The Tea Cosy was unusually busy. There were two customers browsing through the shelves, and a third sitting at a table, tucking into red velvet cake and Earl Grey tea. May Winslow knew her well. Mrs Simpson came into the shop at least once a week and very seldom bought anything.
May was sitting opposite her, holding a book. The cover showed the silhouette of a village with the title in red letters above: The Inverted Jenny: An Amelia Strange Mystery. ‘It’s a wonderful story,’ she was saying. ‘Of course, you’ve read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – this was written in 1924, the same year. It starts with a summer fête in the village of Blossombury in Wiltshire. The vicar, who is running the cake stall, is poisoned and it turns out his uncle is Sir Henry Fellowes, the local squire and a well-known philatelist. The mystery starts when a very valuable stamp is found inside one of the coconuts.’
‘I’m not sure,’ Mrs Simpson said. ‘Who’s Jenny?’
‘It’s the name of the stamp. This is the third Amelia Strange story. There were forty-two of them in total. She’s one of my favourite detectives. She sings in the choir and she has an incredibly clever Siamese cat and they solve the mysteries together—’
The door of the shop opened and two men came in. May’s heart sank. They had already visited her once at The Gables. She thought she’d seen the last of them.
‘Mrs Winslow.’ Hawthorne nodded at her. ‘I wonder if we could have a word with you in private?’
‘I don’t understand.’ May forced a smile to her lips. ‘I understood that the investigation was over.’
‘Far from it, I’m afraid. We need to ask you some questions.’
‘About Mr Browne? I’ve already said—’
‘No. About the Franciscan Convent of St Clare in Leeds.’
Hawthorne stood where he was, daring her to pick a fight. John Dudley looked almost embarrassed to be with him and was shuffling his feet. May understood. In a way, she had been expecting it. She got to her feet. ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to close early,’ she announced so that everyone could hear.
‘I was going to buy that book!’ Mrs Simpson muttered.
May remembered she was still holding it and thrust it into her hands. ‘You can have it, my dear,’ she said. ‘Just let me know if you enjoy it.’
Phyllis had been standing in the kitchen area of the shop all this time and watched, discomfited, as the three customers trailed out into the street. May went over and locked the door. Hawthorne and Dudley sat down at the table. ‘Would you like some tea?’ Phyllis asked.
‘You’d better come and join us, Phyllis,’ May instructed her friend. ‘They don’t need tea.’
Phyllis did as she was told.
‘We’ve just seen Felicity Browne,’ Hawthorne began.
‘Oh. How is she?’
‘You mean, apart from the incurable disease and the suicide of her husband?’ Dudley chipped in. ‘She’s not doing too badly.’
May flushed. ‘What do you want, Mr Hawthorne?’
‘We were just on our way back to Riverview Close and we were passing the shop, so we thought we might have a word, if that’s all right.’
‘And it would be nice if – this time – you told us the truth,’ Dudley added.
‘I think you’re a very rude young man.’
‘I’m not that young.’
‘We know your real names,’ Hawthorne said.
Phyllis looked shocked. May tried not to show any emotion.
Hawthorne continued. ‘Two old ladies move into a house in Richmond. They’ve come from nowhere. Nobody knows anything about them. Nobody visits them. They don’t get any letters or parcels. I try to find out more about them, but nothing turns up and I ask myself if they’re even using their own names. Or maybe they’ve changed them.
‘It’s quite easy to do it without anyone noticing. If your name is More, for example, spelled like Sir Thomas, you just add a second o. Or you can go back to your maiden name. May Winslow, for example, instead of May Brenner. In this country it’s also dead easy to use the deed poll system. Criminals do it all the time. And if you’re not applying for a passport or a driving licence, who’s even going to notice?’
May had gone white. She was breathing heavily, little gasps that made her shoulders rise and fall.
‘You gave yourselves away a few times, love,’ Hawthorne went on. ‘You want to know how?’
May nodded.
