Close to Death

The dead man had been waiting for him in the hallway of his home, covered with a sheet, and it wasn’t so much the multiple bloodstains – on the carpet, the walls, even a few specks on the ceiling – as the sheer incongruousness of it that struck Khan first. The white linen was clinging to the hips and shoulders so that most of the body was clearly visible in silhouette. But when it reached the neck, it rose up like a miniature tent. The effect was grotesque, almost comical. Khan had drawn the sheet back and looked at the crossbow bolt, still lodged in Giles Kenworthy’s throat. The deceased would have been unrecognisable even to his nearest and dearest. His eyes were still open in shock, his mouth twisted in a scream that death had turned into a grimace. The bolt had entered directly under his chin. If he had been wearing a tie, it would have gone through the knot.

Everything had been wrong from the start, and as the day progressed it only got worse.

First of all, there was the murder weapon: a crossbow, for heaven’s sake! Khan had never heard of anyone being the target of a crossbow, not since William Tell’s son – and that hadn’t hit him. The killer hadn’t even tried to get rid of it, simply leaving it on the gravel in front of the house as if he – or she – didn’t even care about being caught. The weapon had already been identified as the property of one Roderick Browne, the middle-aged dentist who lived next door. Then there was Riverview Close itself, an unlikely murder scene with its perfectly attractive houses and Alan Ayckbourn collection of characters: a GP, a jewellery designer and their twin daughters, a chess grandmaster, two little old ladies, a retired barrister, and the dentist.

He wouldn’t normally have thought of them as suspects, but he had to take the facts into consideration. First and foremost, they all had a motive. It was clear that they had disliked or even hated Giles Kenworthy, who, from the sound of it, had been one of those ‘neighbours from hell’, the sort who frequently turned up in sensationalist television documentaries. He had only arrived with his family eight months before, but he seemed to have gone out of his way to annoy everyone around him. Any one of them could have killed him – and for exactly the same reason. They wanted him out.

And then there was the physicality of Riverview Close itself: the electronic gate that automatically locked itself at seven o’clock in the evening, sealing them all in, and the crossbow stored in a garage that was locked and bolted and which nobody from the outside world could possibly have known was there. Khan was sure that other suspects would show up; you didn’t get to be as rich as Giles Kenworthy without making enemies. But he had been killed in the middle of the night. The gate hadn’t been forced and it would have been hard to climb over without leaving some sort of evidence. The entire set-up screamed ‘inside job’.

There was something else going on. Khan had spent most of the day talking to the residents, who had all been asked to stay at home. He was trying to keep things casual: not so much a formal interview as a general chat. It should have been easy. A nice neighbourhood like this, everyone would be eager to help the police with their inquiries. If nothing else, it would be a new experience, a break from routine, something to talk about at their next dinner party. But all along he had sensed there was something wrong. Each one of them had been evasive, reticent . . . even afraid.

The dentist, Roderick Browne, had been the worst of all, his eyes blinking as he spoke, his tongue darting across his lips. ‘Yes. I heard. I couldn’t believe it. Giles Kenworthy! Of course, he wasn’t an easy man to get on with, but none of us would ever have done such a thing. Certainly not me! I’m a dentist. I look after people. I mean, I know it was my crossbow. Tom Beresford called me and I went straight to the garage. It’s gone! I have no idea when it was taken. To be honest with you, I’d almost forgotten it was there. I haven’t fired it in years. Years and years. I hope you don’t think . . . My wife is upstairs. She’s not at all well. But she’ll tell you. I was asleep last night. We don’t share the same room any more . . . because of her illness. But she’d have heard . . .’

The words tumbled out of him almost incoherently, made worse by the idiotic smile he had pinned to his lips. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. In Khan’s opinion, all that was missing was the billboard mounted on his shoulders with GUILTY written on it and a hand with an outstretched finger pointing down.