Festering Lilies, page 25
‘What?’ exclaimed Willow, genuinely flabbergasted.
‘That’s what Albert claims,’ said Tom. ‘He says that very soon after he got the job at DOAP Algy put the proposition to him…’
‘I wonder,’ said Willow interrupting without ceremony.
‘What?’
‘Whether I was right that Albert wanted to work for Algy in order to blackmail him about Mrs Gripper. You see,’ she went on, getting more excited about the idea, ‘Albert is about as subtle as a steam-roller and he would probably have plunged straight in with his demands without waiting to find the best way of putting them. Algy, past-master as he was at manipulating people, would have seen at once that the best way of deflecting Albert would be to suggest that they’d both make more money with the pensions scam. Thick as he is, Albert would have thought that a terrific idea, and then Algy would have had him exactly where he needed him. Any more threats of exposing Algy’s private life could have been countered with the threat of exposing Albert’s fraud.… Algy would of course have ensured that there was no evidence of his involvement at all.’
‘Isn’t all that a little over-subtle?’ asked Worth, the scepticism blatant in his eyes and voice.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Willow shaking her head and trying to keep a certain admiration out of her mind. ‘Algy was subtle – and clever – and very much enjoyed having people make fools of themselves. How he must have laughed at us all!’
‘No wonder your books are so successful!’ said Worth, smiling. When Willow looked surprised, he amplified his compliment a little: ‘Somewhere in that famously cool analytical brain of yours is an excessively vivid imagination. Well, my dear, I’d better leave you to it. I’ll be in touch.’
Almost as soon as he had gone the lightness and amusement Willow had achieved as she described Algy’s possible involvement in the fraud disappeared. She was left with the guilt and regret about Roger’s involvement and her fears about Algy’s probable murderer. Telling herself that opportunity, anger, unhappiness and a certain intensity of character were not enough to prove a man’s guilt, she still could not put them out of her mind; but nor could she imagine any motive that seemed genuinely convincing.
Dredging up the remains of her self-discipline, she put the problem from her and went to bed, where, despite taking two yellow sleeping pills, she had a disturbed night. In the morning, with her head aching and her eyes feeling burnt and sore, she went straight to her writing room after breakfast and tried to write.
Not surprisingly both inspiration and professionalism failed her and she turned instead to the perennial task of tidying up the room. It was the one place in the flat where she did not allow Mrs Rusham to work, and rough paper, notes, typescripts and proofs tended to pile up unmanageably.
The sorting and filing and throwing-away did soothe Willow after a time and she even began to enjoy watching the surface of her large desk becoming clearer. By the time she started to file the miscellaneous correspondence, she had achieved a reasonable degree of serenity. But as she reached for the file, which always hung at the back of the filing drawer, she noticed a rolled photograph jammed behind it.
Willow sat back, surprised, and carefully unrolled the long picture on her desk.
‘Why did I ever bring it here?’ she asked herself aloud, for it was the one official photograph of the senior staff of DOAP that had ever been taken during her time. There had been some reason for it, which she could not now remember, and it had been taken soon after the arrival of Algernon Endelsham as minister.
It was posed like an old-fashioned school photograph, with the minister and the permanent secretary in the middle – on chairs – and the rest of the Civil Servants arranged in order of rank around them. The deputy and under secretaries stood in groups on either side of the minister and the perm., with the assistant secretaries flanking them, with the principals sitting on the floor in front like new bugs at a prep school.
Algy stood out, as he would have done in any gathering, for his height and his splendid shoulders and his features: the big grey eyes, the straight nose and dominating chin. Even his lips looked generous, thought Willow, knowing that she would never again believe those novelists who wrote that character could be read from a person’s features. She looked along the lines of dark-suited men and the few women until she came to the man she suspected of the murder.
As she peered at his likeness on the stiff, glossy paper in front of her, she was visited by an extraordinary idea: an idea unlikely in the abstract and yet so obvious with the evidence in front of her that she wondered that she had never even considered it.
