Festering Lilies (3 page)

‘Really, PUS, I must say that I am surprised at this attack. It is the policy of the Civil Service to allow part-time employment. I have family responsibilities that I cannot delegate: as you well know, after my mother's death there was no one but me to look after my Aunt Agatha, and she is far too old and frail to be left alone entirely. You know perfectly well that I have to spend half the week with her. And as far as I am aware I do all the work that is necessary in the other three days that I spend here. If you can tell me of anything that is being skimped or ignored, please do so and I shall attend to it.'

Shifting uncomfortably under her direct gaze, he muttered something vague about the inconvenience of not being able to consult her on Mondays and Fridays. But there was nothing specific about which he could reasonably complain. He merely resented the fact of her partial freedom from their shared treadmill and had chosen a moment when she was likely to be weak to exercise his bitterness. She left his office at last, despising him even more than usual.

When she got back to her own room, Roger greeted her with the pleasing intelligence that she would be required by the chief investigating policeman first thing the following morning.

‘He's using the ground-floor conference room, Miss King, and they say he's a real tartar. But not to worry, the under secretary (estabs) is sitting in on all the interrogations to make sure of fair play.'

This latest manifestation of Roger's insatiable desire for drama helped to restore Willow's equilibrium and it was with a tolerant smile that she thanked him for the message, assured him that she would obey the police summons and recommended that he suck medicated pastilles for his sore throat and put witch hazel on his excoriated face. It was left to black-haired Barbara to plant a dart of anxiety in their cool boss.

‘Come off it, Roger. Willow's got no need to fret herself: the poor min. is known to have died yesterday evening between seven and nine and Willow's got an alibi for all last night – unlike the rest of us.'

Willow left the office soon after seven with a briefcase full of work and went home to the first-floor flat in Abbeville Road that she had bought ten years earlier. Opening her front door, she inhaled the familiar smell of damp and mothballs and wondered whether she ought not to increase her mortgage and get somewhere better, or perhaps even have the whole flat properly decorated. At first it had been all she could afford and then, just as her income would have been increased on promotion, she had taken her momentous decision to work part-time and had had to adjust to a half salary.

Without the proceeds of her parents' exiguous life insurance policy and the sale of their house in Newcastle, she would not have been able to take the risk at all and would never have discovered her peculiar talents. Dumping her laden plastic briefcase on the sturdy but ugly oak table in the middle of the living room, she took off her overcoat and shivered in the dank coldness of the flat. She quickly lit the sputtering gas fire and then retreated to the kitchen to make herself a mug of instant coffee. A drink might have been more calming, she thought, remembering the bottles of supermarket whisky, gin, indifferent sherry, and Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon at the dining end of the room, but she craved warmth. She took the thick pottery mug of coffee to the sofa and sat down, avoiding the broken spring that could be so uncomfortable, and tried to pull herself together.

The knowledge of Algy's death lay like a spiked weight at the back of her mind and its possible ramifications filled the rest. Reminding herself once again that she had no reason to fear the police, that she was safe in her self-sufficiency and could deal with anything that cropped up, Willow still could not control her uncharacteristic nervousness. For the first time in years she felt young and vulnerable and actually wanted someone else to advise her. Despising her mood, telling herself to brace up, Willow finished her coffee, put on her spectacles again and went to the kitchen to cook four fish fingers and about half a pound of frozen broad beans. After supper she settled down to the work she had brought home and tried not to give another thought to the murder or her looming interview with the police.

The following morning, after an indifferent night's sleep broken by all kinds of unpleasant dreams that dissolved as soon as she woke, Willow walked into her interrogation with her chin up and her dark red hair tightly drawn away from her freckled white face. The first person she saw was the establishments officer, Michael Englewood, to whom she had told that first, crucial lie about her Aunt Agatha.

If only his sense of duty had not insisted that he support his colleagues during their interrogations, Willow would not have been faced with her horrible dilemma: to tell the truth at last and be unveiled in front of him and the whole of the department for what she was; or to lie once again. She would have had no hesitation in taking the second course if only the police had not been involved, but their presence would turn expedient untruth into a crime. Willow could feel waves of wholly unjust hostility to poor Mr Englewood rising in her mind as he stood up to greet her, a questioning look on his tired, pleasant face.

Knowing that her dilemma was not his fault, and that he deserved all her gratitude for having supported her against the PUS in her determination to work part-time, Willow made herself smile at him. He smiled back, with all the shy kindness she had grown to expect from him.

There were plenty of high flyers who despised Michael Englewood for his fussiness, his old-fashioned clothes and his apparent satisfaction with the uninfluential backwater into which his career had taken him; but he was well enough liked by the majority of the DOAP staff. Only his secretaries seemed neither to despise nor to like him, and Willow had occasionally wondered why so many demanded to be transferred after a few months.

‘This is Miss Willow King,' he said to a man in plain clothes, who was seated at the large oval conference table, reading a file. Then Englewood turned back to smile at her again. ‘Willow, Inspector Worth, who is in charge of the investigation into the minister's death.'

‘Are you all right, Michael?' she asked, ignoring the police officer in a forlorn attempt to gain time in which to decide what line to take. ‘You sound horribly hoarse. Is it this beastly cold that's been going the rounds?'

‘Presumably. I'm almost beginning to believe in that journalistic fantasy of sick-building syndrome. We never seem to be free of bugs and viruses here,' he answered, fingering the paisley silk cravat that he occasionally affected in winter instead of a tie.

The policeman coughed irritably, as though impatient at the waste of time, and Willow turned towards him at last. She was struck by the lively intelligence in his dark eyes. In a moment's frivolity, she even admired his rugged handsomeness and exotically broken nose, but was quickly sobered as he said:

‘Morning, Miss King. Now I haven't much time, and so I'd be grateful if you'd tell me exactly where you were the day before yesterday between the end of the working day and, say, ten-thirty.'

