‘She asked me if I’d enjoyed the play. That struck me as odd. She was the critic. Why would she be asking me my opinion?’
‘What did you say?’
‘I asked her the same – “Did you?” I didn’t care, of course. I just wanted the conversation to be over. It was quite difficult to hear her, with the band playing nearby. Anyway, she gave me a queer little smile and ducked the answer. “That’s my little secret!” I suppose she didn’t want to give anything away until she’d written it down.’
He poured himself a glass of water and took a large gulp. I watched his Adam’s apple travel up and down.
‘I’m sorry to have to disappoint you, Mr Hawthorne. But that was it; the full extent of my conversation with her. I cannot begin to imagine what was going on inside her head or why she would think, even for a minute, that I would have any interest in ever seeing her again. I made an excuse and walked away. I left the party almost immediately.’
‘Perhaps she was deliberately trying to upset you,’ Hawthorne suggested.
‘It’s possible, I suppose.’
‘So, tell me about the book. What was it that pissed you off?’ In his own way, and despite his language, Hawthorne was at his most affable. ‘The hard copy’s out of print, by the way, but I picked up a copy on Kindle for nothing. I haven’t had a chance to read it all yet, but from what I’ve seen so far, I don’t think it’s one I’ll be recommending to my book club.’
‘Do we have to do this now?’
‘If we’re going to find out who killed her, we need to move fast.’
I hardly needed reminding. The DNA, the fingerprints, the Japanese blossoms, the witness statements. Cara Grunshaw could be at my front door at any time.
Hawthorne had evidently created some sort of bond of trust with the accountant. Longhurst nodded slowly and put the water down. ‘Very well.’
We waited.
‘I can’t tell you everything you want to know about the summer of 1998,’ Longhurst began at last. ‘You have to remember that this comes from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old boy and I wasn’t even in Moxham when most of this happened. My parents had sent me to boarding school, to Marlborough College, and when this business with Stephen took place I was on my gap year, teaching football to children in Namibia. They wrote me a letter, explaining what had happened and urging me not to come home, even though that was my first instinct. They wanted to keep me out of the spotlight, to protect me, and they were largely successful … at least until that book came out.
‘As I’m sure you’re aware, my parents were fairly well known around the time of the millennium, which is to say they often appeared in the newspapers, in diaries or gossip columns. They had set up a business that started with children’s clothes but then branched out into a much wider range of products – toys, books, furniture. You may remember the name. It was called Red Button. There were Red Button shops, Red Button restaurants and even Red Button holiday resorts and adventure centres by the time they finished. They were extremely wealthy and they were closely connected to centre-left politics, by which I mean, of course, New Labour. This was the same year that Peter Mandelson made that famous remark about being relaxed with people getting filthy rich, or words to that effect. He spoke for the prime minister … and it could have been my mother and father he had in mind.
‘They had already given large sums of money to New Labour. They were major supporters of Tony Blair when he mounted his leadership bid in 1994, and they’d been with him in Downing Street when he won the election three years later. My father was involved in early talks relating to the Millennium Dome and might well have gone into the House of Lords if … things hadn’t happened the way they did.
‘My parents had moved to the village of Moxham Heath in the early nineties. I’m afraid I can’t really describe what it was like, living in the middle of Wiltshire, because I wasn’t there very much. I was either at school or I stayed in London. We’d kept our house off Sloane Square. To this day, I’m not sure why they’d decided that country life would suit them, particularly as they were opposed to so many of its traditions, but let me say at once that it was without any question the worst decision they ever made. It all went wrong from the moment they bought Moxham Hall, which was a quite unnecessarily large country house with a hundred acres just outside the village. Arriving by helicopter didn’t help either. My father flew it himself.
‘It was them and us – although not perhaps drawn across classical lines. This was a time when the Tories were losing power, and maybe there was a degree of resentment in what had always been a true-blue Tory shire. I don’t know. My parents weren’t just rich. There were plenty of rich people in Moxham. They were rich socialists. They supported the Labour opposition to hunting. They wanted to build a wind turbine, and you can imagine that that put a great many people’s backs up. Spoiling the view! Killing a few birds before the locals had a chance to gun them down! My father had been part of the Campaign for Lead-Free Air, so having their own helicopter pad made them hypocrites too. I kept out of it, but I still remember there was one squabble after another. The swimming pool. The footpath they wanted to move ten metres. The church-hall restoration fund. The annual village fête. This was little England and the two of them were incomers and hypocrites … at least, that was the perception. Nothing they did was ever right.
‘Maybe that was why they decided to send Stephen to the village school – Moxham Heath Primary. That was one of the things that Throsby suggested in her book. They were using him to ingratiate themselves with the villagers, to prove that they were “one of them”. It was complete nonsense, it goes without saying. But she wrote it anyway.
‘I need to describe my younger brother to you. Up to the age of nine – before he left London – he was a very quiet boy. He loved reading. He did well at school. He had plenty of friends. Harriet Throsby described him as spoilt and although it’s not a word I would have used, he was certainly indulged. This was because to all intents and purposes he was an only child. My parents always used to say he was an afterthought – although he was much loved and cherished.
‘Things changed almost as soon as he arrived at Moxham Heath. You can imagine how difficult it was for him. As I’ve explained, I was away. He’d lost all his London friends and he was having difficulty making new ones. My parents were launching Red Button in America and they were spending more and more time abroad. Stephen had a lovely nanny, an Australian girl who had moved to Wiltshire with the family, and she did the best she could. But looking back, I would be the first to admit that he was neglected. Things happened very quickly and nobody noticed until it was too late.
‘Moxham Heath Primary School had a policy of taking in boys and girls from as wide a catchment area as possible. They didn’t just want the offspring of local squires and bankers, and I’m sure this is something to be applauded. One of these boys, however, exerted a malign influence on Stephen almost from the start. His name was Wayne Howard and he lived on an estate just outside Chippenham, about eight miles away. He had no experience of village life and would probably have been much happier in a larger town. Nonetheless, he was bussed in every day and he and Stephen became friends.’
He shook his head sadly.
‘It’s hard to believe that they were just nine and ten years old when they first met. They were children! But they formed what you might call a gang of two, with Wayne very much the ringleader, and soon they were out of control, always getting into trouble with the teachers at school, the neighbours, even the police. On one occasion they were reported for shoplifting from the village store, a place called the Ginger Box. After that, my parents went into the school and demanded the two boys be separated, but it was easier said than done in a small community. Really, that was when they should have seen the writing on the wall and taken Stephen back to London. But, as I’ve said, they were preoccupied and were inclined to think that “boys will be boys”, that it was good for Stephen to have met someone of his own age and that eventually things would sort themselves out.