Hawthorne arrived the following morning, a Wednesday.
A taxi pulled up at the archway just after nine o’clock and two men got out. Khan was waiting on the other side, holding a cardboard file. He was glad to see that the press people had disappeared. There was still something about getting outside help that troubled him, as did the sight of the taxi. Was that going to be charged to expenses? Khan had called Hawthorne the night before and had been surprised how cheerful he had sounded at his end of the line, as if he had been expecting the call. Khan had quickly gone through what had happened in Riverview Close. In broad strokes, he had described the various residents: age, profession, ethnicity, what they had told him, what he believed. So far, it didn’t add up to very much. Now that Hawthorne was here, would he be able to do any better?
Quickly, he made his assessment of the man he’d called in to help.
Hawthorne was a diminutive figure, oddly dressed in a suit and a loose raincoat despite the warm July weather, looking around him with eyes that seemed to absorb and analyse every detail, a face that gave nothing away. His hair was short, neatly brushed, of no particular colour. He was in his mid to late thirties, although it was difficult to be sure as there was something childlike about his appearance. Khan had begun his career as a juvenile protection officer and in some strange way Hawthorne reminded him of some of the victims he had met.
The person he had brought with him was equally puzzling. He seemed an unlikely partner for Hawthorne, keeping his distance and taking less interest in his surroundings – as if he was bored by it all. He was about the same age, with sloping shoulders and long, lank hair, untidily dressed in ill-fitting corduroy trousers, a jacket with patches on the elbows and scuffed shoes. He hadn’t shaved that morning and the lower part of his pale, oblong face was covered with stubble. Everything about him had an air of carelessness. He had the appearance of a man who didn’t know how to look after himself or who couldn’t be bothered, and Khan thought that if he hadn’t been in the company of Hawthorne, he wouldn’t have allowed him anywhere near a crime scene.
Hawthorne saw the detective superintendent and walked over, his companion a few steps behind. Already, Khan was wondering if he hadn’t made a mistake. He took Hawthorne’s outstretched hand and shook it. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said.
‘Thank you for inviting me. This is John Dudley.’
The other man nodded vaguely.
‘I take it that’s the house where Giles Kenworthy lived.’ Hawthorne pointed at Riverview Lodge.
‘Yes. That’s right.’ For a brief moment, Khan allowed his irritation to get the better of him. ‘I need to get one thing straight before we go in,’ he said. ‘You’re working for me. I hope you understand. The moment you find anything, I want to know. And you’re to hold nothing back.’
‘Don’t worry, mate. That’s my job – to tell you what you’ve missed.’
‘I don’t think I’ve missed anything so far. And I’d prefer it if you addressed me as Detective Superintendent.’
They began to walk towards the house.
‘Mr Kenworthy was killed on Monday night at around eleven o’clock,’ Khan began. ‘I’ll send you a copy of the pathologist’s report. A single crossbow bolt, fired at close range, penetrated his cricoid cartilage and buried itself in his throat. They took the body yesterday, but I’ve got some of the photographs here. Death was caused by haemorrhagic shock.’
‘Were the cricothyroid or cricotracheal ligaments severed?’ Dudley asked.
‘No.’
‘Then it wasn’t his kids who killed him!’
Khan wondered if he was joking. ‘How do you work that one out?’
‘The bolt didn’t slant up or down. It must have been fired by someone of about his own height.’
‘The kids aren’t suspects.’ Khan scowled. ‘In fact, they’ve got a rock-solid alibi. They’re at a local prep school which does a couple of nights’ boarding each week. They weren’t at home. Probably just as well.’
‘Was Kenworthy on his own?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘Yes. His wife was having dinner with a friend. She was the one who discovered the body. She’s upstairs now . . . and not in a good way. They also have a Filipino housekeeper, but she’s on annual leave, in her own country. She’s not expected back for another week. Then there’s a part-time chauffeur. We’re talking to him and we’ll let you know if he’s got anything to say.’
‘When did the wife get in?’
‘Twenty past eleven on Monday night. The door was half-open, which puzzled her. Her husband was on the other side, blood everywhere. She screamed the house down and that woke up the neighbours. Must have made a change from the parties and the car stereo and all the other things they were complaining about.’
They had reached the front door, where a uniformed policeman stood to one side. But before they went in, Khan stopped. ‘We haven’t talked money,’ he said.
Hawthorne looked offended. ‘We don’t need to, Detective Superintendent.’
John Dudley drew an envelope out of his jacket pocket and offered it to Khan. ‘Terms and conditions,’ he explained. ‘I take it you got clearance from Special Grant Funding?’
‘I spoke to them yesterday.’ Khan took the envelope and folded it away without looking at it. ‘Someone will get back to you,’ he said.
