‘How far off’s Letchworth Garden City?’ Hadley asked that morning, pulling on her coat, ready to leave.
Rachel glanced up from where she sat reading the paper. ‘Forty, fifty years.’
Alice drove.
After threatening the usual rain, the sky lightened the closer they came. Their route took them off the A1 and past the Spirella Building, a former state-of-the-art corset factory, recently restored to its former glory. Friends of Rachel’s had chosen to celebrate their tenth anniversary there, taking advantage of the ballroom’s sprung maple floor to demonstrate their best Fred-and-Ginger.
They parked and walked past a row of neat Arts and Crafts cottages with generous, well-tended front gardens.
‘It wouldn’t be so bad, living out here,’ Alice remarked.
‘You could be dead for six months before you noticed you’d stopped breathing.’
‘You might think differently, ma’am,’ Alice said, ‘if you were living in a flat share behind Finsbury Park bus station.’
‘Cheeky.’
Alice blushed.
There were roses, literally, around the door of number 17.
Hadley pressed the bell. Knocked. Pressed again.
After several minutes the door was opened by a woman in her late forties wearing a purple tunic over black leggings, a dark headband holding back a spring of reddish hair. A streak of vermilion on her right cheek.
‘Susannah Fielding?’
‘Guilty.’
The officers showed their identification. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Alex Hadley and this is Detective Constable Alice Atkins.’
Susannah Fielding smiled. ‘The distaff side of the force, is it? Sensitivity a speciality.’
‘Alice here tackles like a front-row forward and swears like a drunken soldier.’
Alice blushed again.
‘You’d better come in. And please accept my apologies for keeping you waiting. When I’m working at the back of the house I don’t always hear the bell.’
They followed her along a short corridor, one side of the wall busy with small framed paintings, into a compact kitchen-diner and from there into the rear garden.
‘I thought we could sit out here. It’s just about warm enough, I think. If you take a pew I’ll hustle up some tea. Unless you’d prefer coffee, that is?’
They sat on wrought-iron chairs in a kind of arbour midway down the garden. At the far end the doors were open to the double-width shed that served as a studio.
‘There are muffins as well,’ Susannah said, reappearing with a laden tray. ‘Apple and pecan. Fresh this morning. When the work’s not going well I run off to the kitchen and bake by way of compensation. It’s a wonder I’m not twice the size I am.’
‘What are you working on?’ Alice asked.
‘Oh, another still life, I’m afraid. Fruit in a bowl, flowers in a nice vase. Same old, same old. I don’t know why I bother. Except there’s always the thought that next time you’re going to really nail it, the perfect painting. But that’s not what you’re here for, confessions of a moderately successful artist.’ She smiled encouragingly. ‘You don’t have to be polite any longer.’
A blackbird landed softly on a patch of open ground between two shrubs and began to peck hopefully at the soil.
‘You’ve had a visit from the family liaison officer,’ Hadley said.
‘Yes, indeed. All very sympathetic. If, perhaps, a little distant. Good at explaining the nuts and bolts, whys and wherefores.’ She cut a muffin neatly in half. ‘I presume there’s still no way the body can be released?’
‘I’m afraid not. Not at the moment.’
Susannah bit into the muffin, nodded approvingly. ‘It’s one of those curiosities of life – your former husband, whom you’ve barely spoken to, never mind seen, in almost twenty years, dies and you’re expected to make the arrangements for his funeral.’
‘I’m not really sure how these things work,’ Hadley said. ‘But if you really objected …’
‘No, no.’ Susannah waved a hand in the air. ‘It’s fine. Or it will be, I’m sure. There are the children to consider – I say children, but you know what I mean – they kept in touch with Anthony to a degree, Melissa when she was younger especially. And I dare say it’s what they’d expect. A family funeral.’
‘Melissa, she’s what? Twenty-two? Twenty-three?’
‘Twenty-three. Matthew’s two years older.’
‘And they’re …’
‘Melissa’s taking a break from university. She started a bit late; couldn’t, you know, make up her mind. Thought she fancied art school and by the end of her foundation year found out she hated it. Too much like following in the family footsteps, I suppose, too many expectations. She tried English after that, North Wales, Aberystwyth – that didn’t work out either.’ She smiled. ‘Too many long books, too much reading. I’m not sure what she expected. Wuthering Heights on Twitter, possibly. Thomas Hardy on Snapchat. Anyway, now she’s at Leicester studying history. Or she would be. If, as I say, she weren’t taking a sabbatical.’
‘And so, what, she’s living at home?’
‘Some of the time, yes. She’s still got her room, a student house up in Leicester. And a room here, of course. Flits between the two, sort of. Starts her course again properly in September. Or she should do.’
‘And Matthew?’
‘Contrary to all my wishes, he’s in the military – Twenty-six Regiment Royal Artillery.’ Another smile, self-deprecating, crossed Susannah’s face. ‘So much for never letting him play with guns when he was growing up. Now he’s a lieutenant in charge of a fire-support team in Afghanistan. What do they call them? The punch behind the iron fist?’
‘He’s there now?’
Susannah nodded. ‘Kandahar. Part of the International Security Assistance Force. Though I don’t know for how long.’
‘You’ll be pleased to have him come home,’ Alice said.
The smile this time was wistful. ‘Only to have him posted somewhere else. But still’ – she sat up straighter, hands together – ‘life is what it is, you play the cards you’re dealt. And if you’ll just excuse me for a moment, I’ll get some more hot water for the pot.’
Hadley ran a finger slowly down her cheek to mime tears and Alice nodded.
