Festering Lilies (4 page)

‘That he threw me over and I killed him, you mean?' said Willow, who had never even considered the possibility that anyone might suspect her until that moment. Her tone of dry amusement made Barbara look at her directly for the first time since they had stopped working.

‘Well, yes actually. But don't you mind?'

Willow, who normally thought about her own emotions as little as it was possible to do, considered for a moment or two.

‘Yes, in fact I do. It's such an insult, for one thing, and not only to me.'

‘The minister, too, you mean?' Barbara suggested doubtfully.

‘No, Barbara,' said Willow more coldly. ‘It suggests that they think that all single women in this office – or for that matter in the whole of the Civil Service – are hanging about hoping for some man to dignify them by selecting them for his own pleasure. Idiotic! I can imagine – just – some men thinking it, or the sort of idle women who spend all day in hairdressers' shops reading selfishness-inducing magazines, but intelligent women like the ones who work here? It makes me feel ashamed of them.'

‘I thought you were going to say that the insult lay in their assumption that you would ever allow your emotions to overrule your judgment,' said Barbara, blushing because she, too, was guilty of pining for a particular man to dignify her existence by so selecting her.

‘That too. But Barbara, since we're wasting time gossiping, tell me: am I the only suspect they've dug up? Or are there other victims of their overheated fantasy?'

‘It did occur to someone in the canteen yesterday that perhaps the permanent secretary had been sneered at once too often and decided to act instead of sulking for once, but that only raised a laugh. Everyone knows he's far too much of a physical coward to hit anyone, let alone a man six inches taller than himself,' answered Barbara.

Willow got out of her chair and prowled about her office, trying to excise the sudden, unexpected sympathy that had sprung into her mind. She had never expected to feel remotely sympathetic towards the PUS, but she did experience a sickening lurch of fellow-feeling as she realised that the pair of them must be equally despised and talked over by the denizens of DOAP. Reminding herself of the maxim ‘It's all good copy', which had got her through the embarrassing days of Algy's blatant courtship, Willow turned back to her subordinate.

‘I overheard something in the canteen, too, last week,' she said. Barbara, clearly bothered about what Willow was going to say, fiddled with the red combs that held her dark hair in place. One fell out and, slipping from her fingers, dropped on the floor. The girl grovelled after it and when she stood up again made an enormous fuss about putting it back. Willow watched with a hint of amusement in her eyes.

‘A bunch of messengers were talking their usual smut and making jokes about the minister's, er…sexual preferences. Was it true, do you know?' she asked.

Barbara, with the relief showing so obviously in her stance and expression that Willow wondered what they had been saying in the canteen about her, answered slowly:

‘Well, I suppose it could be, Willow, but a man like that… I mean, with the kind of womanising reputation that Algy Endelsham had: do you really think it's likely?'

‘Not very perhaps,' answered Willow, as though carefully considering, ‘but anyone who displays his conquests so flagrantly might well be hiding something, don't you think? And despite Wolfenden and all that, I imagine a politician could still be blackmailed.…'

‘But hardly murdered. In any case, I'd have thought you of all people had ample evidence to refute such a suggestion.' Barbara's almost cheeky tone pulled Willow up short, and she realised how sensible had been her previously constant determination never to gossip with her staff or take any interest in the extra-curricular goings-on of the department. Retreating into the personality she had heard described more than once as ‘the terrifying Willow King', she dismissed her AT and settled down to work.

By the end of the day Willow had allowed herself to hear a lot

more gossip about the minister and his relations with innumerable

other members of DOAP and she no longer wondered why it was that some of her staff got through so little work in their entire weeks in the office. She had talked to most of the people she had ever worked with, and heard views ranging from the least uncomfortable one that the minister had been mugged by a stranger to perhaps the most horrible: that he was being blackmailed, had gone to hand over the money to his blackmailer, decided to take the ‘publish and be damned'line and been beaten to death.

Willow heard that unpleasant idea from a long-serving higher executive officer in the registration department, whom she had met coming out of the canteen after lunch.