She pulled the telephone towards her and pressed in the number of the department. When one of the girls at the switchboard answered she asked to be put through to Valerie, the establishments officer’s secretary.
‘I’ll put you throu-ough,’ sang the telephonist and a moment later Willow heard Valerie’s voice, saying:
‘Can I help you?’
‘Valerie, it’s Willow King here,’ she said. ‘Is the under secretary still closeted with the police or could I have a word with him?’
‘I’m afraid he is still with Inspector Worth, Miss King,’ said Valerie. ‘Is it very urgent? I know that they will be breaking for lunch at twelve today. Could I get him to call you then? Oh, but your aunt isn’t on the telephone, is she? Well you could ring back.’
‘I’m not with her today,’ said Willow, pleased to notice that Roger’s indiscretion and Albert’s discovery had not yet reached their colleagues. She improvised quickly: ‘I’ve had to get a neighbour in to see to her while I come up to London today. But I must see Mr Englewood. Look, will you tell him that I shall be in Selina’s wine bar – where he and I had a drink the other day – from twelve onwards. Can you ask him to join me if it’s humanly possible?’
‘Of course, Miss King. Ill tell him,’ said Valerie, sounding as though she was enjoying the hint of drama. Willow thanked her and put down the receiver. She went to change into her noncommittal jeans, called out to Mrs Rusham that she would be out for the rest of the day and left for Abbeville Road.
The temperature was even lower than it had been the previous few days and the new snow was lying thickly on the pavements. As she walked towards the tube station, Willow kept sliding and nearly lost her balance more than once.
But she reached Clapham at about ten to twelve and made her way as carefully as she could to the wine bar. There she ordered a jug of mulled wine, two helpings of hot pâté en croûte, and settled down to read the newspaper she had brought with her. It was only a few minutes before she was interrupted.
‘Willow, my dear,’ came Englewood’s voice, sharp and anxious. ‘Are you all right? What has happened?’
‘Michael,’ she said, flinging down the paper. ‘Thank you for coming. Sit down and have a glass of wine.’
‘But what is it? Valerie told me you sounded distraught on the telephone,’ he said, and her conscience pricked as she saw how worn he looked and how the lines on his face had deepened since the beginning of the investigation.
‘I’m afraid she must have been investing a perfectly ordinary message with drama, Michael,’ she said unfairly. ‘Roger is for ever doing it. But I did badly want to see you.’
‘Why?’
‘Have some wine,’ she said, pouring him a glassful. ‘And some pâté.’
‘Why did you want to see me, Willow?’ he asked, and there was a quite different note in his voice. For the first time since she had decided to talk to him she remembered her promise to Tom Worth, but despite the promise and her sudden fear, she did not consider abandoning her task. As though the sound of his voice had stiffened her resolve, she sat up straighter, looked at him directly and said:
‘Michael, I cannot believe that you intended to kill your brother. I am quite sure it must have been an accident. But you can’t really have expected to keep it secret for ever, can you?’
At that he did pull out the chair opposite hers and sat down heavily. His shoulders drooped and he breathed deeply several times.
‘How did you find out?’ he asked at last in a voice that expressed no more than a mild interest.
‘About your relationship?’ asked Willow. He nodded. ‘I can’t think why I never realised it before,’ she went on. ‘But today I was looking at that photograph that was taken of us all and I saw how alike you are to him. Take away the moustache, and your faces are exactly the same shape. Take away his arrogance and the drawl, and your voices are – were – the same. Your hands, too, now I come to think of it.’
He snatched them off the table and stuffed them between his knees. But he did not speak.
‘What horribly bad luck that he turned up at DOAP,’ she said with some genuine sympathy. ‘Having changed your name and got away from him, you must have thought that you were safe.’
