Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan wasn’t happy to find himself driving back to Richmond.
For a start, the traffic was terrible on Kew Bridge, which had been built in 1903 when horse-drawn omnibuses and hansom cabs would have been carrying pleasure-seekers to Kew Gardens and Richmond Green, but was now, over a hundred years later, completely unfit for purpose. More to the point, though, he had finished with the business at Riverview Close. He had briefed the press. He had, once again, been on TV and his wife and parents-in-law had all said how handsome he looked. Going back could be seen as an acceptance of defeat, or at least an acknowledgement that it was just possible there was something he had missed. The worst of it was, he couldn’t resist it. He had to know.
DC Goodwin was behind the wheel. Khan liked to check the messages and social media on his phone (he had set up a Google Alert for his name), to scroll through the news and generally keep his mind off the road. This was the start of another week, but neither of them had discussed what they had done over the weekend. They had a good relationship at work but none at all out of it.
Half an hour later, they had reached the centre of Richmond and the annoying one-way system that would take them literally round the houses before allowing them to strike out for Petersham. Ruth Goodwin spoke for almost the first time.
‘Why are we doing this, sir?’ she asked.
‘Good question.’ Khan tapped a few last words into his iPhone and put it away.
‘You know Hawthorne is dangerous,’ Goodwin continued. ‘He committed a violent assault on a suspect . . .’
‘As I recall, you were the one who suggested using him in the first place.’
‘I thought he might be useful to us. But the whole thing turned out to be a whole lot easier than we first thought. You did a very good job, sir.’
Khan sniffed but made no answer to that.
‘It’s just that it might be trouble bringing him back.’
‘He says he has new information.’
‘And if everything changes, what are we going to tell the Daily Mail?’
The back seat of the car was covered with old newspaper and magazine articles relating to the case and the Daily Mail had indeed made it to the top, open at a double-page spread with the headline: CELEBRITY DENTIST FOUND DEAD. There was a photograph of Roderick Browne, another of the actor Ewan McGregor and – above a caption reading ‘THE CASE IS CLOSED’ SAYS POLICE HOTSHOT DS TARIQ KHAN – a picture of the detective superintendent too.
‘If he really does know something, it’s better that he talks to us than to the press,’ he said now.
‘And if he says we’ve got it all wrong?’
‘We’ve got nothing wrong, Ruth. Nothing at all.’
They drove down Richmond Hill and into Riverview Close. Hawthorne and Dudley were already there, waiting for them on the other side of the archway and the gate. Khan noticed that Hawthorne was dressed in the same clothes he’d worn the last two times they had met. Goodwin parked outside Woodlands and they both got out.
‘I hope you’re not wasting my time,’ Khan said. There were no greetings, no handshakes.
‘If you thought I was wasting your time, you wouldn’t have come,’ Hawthorne said reasonably.
‘So what do you want to tell me?’
‘Well, the first thing to mention is that Dudley and I haven’t been paid, since you ask. And as we’ve done your job for you, it would be nice if you’d see your way to giving us the whole week plus bonus.’
‘It’s in the contract,’ Dudley said.
‘You tell us what you know and I’ll be the judge of that,’ Khan said. He looked around him. ‘It seems very quiet here.’
‘The killer’s in. Don’t worry. We wouldn’t drag you all the way over here without making sure of that.’
Khan looked for movement behind the windows. Woodlands was empty, obviously, but Gardener’s Cottage? The Stables? Well House? There was no sign of anyone.
‘I thought we might start out here,’ Hawthorne said. ‘It’s a nice day and we need to get back to the beginning.’
‘And when was that?’ Goodwin asked.
‘A long time ago, as a matter of fact. Much longer than any of us thought.’
Hawthorne took a few steps forward so that he was on the edge of the roundabout, surrounded by the six houses. Dudley stayed where he was. He had nothing more to do, but he was quietly pleased to be here. Khan and Goodwin stood, a little self-consciously, waiting for Hawthorne to begin.
‘Most murderers don’t really think about what they’re going to do,’ he said. ‘You get the fantasists, the husbands who hate their wives, the kids who hate their stepdads, and they may think about murder for years . . . but they’re never going to do it. Planning it is enough. You know as well as I do that most murders are acts of passion – spur-of-the-moment things. One drink too many. A fight that gets out of control. But then, just now and again, you get the genius, the killer who’s not going to get caught, who sits down and works it all out. These are what you call the stickers, the crimes that are like no others because there’s an intelligence behind them. That’s where I come in. That’s sort of my speciality.
‘You knew from the start that something was wrong, but what was it exactly that worried you about this one? Well, the crossbow and bolt screamed out that something weird was going on. It’s not a weapon of choice for your average killer. And then there was the setting: a smart close in Richmond. Do you know how many people get killed in a place like this? You could probably count them on the fingers of one posh lady’s hand. Finally, everyone had the same motive. That doesn’t even seem fair! How do you choose between the neighbour who’s pissed off about the smoke coming off the barbecue and the one who can’t park his car?
