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.