‘The doorbell here?’ Grunshaw asked.
‘Yes. I heard it at the end of the line. Richard stopped in the middle of a sentence. “Who can that be?” he said. He wasn’t expecting anyone. He told me to hang on a minute and he put his phone down.’
‘He was also on his mobile?’
‘Yes. He must have put it on the table in the hall. There was a long pause and then I heard his footsteps on the wooden flooring and I think I may have heard the door open. Then I heard him speak. “What are you doing here?” That’s what he said. He sounded surprised. “It’s a bit late.”’
Darren had been writing all this down too. He paused. ‘His exact words?’ he asked.
This time Spencer didn’t hesitate. ‘I’m certain of it. “It’s a bit late.” That’s what he said.’
‘And then?’
‘He came back to the phone. He said he’d call me back later and he hung up.’
‘He didn’t tell you anything else about his visitor?’ Darren had a way of ensuring his questions sounded aggressive and intimidating. He could have made you feel nervous just wishing you a good morning. ‘You didn’t hear them say anything else?’
‘He didn’t say anything more. I told you. He just hung up.’ The tears welled up again. ‘I waited for him to call me again but when I didn’t hear from him I thought he must have been busy or something. He was often like that. He would get absorbed in what he was doing. I drove back this morning and when I got to the house I saw all the police cars and I still had no idea . . .’
Hawthorne had been listening to all this with his shoulders half turned towards the window. Now he looked back. ‘Nice car,’ he said. ‘Does it have electric windows?’
‘What?’ Spencer was so thrown by the question that he briefly forgot his tears. I was less surprised. From my experience of Hawthorne, I knew he had a way of firing off seemingly irrelevant observations. He wasn’t being deliberately offensive. It was just that offensive was his default mode.
‘It’s a classic model,’ Hawthorne went on. ‘What’s the date?’
‘Nineteen sixty-eight.’
Spencer was tight-lipped now, looking to DI Grunshaw to take back control. She obliged. ‘You know that your husband was attacked with a bottle of wine. It was a Château Lafite Rothschild. Was that the same bottle of wine given to him by Adrian Lockwood?’
‘I can’t be certain – but yes, I think so. Richard had said it was very expensive. It was also a waste of money because he didn’t drink.’
‘He was a teetotaller.’
‘Yes.’
‘So there’s no alcohol in the house,’ Hawthorne said.
‘Actually, there’s quite a lot of stuff in the kitchen – whisky, gin, beer and so on. I’ll have a drink now and then. But Richard didn’t like alcohol. That’s all.’
Cara Grunshaw smiled at Hawthorne. It didn’t make her look any more attractive. I was becoming aware of an edge of malice behind her good humour. ‘Do you have any other questions?’ she asked.
‘Just one.’ Hawthorne turned to Spencer. ‘You mentioned that Richard was expecting a visitor on Saturday afternoon. Did he say who it was?’
Spencer considered. ‘No. He just said there was someone coming. He didn’t say who.’
‘I think you’ve probably got enough,’ Grunshaw cut in, daring Hawthorne to disagree. ‘Why don’t you run along now while I take a full statement from Mr Spencer?’
‘Whatever you say, Cara.’
I still half admired the way she’d handled herself. She was the complete opposite of Meadows. She wasn’t going to allow Hawthorne to get under her skin and she had made it clear that she was the one in charge. The two of us left, taking the stairs back down and passing through the front door. The moment we were outside, Hawthorne lit a cigarette. While he was doing that, I examined the broken bulrushes a second time, looking for a footprint. Sure enough, there was a small, quite deep indentation in the soil. It might have been made by the tip of someone’s shoe or, more probably (I thought), a woman’s stiletto heel.
‘What a tosser,’ Hawthorne muttered.
‘Grunshaw?’
‘Stephen Spencer.’ Hawthorne blew out smoke. ‘Christ! I couldn’t have stood in that room a minute longer. If his wrists had been any limper, his hands would have fallen off.’
‘You can hold it right there,’ I said. ‘I’ve already told you. You can’t talk about people’s sexuality like that. I’m not having it and I’m not putting it in the book.’
‘You can put what you bloody like in the book, mate. But I wasn’t talking about his sexuality. I was talking about his acting technique. Did you believe any of it? The tears? The hanky? He was lying through his teeth.’
I thought back to what I had just seen. It didn’t seem possible. ‘I thought he was genuinely upset,’ I said.
‘Maybe he was. But he was still hiding something.’ The MG was right in front of us. Hawthorne pointed with the hand holding the cigarette. ‘There’s no way that’s just driven down from Essex or Suffolk or anywhere near the coast.’
‘How do you know?’
‘That house he showed us in that photograph didn’t have a garage and there’s no way this car has been sitting by the seaside for three days. There’s no seagull shit. And there’s no dead insects on the windscreen either. You’re telling me he’s driven a hundred miles down the A12 and he hasn’t hit a single midge or fly? I reckon he was somewhere much nearer and he wasn’t alone.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t know. I’m guessing. The passenger window is open a few inches and the windows aren’t electrically operated. I’d say there’s an even chance it was actually opened by the passenger. If he’d been driving alone, he’d have had to lean all the way across and why would he do that?’
‘Is there anything else?’ I asked.
‘Yes. There is one thing. Richard Pryce’s last words. “It’s a bit late.” Don’t they strike you as a bit odd?’
‘Why?’
‘It was eight o’clock on a Sunday evening. He’d had an unexpected visitor but it was someone he knew. He invited them in and he gave them a drink. Now, it may have been dark – winter time had just started – but it certainly wasn’t late.’
‘Do you think Stephen Spencer was making it up?’
‘I doubt it. He’s probably telling the truth about what he heard. But it’s still a strange thing to say and maybe Pryce wasn’t actually referring to the time. Maybe he meant something else.’
We had been walking down Fitzroy Park while we were having this conversation, leaving the police cars and all the forensic activity behind us. The taxi that had brought us here was still waiting, the meter running. The driver was reading a newspaper. We passed the turn-off we’d come down when we arrived. The far side of Hampstead Heath with the women’s pond and the other lakes was visible ahead of us. A few steps later, we reached Rose Cottage, which was indeed pink and pretty, set back in its own little world and half smothered in shrubs and flowers, although all the roses had been cut back for the coming winter. Hawthorne walked up and rang the front doorbell, which immediately set off a dog barking somewhere inside.
After a long wait, the door was opened by a man in his eighties, wrapped in the sort of cardigan that might have been knitted with rolling pins. Even as he stood there, he seemed to be shrivelling inside it. He gazed at us with watery eyes. He had straggly hair and liver spots. There was no sign of the dog, which was locked up somewhere, still barking on the other side of a door.