Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan had realised straight away that the murder of Giles Kenworthy would be like nothing he had ever investigated and that it might threaten what had so far been an unblemished career.
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.
The others were just as bad. The two old ladies had to be persuaded to let him into the house, preferring to address him from the other side of a half-open door. The barrister, Andrew Pennington, was so circumspect that he tied himself in knots, talking as much as he could without actually saying anything. By contrast, Adam Strauss, whom Khan remembered from a terrible quiz show his grandmother had liked to watch, was monosyllabic. Gemma Beresford, the doctor’s wife, was openly hostile.
Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan was something of a poster boy for the Metropolitan Police – and knew it. He was young, good-looking, Oxford-educated, a great communicator from a working-class background. His father had been employed as a hospital porter. With his prematurely silver hair, his slim physique, his Bollywood good looks and his easy manner, Khan was admired by everyone who knew him and was regularly put forward for press briefings and evening news slots. This was the first time he had ever felt out of his depth. He’d found himself in drug-ridden sink estates in the worst parts of south London that had been more open and accommodating than Riverview Close. So far, they hadn’t given him so much as a Mr Kipling cake.
Late in the afternoon, he stood in the sunlight, comparing notes with DC Ruth Goodwin, who had worked with him for the last five years. The two of them got on well even though they came from different worlds – in her case, Hampstead Garden Suburb and a well-to-do Jewish family who wouldn’t have objected if she’d married a police officer but were surprised when she announced she was going to become one. Short and dark, with a round face and close-cropped hair, she had recently given up smoking, much to Khan’s satisfaction. Unfortunately, she had replaced cigarettes with a series of brightly coloured vapes, each one with a more unlikely flavour. Today it was lemon and mint. Khan thought she looked ridiculous, like a child sucking a sweet.
‘What do you think’s going on here?’ he asked. They were both leaning against the car that had brought them here.
‘I don’t know, sir. They’re all hiding something. That much is obvious.’
‘Do you think one of them killed Giles Kenworthy?’
‘It seems unlikely. They’re all friends, living in each other’s back gardens. But this is murder and they don’t seem like the sort of people who would cover up anything as serious as that.’
‘Unless they were somehow involved.’
‘Well, they can’t all have done it.’
Khan nodded. ‘He’d have had nine crossbow bolts in him if they had.’ He watched as a cloud of steam from the vape formed in the air and then disappeared. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Ruth. If they’re covering for each other, it’s going to be hard to untangle.’
‘And they’ve all got the same motive. The neighbour from hell. That doesn’t make it any easier.’
There was a long silence. The police and forensic officers were moving around them like pieces on one of Adam Strauss’s chessboards.
‘I wonder if we could use some outside help?’ DC Goodwin suggested at length.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Well, don’t shout at me, but I was thinking. Maybe . . . Hawthorne?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘It can’t do any harm and this might be right up his street . . .’
Neither of them had met Hawthorne, but they both knew who he was: the detective inspector who had lost his job when a suspect he’d been interrogating had sustained life-changing injuries – although he’d had a reputation long before that. He was a hard-working, solitary, difficult man who somehow always managed to pull the guilty rabbit out of the blood-soaked hat. After he’d been thrown out, his reputation had grown. They had both heard DI Cara Grunshaw talking about him. She had come across him on two occasions and had a deep loathing for him, but even she admitted that he had helped her. He also had plenty of friends inside the force. DCI Ian Rutherford had been his superior officer and wouldn’t hear a word said against him.
‘We could bring him in as an outside consultant,’ DC Goodwin went on. ‘If you think this one is a special case.’
‘I don’t know.’ Khan shook his head doubtfully.
‘It’s a crossbow, sir. In a private close in Richmond. We’ve already got the local hacks outside. They’re going to lap it up.’
‘But how do we even reach him? And who authorises payment?’
‘I can ask DCI Rutherford.’ Goodwin inhaled on her bright yellow vape. The light at the end blinked on. A smell of something like candyfloss shimmered in the air between them. ‘From what I hear, Hawthorne never takes any of the credit.’
This mattered to Khan. He didn’t want anyone to think that he was already giving up on such a shocking crime.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we give him a call?’