Poison Flowers Read Online Free PDF Page B

really bothering you so much about this case?’
    â€˜Isn’t the thought of a murderer on the loose enough?’
    Willow shook her red head and then had to brush a strand of hair out of her eyes.
    â€˜One of the prime movers in the campaign to stop me “wasting time” trying to find a connection between the cases has a personal connection to Titchmell,’ he said at last. His voice dragged as though he were fighting a deep reluctance to tell her anything about it.
    â€˜His father, who was once a Chief Constable, was Simon Titchmell’s godfather,’ he said.
    â€˜That doesn’t sound too bad. Couldn’t it be simply coincidence?’ asked Willow, trying to understand why he was so worried.
    â€˜Possibly. And he is ferociously keen on time-and-motion studies and value for money. And he dislikes me. But his determination to end the investigation into his father’s godson’s murder strikes me as … well, it leaves me uncomfortable.’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Willow, her novelist’s imagination flashing possible plots across her mind like trailers across a giant cinema screen. ‘I can see that it might. What’s his name, your policeman?’
    Tom stood up, towering over Willow and her sofa. She quickly got up herself.
    â€˜Bodmin,’ he said. ‘Commander James Bodmin. He’s usually so efficient … Never mind that now. I must go.’
    â€˜Must you?’ she asked.
    â€˜I think I’d better,’ he said, ‘uninvited as I was this evening. Besides, I’ve got work to do before tomorrow. Good night.’
    â€˜Good night, Tom,’ said Willow putting out a hand. He gripped it for a moment, kissed her calmly and walked away.
    Willow was left to her dingy flat, the frozen pizza, her briefcase full of work, and her difficult acknowledgment that she minded his going.
    Pulling herself together with an effort, she cooked and ate her pizza, drank another glass of wine and then turned to the dark-red manilla folder that Tom had left for her. Opening it, she saw a pile of sheets of lined paper covered in the neatest, blackest, most elegant handwriting she had ever encountered.
    It was strange, she thought, but she had never seen his writing before. All their arrangements to meet had been made by telephone. If anyone had asked her what she expected it to be like, she would have unhesitatingly said ‘schoolboyish, like the writing of someone who doesn’t put much on paper and isn’t very interested’; yet she was confronted by a hand infinitely more sophisticated and attractive than her own. It gave her a most peculiar sense of disadvantage and stopped her actually reading what he had written for at least five minutes.
    When she did eventually make herself concentrate on the content of his notes, she became more and more absorbed in them. By the time she had read the last page, she could understand both why Tom had believed that there must be a connection between the killings, and why some of his superiors had been just as certain that there could not.
    As Worth had told her, the victims were quite different from each other, lived in quite different parts of the country, and had no apparent connection between them at all. The first was a sixty-five-year-old spinster, Edith Fernside, who had been living in sheltered housing in Newcastle. Willow saw with a slight chill in her mind that Miss Fernside’s address had been only streets away from the red-brick house where she herself had been brought up. She had never been back to Newcastle since the death of her parents some years before and she had hoped never to go there again or even think about it. There had been no actual cruelty or conscious deprivation in her childhood, but it had been bleak enough for her to want to forget it.
    According to Tom’s notes, Miss Fernside had retired to Newcastle after working as matron in a famous girls’school in Berkshire.