Festering Lilies by Natasha Cooper Page A

brown eyeshadows brushed on to her lids and glossy mascara on her pale eyelashes, let alone the carefully chosen blusher warming her skin and coral lipstick emphasising her mouth, Willow was confronted with a reflection she had never expected to see even in her most extreme fantasies. She could not be described as classically beautiful, but the face she saw in the mirror that day looked modern instead of spinsterly, vividly alive and – she could not deny it – thoroughly attractive.
    In order to protect the secret of her double identity, Willow had never returned to that particular hairdresser, but Gino had proved an efficient successor whenever Willow needed to appear anywhere as ‘Cressida’. As the advances and royalties she earned built up into what seemed to her to be a fortune, she learned to enjoy the transformation process for its own sake rather than for the disguise it gave her. The spending of money on glamorous clothes and hairdressing gradually stopped seeming either wasteful or extravagant and, by the time the murder shocked her out of her easy security, it had become a positive pleasure.
    â€˜Thank you, Gino,’ she said, smiling at his reflection as he held up a hand mirror so that she could judge his handiwork at the back of her head as well as the front.
    â€˜As always: a pleasure, Miss Woodruffe. I’ll call the manicurist now, and I’ll see you next Thursday.’
    â€˜Yes indeed. Good night, Gino.’
    When the manicurist had finished and Willow’s nails were as clean and gleaming as her hair, she paid the relatively enormous bill and walked slowly back towards Chesham Place, where she had her other flat, revelling in the contrasts of her existence. Now that she had left Willow King behind, and had become ‘Cressida Woodruffe’once more, she felt less bothered about all the lies she had had to tell at DOAP.
    After all, without that first one to Michael Englewood, she would never have discovered the pleasures and luxuries that ‘Cressida Woodruffe’had brought her; she would still be frustrated, bored, and unhappily wedded to the department because of the index-linked pension that would come to her when she retired at the age of sixty. And she would still be lonely.
    Reaching the house in which she owned the second floor, she let herself in and went upstairs, knowing that the flat would have been impeccably cleaned and supplied in her absence by Mrs Rusham, her daily housekeeper. When Willow walked into the drawing room she was greeted with the sweet fresh scent of about five dozen freesias, which Mrs Rusham had arranged in a pair of black Ming vases on the chimneypiece.
    Heaving a sigh of relief, Willow took off her jacket, flung it over the back of a sofa and poured herself a modest glass of Palo Cortado sherry, not even noticing that the ache in her throat had gone.
    Glass in hand, she pottered about the large elegant room, taking renewed pleasure in the walnut bureau bookcase she had bought at Sotheby’s four years earlier, in the Chinese embroideries that hung in the embrasures on either side of the fireplace, in the thick pale silk carpet that covered the polished parquet and the soft plumpness of the handmade sofas. When she had begun to write the first book, one of her ambitions had been to generate enough money for just such a room, in which she could try to create an atmosphere of peaceful luxury. Looking around on that Thursday evening, she considered that she had succeeded. There was space, there was warmth and there was a delicate concentration of colour and light.
    The panelled walls had been painted in a pale duck-egg blue, which set off the golden wood of the furniture as well as the old French chintz curtains and flattered almost every kind of flower that was placed in front of it. The sofas were loose covered in thick twilled silk of a colour somewhere between silver-grey and pale olive-green, and the two Louis XV elbow chairs in