‘Would you like to come into the kitchen? I’ll make us some coffee.’
Hawthorne hadn’t explained who I was and nor did she seem interested. We followed her into a room on the other side of the stairs. The kitchen was warmer but it was also drab and dated. It’s funny how much white goods tell you about a house and its owners. The fridge would have been expensive when it was installed but that was too long ago. The panels had a yellowy sheen, pockmarked with magnets and old Post-it notes containing recipes, telephone numbers, emergency addresses. The oven was greasy and the dishwasher worn out with overuse. There was a washing machine, grinding slowly round, murky water lapping at the window. The room was clean and tidy but it needed money spent on it. A Weimaraner with mangy fur and a grey muzzle lay half-asleep in the corner but thumped its tail as we came in.
Hawthorne and I sat down at an uncomfortably large pine table while Judith Godwin plucked a percolator out of the sink, washed it under the tap and set about making coffee. She talked to us as she worked. I could see she was the sort of woman who never did just one thing at a time. ‘You wanted to talk to me about Diana Cowper.’
‘I assume you’ve spoken to the police.’
‘Very briefly.’ She went to the fridge and took out a plastic carton of milk, sniffed it, dumped it on the counter. ‘They telephoned me. They asked me if I had seen her.’
‘And had you?’
She turned round, her eyes defiant. ‘Not in ten years.’ Again, she busied herself, now putting biscuits on a plate. ‘Why would I want to see her? Why would I want to go anywhere near her?’
Hawthorne shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d have been too sorry to hear she had died.’
Judith Godwin stopped what she was doing. ‘Mr Hawthorne. Who exactly did you say you were?’
‘I’m helping the police. This is a very delicate matter and obviously there are all sorts of ramifications. So they called me in.’
‘You’re a private detective?’
‘A consultant.’
‘And your friend?’
‘I’m working with him,’ I said. It was simple and true and begged no further questions.
‘Are you suggesting I killed her?’
‘Not at all.’
‘You’re asking if I saw her. You’re suggesting I’m glad she’s dead.’ The kettle had boiled. She hurried over to flick it off. ‘Well, on that second point, I am. She destroyed my life. She destroyed my family’s life. One second behind the wheel of a car she shouldn’t have been driving and she killed my child and took everything away from me. I’m a Christian. I go to church. I’ve tried to forgive her. But I’d be lying to you if I said that I wasn’t glad when I heard someone had murdered her. It may be a sin and it may be wrong of me but it’s nothing less than she deserved.’
I watched her make the coffee in silence. She attacked the percolator, the mugs and the milk jug as if she was taking out her anger on them. She carried a tray over to the table and sat down opposite us. ‘What else do you want to know?’ she demanded.
‘I want to know everything you can tell us,’ Hawthorne said. ‘Why don’t you start with the accident?’
‘The accident? You’re talking about what happened to my two sons in Deal.’ She smiled briefly, bitterly. ‘It’s such a simple word, isn’t it. An accident. It’s like when you spill the milk or bump into another car. I was in town when they rang me and that’s what they said. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident.” And even then I thought that maybe something had happened at the house or at work. I didn’t think that my Timmy was lying in the morgue and that my other boy was never going to have a normal life.’
‘Why weren’t you with them?’
‘I was at a conference. I was working for Shelter at the time and there was a two-day event in Westminster. My husband was in Manchester on a business trip.’ She paused. ‘We’re not together any more. You can blame that on the accident too. It was half-term and we decided to send the boys on a trip with their nanny. She took them to the coast, to Deal. The hotel had a special offer. That’s the only reason we chose it. The boys couldn’t have been more excited. Castles and beaches and the tunnels up at Ramsgate. Timmy had a wonderful imagination. Everything in his life was an adventure.’
She poured three cups of coffee. She left us to add the sugar and the milk.
‘Mary, the nanny, had been with us for just over a year and she was absolutely wonderful. We trusted her completely – and although we went over and over what had happened, we never thought for a minute that it was her fault. The police and all the witnesses agreed. She’s still with us now.’
‘She looks after Jeremy?’
‘Yes.’ Judith let the word hang in the air. ‘She felt responsible,’ she went on. ‘When Jeremy finally came out of hospital, she found she couldn’t leave him. And so she stayed.’ Another pause. She had to make an effort to revisit the past. ‘The three of them had been on the beach. They’d been paddling. It was a nice day but it wasn’t warm enough to swim. The road runs right next to the beach. There’s just a low sea wall and a promenade. The children saw an ice-cream shop and although Mary shouted out to them, they ran across. I’ve never understood why they did that. They were only eight years old but they usually had more sense.
‘Even so, Mrs Cowper should have been able to stop. She had plenty of time. But she wasn’t wearing her glasses and she just ploughed right into them. As we discovered later, she could barely see from one side of the road to the other. She shouldn’t have been driving. And as a result, Timmy was killed immediately. Jeremy was flung into the air. He had terrible head injuries but he survived.’
‘Mary wasn’t hurt?’
‘She was very lucky. She had run forward to grab hold of the boys. The car missed her by inches. This all came out in the trial, Mr Hawthorne. Mrs Cowper didn’t stop. Later on, she told the police that she had panicked, but you have to ask yourself what sort of woman does that, leaving two children in the road!’
‘She went home to her son.’
‘That’s right. Damian Cowper. He’s quite a well-known actor now and he was staying with her at the time. The Crown lawyers said that she was trying to protect him, that she didn’t want his name dragged into the press. If that’s true, then the two of them are as bad as each other. Anyway, she turned herself in later that same day – but only because she had no choice. There were lots of witnesses and she knew that her number plate had been seen. You’d have thought the judge would have taken that into consideration when it came to sentencing but it didn’t seem to make any difference. She walked free.’
She picked up the plate of biscuits and offered me one. ‘No, thank you,’ I said, at the same time thinking how bizarre it was that she should manage to do something so homely, so banal, in the middle of such a conversation. But I guessed that was how she was. She had lived the last ten years in the shadow of what had happened in Deal until, for her, it had become the new normality. It was as if she had been locked up in a lunatic asylum for so long that she had forgotten she was actually mad.
‘I know this is painful for you, Mrs Godwin,’ Hawthorne said. ‘But when exactly did you and your husband split up?’
‘It’s not painful, Mr Hawthorne. It’s actually the opposite. I’m not sure I’ve felt anything since I answered the telephone that day. I think that’s what this sort of thing does to you. You go to work. Or you go to visit friends. Or maybe you’re having a lovely holiday and everything seems to be completely perfect and then something like this happens and a sort of disbelief kicks in. I never actually believed it. Even when I was at Timmy’s funeral, I kept on waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and tell me to wake up. You see, I had two gorgeous twins. The boys were just perfect in every way. I was happily married. Alan’s business was going well. We’d just bought this house … the year before. You never realise how fragile everything is until it breaks. And that day it was all smashed.