‘So you decided to get me involved. To be honest with you, the first day I came here, I thought you were wasting my time. It all seemed pretty straightforward to me. Nightmare neighbour. Crossbow in the garage. Who’s going to fire it? They draw straws and . . . bang!’
‘What are you talking about – drawing straws?’ Khan asked.
‘Oh yeah. You never found out about that.’ Quickly, Hawthorne described his meetings with Felicity Browne and then May Winslow and Phyllis Moore and where they had taken him.
‘So the piece of straw in the dead man’s pocket . . . ?’ Goodwin began.
‘Got it in one, Detective Constable. Roderick drew the short straw and took it with him to his death.’
Hawthorne paused.
‘Except it wasn’t like that. What I’ve realised, since I arrived at Riverview Close, is that nothing here is what it seems. Nothing! Every clue, every suspect, every question, every answer . . . it’s all been carefully worked out. Everyone who lives here has been manipulated. So have you. So have I. Something happens and you think that it somehow connects with the murder – but you’re wrong. It’s been designed to trick you. Smoke and bloody mirrors. I’ve never seen anything like it.
‘I mean . . . take all the coincidences. What is a coincidence? It’s the most random thing in the world. It’s like when you go to the supermarket and bump into your mum. And it never occurs to you that it might have been carefully arranged—’
‘Hawthorne, where is this taking us?’ Khan was losing his patience.
‘To the solution, Detective Superintendent. I’m just trying to explain what we’ve been up against.’
‘What coincidences?’ Goodwin asked.
‘Well, three attacks. One was an old lady living a couple of miles away in Hampton Wick. This happened the night before Giles Kenworthy was killed. Nothing to do with it, you’d think. Except the old lady, Marsha Clarke, was being looked after by Kylie Jane, who was the Beresfords’ nanny. And a couple of days before that, on Friday morning, someone pushed Adam Strauss down a flight of stairs.’
‘Well, you’d know about that,’ Goodwin muttered and immediately wished she hadn’t.
Hawthorne didn’t care. ‘We’ve checked out the CCTV,’ he said.
‘There’s definitely someone behind Mr Strauss,’ Dudley said. ‘Wearing a hoodie and filmed from behind. Looks like a kid. CCTV wasn’t a lot of help.’
‘Again, these things happen. You’d think it had nothing to do with a murder that was being planned in Riverview Close. But you’d be wrong. It was all part of the same thing.’
‘What was the third attack?’ Ruth Goodwin asked.
‘That happened six weeks earlier. Someone hacked into Giles Kenworthy’s computer system. It was the reason he couldn’t come to The Stables the first time he was invited. Again, it hardly seems likely that it was part of the plot, but I’ve got every reason to think it was.’
‘Why don’t you just cut to the chase and tell us who did it?’ Khan asked. He didn’t like the feeling of being strung along.
‘There are more coincidences,’ Hawthorne said. ‘We now know there were two meetings where the neighbours tried to work out what to do about Giles Kenworthy. I think it’s fair to say that the first time they met, they were divided fifty-fifty. Roderick and Felicity Browne would do anything to get rid of Giles Kenworthy. They hated him and they were desperate not to lose their view. The same goes for Tom and Gemma Beresford. Mrs Beresford in particular was worried sick about her husband and the stress he was feeling from this parking thing. But, on the other side of the coin, Andrew Pennington wasn’t going to step out of line. His solution to the whole situation was to write letters, to stop things escalating – exactly what you’d expect from a criminal barrister. May Winslow and Phyllis Moore agreed. They had their own reasons for avoiding anything that might look like criminal activity. And Adam Strauss and his wife were neutral, happy to see how things developed.
‘What happened in the next six weeks? Everyone who didn’t already hate Giles Kenworthy was given a good reason to. May Winslow and Phyllis Moore lost their pet dog in a particularly cruel way, and they were led to believe that this was down to Kenworthy. Adam Strauss had his most expensive and precious chessboard smashed by a cricket ball. As it happens, cricket had been mentioned at the meeting – along with skateboards. And guess what! Andrew Pennington’s flower arrangement, a tribute to his dead wife which he’d spent years looking after, was crushed by a skateboard. And not just that. It happened on the fifth anniversary of her death. That’s terrible luck.
‘But was it luck? Or was everyone being tricked into thinking things they didn’t actually think?
