‘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.
2
The six of them were sitting quite formally in the living room, facing each other on two sofas and two chairs. Hawthorne and Dudley had taken the chairs.
‘What sort of person would always be ten moves ahead?’ Hawthorne was saying. ‘That was the question I asked myself. Who might see the whole world as a game where you could manoeuvre people left and right, this way and that, making them do almost anything you wanted? Who would remember every last detail about everyone around them so that they could use it to their own advantage? Who could plan against any eventuality so that no matter what happened, they’d be able to come back with the right response?’
‘A chess player,’ Adam Strauss said. ‘I have to admit, it’s an interesting idea, Mr Hawthorne.’
‘Why are you here?’ Teri demanded. ‘Are you accusing my husband of murdering Giles Kenworthy?’
‘And Roderick Browne,’ Hawthorne remarked amicably.
‘It’s lies! You are telling lies! You should get out of my house.’
Adam smiled and laid a hand on his wife’s thigh. ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ he said. ‘I’ve got nothing to be afraid of and I’d be quite interested to hear what Mr Hawthorne has got to say.’
‘You’re denying it?’ Detective Superintendent Khan asked.
‘I’m not quite sure yet what it is I’m being asked to deny. Murder, obviously. But how, why and when? I’ve never been a great shot with a bow and arrow and right now –’ he lifted the walking stick – ‘I’m in no fit state to have broken into Roderick’s house and killed him. In fact, I was the last person to see him alive. Alive being the operative word. We were also good friends, although I don’t suppose that counts for anything in Mr Hawthorne’s mind. Do go ahead, Mr Hawthorne. So far, you’ve made complete sense, even if you’re barking up entirely the wrong tree.’
‘Unlike Mrs Winslow’s dog,’ Dudley said. ‘He had a thing about that magnolia in the Kenworthys’ garden.’
‘We’ll come to that in a minute,’ Hawthorne said. He hadn’t been put off by Strauss’s denials. He was quite relaxed.
‘We already know everything about the first meeting,’ he continued. ‘All the neighbours get together to air their complaints and at the last moment Giles Kenworthy pulls out – because someone’s tried to hack into his computer system. I’d guess you had a hand in that, Mr Strauss. It’s a smart move. It makes him look bad, worse than he is. It helps turn him into the target that he’ll eventually become. And that’s just the start of it. In the weeks that follow, the weaker chess pieces – May Winslow and Andrew Pennington – will be advanced across the board. Horrible things will happen to them to bring them onside. May’s pet dog will be killed. Andrew’s flower display will be spoiled – and in both cases the Kenworthys will get the blame.’
‘My chess set was also smashed,’ Adam reminded him.
‘Yeah . . . you and your precious chess set, Mr Strauss! You had to be one of the team. You had to suffer too. That’s part of the reason everyone trusted you. They thought you were with them. But it wasn’t a cricket ball that came through your window. You did it – just like you cold-bloodedly crept out and killed that poor bloody dog, and cut down the flowers on the anniversary of Andrew Pennington’s wife’s death. Only, here’s the funny thing, you were too vain to destroy anything that was truly valuable. So you chose a piece of posh merchandise made under licence from a film that came out thirteen years ago. You may have tried to big it up, but even when it was in a hundred pieces rather than thirty-two, I could tell it wasn’t up to much, and my friend Dudley thought it was rubbish too. A king that looks like Ian McKellen? A knight based on Orlando Bloom? The whole idea of hobbits against orcs? Fifty quid on eBay even if it was given to you by some major sheikh, which, incidentally, I doubt. Pull the other one!
‘The first meeting assembled the pieces that really mattered – your neighbours. The second moved them into position. By the way, Andrew Pennington thought it might have been his idea for all of you to get together again, but he also mentioned that it came out of a conversation with you two lovebirds. So you probably found a way to suggest it to him, the same way you hired two people to buy the same book at The Tea Cosy so that Phyllis or May would bring up the idea about everyone committing the same murder. The way you see the world, everyone’s a pawn.
‘So now they’re all pissed off with the Kenworthys and this time you make sure there’s lots of alcohol but no food so that things get a bit out of hand and there will be no inhibitions. When someone brings up the idea of murder, it’s all a bit of a laugh. To start with, you’re all going to do it – just like in the book. But then you remember that you’ve got a packet of drinking straws in the kitchen. You know, the very first time I heard that, it struck me as weird. You don’t have kids but you’ve got drinking straws left over from some party? It’s rubbish, of course. You’d bought them specially for that night. More manipulation.