‘Really, Thomas,' she said, ‘you can't believe that. It's about as likely as believing the min. to have been a blackmailer himself.'

‘Don't be absurd,' said Thomas. ‘Admirable Algy needing to blackmail anyone? It's a risible idea.'

‘Oh, I don't know,' said Willow, quickly trying to imagine a situation – however absurd – in which a minister might have been in a position to blackmail one of his Civil Servants. ‘Think,' she went on in an exaggerated story-teller's voice, ‘the minister discovered that a group of you lot in Registry were getting up to something quite frightful and he tried to extort money out of you as the price of his silence.'

‘All right, all right, Willow,' said the HEO almost laughing, despite his patent astonishment at her unlikely flippancy. ‘I agree that the whole idea of blackmail is absurd. Hello, Albert,' he went on in a voice in which surprise had quite displaced amusement. ‘Did you want to speak to me or to Miss King?'

Once more Willow found herself faced with the looming hostility of the minister's driver.

‘Neither, Sir,' said the chauffeur, stepping reluctantly out of their path and directing at Willow a look of such contempt that she almost took a step backwards.

Having parted from the executive officer, Willow went slowly back to her own office, wondering whether Albert's obvious loathing had been caused by her apparent trivialising of the minister's death. The driver had clearly overheard every word of her sarcastically intended scenario. She could think of nothing else that could have elicited such contempt from him. Shrugging off the uncomfortable feeling, she settled down to work again and did not relax her concentration until the end of the day.

Sitting back in her chair a little after six o'clock, she examined all the theories she had heard that day and decided that none was completely convincing, although several had elements of plausibility. Thinking over the day, she was slightly appalled to realise how much time she had wasted in chatter and speculation. For Willow, unlike many of her colleagues and subordinates, the office had always been a place for work rather than entertainment and substitute life, and consequently she had done almost as much work in her three-day week as they had done in five.

It occurred to her as she was locking away her confidential papers and facing another solitary evening's work in Abbeville Road that it might be useful to see the place where Algy had actually died. She was not silly enough to expect to find any physical clues that the police might have missed, but she did think that following the steps of aggressor and victim might give her some useful ideas.

Collecting her grey mackintosh from the curly bentwood coatstand by the door, Willow left her office. As usual she was among the last to go, apart from the few young high-flyers who believed that the field-marshal's batons they carried in their knapsacks would be more obvious to their superiors the longer they spent in the office. But just as she reached the front door, she encountered the establishments officer buttoning up his reversible coat with the mackintosh side outwards.

‘Evening, Willow,' he said, looking slightly startled at the sight of her. He tucked the ends of a thick scarf into the neck of his coat. ‘Bitterly cold, isn't it?'

‘Good evening, Michael. Yes, isn't it foul? You're leaving rather late, aren't you?'

‘It'll be the first time for ages that I haven't caught the six-fifteen from Waterloo,' he agreed, adding in what she thought quite unnecessary detail, ‘I've taken that train every evening for nearly twenty years. But I've been sitting in with the inspector, listening to apparently irrelevant alibis all day. He's an impressive worker, I can tell you – and incredibly patient.'

‘Poor you,' said Willow. ‘But why patient?'

Englewood's face twisted into a curious self-deprecating grimace.

‘He never even sounded sharp, let alone lost his temper, despite having to listen to hours of the most idiotic, giggly excuses, alibis and coy questions,' he said with an impatience she had never heard from him before.

‘Goodness, Michael,' said Willow, rather entertained to hear him sounding quite different from the weary, kindly man she had always thought him, ‘you sound positively vitriolic.'

To her surprise, his face reddened once more and his hard-looking moustache quivered. With a visible effort, he controlled himself and spoke in a voice that was almost as mild as usual:

‘Oh, but surely you've heard of my appalling temper.'

‘Certainly not,' said Willow, shivering a little in the bitter cold, but too interested to cut the encounter short. ‘But as you know, I never encourage my staff to gossip to me.'