They went in. As they entered the hallway, Dudley took out his iPhone, found the Voice Memos app in the Utilities folder and turned it on. At the end of the day he would save the file, transfer it to his laptop and share it with Hawthorne. He also took several photographs, focusing on the extensive bloodstain on the once beige carpet and the splatter on the walls.
‘What was Giles Kenworthy wearing when he answered the door?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘He hadn’t got ready for bed, if that’s what you mean. He had a white shirt, suit trousers. The jacket and tie were in his office.’ Khan pointed towards an open door. ‘He had his slippers on. Prada – mauve cashmere. And he’d drunk a couple of glasses of Hakushu single malt whisky. Expensive stuff and not small measures.’
‘So he was working late. The doorbell rang. He answered and the weapon was fired over the threshold.’
‘It looks that way.’
‘Where did you find it?’
‘It was just dropped on the ground, outside. Mrs Kenworthy didn’t notice it in the darkness. The crossbow belongs to Roderick Browne, who lives next door in the house at the end of the terrace . . . Woodlands, it’s called. No fingerprints – apart from his. It’s always possible that the killer wore gloves.’
‘They just left it?’ Dudley was surprised. ‘You’d have thought they’d have got rid of it. Chucked it in the Thames.’
‘Funnily enough, it was pointing at Roderick Browne’s home. It was almost as if the killer wanted us to know who it belonged to.’
Khan opened the file he had been carrying and took out several photographs, which he handed to Hawthorne. They had been taken from different angles and showed Giles Kenworthy’s body as it had been found. Half of them were in black and white. The ones in colour were more horrible. Hawthorne stopped on a close-up shot of the dead man’s head. He said nothing and his face gave nothing away, but somehow Khan was aware of an extraordinary intensity, a sense that at that moment nothing else in the world mattered.
‘It’s a standard bolt,’ Khan explained. ‘Twenty inches long, aluminium shaft, plastic vanes. We found five more, identical, in the Brownes’ garage.’
‘Has Browne confessed to the killing?’ Dudley asked.
The question took Khan by surprise. ‘No. Why do you ask?’
‘If he’d used his own weapon and his own bolt and he just left it all there for you to find, you’d think maybe he didn’t care if he was caught.’
‘Well, he’s a nervous wreck,’ Khan said. ‘But he hasn’t confessed to anything. Quite the contrary. The first time I met him, all he would say was how shocked he was, how upset, how it couldn’t have had anything to do with him because he was asleep, in bed, with his wife in the next room . . . I wasn’t even accusing him!’
Hawthorne handed the photographs back. ‘You said we could talk to Mr Kenworthy’s widow.’
‘She’s upstairs.’
The Kenworthys’ home was expensive and wanted you to know it. The furniture was Scandinavian, the lights ultra-modern, the carpets ankle-deep and the paintings straight out of some smart auction-house catalogue. Two young boys lived here with their parents, but there was no mess, no scattered clothes or toys, as if their very existence had been wiped away. A plate-glass window at the back, rising almost the full height of the stairs, looked out over the new patio with a Union Jack fluttering on the other side of a chrome-plated beast of a gas barbecue.
Lynda Kenworthy was lying on a bed so large that her entire family could have joined her with room to spare. She seemed to be sinking into the duvet and pillows, her blonde hair hanging loose, her silk dressing gown rising and falling over the folds of her body, her face, with its once perfect make-up, streaked by tears. The room smelled of cigarette smoke. There was an ashtray next to her filled with cigarette butts, each one signed off with a smear of bright red lipstick. None of the windows was open and even if they had been they’d have been helpless behind the great swathes of silk curtains, pelmets, gold cords and tassels.
‘How are you feeling, love?’ Hawthorne asked. From the way he spoke, she could have been recovering from a bad cold.
‘Who are you?’ Lynda asked – her voice little more than a whisper.
‘We’re helping the police,’ Dudley said. ‘We want to find out who killed your husband.’
‘They all hated him!’ Fresh tears followed in the tracks of the old ones. ‘I told him it was a mistake, the moment we came here. They were stuck-up and snobby, the whole lot of them.’
‘So you didn’t get on with the neighbours,’ Dudley remarked.
‘It wasn’t our fault!’ She reached for a tissue, pulling it out of a box embroidered with a gondola on a Venetian canal. ‘We never did anything wrong. They were always trying to find fault. Everything we did! Nothing was ever right.’
Hawthorne and Dudley waited until she had calmed down.
‘Would you say there was anyone in Riverview Close who had a particular animus towards your husband?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘I’ve just told you. They were all the same. They’d made up their minds about us before we even moved in.’
‘Had there been any recent incidents that you might want to tell us about?’