‘Well, to start with, you said you were at the convent for almost thirty years, but your friend Phyllis here seems to think that the last service before bed is vespers, when she really ought to have worked out that it’s compline or night prayer, which is followed by the great silence, when nobody is meant to talk. Also, she said that you and she were “cellies” and you were quick to explain this meant you shared a room, but quite apart from the fact that I’m not sure nuns ever have to share, it’s prisoners who call themselves cellies, women prisoners in particular.
‘Let’s work this out. St Clare was supposedly in Osmondthorpe, near Leeds. By an amazing coincidence, that’s just half an hour away from HMP New Hall in Wakefield, which is where Sarah Baines did her time, and you recommended Sarah for a job here. “You have to give young people a chance”. That’s what you said. It’s a lovely thought and I suppose it’s doubly true if she’s threatening to expose who you really are. It’s also why you couldn’t fire her, even though she’s a useless gardener and she may have killed your dog. She had you by the short and curlies.’
‘Do nuns have short and curlies?’ Dudley asked.
May glared at Phyllis. ‘I was always warning you,’ she said. ‘But you never could keep your mouth shut.’
‘I didn’t mean to . . .’ Phyllis began miserably.
May looked across the table at Hawthorne, the half-eaten cake and the cold tea between them. ‘I’ve done my time,’ she said. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong. All I wanted was to get on with the rest of my life in peace. Sarah knew that. And you’re right, the little cow blackmailed us. She knew who we were and she was going to tell everyone.’
‘What was she going to say?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘That we’d been in prison.’
‘Rather more than that, I think.’
‘You murdered your husband,’ Dudley said. ‘His name was David Brenner.’
‘He deserved it.’
‘Well, you certainly made your point. You hit him thirty times with a meat cleaver. There was so much blood in the house that even the police dogs threw up. You piled up the pieces in the bath and put his head in a dustbin for the Thursday-morning collection.’
‘I told you the truth about him. David was a monster. I was seventeen when I met him. I didn’t know anything about the world. I was just a child. And once I was in his hands . . . you have no idea. The things he did to me! He beat me and he brutalised me and he destroyed any confidence I had in myself until the day I finally snapped.’ She paused. ‘I’ll have one of your snouts, Phyllis, if you don’t mind.’
‘Snouts,’ Dudley muttered. ‘More prison slang.’
‘You can never get it completely out of your system.’ May had got rid of the fear and anger when the accusations had been made. Now she was regaining her composure. Phyllis handed her a pouch of tobacco and she rolled a cigarette for herself with expert fingers and lit it. ‘The judge agreed with me,’ she said. ‘He said I had a submissive personality and that David had tormented me. Those were his exact words. He said it was because of David’s appalling behaviour throughout our entire married life that I’d been driven to such extremes and that I wasn’t entirely responsible for what I did.’
‘He still sent you to prison.’
‘That was because I’d planned the crime.’ Despite herself, she half smiled. ‘I planned it for ten years. The judge had no choice. But he felt sorry for me and he let me keep the money.’
‘You mean, your husband’s money.’
‘Yes.’
‘The Forfeiture Act of 1982,’ Dudley said.
‘You know your law! In normal circumstances, you’re not allowed to keep your partner’s cash if you kill them. You lose everything. But judges can make exceptions – and he did that for me.’
‘I never did believe your story about the rich aunt,’ Hawthorne said. ‘That sort of thing might happen in one of the books you sell here but never in real life.’
‘And let’s not forget Phyllis More with one o . . .’ Dudley said.
Phyllis squirmed. ‘Do we have to?’ she asked, feebly.
‘It’s best to have it all on the table, love.’ Dudley sighed. ‘You didn’t much like your husband either, did you! You smashed a whisky bottle over his head, doused him in petrol and set fire to him. They heard his screams a mile away.’ He shook his head. ‘If either of you two ever write your autobiographies, I rather doubt you’d be able to stock them here.’
‘I lost my temper,’ Phyllis said. Her eyes were downcast. ‘But you’d have done the same if you’d been married to him. He was a dreadful man.’