‘The change was no choice of mine,’ he said, and again she heard that faint echo of Algy’s voice. ‘He was still at Cambridge when I left my humble red-brick university, and he was already making a name for himself. He told me that I was to call myself something different because he did not want his future to be messed up by any embarrassing connection made with me.’
‘God, he was a shit!’ said Willow, her own voice warm with anger. Englewood made his usual half-bow in acknowledgement of her sympathy.
‘Yes,’ he said as he expelled a deep breath. ‘You obviously know rather more about us both than I had realised and so I won’t need to give you the background of our childhood.’ He laughed and curiously there was little bitterness in the sound. ‘You’re right about his shit-like character, but I was pleased enough to do what he wanted then. I made him a deal: I would change my name, never communicate with him, never tell anyone I was related to him however wonderfully successful he became, on condition that he never approached, spoke to, or searched for me again.’
‘But it went wrong,’ said Willow. ‘How did he meet your wife?’
‘Just as I told you,’ he answered. ‘I do truly think that that one was a coincidence. He wouldn’t have recognised the name, you see, because he had no way of knowing what I’d decided to call myself. I changed my name by statutory declaration so that there would be no record. But I ought to have known that I’d never be safe. It may have been just damnable luck that Algy met my wife like that and was taken with her. She was exceedingly pretty – and susceptible: thrilled, I suspect, by his glamour.’ He fell silent and when Willow refilled his glass he drank the warm wine down in one gulp.
‘She invited him to dinner with us unexpectedly or I’d have stopped it. You should have seen his delight when she introduced us! I could see straight away what he was going to do. You see, Willow, that was one of the ghastly things: I had to watch the seduction every step of the way and there was nothing I could do to stop it, although I tried. And even while Algy was reducing her to a state of desperate desire, he was watching me to see how I was taking it. In a way it was a kind of relief when she finally said that she was leaving me to go to him.’
Willow found herself quite unable to eat, but she too drank the stickily cooling wine and held up the empty jug to signal to the waitress for more.
‘But of course, Algy didn’t want her. As soon as he had got her away from me, he dumped her,’ said Englewood, staring down into the bottom of his empty glass. Willow looked at him in speculation.
‘And wouldn’t you have her back?’ she asked at last. At that his face began to redden and his moustache quiver with the anger that she now knew lay just below the placid surface of his character.
‘I begged her to come back,’ he said, and Willow almost shivered at the sound of his voice. ‘But as I said before, she could not bear the thought of living with someone who had witnessed the whole of her humiliation.’ His face had reverted to its normal pallidity and Willow saw that he was chewing at his bottom lip. She waited.
‘That’s why I was so afraid for you, Willow,’ he said. She shifted uncomfortably under the intensity of his stare. ‘When I saw that you were not going to be taken in, I knew that he would be furious and I wondered what he would try next. He wouldn’t have been able to leave you the winner like that. Somehow he was going to have to humiliate you… as he did everyone in the end.’
‘But he didn’t, Michael,’ said Willow gently. ‘It was months since he had understood that I would not sleep with him, and he was still perfectly friendly.’ The new jug of wine was brought to their table and Englewood absent-mindedly poured them each a glassful.
‘I suspect he would have done,’ he said sadly. ‘It was simply not possible for him to leave anyone else in a position superior to his own. That’s why he was so successful always. He was driven to it.’
Englewood had been so absorbed in his story that he had never looked round when the door opened and new customers came in to find tables around them. As he produced his last indictment, the door opened once again and Willow looked up to see Inspector Worth flanked by two uniformed policemen come into the small wine bar.
Worth caught her eye and she knew that she had never seen him so angry. Checking that Englewood’s attention was still deflected, she looked back at Tom Worth, shook her head very slightly and gestured towards an empty table. Much to her relief he took it and made his officers sit there with him. When they were settled, Willow poured out more wine and said softly:
‘How did it happen Michael?’
He put down his glass and covered his face with both hands. Gently she put her hands on his wrists and pulled them away from his face.
