There was a single policeman standing guard at the entrance to Riverview Close, keeping away any sightseers, but otherwise the whole place was eerily empty by mid-afternoon, when Hawthorne and Dudley returned. All the investigating officers, including Khan, had disappeared, as if, just a couple of days after a particularly violent and unusual murder, they had decided there was nothing more for them to do.
‘Have they made any arrests?’ Hawthorne asked the young constable – who at least knew who he was.
‘No, sir. Not that I heard.’
They walked through, into the close.
‘You think they’ve pulled Roderick Browne in?’ Dudley asked.
Hawthorne nodded. Dudley could have been reading his mind. ‘I’m not sure he murdered Giles Kenworthy – although he did his best to convince us otherwise. But I don’t think DS Khan will be able to resist it. Pull him in. Give him a night in police custody. Hope to terrify him enough into talking.’
The door of Well House was the first they came to and Dudley rang the bell. It was opened by Andrew Pennington, who seemed to know exactly who they were and had been expecting them. ‘Adam called me after you spoke to him,’ he explained. ‘He said you might want to speak to me.’ He leaned out and looked around the close. ‘It looks as if everyone else is out.’
‘Do you talk to each other a lot?’ Dudley asked.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You and Mr Strauss. It seems to me that the whole lot of you are pretty tight. You keep each other informed of what’s going on.’
‘We’re all friends, if that’s what you mean. At least, we were until the Kenworthys arrived. Please, come in . . .’
Andrew Pennington’s home was neat, comfortable, old-fashioned. The sitting room had a desk in one corner, a matching three-piece suite, bookshelves filled with mainly nineteenth-century English, French and Russian classics. The colour scheme tended towards the dark – walls painted in shades of green and mauve, with oak and mahogany furniture, thick carpets and curtains. Triple French windows at the back looked out into the garden, but only allowed a little afternoon sun to trickle in.
It was immediately obvious that he lived alone. The house had a sense of emptiness. It felt stuck in time, as if nothing had changed, but it was immediately obvious what was missing. There were photographs on every surface, mounted in a variety of frames, but all of them showing the same subject: a beautiful woman, always smiling, her face filled with life. Iris Pennington at work, Iris on the beach, Iris and Andrew arm in arm on a swing chair, Iris and Andrew dancing, Iris making a heart sign with both hands, Iris in bed, ill and wasted but still smiling for the camera. Well House spoke equally of her death and her surviving husband’s life.
Andrew was in his early sixties, a handsome, softly spoken black man with hair that was tinged with white around his ears. It would be easy to imagine him in court. He would be courteous, precise . . . but he would miss nothing. Those grey eyes of his would pick up the slightest nuance and when he sensed a weak spot he would strike with lethal accuracy. Of course, all of that was far behind him now. He had not so much embraced retirement as allowed it to engulf him. The slippers he was wearing, the cardigan pushed out of shape by the bulge of his stomach, the glasses, the tiredness in his face . . . He was tumbling into old age.
‘Can I get you tea or coffee?’ he asked as he showed them to a seat.
‘No, thank you. We just had lunch.’ Hawthorne picked up on what Dudley had been asking. ‘We’ve been told that you and your friends had a meeting,’ he said. ‘You were going to confront your new neighbours about their behaviour.’
‘You’re referring to the meeting we had six weeks ago at Adam Strauss’s house. But I don’t think “confront” is the right word.’
‘What word would you use?’
The barrister shrugged. ‘I haven’t quite put my finger on what it was about the Kenworthys that annoyed so many of us. I’m not convinced it was the issues – the noise and all the rest of it. I think it was the people themselves. There was something about them that was deeply off-putting. I’ve seen it in court, many a time. A jury takes against a defendant for no clear reason and it’s almost impossible to make them see sense, no matter how many facts you have at your fingertips.
‘For what it’s worth, I would have said the meeting was more about conciliation than confrontation. It seemed a good idea to discuss the issues before they got out of hand.’
‘They got out of hand – big time,’ Dudley muttered.
‘It was unfortunate that the Kenworthys decided not to come. They sent a text while we were together, after we’d arrived. It didn’t go down well.’
‘The meeting was your idea?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘The idea presented itself when I was talking to Adam. It’s long been my experience that it’s all too easy to get a false impression of someone if you don’t talk to them. You imagine the worst and that’s what they become. There’s a poem by William Blake.’ He closed his eyes, recalling the words. ‘“I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow.”’ He smiled. ‘The poem is called “A Poison Tree”. I suppose we met to avoid cultivating one.’
‘There must have been a lot of anger in the room,’ Hawthorne said.
‘Wrath,’ Dudley corrected him.
‘Again, that’s not the case. Tom was probably more annoyed than anyone because of the parking situation – quite rightly, as it turned out. A man died in his surgery when he couldn’t get there to save him. Roderick and Felicity were determined to fight the swimming pool. They’d just received notice of the planning application. We all had. If it went through, they would lose their view – not at all helpful when you’re bedridden. But nobody said anything particularly aggressive and certainly nothing that might be deemed illegal. Adam didn’t complain at all, as far as I can recall, although of course his most precious chess set hadn’t been smashed at the time. That happened later. May actually said what a lot of us were thinking, which was that we should do everything by the book. The important thing was not to let the situation escalate. In the end, it was quite a pleasant evening, albeit a short one. There was no point hanging around if they weren’t going to show up.’