‘How did Sarah Baines find you?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘It was just bad luck. She saw us on the street in Richmond and followed us home.’ May glared at Hawthorne. ‘I’m not proud of what I did, but I’m not ashamed either,’ she declared. ‘Nobody understands murder . . . not real murder.’ She waved a dismissive hand, drawing in the entire bookshop. ‘All of this is entertainment. It doesn’t mean anything. But Phyllis and me, we’ve been to a terrible place.’
‘New Hall,’ Phyllis said.
‘No, dear. Not prison. Before that.’ May drew on her cigarette. ‘You have no idea what it’s like to commit murder, the darkness that destroys everything inside you and consumes you. To take a human life. Not in a battlefield or a place of war but in your kitchen, your living room, in the home where you felt safe. In that single moment, it’s two lives, not one, that are finished.
‘You sit there and you feel euphoria. It’s over! All the anger and the rage has finally burst out of you. But then comes the recognition of what you’ve done, the knowledge that there’s no going back, the terrible fear of being found out, and, of course, regret. How you wish . . . how you wish it hadn’t happened. Have you read Thérèse Raquin? We have a copy here somewhere. You should take it with you.’ She paused. ‘All murderers regret their deeds . . . unless they’re completely insane. When I was in New Hall, and in Holloway before that, I never met a single woman who still celebrated what she’d done. There were some who pretended, but you could see it eating at them, day after day. I spent twenty-four years behind bars for what I did. Look at me now! I’m a shadow. Everything has gone. I have a son who won’t even speak to me, who lives in California and who probably regrets he ever came out of my womb. I have grandchildren I’ve never seen.’
She hadn’t finished the cigarette, but she stubbed it out anyway.
‘So now you know the truth, Mr Hawthorne. What else do you want?’
‘I want to know what Sarah Baines was doing with Roderick Browne.’ May looked blank so he went on. ‘The two of them had a relationship. He was protecting her . . . just like you were. She texted him while we were with him.’
‘I don’t know. She’s a devil. She was always taking money from us. She’d steal anything she could get her hands on.’ She gave a sniff of laughter. ‘Giles Kenworthy and his precious Rolex. I could have told him where to look on eBay.’
‘Is that why you went with her when she found the body?’
‘I wasn’t going to leave her alone with Roderick’s keys! He’d have come back to an empty house. I followed her there and we went into the garage together. I managed to wiggle the key out and open the door and there he was in his car. A horrible sight with the bag over his head.’
‘Sarah broke the car window.’
‘I told her to. Roderick wasn’t moving, but there was always a chance he was still alive.’
‘What happened then?’
‘I opened the car door and felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one. We went back into the house and called the police.’
‘You did or she did?’
‘She did.’
‘She had her own phone?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure she didn’t see Roderick’s?’
‘I think I saw Roderick’s phone on the chest of drawers in the hall. She definitely used her own.’
‘Can we go home now?’ Phyllis asked.
‘We may not have a home any more, dear. But you’re right. There’s no point staying here. Why don’t you start clearing up?’ May waited until Phyllis had moved away, then spoke quietly. ‘We’ll have to sell the house after all this – and The Tea Cosy. You know who we are. So does Detective Superintendent Khan. It won’t be long before the whole of Richmond finds out.’
‘You may find people are more forgiving than you think,’ Dudley said.
‘I don’t want their forgiveness. I just want to be left alone.’
Hawthorne hadn’t finished yet. ‘There’s one thing more I want you to tell me,’ he said. ‘On the Sunday night – Sunday, July the sixteenth – you went to a meeting at The Stables. That was one night before Giles Kenworthy was killed. Who was there?’
‘I didn’t go to the meeting.’
‘Yes, you did. If you’re going to lie to me, Mrs Brenner, your face is going to be all over the Richmond and Twickenham Times – and every other newspaper in the country. To be honest with you, I’m getting a tiny bit tired of being led up the garden path by the residents of Riverview Close. Who was there?’
May was stone-faced. ‘Almost everyone. Mrs Beresford came with her husband. They had a babysitter looking after the children because their nanny was away. Mrs Browne wasn’t well enough to come over, but otherwise we were all there.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I can’t tell you, Mr Hawthorne. Not on my own. I’m sure we all have different memories anyway. I’m not going to say anything to you unless the others are there.’