‘Michael,’ she said. He sighed
‘You know,’ he said at last, ‘I’ve been longing to talk to you about it. I nearly told you that other time we were here.’
‘I know you did,’ said Willow. ‘Tell me now.’
‘All right. As you probably know, Algy couldn’t help tormenting me. I’d done all right in the Civil Service. Under secretary (establishments) in DOAP isn’t the most thrilling peak of a man’s career, but it’s all right.’
‘Of course it is, Michael.’
‘But Algy wanted me to know how pathetic he thought it – and then more: he wanted to show me that I couldn’t even do that properly; and went out of his way to cause trouble and difficulty whenever he was bored.’
Suppressing the thought that poor Michael Englewood must have become paranoid about his brother, Willow sat and listened in silence; as did Inspector Worth and his men sitting at the next table.
‘Between that and what he was trying to do to you,’ said Englewood, ‘I realised that I had to stop him or I’d have no self-respect for the rest of my life. I asked him to come to my office that evening to tell him that the worm had turned, that if he didn’t lay off I’d blow his cover.’
‘How?’ asked Willow involuntarily. Englewood shrugged his tweed-covered shoulders.
‘Oh, by telling the tabloids about him: the mistresses, the persecutions, forcing me to change my name – even my poor wife. And then he’d be exposed to the world for what he actually was: cruel, mischievous, power-crazy and damned dangerous.’
Willow caught sight of Inspector Worth gesturing to one of his men, who opened a notebook and took a pencil from his tunic pocket.
‘So what happened, Michael?’ she asked.
‘He told me we’d have to talk about it and asked me to walk across the common with him to his car so that we could get it all said without inquisitive people listening to us. I heard him ring Albert and tell him to wait at the top of Cedar’s Road, and then we set off.
‘At about half-way over, while he was talking and I was answering back for once, he suddenly grabbed me by my neck.’ As he said that, Englewood pulled the cravat he wore away from his neck and Willow saw the fading remains of ferocious bruises on either side of his jugular.
‘As you probably know,’ he went on while she tried to deal with the effects of shock in herself, ‘he was immensely strong and I panicked. All I had to defend myself was…’
‘Your chess computer,’ said Willow suddenly. ‘That’s what it was, wasn’t it?’ Englewood nodded. ‘And I suppose you just hit him and hit him and hit him until he let go,’ she said. He nodded again.
‘And by then he was dead,’ he said.
‘You needn’t tell me the rest,’ she said. ‘I know that you must have wiped the blood off your face and hands with something, put your reversible coat on the other way about so that the stains didn’t show on the outside, and walked to Clapham Junction station. There you washed the remaining blood off your face and hands and neck in the gents’lavatory, and took a train to Surbiton – later than the six-fifteen from Waterloo, despite what you told me.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ he agreed. ‘I should have known that someone would find out, but I never thought it would be you.’
‘And I suppose you got rid of the chess computer somewhere,’ Willow went on, trying not to hear the pain in that statement.
‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘And all the clothes I’d been wearing. That night when I met you outside the building, I was on my way to buy more. And when I got back to Surbiton that night, I soaked all the bloodstained stuff in a huge basin of surgical spirit to get the blood out and then in the middle of the night took it to the river, weighted it with a couple of bricks and chucked it in. I don’t think anyone saw me.’
Willow saw Tom Worth standing up, but before he could cross the small strip of floor between their two tables, Englewood said:
‘I’d better go and find Worth now.’ He smiled at Willow and she tried to think that there was a new look of peace in his face, but she could not quite manage it. ‘I suppose I always knew that I wouldn’t get away with it in the end,’ he said. ‘And I was always prepared to confess if they accused one of the staff.’
‘I realised that that was why you sat in on all the interviews,’ said Willow. ‘I am sorry, Michael.’
‘Yes, Algy wasn’t worth going to prison for,’ he said and turned to face the police.
