Read Online Festering Lilies by Natasha Cooper - Free Book Online Page A

grew up between them, and they dined together on most evenings between Thursday and Sunday, except when Richard was in New York, Paris or Tokyo on bank business.
    Willow considered that their friendship was both civilised and eminently satisfactory. It gave each of them pleasure, an escort to the occasional party, theatre or cinema, and just as much overt emotion as each could handle comfortably. Willow knew quite well that ‘Cressida Woodruffe’s’ readers would have found the arrangement unattractively cold, even selfish, but there was genuine affection between them. Neither made claims on the other (although just occasionally as the years passed Richard allowed himself the luxury of sentimental pleading, secure perhaps in the knowledge that Willow would never spoil things by yielding to his pleas) and both were considerate of the other’s privacy. Willow had not consciously kept her secrets from him, but Richard had never asked any of the questions that might have elicited frankness from her. She told him the truth in the end only because it had come to seem impolite to withhold so much from a man with whom she made love once or twice a week.
    Watching him on that Thursday evening in November admiring her new clothes, Willow remembered how he had burst out laughing as she told him of the life she led in Clapham, and she herself laughed at the memory.
    â€˜What’s so funny?’ he asked, rather defensive. ‘Have I sat in something?’ He twisted round to squint down at his own impeccable backview. Willow laughed again and shook her curly head.
    â€˜Nothing, Richard. I was just remembering how amused you were when I first told you who I really was. It was such a relief!’
    He only smiled and picked up her fur coat for her. Willow shrugged herself into it and together they walked out into the icy street. Richard told her about the restaurant he had chosen, asked her what she had been reading since they last met and said nothing of any importance until they were sitting in immense comfort with their oysters and Chablis in front of them. Then he settled himself more luxuriously in the embracing red-velvet chair and said:
    â€˜And so how was the department this week? All of a flutter, I take it, over this ghastly business.’
    Willow swallowed an oyster, enjoying the peculiar sensation of the soft, yielding saltiness sliding over her tongue and trying to ignore a sudden recognition of the highly similar sensations she felt as she recovered from a phlegmy cold.
    â€˜All of a flutter just about describes it,’ she said. ‘They’re all inventing wilder and wilder solutions about whodunnit and causing untold umbrage to each other as they propound them.’
    â€˜And have you any theories?’ Richard asked, wondering as so often before what she was like in her professional persona and whether it could really be true that none of her colleagues guessed who she was.
    â€˜Not yet,’ she answered, not wanting to expose poor Mrs Gripper’s sad secret (even if it were genuine). She picked up another oyster shell, ‘But I shall pretty soon have to.’
    â€˜Oh, God, Willow, I’ve seen that look before,’ he said, peering through the candlelight at her. ‘What on earth have you done?’
    She dropped the empty oyster shell on the plate, wiped her long fingers on her napkin, took a sip of wine and said coolly:
    â€˜Richard, you’re as bad as the idiots at DOAP: you of all people can’t really believe that I banged the Minister over the head with a cricket bat or something and killed him, can you? In any case, you and I spent the whole of that evening together with the Krug and fish fingers. You must remember.’
    â€˜I remember perfectly well, not least my perennial horror at what you do to a good wine by insisting on eating those disgusting, vulgar things,’ he said. Then, sobering, he added: ‘In any case, I know you far too