Altered Life
Page 50
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
THE ADDRESS THAT SUZI had given me was in Hatfield, north of London, about an hour’s drive from where I was parked. I got back on the motorway, heading south again, into driving rain. The constant stream of lorries whipped up a dirty grey slush that pounded against the windscreen of the Corsa. I frowned into the road and watched tail-lights intently.
Suzi Hampshire had given me a lot to think about. It was obvious that the relationship between Tara and Eddie was much more serious—at least in his eyes—than anyone had realised. I’d seen that kind of obsession before in middle-aged men. It was more than the usual crisis—the fear that the opportunity for sex or other kinds of happiness was becoming remote—it was a kind of egocentricity, a belief that age had created wonders of technique that younger women would be only too glad to experience, if they had the chance. I’d also seen situations when that belief wasn’t matched by the woman’s willingness to comply, and a kind of madness had come over the man, making him unable to see things straight. What surfaced then was jealousy, envy and an internal rage that distorted reason like a magnifying glass being passed over a page of type—enlarging conversations and casual remarks that the woman made and warping their meaning.
Had Eddie Hampshire entered this state of mind? Was his relationship with Tara skewed in this way? I still didn’t believe that she’d conspired with him to murder Rory and take hold of the business. But at the same time I realised that people changed, and that maybe Tara had been influenced by Eddie’s air of confidence. After all, she’d reacted violently against her life with me. Perhaps that was her defining feature—a susceptibility to mood and atmosphere in a relationship. And then a willingness to take drastic action to change it.
She’d altered quite a lot since I knew her. And so had I.
Eddie Hampshire’s house was on a new estate of three-storey red-brick buildings evidently aimed at young professionals moving one step up from their starter home. There was a garage built into the front that accounted for most of the ground floor space, though looking around at the other houses, most people seemed to park on the short driveways in front of the garage and probably used the internal space for storage. There was no vehicle on Eddie’s drive.
I put the key in the lock and went in. Suzi had told me the house wasn’t alarmed, so I shut the door quietly behind me and started to look around. There was a strong smell of citrus in the air—perhaps cleaning products used in the kitchen, which was straight ahead of me. To my left was the side door to the garage—locked. I went into the kitchen. It was one room that ran the width of the house and was split in two by a breakfast bar. There was no washing up on the sink, very little food in the fridge. There was a phone attached to the wall. I dialled 1471 but the last call was from a double-glazing outfit with a special offer. I turned around and went up the first flight of stairs, my ears tuned in to the slightest hint of sound.
Here there was a bathroom done as a fashionable wet-room, all in white with silver accessories. Around the well of the stairs were three bedrooms of roughly equal size. Two of them were furnished as bedrooms, the other was a store room and held half a dozen cardboard boxes fastened down with broad sticky tape of the sort that’s dispensed by a gun. The walls of all the rooms were painted plain white, the only decor being abstract prints—splashes of primary colour that had been hurled almost angrily on to the canvas. It was as though the house had been put together by someone of Spartan taste but who concealed an inner passion that had to be released somehow.
The top floor was one large sitting room, a corner of which had been arranged as an office: computer, printer, filing cabinet, two shelves containing management books. The computer sat on what looked to be an antique desk that had drawers either side. The rest of the room was laid out traditionally, with a floral sofa and a couple of armchairs facing a wide-screen television and a modern electric fire that was designed to look like a wood-burning grate. It struck me how conventional Eddie’s living arrangements were—but why not? He’d served in the forces and knew how to kill someone easily. That didn’t mean he wore camouflage clothing and lived in a tent in the forest.
I turned back to the desk and went through the drawers. It seemed that Eddie filed away his correspondence in a clear plastic folder until he’d dealt with it, at which point he transferred the letters into dated box-files that stood on his shelves. The boxes went back five years. I read a few letters in the plastic folder but there was nothing of interest.
In the bottom right-hand drawer I found a key ring containing half a dozen keys. I put them in my pocket.
I stood and looked around the room. I didn’t know what I’d expected to find, but nothing I’d seen so far yelled ‘Murderer!’ Perhaps I was missing something.
I went to the windows and looked over the front driveway. This was a polite suburban community whose families worked in the IT industry or petro-chemicals or finance, whose mothers took the children to school in the 4x4 and whose fathers spent the weekend playing golf and tinkering with their sound systems. It reminded me of Waverley in its dedication to perpetuating the status quo. It was utterly aspirational and commonplace, and to think that Eddie Hampshire had blown a fuse, murdered Rory and kidnapped Tara was madness.
I felt the keys in my pocket and had a thought. I went downstairs quickly and one by one tried the keys in the garage door. Finally one turned and the door swung open, into darkness. I found a switch inside and turned it on.
The heavy Germanic bulk of a black BMW X5 stood less than a metre from me, its black windows reflecting my own features. I turned and looked down its flank, where a long red streak the same colour as my Cavalier ran down its offside wing and told me all that I needed to know.