me how very kind you were to her yesterday.'

‘It was a pleasure,' said Willow warmly. ‘She's a sweet girl.'

‘Well I think so, too,' said Gnatche. ‘I must confess that my invitation has a slight ulterior motive.'

‘Oh?' said Willow more coolly.

‘Yes, I'm worried about Emma and I wanted to ask your advice. Are you free?'

‘In fact I am,' she said. ‘Shall we meet somewhere?'

‘No, I'll come and pick you up, at – what? – about eight?'

‘Could we make it seven-thirty? I like to get early to bed on Mondays,' said Willow, making it quite clear that she was accepting only the offer of dinner. Gnatche agreed and wrote down her address.

Willow put down the receiver, made herself a cup of black coffee and returned to the newspapers. The only other relevant article was a profile of Inspector Thomas Worth, which had been written by the paper's defence correspondent. Willow was slightly surprised by that: after all, an inspector was not particularly senior, and it seemed strange that he should have so much coverage. But when she had read the article, she understood.

Thomas Worth had, it seemed, been an officer in the SAS, and something of a hero. The profile did not go into any great detail about his army service or the decorations he had won, which did not surprise Willow. Journalists like the defence correspondent would need to keep their official sources sweet, and the SAS of all regiments would dislike any precise accounts of their officers and actions to be published. Where the detail came was in the accounts of his police career.

According to the article, Inspector Worth was greatly disliked by some of his colleagues and junior officers, not least for his insistence that the laws designed to protect the country's citizens applied as much to the villains in their charge as to the law-abiding public. They also disliked the fact that he had had a public-school education and ‘talked posh'. When Willow read that, she thought that she understood why his voice had sounded so colourless: he must have tried desperately to remove its elitist accent and intonation without going so far as to pretend to regional vowel sounds and glottal stops.

By the time she had finished the profile, Willow had the strong impression that the journalist felt that Worth ought to have been promoted rather higher than inspector, and that he was given all the thoroughly unpopular cases. There was even a delicately masked suggestion that the Met did not believe Algy's murderer would ever be found, because of the complete lack of physical clues and witnesses, and that Worth had been lumbered with the apparently impossible task to teach him a lesson.

With rather less antagonism in her mind than usual, Willow left the subject of the inspector and returned to work on her novel. When she eventually let herself decide that she had done enough for the day, she was so tired that she had no energy left for anybody's problems, least of all his. Forgetting them, her own, Emma Gnatche's and everyone else's, Willow had a deep, hot bath, dined in her dressing gown off scrambled eggs, mineral water and marrons glacés, and watched an old romantic film on the television.

Just before she went to sleep, she found enough energy to scribble a list of questions she wanted to ask various people the following day, in case she lost another opportunity. She needed to ask Nan Hambalt, the publicity manager of her publisher, about the Grippers; she had to find out where Algy's brother lived and either talk to him or to people who knew him and discover at least whether he had had any expectations of an inheritance from Algy; and on Tuesday morning, she would have to pluck up enough courage to ask Roger whether the
Daily Mercury's
hints about the minister's sexuality had any basis in fact, and whether he knew anything about the vigilantes.

Her list written, she laid down both pen and paper and switched off the lamp by her bedhead. Turning over, so that her face lay in the softness of the goose-down pillows, she remembered that there was still nothing substantial in the column headed ‘Fear'on her list of possible motives. Before she could tease her weary mind even into speculation, she was engulfed in sleep.

The following morning, bathed, dressed and breakfasted, she rang up Nan Hambalt to put in train some enquiries about Mr and Mrs Gripper. The questions were disguised in a general request for information about gossip columns, explained by Willow's plans for a new book set in the fervid world of the tabloid press. An amused chuckle came down the telephone.

‘Oh you could have such fun with that,' said the publicity manager. ‘I have a couple of friends who might be useful. One works on the
Evening Standard
and the other on “Gripper's Gripes”: would you like me to set up a meeting with them?'

‘That would be terrific, Nan, if you don't mind? “Gripper's Gripes”, what a superb name for his outpourings! I'd love to meet someone who knows all the ins and outs of that column.'

‘Isn't it good? Jane once told me that that's what they call it on the paper. Look, I'll give her a ring and find out when she's free – is lunch or dinner better for you, Cressida?'

‘Dinner, really, and any night between Thursday and Monday. If I'm not here when you ring back, leave a message on the machine or with Mrs Rusham. Okay?'

‘Sure. How's the book?'

Willow answered politely but soon managed to extricate herself from the conversation and put down the receiver. Unable to think of any other way of finding out about the Grippers that would not involve coming face to face with him once again, Willow realised a little bitterly that she would have to leave that part of the investigation until Nan produced her friend.

She turned instead to one of the other parts of her investigation: the possible existence of corruption in the department. At first sight the proposition seemed fairly unattractive, because it was hard to see how anyone could run any lucrative scam from so dreary an organisation. At that thought Willow told herself that she was thinking far too much as Cressida Woodruffe. The assistant secretary (finance) of the Department of Old Age Pensions ought not to be so naive. Billions of pounds were spent each year on pensions for the country's elderly: not enough, she believed, but nevertheless millions. There must be ways in which some of those millions could be diverted into the pockets of a clever swindler.

Unfortunately all the swindles that occurred to Willow were on a pathetically small scale, which might get their perpetrators sacked but would never result in criminal prosecution, and she could not imagine that anyone would kill to avoid being sacked. In any case, Algy himself would be quite uninterested in anything so paltry.

Willow's main difficulty in finding a possible source of major corruption was that if any pension were to be diverted from its intended recipient, that person would rightly set up such a squeal of protest that it would be found out at once.

‘Unless,' she said aloud, wondering at her own absurd slowness of brain, ‘the pensioner was no longer there to squeal.'

As she well knew from her early days at the department, when a pensioner died whoever was in charge of his or her affairs was bound to report the death and return the pension book to the department. Occasionally if the department had any reason to believe that the pensioner had died (if no one had drawn the money for some time, for example), a form would be sent to the pensioner's last known address asking for confirmation.