‘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.’