‘Did Mr Browne ever talk to you about his animosity towards Giles Kenworthy?’ Khan asked, shifting uncomfortably on his stool. He didn’t want to be here – he had already interviewed both women and he was sure that they had nothing more to say – but he hadn’t been keen to let Hawthorne continue on his own. If any further information presented itself regarding the death of Roderick Browne, he wanted to be the first to hear it.
‘I’m not sure that “animosity” is the right word, Detective Superintendent,’ May replied. ‘He didn’t really have feelings towards Mr Kenworthy. Of course he was upset about the pool. Mrs Browne hardly ever leaves her bed these days and it mattered to her, the view from the window.’
‘A view is important,’ Phyllis agreed.
‘I’m sure we all know that, dear.’ May gave her friend a pinched smile. ‘All I’m saying is that Mr Browne was a very kind and very gentle man who didn’t harbour grudges and I find it impossible to believe that he killed anyone.’
‘Then why do you think he committed suicide?’ Khan asked.
‘You should never use the word “committed” in that context, Detective Superintendent. Suicide may be a sin, but it is not a crime! As to your question, I’m afraid I have no answer. I saw him with my own eyes, sitting in that car with a bag over his head. I wish I hadn’t. It’s something I will take with me to the grave. All I can say is, he was questioned yesterday at Shepherd’s Bush Police Station for two whole hours and he was terribly upset.’
Khan squirmed, avoiding Hawthorne’s eye. ‘He told you this?’
‘Not me. Phyllis. She spoke to him over the garden hedge.’
‘He wasn’t himself,’ Phyllis said. She seemed to be too nervous of May to utter more than three words.
‘What did he say to you?’ Dudley asked. He had his notebook poised. ‘And how do you spell your name, by the way?’
‘Moore. Phyllis Moore.’
‘Is that with two o’s? Or like St Thomas?’
‘Two o’s.’
Dudley wrote this down.
Phyllis glanced at May for permission, then continued. ‘It was late in the afternoon. He’d just come back in a police car! We didn’t speak very much. He said that he’d been asked a lot of questions and that he was relieved he had taken his wife to her sister’s.’
‘Did he think he was about to be arrested?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘He didn’t say. But the police wouldn’t have arrested him for something he hadn’t done.’
‘I’m sure that’s never happened,’ Dudley agreed.
‘He told me he was going to call Adam Strauss and ask him for advice.’
Hawthorne frowned. ‘Why not Andrew Pennington? He was a barrister. He’d know a lot more.’
‘That’s a very good point. I would have thought Mr Pennington would be exactly the right person to go to. I can’t imagine why he didn’t.’
Dudley wrote something down in his notebook. He added a question mark and circled it.
‘How did the two of you come to be living in Richmond?’ Khan asked.
‘You were nuns.’ Hawthorne made it sound improbable, like the first line of a joke.
‘We met at the Franciscan Convent of St Clare in Osmondthorpe, near Leeds,’ May said.
‘We were cellies,’ Phyllis added.
‘That’s what we called the sisters who shared rooms. There was very little space. I arrived two years before Phyllis – and we left at the same time.’
‘How long were you there for?’
‘Almost three decades. I went in when I was in my forties.’
‘Why?’ Hawthorne sounded almost hostile.
‘It’s rather personal, Mr Hawthorne. And I don’t see that it has anything to do with what’s happened here, but I suppose this is a murder investigation so I’ll tell you what you want to know.
‘I had a very unhappy marriage. I was living in Chester at the time and I was in an abusive relationship. My husband was an alcoholic and hurt me quite badly on many occasions. Once, he even put me in hospital. And yet I found myself unable to leave him. I’m told this is not uncommon in cases like mine. It was a bit like Stockholm syndrome. Is that the one I mean? We had a son and I did my best to protect him until he turned eighteen and left home. I thank the Lord that he had no idea what his father was like. David had a hold over me that I cannot explain to this day. He destroyed my self-confidence, my inner resolve. He controlled my every waking moment until the day he died of a heart attack . . . and I’m ashamed to say I didn’t mourn him for a single minute. The bigger question was – what was I going to do? I was forty. I had a house, a little money and no income.
‘It’s funny, really. I had always been a regular churchgoer, although I didn’t think of myself as a religious person. It was more of a respite from David. He would drink on Saturday night and sleep it off on Sunday, so church was somewhere for me to go. The vicar was a friend of mine and after David died, she talked to me about St Clare’s. At first, the idea was that I might go there for a month or two while I thought about what I might do next, but from the moment I arrived, I felt happy and didn’t want to leave. It was a safe space. I liked the simplicity . . . Not so much the prayers and the meditation but the friendship and the sense that I was doing something useful. We ran soup kitchens and food pantries in Bradford and Leeds. We visited families in their homes. It was the first time in my life that I actually felt wanted.’
Dudley turned to Phyllis. ‘Were you ever married?’ he asked.
Phyllis seemed reluctant to answer. She lowered her head. ‘My husband passed away.’ That was all she would say.
‘So why did you leave the convent?’ Hawthorne continued.
May answered. ‘It was time. Almost thirty years. Phyllis and I often spoke at night about what we might do after St Clare’s. As she just told you, we shared a room.’
‘We weren’t meant to speak to each other after vespers,’ Phyllis added. ‘But we’d whisper to each other in the darkness.’
‘It’s true. There was no talking after night prayer. Maybe that little disobedience should have told me something.’ May paused. ‘And then an aunt of mine died and left me money. It was like something out of a fairy story! I’d already given everything I had to the convent and the mother superior expected me to do the same with my inheritance. But I didn’t agree, I’m afraid. I saw it as a sign that it was time to move on – a sign from God, if you like. So I talked to Phyllis and we left together the same day.’
‘Why Richmond?’
‘This is where I grew up. I saw the house on the internet and I thought it looked perfect.’
‘It is perfect,’ Phyllis agreed. ‘We’ve been very happy here.’
‘Until all this business started, anyway.’
‘You run a bookshop selling crime fiction,’ Dudley said. ‘That seems like a strange occupation after all those years in a convent.’
‘Well, we had to do something to keep ourselves busy,’ May replied. ‘I used to like Gladys Mitchell when I was a girl. She wrote over sixty novels, you know. But they were never violent. They were never horrible like so much modern fiction. And lovely Dorothy, too. And Agatha. All this modern interest in dead bodies and women being killed – and children too! Why would anyone want to read stories like that? That was what gave me the idea for The Tea Cosy. We never stock books with bad language, and I’m afraid there are a lot of writers we simply won’t touch. The truth is, we don’t make a lot of money out of it, but that isn’t the point.’