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still be blackmailed.…’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜Really, Thomas,’ she said, ‘you can’t believe that. It’s about as likely as believing the min. to have been a blackmailer himself.’
    â€˜Don’t be absurd,’ said Thomas. ‘Admirable Algy needing to blackmail anyone? It’s a risible idea.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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