‘Let’s take the whole premise of what was going on in Riverview Close. The “Nightmare Neighbours” scenario. I agree that Giles Kenworthy doesn’t sound like the nicest of guys, but was he really such a monster? You know the most sensible thing anyone said when I was asking questions? It was Lynda Kenworthy – “There’s nothing special about Riverview Close . . . There isn’t a street in England where the neighbours don’t have disputes. I was brought up in Frinton and it was just the same.” Everyone argues with their neighbours. They’ve been doing it since the Middle Ages, and maybe there have been odd instances where it’s led to murder. But hen’s teeth, I’d say. Even in tower blocks and housing associations, where a thoughtless neighbour can make life a complete misery, people somehow manage to put up with it. Are we really going to believe that selfish parking could be a motive for murder? Or kids on skateboards? Or flying a Union Jack in a back garden? It’s ridiculous!’
‘What about the swimming pool?’ Khan asked.
‘Oh, yes. That was the one big thing that happened between the first meeting and the second meeting. The Kenworthys got permission to build their pool. And we’ve heard lots of things about that, haven’t we. The loss of Felicity Browne’s view was the big one. It’s strange how nobody has considered that Felicity could have crawled out of bed and shot Giles Kenworthy with her husband’s crossbow or that Roderick might have killed himself to protect her, taking the blame. I wondered about that for a while. There were plenty of other reasons to stop the swimming pool being built: the noise, the chlorine, the disruption, the extra traffic. But do any of those sound like a motive for murder, or was there something else that no one had mentioned that might have had more serious consequences?’
‘You’ve been talking for a long time, Hawthorne,’ Khan interrupted. ‘And you haven’t said anything yet that’s made me think it was worth coming here.’
‘Then maybe you haven’t been listening, Detective Superintendent. But everything will make sense soon. We just need to talk a little bit about the so-called suicide of Roderick Browne.’
‘There was nothing so-called about it,’ Ruth Goodwin cut in. ‘This second meeting you just told us about. It proves we were right. Roderick Browne drew the short straw. He killed Giles Kenworthy and then he was worried sick he was going to be found out, so he did himself in.’
‘Oh, come on, love. Why don’t you go back and read that letter of his? There isn’t a single word that admits to his having killed anyone! “I did something very stupid”. You really think he would use the word stupid to describe murdering his neighbour? “I cannot bear you to see the consequences.” Is that him killing himself? “I do not want you to see this”. That must be his body in the garage?’
‘Exactly,’ Goodwin said.
‘Rubbish. What he did that was stupid was to announce, in front of everyone, that he was going to murder Kenworthy. The consequences were that everyone would assume he had done it and he would be arrested. And that was what he didn’t want her to see – him being led away in handcuffs.’
‘A bit convenient that he should have framed it that way,’ Khan muttered.
‘Not convenient. All part of the plan!’
Hawthorne slowed down. He was trying to make it as simple as he could.
‘Let’s look at yet another coincidence. The whole idea of killing Giles Kenworthy starts with Phyllis Moore because – guess what – two people have gone into her bookshop and bought the same Agatha Christie novel just days apart and that novel has a plot in which all the suspects have joined together to kill a man they hate! What do you reckon the chances of that happening are?’
‘People like Agatha Christie.’
‘Yes. But once again, you don’t seem to appreciate what was going on here, how every detail was being thought out in advance.
‘If you believe for a single minute that Roderick Browne killed himself because of what happened at that second meeting, ask yourself this. First, why was the suicide so bloody complicated? A locked car in a locked garage. The only keys inside the one pocket you don’t normally use to store them. You try getting them in when you’re sitting down! Stainless-steel screws which don’t rust have somehow gone rusty, making it impossible to open the skylight. And here are two more questions. Why is there a puddle on the floor when it hasn’t rained for weeks, and what is a piece of drinking straw doing in his top pocket?’
‘You’ve already told us where the straw came from,’ Goodwin said.
‘So when Roderick Browne killed himself, he made sure that it was somewhere we’d find it because he wanted us to know what had happened? You really think he even kept the straw, took it with him from The Stables? That clue was more planted than any of the flowers in Andrew Pennington’s roundabout. The aim was to manipulate us, to steer us to the second meeting, which would shine a light on the suicide-that-had-to-be-suicide and couldn’t possibly be murder!’
Hawthorne had said enough. He came to a halt, turning his soft brown eyes on the two police officers, daring them to challenge him.
There was a long silence.
‘What you’re saying,’ Khan began at last, ‘is that someone else killed Giles Kenworthy. They set up Roderick Browne and then killed him too, making it look like suicide. And that from start to finish, they’ve been dangling everyone on a string – a series of strings – and have been in complete control?’
‘You’ve finally got there, Detective Superintendent. Even now they’re laughing at us. They think it’s all gone their way.’
‘So who are you talking about?’ Khan looked around him, at the six houses that made up the close: Riverview Lodge, Woodlands, The Gables, Well House, The Stables, Gardener’s Cottage. Hawthorne had said that the killer was at home. ‘Which door do we knock on?’
Hawthorne smiled. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said.