Close to Death

‘I’m not quite sure yet what it is I’m being asked to deny. Murder, obviously. But how, why and when? I’ve never been a great shot with a bow and arrow and right now –’ he lifted the walking stick – ‘I’m in no fit state to have broken into Roderick’s house and killed him. In fact, I was the last person to see him alive. Alive being the operative word. We were also good friends, although I don’t suppose that counts for anything in Mr Hawthorne’s mind. Do go ahead, Mr Hawthorne. So far, you’ve made complete sense, even if you’re barking up entirely the wrong tree.’

‘Unlike Mrs Winslow’s dog,’ Dudley said. ‘He had a thing about that magnolia in the Kenworthys’ garden.’

‘We’ll come to that in a minute,’ Hawthorne said. He hadn’t been put off by Strauss’s denials. He was quite relaxed.

‘We already know everything about the first meeting,’ he continued. ‘All the neighbours get together to air their complaints and at the last moment Giles Kenworthy pulls out – because someone’s tried to hack into his computer system. I’d guess you had a hand in that, Mr Strauss. It’s a smart move. It makes him look bad, worse than he is. It helps turn him into the target that he’ll eventually become. And that’s just the start of it. In the weeks that follow, the weaker chess pieces – May Winslow and Andrew Pennington – will be advanced across the board. Horrible things will happen to them to bring them onside. May’s pet dog will be killed. Andrew’s flower display will be spoiled – and in both cases the Kenworthys will get the blame.’

‘My chess set was also smashed,’ Adam reminded him.

‘Yeah . . . you and your precious chess set, Mr Strauss! You had to be one of the team. You had to suffer too. That’s part of the reason everyone trusted you. They thought you were with them. But it wasn’t a cricket ball that came through your window. You did it – just like you cold-bloodedly crept out and killed that poor bloody dog, and cut down the flowers on the anniversary of Andrew Pennington’s wife’s death. Only, here’s the funny thing, you were too vain to destroy anything that was truly valuable. So you chose a piece of posh merchandise made under licence from a film that came out thirteen years ago. You may have tried to big it up, but even when it was in a hundred pieces rather than thirty-two, I could tell it wasn’t up to much, and my friend Dudley thought it was rubbish too. A king that looks like Ian McKellen? A knight based on Orlando Bloom? The whole idea of hobbits against orcs? Fifty quid on eBay even if it was given to you by some major sheikh, which, incidentally, I doubt. Pull the other one!

‘The first meeting assembled the pieces that really mattered – your neighbours. The second moved them into position. By the way, Andrew Pennington thought it might have been his idea for all of you to get together again, but he also mentioned that it came out of a conversation with you two lovebirds. So you probably found a way to suggest it to him, the same way you hired two people to buy the same book at The Tea Cosy so that Phyllis or May would bring up the idea about everyone committing the same murder. The way you see the world, everyone’s a pawn.

‘So now they’re all pissed off with the Kenworthys and this time you make sure there’s lots of alcohol but no food so that things get a bit out of hand and there will be no inhibitions. When someone brings up the idea of murder, it’s all a bit of a laugh. To start with, you’re all going to do it – just like in the book. But then you remember that you’ve got a packet of drinking straws in the kitchen. You know, the very first time I heard that, it struck me as weird. You don’t have kids but you’ve got drinking straws left over from some party? It’s rubbish, of course. You’d bought them specially for that night. More manipulation.

‘And there was something else about the drawing of the straws that didn’t add up. Phyllis Moore told me that you were the one who held them – no surprises there – but she added that they were behind your back “so there could be no cheating”. But that makes no sense at all. It’s exactly the reason why you hold them in front of you, so everyone can see. If they’re behind your back, it’s easy to conceal the shortest straw in the waistband of your trousers or somewhere and force it on the person you’ve chosen by leaving them until last. That person was Roderick Browne. All along, you’d decided that he was going to be your patsy. But then, like every opponent you’ve ever come across, you had him psychologically pinned down like a butterfly. He was perfect for what you wanted.