“A swimming pool.” Hennessey sat in the front passenger seat and went on to tell Yellich about Marina Westwood’s hair smelling of chlorine; he also told him about diatoms and vagal inhibition.
The Westwood house in Allingham was a sprawling bungalow set in expansive grounds. A large car and a small car stood in front of the building, saying clearly “his and hers”.
Marina Westwood opened the door almost immediately upon Hennessey ringing the door bell. She looked surprised to see Hennessey. Hennessey remarked upon the fact.
“No... no...” she stammered. She was dressed fetchingly in faded jeans, leather belt and a blue T-shirt. “Well I suppose I am... I thought that yesterday was it, just identify him. What do you want?”
“Your husband died in suspicious circumstances. We’d like to look at your house.”
“Do you have a warrant? On television...”
“Do we need one?” asked Hennessey.
“Are you hiding something?” asked Yellich.
“No,” she shrugged offhandedly, and stepped aside, allowing the police officers to step over the threshold.
It was a large, spacious house inside, very light, very airy, with interior walls of unfaced brick.
“Where is the swimming pool?” Hennessey asked suddenly.
“Down there.” Then Marina Westwood’s face paled.
Hennessey saw her pale and he knew a chord had been struck, and he knew this inquiry was drawing to an early close. It was so often the case, he thought, before you look at the outlaws look at the in-laws. “If you’d lead the way?”
Marina Westwood led them down a narrow corridor to the indoor swimming pool. Thirty-feet long, twenty wide, brick walls on three sides, the fourth wall was given over to tall windows which looked out over the rear lawn. Hennessey took a test tube from his pocket and knelt and dipped it into the pool and sealed the contents. “You haven’t changed the water in this pool since they drowned in it, have you?”
“No.”
A pause, a look of horror flashed across her face. Marina Westwood screamed and ran from the poolside into the body of the house. Yellich lunged at her as she ran past him, missed and started to run after her.
“Don’t.” Hennessey placed the test tube in his jacket pocket. “She’s not running from us, she’s running from herself, either that or she’s engaging with life for the first time. Either way, we’ll find her sobbing on the sofa somewhere.”
In the event they found her on the rear patio looking out over the garden, sobbing quietly. Hennessey stood beside her.
“You know,” she said, “this was all going to be mine.”
“Was.”
“Can’t profit from a crime, can you?”
“No.”
“His brother will inherit it all now.”
“But it wasn’t your idea to murder them?”
“No, it was his.”
“Richardson?”
“Yes,” she nodded as she watched a pair of swans, keeping perfect stations with each other like aircraft in formation, swept low over the house. “Won’t see that goal will I?”
“No. No, you won’t. Wasn’t even your idea, was it?”
“No. It was his. My marriage wasn’t good. My husband was carrying on with Wendy Richardson. I found out about it. Went to see Herbert Richardson. He went cold with anger. He said we should do something. I told him that every Sunday afternoon they swim at our house, I’m out then, but I know they do it. I gave him a key. Came back Sunday evening and he was in the house, by the pool, soaked to the skin. My husband and her lying on the poolside. He’d just jumped into the pool, grabbed them, held them by their ankles face down until they drowned. He’s a big man, strong enough to do that.”
“Then?”
“Well, then we dressed them. It’s not easy dressing a dead body.”
“I can imagine.”
“But we managed it. Took them out and laid them side by side in a field. Herbert Richardson said, ‘That’ll fox ’em.’”
“Which it did,” Hennessey thought... “and there lay your undoing.”
“Where will we find Richardson now?”
“At home. He said to carry on as though nothing had happened. So he’ll be at Penny Farm. There’s nothing between us, me and him. We have nothing in common.”
And Hennessey thought, but did not say, “Except double murder. You’ve got that in common.”
That evening, with both Herbert Richardson and Marina Westwood in the cells having been charged with the murders of Dominic Westwood and Wendy Richardson, Hennessey drove out to Skelton, taking an overnight bag with him. He walked up to a half-timbered house and tapped on the door. The door was opened, by a woman who smiled warmly at him.
“Evening, madam.” Hennessey stepped over the threshold and kissed the woman.
“The children are in bed,” said Louise D’Acre. “We can go straight up.”
Murder
Nicholas Royle
With the ocean in front of you and waves crashing only a few feet below, close enough for you to taste the salty spray on the air, Canglass Point feels like one of the ends of the Earth. Great black-backed gulls hang steady in the buffeting wind, the bold curly bracket of their wingspan tipping this way and that, while further out gannets cut through the white space like dashes, before one turns into a W as it dives, then a Y and finally, as it drops into the sea, an almost perfect I.
If you were to climb the rock ledges behind you, they would eventually yield to a plateau of close-cropped grassland 120 feet above the waves that in turn leads to a gentle climb to the top of Slievagh more than 600 feet high. If you’re likely to spot the blood-dipped beak of the glossy black chough anywhere on the mainland, you’re likely to spot it here, somewhere between hilltop and cliff.
In the middle of the plateau is a hole 150 feet by 100. The only way to approach the edge — on your belly. A sheer drop, the odd grassy ledge from which there’s no route back up and only one way down. Narrow bands of black rock forced by unimaginable pressures into a series of looping curves. A jagged archway at the western end leading to the ocean, the deep water clear enough to reveal rocks at the bottom.
If you walked over the edge one night, no one would ever know. If you ran down the hill on a foggy day, they would never find you. The waves would drag you out into the ocean to become food for fish. Picked clean, your skeleton would disintegrate and sink to the sea bed to be found, maybe, a few pieces anyway, a bone at a time in trawl nets over decades to come.
My friends Alice and John stay in a farmhouse in the west of Ireland every year with their friends Virginia and Donald. The four of them are academics with elevated positions in English departments at various universities — in the north of England in Alice and John’s case, while Virginia and Donald live and work in the US.
Academia is meant to be an incestuous world, but if you avoid conferences and turn down ridiculously low-paid offers to work as an external examiner, it can be fairly isolating. I have heard of Humanities departments where nobody knew that a colleague had left, and another where a senior lecturer was challenged on entry to the building since it was believed she had retired. My wife, Diana, is Professor of English and head of department — twin roles that exact a steep price in terms of simple happiness. Nothing pleases me more than hearing her unselfconsciously girlish laughter, whether prompted by TV comedy or dinner party or (still occasionally) something I have said. But laughter is rare; I’m more likely to hear “I could kill that woman” or “I despair, I just despair”. My professional life, as a fractional lecturer in creative writing, is less stressful.