‘But then things got worse,’ Dudley said.
‘It’s true. The next six weeks were very trying.’
‘Mrs Winslow lost her dog.’
‘The dog belonged to both her and her companion. I was with them when they found him. He was at the bottom of the old well in the corner of my garden and in considerable pain, poor thing. They’d had a long dispute with the Kenworthys – I’m afraid the dog had a habit of burrowing into their garden – but there’s absolutely no evidence that either Giles or Lynda had anything to do with it.’
‘What did it do, then? Commit suicide?’ Dudley was unimpressed.
‘May and Phyllis believe that Giles Kenworthy ordered Sarah Baines to do away with it. It’s true she had scratches on her arms the following day, but I’ve spoken to her and I believe her when she says she would never have done anything like that. For that matter, I’m not sure that the Kenworthys would have given the order.’
‘You mentioned Adam Strauss’s chess set,’ Hawthorne said.
‘That was the children playing cricket. No doubt about that.’
‘They also rode their skateboards over some of your flowers.’
For the first time, Andrew Pennington was taken aback, losing some of his poise. When he spoke again, his voice was low. ‘Yes. That was Hugo and Tristram Kenworthy again. They’re very young and I’m sure they meant no harm, but we have repeatedly asked their parents to keep them under control.’
He wanted to stop there, but Hawthorne and Dudley waited in silence, expecting more.
‘You may have noticed the roundabout in the centre of the close. With the permission – indeed, with the encouragement – of the other residents, I had planted it with shrubs and flowers that had a special significance for my late wife, Iris. She died of cancer just as I retired and I have to tell you, I miss her terribly. I try to keep myself busy. I’ve joined a bridge club and I play twice a week – Mondays and Wednesdays. In fact, I’m playing tonight. There’s a walking group. Swimming in the summer. But it’s not easy without her, which is perhaps why the display means so much to me.
‘Anyway, I came home one evening to discover wheel marks from two skateboards cutting right through the beds. A lot of the flowers were severed. In fact, the whole bed was decimated. I would say “profaned”, but perhaps that’s going too far.’ He tried to make light of it. ‘It’s not hugely important. I can always plant more. But I was upset because it happened to be the fifth anniversary of her death.’ His eyes met Hawthorne’s. ‘Perhaps that leads you to think that I had a motive to kill their father. He didn’t even apologise. The boys still race around on their skateboards.’
‘It might do.’
‘Well, I’ll give you a much better motive if it will help you with your inquiries, Mr Hawthorne. Giles Kenworthy was a card-carrying member of the UK Independence Party.’
‘What of it?’
‘I think it informed the way he treated me.’
‘And how was that, Mr Pennington?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘With disdain.’
‘Are you saying he was a racist?’
‘I’m asking what sort of man puts jingoistic slogans in his front window and flies a Union Jack in his back garden?’
‘A patriot?’
‘I’m afraid it’s been a very long time since the Union Jack was associated with patriotism, Mr Dudley,’ Andrew replied.
‘The UK Independence Party wouldn’t call itself racist,’ Dudley said.
‘Their leader said he wouldn’t want to live next to a Romanian. One of their councillors was recorded admitting she had a problem with “Negroes”. The Prime Minister himself has referred to them as “closet racists”. Maybe the view is different when you’re seeing it from your side of the fence, Mr Dudley. But as I understand it, the police are even looking into a possible political connection in the attack on Marsha Clarke. You won’t have heard of her, but there have been quite a few stories about her in the local press.’
‘She was the old lady being looked after by the Beresfords’ nanny.’
‘That’s right. Apparently, an Independence Party leaflet has been found in her letter box. It may have been a calling card.’
Hawthorne and Dudley took this in. Marsha Clarke, a woman living in Hampton Wick, had been the victim of what might have been a racist attack. Her assailant might have belonged to a right-wing political party. Giles Kenworthy supported the same party. And he happened to have lived next door to the young woman who had been caring for Marsha.
There might be a connection, but it was definitely an oblique one.
‘Giles Kenworthy never spoke to me,’ Andrew went on. ‘He never invited me into the house. He always looked at me with a sense of superiority, almost contempt. I used to think that he deliberately revved the engine of his car outside my house to wake me up.’
‘Why are you telling us all this, Mr Pennington?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘Because I think you’re focusing on the wrong angle. All the trivia of a suburban close means nothing at all. Nobody ever murdered anyone because they played their music too loud. It may be that Kenworthy was a racist and a deeply unpleasant man who deserved to die.’
‘Did you kill him?’
‘No. I did not.’
Before either of them could say anything more, there was a movement outside the window and a young woman walked past, dressed in a vest top and jeans, pushing a wheelbarrow.
‘Is that Sarah Baines?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘Yes.’
‘She works here?’
‘She does all the gardens.’
‘Not the Kenworthys’,’ Dudley said. ‘They fired her.’
‘Would you mind if we had a word with her?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘There’s nothing more you want to ask me?’
‘Not for the moment, thanks.’
Andrew Pennington got up and opened the French windows. ‘Then be my guest . . .’