Carefully avoiding any anxious glances at Englewood, Willow braced herself. Before she could even speak, she heard his voice warm with indignation, or even anger. Taking a quick look at him, she was surprised to see his face reddening and his mouth stretched tight over his teeth.

‘As I've already told you, Inspector, Miss King does not work on Mondays or Fridays and has spent every single Monday night for the past eight years in Suffolk caring for an invalid relative,' he said, coughed and took a tin of blackcurrant suckers from his jacket pocket.

‘I'd rather Miss King answered for herself, Sir,' said the policeman coldly in a voice that seemed to have had every nuance of accent or colour scoured away from it, ‘and I'm sure it would be better for your throat if you talked as little as possible.'

Englewood's furious intervention put an end to the last of Willow's doubts and she spoke with as little hesitation as she had when she first invented her aunt.

‘Mr Englewood is quite right, Inspector Worth. I was in Suffolk, with my aunt, Miss Agatha Carlyle. She was my mother's sister.'

Inspector Worth's head snapped up at that piece of elaboration and Willow realised that she had made an idiotic mistake. That was just the kind of extra detail that would sound false and might lead him to check-up on her alibi. She had decided to bank on the fact that with two thousand or more people working at DOAP, the police were highly unlikely to test anyone's whereabouts until they were a little further into their investigation. And she was quite confident that when that had happened they would have no suspicions of her and therefore no need to test her story.

‘I see,' he said coldly. ‘Telephone number?'

‘I'm afraid she's not on the telephone,' said Willow, relieved to have something truthful to say.

‘Right. Thank you, Miss King. Leave the address with my sergeant please. He's in the next-door office.'

Willow just managed to stop herself asking ‘Is that all?', substituted, ‘Not at all', and left the room, wondering whether she had made an almighty fool of herself. She also carefully forgot to find the sergeant.

The idea of running into any interested colleagues bothered her and so she made for the stairs that no one used except during fire practices or when the lifts were out of order. As she walked slowly up the stairs, idly disliking the grey-green lino that covered them, she comforted herself with the fact that she could always come clean about her real alibi if the police turned tiresome and forced her to throw away her carefully designed and preserved disguise.

It was not until she had reached the sixth floor and was already panting a little that she remembered that there was a crime called ‘wasting police time'. There was no doubt that, if he were a vindictive man, the inspector could have her prosecuted for that – if for nothing worse – if he bothered to check her alibi. This is where lying gets you, she said to herself grimly as she realised that having the entire story coming out in court would be fifty times worse than confessing it at the first possible opportunity, even in front of the establishments officer. She would be disgraced; she would probably have to resign from DOAP in any case. But infinitely worse, she would look the greatest fool of all time.

By the time she had climbed the next two flights of stairs she had cudgelled her mind back into rationality and decided that she would just have to work out for herself who had murdered Algernon Endelsham. Then if the police were absurd enough to want to prosecute her, she could try to buy them off with the solution to their mystery.

Willow had infinite faith in her own brains – for her childhood and much of her early adulthood, they were all she had had to give her any sense of identity or self-worth – and, after all, she had known Algy as well as anyone in the department, and far better than any of the police. It also occurred to her that to concentrate on the intellectual problem of who it was who had beaten Algy's brains out might distract her from the miserable reality of his death.

Besides, it would be rather interesting, she thought. With the finance committee under control, her staff reasonably well trained and the rest of her life working beautifully, Willow had been feeling rather short of challenge. To go about the department ferreting out secrets and finding the truth about the murdered minister might give her mind some much-needed testing, and the results could be useful. That the challenge she had chosen might become dangerous or distasteful never occurred to her.

There was a slight smile on her unpainted lips when she walked up to Roger's desk and the crispness was back in her voice as she inquired of him whether he had finished typing out the redrafted version of her part of the new White Paper or whether his cold was so bad that he was still unable to produce a full day's work.

‘Er, no, no I haven't quite finished actually, Miss King. It's really been so upsetting, what with the minister's death and the police and all the things everyone's saying,' he said, blushing slightly. ‘I got waylaid downstairs when I took your photocopying down, and had to listen to all the latest theories.'

The scars on his right cheek were turning crusty as they healed and looked fiercely itchy. Willow almost said something sympathetic about them, but then decided not to embarrass either herself or Roger. She was also tempted to comment on his infuriating dilatoriness, but, not wishing to provoke one of his all-too-frequent outbursts of personality, she merely asked him to do his best and walked into her own office, calling Barbara to follow her.

They got through the piles of work on Willow's desk in record time and Barbara raised various problems that had arisen during her chief's absence. Willow dealt with them with all her customary efficiency and Barbara was moved to say:

‘I am glad that you're all right, Willow.… Not letting it all get to you.'

It was the first really personal remark the girl had ever dared to address to her assistant secretary, and Willow was a little repelled by the hint of intimacy between them.

‘Thank you, Barbara,' she said, trying to concentrate on her assistant's efficiency and ignore her distaste. ‘But what is “it all”? The minister's death is horribly distressing, but everyone here has to deal with that.'

The 22-year-old trainee flushed and scraped the carpet with her shoe like a child in her headmistress's study. Willow was amused to find her so much less sophisticated than she had always appeared. ‘Come on, Barbara, out with it. You've started, so I really think you ought to finish.'

They both laughed at that and the momentary amusement seemed to give Barbara the courage to amplify her earlier remarks.

‘Well, it's just that everyone seems to think… They all know about you and the minister, you see, and they're saying…'