The female blackbird had been joined by her partner; the scent of flowers was faint in the air. Somewhere in the middle distance a lawnmower started up, stopped, started again. How many young men had been killed with knives in London the previous week, Hadley asked herself? Six? Seven? Enfield, Bromley, Peckham, Brent Cross, Battersea, Bow. How many killed in Kandahar? Maybe living somewhere like this really was little more than an illusion, she thought, life as some Quaker idealist had seen it at the turn of the previous century. Though there were probably food banks here as well. Weren’t there everywhere nowadays? Knives, too.
Susannah came back out, red-eyed, carrying a kettle. ‘Who’s for more tea?’
Hadley held her cup towards the pot, said no to another muffin, asked if, to Susannah’s knowledge, Anthony Winter had left a will.
‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea. I haven’t heard from his solicitor or anything. But if there is a will, there’s no way in which I’d be any kind of beneficiary. The children, possibly, but not me.’ She shook her head, resettled in her chair. ‘I remember a conversation we had, Anthony and myself, around the time of the divorce. I wouldn’t give you, he said, the shit from the sole of my shoe.’
‘Nice,’ Alice said quietly.
Susannah shrugged. ‘Alliterative, at least.’
‘His estate,’ Hadley said, ‘won’t be inconsiderable, I suppose. Once the sale of recent work’s been taken into account.’
‘I do have a few of Anthony’s paintings,’ Susannah said. ‘Early, of course. Before all that latent nastiness had squirmed its way on to canvas. Third-rate pornography, if you ask me. But then who am I? A woman artist painting flowers, what do I know? Just a lady fucking painter!’
More tears. She brought her cup down hard on the saucer, splintering it across. ‘I’m sorry, I …’
‘It’s fine,’ Hadley said. ‘It’s okay.’
‘No, it’s not fine. It’s not fucking fine. It’s …’ With a sweep of her arm she sent cup and shattered saucer catapulting across the garden.
Alice arched back out of the way; Hadley was swiftly to her feet. Susannah pushed herself up from the table; stood for several moments, head down, breathing uneasily. ‘Life,’ she said. ‘It’s so … so fucking unfair.’
‘Do you want to go back inside?’ Hadley asked solicitously.
‘No, no. It’s okay. I’m better off out here.’ She leaned for a few moments longer against the back of her chair, then sat back down. ‘You know, I never used to swear. Oh, sometimes under my breath if a brushstroke went wrong, but otherwise … it betrays an insufficient vocabulary, I used to say. But then when Matthew came back on leave – well, I’d heard all the words before, but not necessarily in that order. Even Melissa, since she went to university. F this and F that, the new universal qualifier. It used to be in the papers in asterisks, but now it’s spelt out in full. The C word as well.’
She fished a tissue from the sleeve of her tunic, dabbed her eyes and blew her nose. ‘You’ve just heard me swear more in a few minutes than I have in the last six months. But then I suppose you’re used to it.’
‘We hear the odd word,’ Hadley said with a smile. ‘Now and again.’
Susannah smiled back.
‘You said you’d barely spoken to your ex-husband in twenty years. That would be since the divorce proceedings?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the occasion on which he made the remark about the sole of his shoe?’
‘That was the same. July the twenty-sixth, nineteen ninety-seven. Not a date I’m likely to forget.’
‘Melissa would have been what? Three?’
‘Three and a half, yes. Matthew was just five.’
‘It must have affected them badly.’
‘Matthew more, possibly. At the time, anyway. He was old enough to know what was going on. Not all the whys and wherefores, but yes, he understood and he was angry. Really angry.’
‘At what was happening? The situation?’
‘At me. It was all my fault, that’s what he thought. What his father had told him.’
‘And Melissa?’
‘She was too young to really know what was happening. Except that her daddy was going away.’
‘And she blamed you for that as well?’
‘No, not really. At least, I don’t think so. I mean, she may have done later, but then, no, it was Anthony. Anthony she had it in for. From her point of view, why wouldn’t she? One minute he was there and the next he was gone. Walked out on her for reasons she didn’t understand.’
‘But later,’ Alice said, ‘when she was older …?’
Susannah sighed. ‘We come to terms, don’t we? On the surface, anyway. It’s what we do.’
‘And Melissa managed to do that? Come to terms?’
‘For a while, yes.’ She turned her head away as if something down the garden had caught her attention.
Hadley waited. ‘You wouldn’t have any idea, would you, who might have wanted Anthony dead?’
‘Apart from me, you mean?’ Susannah said and laughed. ‘But, no. No, I’m afraid I don’t. Aside, that is, from probably half the people he ever met.’
Hadley paused alongside one of the paintings as they were leaving. A portrait, head and shoulders, of a girl of perhaps thirteen or fourteen, soft features, dark shoulder-length hair.
‘Is that Melissa?’
‘Yes,’ Susannah said. ‘Shortly after her fourteenth birthday. I had to practically bribe her to sit for it. Six months of riding lessons it cost me.’
‘It’s lovely.’
‘Thank you.’
‘She’s lovely.’
‘She doesn’t think so. I wish she did.’
At the door, Hadley offered her hand. ‘Thanks for your time.’
‘Thank you. Thank you for coming all this way. Whatever I might feel about Anthony, whoever did this, I hope you find them.’
‘We will.’
As they reached the gate, Hadley glanced back and saw a movement, faint and quick, at one of the upstairs windows. A hand, pulling the curtain closed.
They were almost at the car when her mobile rang. Chris Phillips eager to update her with developments. Data recovery had unearthed something juicy hidden away on Winter’s computer.
‘Okay, Chris. We’ll be there in an hour, hour and a half tops. Keep a lid on it meanwhile.’
‘Boss.’
Hadley closed her phone, snapped open the car door. ‘Right, Alice. Time to leave Munchkinland behind.’