Lynda used the tissue to dry her eyes, at the same time wiping away some of the blusher on her cheekbones. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.
‘Had anyone threatened your husband with violence?’
‘Well . . .’ She thought for a moment. ‘Giles was always fighting with Dr Beresford,’ she said. ‘He and his wife live next door and they never stopped complaining about our cars. Why can’t we park our cars outside? It’s our drive, our house, and it wasn’t as if we were deliberately blocking the way. If Dr Beresford hadn’t been such a bad driver, he could easily have got past.’ She stopped herself as she remembered what had happened. ‘The two of them had a proper set-to about a week ago and Dr Beresford threatened to kill Giles!’ Her eyes widened. ‘He used those very words!’
‘What did he say, exactly?’
‘I’m going to kill you!’
‘You heard him?’
‘No. Giles told me.’
Hawthorne and Dudley exchanged glances. They both knew that a lot of people argued about parking rights; it was one of the things that always came close to the top of neighbourhood disputes. But even if Dr Beresford had made the threat, a parking dispute would be an unusual motive for murder. ‘Anything else?’ Dudley asked.
Lynda gazed into the distance. ‘I already told him all this,’ she said, referring to Detective Superintendent Khan, who had been listening to the conversation from a distance.
‘Tell us.’
She swallowed. ‘Well, he had a falling-out with Sarah.’
‘Who’s Sarah?’
‘She’s the gardener. That was on Friday,’ she added.
‘And what happened on Friday?’
‘Giles went into his study and there she was, standing in front of his desk. She had no right to be there. She’d come in through the French windows. And she was looking at his computers. Giles was very sensitive about that. He’d had a hack at his office just a few weeks before – someone trying to get into his database. It was the reason we couldn’t go to that drinks do at The Stables. It hadn’t worked that time, but he didn’t have the same security at home so he had every right to ask her what she was doing. Sarah was just horrible and abusive and he fired her on the spot – and quite right too. I said he ought to report her to the police.’
‘What for, exactly?’
‘What do you think?’ It was remarkable how quickly Lynda could switch between desolation, indignation and malice. ‘Do you know how much information there was on those screens about money markets and investments and all that stuff? She could have been working for someone!’ Lynda drew herself up against the pillows. ‘Giles wouldn’t even let me into his office because of all the sensitive stuff he had in there and I wouldn’t have understood a word of it if he had. So what did Sarah think she was doing in there?’
‘You think your gardener was involved in . . . what? Financial espionage?’
‘She might have been. She was certainly a thief. All sorts of things had gone missing. Giles lost a Rolex watch. I’d bought it for him myself when we were in Dubai. And I had fifty pounds taken from my bag. Giles said I left it at the hairdresser, but I know it was Sarah. We only gave her the job in the first place because she was doing the gardens for everyone else in the close. I always said she was trouble. We should have found someone of our own.’
She fell silent, dabbing her eyes.
‘Is there anyone else you employ in the house?’ Dudley asked. ‘I understand you’ve got a Filipino cleaner. I bet she’s a treasure!’
‘She’s lazy and she’s never there when you need her. In fact, she’s away right now. Every summer we have to give her the whole month off so she can see her family, but getting any sort of help is so difficult these days. Jasmine hardly speaks a word of English and getting her to do anything is always an uphill struggle.’ She paused. ‘And there’s Gary. He’s Giles’s driver, but he’s only part-time. He doesn’t live here.’
‘How did you meet your husband?’ Dudley had changed the subject, perhaps hoping the question would cheer her up.
Instead, it brought fresh tears. ‘On a British Airways flight to New York. He was in first class. I was one of the cabin crew. I served him a mai tai and we hit it off immediately. He was so kind to me. He invited me to his hotel next to Central Park. We had so many laughs!’
‘So where were you last night?’ Hawthorne cut in.
That stopped her. ‘I was seeing a friend.’
‘Can we have his name?’ Dudley had produced a small notebook, which he was holding in front of him. He had somehow assumed that the friend was male and Lynda didn’t disappoint him.
‘What’s that got to do with you?’
‘You’re going to have to tell us sooner or later, love.’ It was always a mistake taking on Hawthorne. When he was at his sweetest and most reasonable, that was when he was most dangerous. ‘You got back after eleven o’clock. That’s time for a lot of laughs.’
‘It was horrible! The door was open. And he was lying there . . . !’
‘Who were you with?’ Hawthorne insisted.
Lynda reached for another tissue. ‘His name is Jean-François. He’s my French teacher.’
‘You’re learning French?’
‘Giles was talking about buying a place in Antibes.’
‘Mais malhereusement, cela n’arrivera pas,’ Dudley muttered.
Lynda stared at him. ‘What?’