Close to Death

I’d sent Hawthorne the next section (‘Another Death’) and was waiting for him to show up. He was coming to the flat again at eleven o’clock. That gave me thirty minutes to get myself into his mindset. I went to my desk and sat there, thinking about the possibilities, trying to work it out for myself. It should have been simple. After all, there weren’t that many suspects.

Who had killed Giles Kenworthy?

The way I saw it, May Winslow and Phyllis Moore had replaced Sarah Baines as the most likely suspects . . . even if it seemed almost impossible to believe. Isn’t that how it always works? The killer is the last person you expect and these two were ex-nuns with such a hatred of violence that they wouldn’t even stock Jo Nesbø in their ‘cosy crime’ bookshop. I would have been surprised if, at eighty-one and seventy-nine, they even had the strength to lift the crossbow and take aim, but maybe one of them had held it while the other pulled the trigger?

They certainly had a motive. They had been shattered by the death of their dog, and although Sarah Baines was almost certainly responsible, it was Giles Kenworthy who had given the order. They had a key to Roderick’s house. They could have slipped into the garage at any time. That would also have helped them to engineer his death. I wondered how they’d raised the money to buy both their house and the shop in Richmond. That story about the surprise inheritance hadn’t rung true. It’s the sort of thing that only happens in children’s books. And an aunt, of all things!

I reached for a sheet of paper and scribbled their names at the top.

Who next?

Sarah Baines had slipped down to number two. She was an ex-prisoner who had somehow talked her way into Riverview Close, taking advantage of May Winslow’s good nature. She certainly had a reason to kill Giles Kenworthy. He had found her snooping around in his office and had fired her, threatening to report her to the police, which would have been the last thing she needed. There was also an interesting link between her and Roderick Browne. She had called him while he was in the garage with Hawthorne and Dudley. Was it possible that she was sharing something she had found on Kenworthy’s computer? Roderick was certainly an enthusiastic supporter. ‘She’s a fine young woman, very hard-working and always helpful . . .’ – although his untidy garden told a different story. Did she have some hold over him? Why had his phone gone missing at around the same time as his death? Did he know something that had got him killed?

And then there was Dr Tom Beresford and his wife. Hawthorne had described Dr Beresford as an alcoholic, addicted to sleeping pills, stressed and miserable, locked into an endless row with his neighbour about a narrow driveway and who had the right to park there. But it was more likely to have been the death of his patient, Raymond Shaw, that had tipped the balance and turned him into a potential murderer. Was there some link between Shaw and Beresford that I hadn’t yet discovered? Suppose he had stolen the crossbow and Roderick had seen him? That might have been a motive for a second murder . . . although I still had no idea how he could have done it.

Unless he was assisted by his wife!

Gemma Beresford would surely do anything to protect her husband. I opened a drawer and took out one of the photographs that Hawthorne had sent me. It was a printout from her website showing her Rare Poison collection of jewellery: snakes, scorpions, spiders and doll’s eyes (a toxic plant from North America). There was definitely something sinister about her and I wondered how far she would go to keep her family together. Far enough to kill?

She reminded me a bit of Teri Strauss, Adam’s second wife. Of the two of them, I found it easier to imagine Teri creeping around Riverview Close in the middle of the night with a crossbow, and I always felt there was a certain darkness hiding behind her smile, even the fact that she was a blood relative of Strauss’s first wife, Wendy. She had a reason to kill Giles Kenworthy, although not a very good one. It was his children who had smashed her husband’s prize chess set, a gift from Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, no less. She was certainly ferocious in her devotion to Adam. She thought he was a genius. She accompanied him to all his chess tournaments. But would she really murder someone on account of a broken chess set? I wasn’t sure.