Free Festering Lilies by Natasha Cooper

interview, I could hardly tell them where I actually was, now could I?’ said Willow.
    Richard picked up his glass of white wine again, took a deep swallow as though to give himself courage and then spoke.
    â€˜Are you telling me that you have lied to the police in a murder enquiry? You must be stark staring bonkers! Yes, I’m not surprised you’re looking a bit nervous.’
    Willow, unaware that her expression had changed, shrugged.
    â€˜I had no option, Richard, unless I was going to throw all this away.’ She gestured at their sumptuous surroundings, gobbled up the rest of her oysters and then looked across the table at him. ‘Oh, come on Richard, smile! It’s not that serious. Either I’m going to discover who did do it before they check out Aunt Agatha, or if they get there first, I can always confess – but privately. I really am not going to have Cressida Woodruffe trumpeted all through the lino-covered corridors of that hellish plague-ridden building for them all to point and giggle at.’
    Richard, sighing as though he simply could not cope with her, signalled to a waiter to clear away their plates. He was half genuinely appalled by her lawlessness; but the other half of him was secretly excited by it. One of her greatest attractions for him had always been the hint of Cressida’s irresponsible, self-indulgent wickedness, which was so easily kept in check by Willow King’s unassailable probity: she had the tamed, almost contrived, wildness of an eighteenth-century ‘wild’ garden, and he had always felt free to enjoy it without fear of any real danger.
    â€˜Don’t worry so, Richard,’ she said, suddenly touched by the serious expression on his thin face. ‘I can devote the whole time until next Tuesday morning to solving the mystery – the book’s gone sticky on me anyway and a little mild detecting will probably clear my brain. I’m sure that I can discover…’
    â€˜Better than the police, forensic scientists and so on?’ Richard demanded, with all the arrogance of which he was quite unaware. There were times when Willow found it so infuriating that she challenged him, but on that evening for some reason she found it merely amusing; perhaps her reaction was part and parcel of her dressing up to please him.
    â€˜I really do think you have gone mad,’ he went on, and Willow began to feel a licking flame of anger somewhere in her mind. ‘You think that your novelist’s brain will invent the motive, don’t you? And that you can present the guilty one to the police with a flourish next Tuesday morning? You need to rein in that imagination of yours. It could get you into serious trouble.’
    â€˜Don’t sneer too much at my imagination, Richard,’ said Willow with more than a hint of Civil Service crispness. ‘It earns me even more than your banker’s brain earns you.’
    â€˜ Touché , b’gad,’ he said with the rueful smile that always disarmed her. ‘But you must be careful about pinning all your investigating on motive, mustn’t you? I mean, do remember what Lord Peter said about motive to Harriet in Busman’s Honeymoon. ’
    Before she could answer, the waiter brought their grouse and then made way for the sommelier with a bottle of Burgundy. When they had both gone and Willow had eaten at least half of the delicious bird, she took up the conversation where Richard had left it.
    â€˜But you know, Richard, it is really a question of motive.… Not the killer’s,’ she said quickly as he made as though to protest. ‘But the minister’s. I mean, what could he possibly have been doing bang in the middle of Clapham Common at the end of a working day in November? That’s got to be sorted out before anyone – police included – can have any idea about who killed him, because there were no witnesses, there was no weapon left at the