Close to Death

‘No problem. I’ll give it to you before you go.’

‘What about May and Phyllis?’ I asked. ‘You fell out with them pretty badly.’

Her mouth fell. She shook her head. ‘Hand on heart, Giles and I never touched their dog and I never told Sarah to go anywhere near it. Do I look like the sort of person who’d do something like that? I’m the mother of two boys! I’m not a monster.’ She blew a great plume of grey smoke into the air. ‘We argued about Hilary. Was that its name? They should have controlled it. It was always coming into our garden, sniffing around the magnolia and leaving its business on the grass. I used to pick up after it and deliver the bags to their front door. I wasn’t trying to be mean. I could see how old they were. But they never listened to me. What else was I supposed to do?’

‘It must have been awful for you, the whole experience . . .’

‘You have no idea! Nobody should have to go through what I went through. Being questioned by the police – as if I had anything to do with it. And your friend, Mr Hawthorne, he was the worst. Prying into my private life and making jokes about me in that sneery way of his. When I was with British Airways, there were always passengers you knew you had to avoid, the ones who were going to make trouble when you were thirty-five thousand feet up. He was just like them.

‘But it wasn’t only the investigation. Mercifully, that didn’t last very long. It was afterwards! I couldn’t even go shopping without people staring at me. I could hear them whispering behind my back. The children missed weeks of school. Tristram still has nightmares about it and he wasn’t even here when it happened. You write murder stories, don’t you? Well, perhaps you should think a little more about the people who have to live through them and what it does to them. To this day, there are still people who believe I had something to do with what happened. It never goes away.’

‘You suggested that things went wrong between you and Giles when you moved to Richmond.’

‘Yes. It was such a mistake! We were never meant to live in a cul-de-sac with lawnmowers and Sunday lunches, cocktail parties and school plays. Growing old together! It was the last thing I wanted. This is a big house, but we both felt trapped in it. It’s hardly surprising we grew apart. Giles had his work, his head was always buried in his computers. He had his cars and his clubs. He gambled . . . and he always lost. But he never really cared about me. Not after we were married.’

‘Were you sorry he died?’

I hadn’t meant to be so blunt.

Lynda wasn’t offended. ‘It was horrible, finding him in the hallway. I’ll never forget that for as long as I live. But it’s like I say . . . we weren’t together by the end. I knew he was being unfaithful to me, but I was doing the same to him. Ours was an open marriage and it would have ended sooner or later anyway. I’d have preferred a divorce, but I suppose I can’t complain. This way I got everything.’

We were interrupted by the arrival of a man who must have been in the house the whole time. He strutted in, dressed like a male model in a T-shirt and skinny jeans and looking like one too: perfect teeth and moustache, chest hair and a medallion, chiselled features and dark brown eyes. He was in his mid-thirties and he was surprised to find me there.

‘I did not know you had company,’ he said to Lynda. He spoke with a French accent.

‘This is Jean-François,’ Lynda said. ‘Anthony is asking me about the murder,’ she explained.

‘Why?’

‘He’s writing about it.’

‘I don’t think you should talk about it.’

Jean-François. I remembered the name. ‘You were with Lynda the night her husband was killed,’ I said.

He shrugged . . . Very Gallic. ‘Maybe.’

‘You’re a French teacher.’

‘I was. Not any more.’

‘Jean-François writes about sport for lots of French magazines,’ Lynda told me. ‘He’s an Olympic champion. He won a bronze medal in 2012 – at the London Olympics.’

I was impressed. ‘What sport?’ I asked.

He had already lost interest in me. ‘Tir à l’arc

,’ he said.

My French is good, but I didn’t know that one. I looked blank.

‘Archery,’ Lynda said. Smiling, she took hold of his hand.

4

Lynda Kenworthy had given me the telephone number of Detective Superintendent Khan and I rang him on my way back to Richmond station.

I felt depressed after my visit to Riverview Close. Thinking about it, I saw that both Lynda Kenworthy and Andrew Pennington were casualties. It had never occurred to me before, but murder is in many ways like a fatal car crash, a coming together of people from different walks of life who will all be damaged by the experience. At least one of them will die. One or more will take the blame. But none of them will be glad that they were involved.

And what did that make me? I had come to Riverview Close like the worst rubbernecker . . . and a foolish one too. I had arrived far too late to pick up anything very much in the way of debris. I had nothing to take back home.