‘I know, and that's one of the many things I've always admired in you, my dear Willow,' he said, sounding quite normal again. ‘But I have very little tolerance for the kind of giggling stupidity and malicious tittle tattle in which the department‘s typists seem to specialise. But never mind that: as I was saying, Inspector Worth put up with it all admirably. Although,' he added with a sly smile, ‘I could see how much he appreciated your incisiveness and good sense.'

‘I noticed that it was abominably stuffy in that room even when I was there this morning; you must have the most frightful headache as well as your cold,' said Willow, changing the subject. For some reason she did not want to talk about the policeman's possible reaction to her and her alibi, and she was beginning to find Michael Englewood's unprecedented compliments rather repellent.

He smiled ruefully: ‘In fact, I have; but you're the first person to have noticed, Willow. You are an extraordinarily perceptive woman.'

‘Well I dare say the walk to the tube will clear it,' she answered hastily. Algy's death seemed to have plunged her into more personal contact than she had ever allowed before. She did not like it at all and had no intention of letting herself get on to intimate – or even personal – terms with Michael Englewood.

‘Are you going that way, too?' asked Englewood.

‘No, I have to go to Peter Jones – late night shopping tonight,' she said in ill-considered excuse. ‘I thought I'd walk across the Common and pick up a 137 at the top of Cedar's Road.'

For a moment she thought that he was going to protest and remind her that the bus also stopped outside Clapham Common tube station, but after a second or two he shrugged, wished her good night and strode away. Willow stood, looking after him and wondering what it was that he had so nearly said. Neither of them was very good at personal contact and he had probably just been as uncomfortable with their unusual intimacy as she had been. Perhaps that was why his compliments had been so unpleasant, she thought. Willow rather wished that she had brought up the subject of the minister's driver's violent rudeness to her and ensured that their conversation had been confined to matters of DOAP's personnel. She tightened the belt of her chain-store mackintosh and turned towards the common.

Walking past the rows of ethnic restaurants, sleazy-looking secondhand shops, and car-breakers'yards, Willow found it harder and harder to imagine Algy Endelsham taking this walk, but when she reached the common itself and skirted the edge of the first pond, she began to wonder whether he had simply wanted to clear his head after a day of tiresome meetings.

The sound of the water, whipped up by the wind into slapping wavelets, the relative freshness of the air and the feeling of space all around were extraordinarily relaxing. The moon was nearly full and, whenever the clouds parted, its pale-grey light fought with the boiled-sweet glare of the orange street lights.

Willow walked quite briskly along the main path towards the bandstand, where she intended to turn right, almost enjoying herself. She was timing the expedition and reckoned that she would reach the place of Algy's death in about four minutes at the pace she had chosen. Passing the bandstand, she noticed various men standing about: some were alone, others chatting in pairs or groups. It seemed to Willow to be a curious place to hang about in the freezing dark of a November evening. The men ignored her completely and she them as she plunged off the path on to the soggy grass.

After two minutes'walk Willow found herself in thick darkness. She would never have imagined that the street lamps shed such a small area of light. She could still see the orange blocks of light, of course, but they did not affect the darkness that enveloped her. It dawned on her that she was not going to discover anything without light and she wondered why she had never thought to bring a torch. She thought of turning back, but since she had never left a task unfinished in her life she walked on, increasingly uncomfortable in both her mind and her cold, wet feet. The lights on the far side of the common glowed seductively, and Willow kept her eyes on them, determined not to give way to her absurd fears.

Clinging to rationality, she told herself that it was curious how a place, which only an instant before had seemed perfectly safe and even pleasant, should for so little cause have taken on an air of desperate menace. Sounds that she had not even noticed before seemed sinister: the rustling of shrubs, the creaking of the chains of swings in the distant playground, steps in the distance, all made her start. The only noise that seemed to carry any comfort with it was the steady throaty rumble of the traffic along the south and north sides of the common.