Rotten Apples by Natasha Cooper

anti-depressants. She picked up the pills from the chemist and went straight home to swallow the lot with a large whisky. The front door was bolted on the inside and the back door locked. There were no signs of a break-in. No one else had been there.’
    â€˜But no one really knows why she did it this time.’ Willow looked across the desk at the self-controlled, intelligent woman on the other side, and told herself to stop being silly. Serena would hardly be talking so frankly if she had had a hand in her sister’s death. It frightened Willow to think how seriously her judgment had been affected by what had happened to Tom.
    â€˜No, but several people knew that the tax investigation had been upsetting her, and her papers underline that.’
    â€˜â€Several people”? Who?’
    â€˜Oh, old friends of ours, like her MP, and even one or two people she’d bought pictures from. I didn’t know at the time, but some of them have been in touch with me since she died. Apparently Scoffer was convinced she’d been understating the gains she’d made on her paintings and he’d approached some of her buyers and sellers to check up on the information she’d given him.’
    â€˜What?’ Willow was outraged that there were no copies of such letters on the file she had read. She assumed that Scoffer had removed them until it struck her that Serena might be lying in an attempt to arouse extra sympathy for her dead sister, or even to press the blame for her death more firmly on to Scoffer than the evidence warranted. Willow reminded herself that hearsay, such as Serena had offered, was not proof of anything at all.
    â€˜I know,’ said Serena, unaware of Willow’s wavering sympathy. ‘It’s no wonder Fiona was getting in such a state. Her reputation could have taken quite a beating from gossip generated by his activities. After all, it’s not as though all the picture buyers and sellers were friends of hers, who’d have known she’d never lie. Some were perfect strangers, who might have believed anything of her—even that she’d cheated them. It must have been utterly ghastly for her.’
    There was a long silence as Willow tried to absorb the implications of what she had learned.
    â€˜Have you any photographs of her?’ she said eventually.
    â€˜Yes,’ said Serena, looking as though she had been jolted by the change of subject ‘Why?’
    â€˜It’s irrational,’ Willow said, ‘but I feel that if I knew what she looked like I might be able to understand a bit more about what went on between her and Scoffer, which would help me come to the sort of conclusions I’ve been asked to make.’
    â€˜Okay. They’re all at home. I’ll bung one in the post for you.’
    Willow thanked her, talked for a few minutes more, and left for the hospital.
    There was no change in Tom’s condition. She sat with him in complete silence for four hours, sometimes certain that he would regain consciousness, at others coldly convinced that he would die. Eventually she gave in to common sense and took a taxi back to the mews, trying to deaden her own raw feelings without rebuilding the self-defensive walls that she had been working to dismantle ever since she and Tom had decided to marry.
    Finding that the insides of her cheeks were clamped between her teeth again as she unlocked her front door, she deliberately relaxed her jaw muscles and tried to turn her mind to more productive things. She wished that she had prepared better for her meeting with Serena and not been so easily and completely distracted. If only she had drawn up a proper list of questions as she would have done in the old days before the shooting, the interview would have been of much more use.
    Later, lying in a cool bath, with the skin of her fingers and toes slowly puckering in the scented water, she thought about Fiona Fydgett’s alleged suicide