Those People

by Louise Candlish

  DC Forrester was serious again, borderline offended. “I’m not sure that’s what I suggested, Mr. Morgan.”

  “Really?” Ralph said, flattening the question. He’d learned, by now, how to have the last word with her.

  CHAPTER

  33

  TESS

  Fine. It was inevitable that the detectives investigating Amy’s death would be looking for links, she reasoned. There was no such thing as a coincidence, after all (except when it was a coincidence). Police were now as much of a presence on Lowland Way as postal and delivery services. The rubbish and recycling lorries or the van that drew up twice a week to dispatch cleaners for the Boulters.

  “I understand you were very helpful to our colleagues,” DC Shah told her, and she pulled the good-citizen face she had perfected in her numerous encounters with neighbors keen to know details of the gas incident. Somehow, her actions had been elevated to the foiling of a blast that might have taken out the whole street. She was the heroic savior of multiple souls.

  “And you’ve been speaking to the press,” he added.

  “So have you,” Tess pointed out. Tuppy had settled next to the detective’s legs, a sign of the times if ever there was one: he thought DC Shah was a regular member of the household now, probably expecting to welcome him back for Christmas. “So, I gather from my brother-in-law that you think it might not have been a straightforward gas leak?”

  “Word travels fast.”

  “We’re next-door neighbors, remember. Have you had the postmortem results?”

  “Not yet. But we do know that one of the rings on the gas hob had been left on and the flame either not ignited in the first place or somehow blown out.”

  Well, they hadn’t told Ralph that. It was surely a positive sign that they’d told her, she thought. She would WhatsApp the group to warn anyone yet to be interviewed. “You’ve come to the right place, then,” she said, “because the only time I’ve ever been in their house I found one of the gas rings left unattended. Which suggests it might have been a regular occurrence. I got the impression they lit their cigarettes from the flame, so he might have turned it on for that reason and been distracted.”

  “It’s a possibility. Except Booth kept a lighter inside his cigarette pack.”

  “A working lighter?”

  “Yes.”

  Tess suppressed a sigh. This was the problem with law enforcement: no sense of poetic justice. She remembered what Sissy said about the relative harmlessness of household gas. “Would a hob being left on be enough to kill someone? It wasn’t like he was in a confined space.”

  “As I say, we’ll know that very soon.” DC Shah chewed the end of his pen, a new habit or at least one that hadn’t caught her eye before. “For now, we’re trying to get a picture of all the neighbors’ movements last Thursday night.”

  “Right. Well, mine were very boring. I was in with the kids and Finn went out to the pub with Ralph.” Her tone was unattractively waspish and she had a sudden picture of herself as a neglected suburban housewife, bursting into tears without quite knowing why, treating tradesmen as therapists. She needed to be careful not to get emotional here.

  “What time did your husband leave and return?”

  “Seven thirtyish. He was back late. I don’t know what time exactly, but he was there in the morning, lying next to me, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an impostor.”

  Her sarcasm drew no response. “And in the morning you went to Mr. Booth’s house to speak to Jodie. I understand you keep spare keys for some of the neighbors? In case of emergency.”

  “That’s right. For Ralph and Naomi, Sissy and the Kendalls. Sissy and I are usually the ones neighbors ask, because we’re based at home.”

  “How about the spare key for number 1? Who kept that?”

  “You’d have to ask Jodie, but it’s certainly not me. We hated each other.” Tess felt her rage swell. “This woman killed a defenseless animal and dumped it on my path, remember? That’s why I was there!”

  She could see what DC Shah was thinking—It’s the defenseless human I’m interested in here. But Booth had never been defenseless, had he? Expecting a mild rebuke for her outburst, she was surprised by his next comment: “We’ve been passed some information about the cygnet and it looks very much as if it wasn’t your neighbors who left it at your door.”

  “What?” Tess flushed in disbelief. “You mean, it wasn’t her? It wasn’t them? Who, then?”

  He leafed back a page or two in his pad. “It was a Mrs. Becky Wallace. She responded to the Swan Rescue notice appealing for witnesses and came forward with information. She found the bird in the park just before the gates closed. She believes it had become separated from its parents and was the victim of a group of boys with an air rifle. They’ve been warned before about using it. She’s helping us ID the individuals involved.”

  Tess pressed her fingers into her hot cheeks. “Oh! I can’t believe that! That’s very upsetting. I don’t know her. Do you have a photo of her?”

  He did not. “She gave her profession as childminder. She’s local, goes to the park once or twice a day.”

  “I think I might know who you mean. She’s got quite a few kids. I saw her in the shop next to the Star as well, when I went in to complain about them selling stale bread to feed to the birds. So she found the poor thing, did she? Why did she bring it to me?”

  “She said she’d noticed you were active in the swans’ welfare and she knew where you lived. She thought you would know what to do with it. She didn’t know about Swan Rescue until she saw the appeal after the event.”

  “Why didn’t she ring my doorbell and ask me face-to-face?”

  “Perhaps she didn’t feel confident enough to do that. These houses look quite grand to most people, Mrs. Morgan.”

  Again, Tess felt the pain of imminent tears. “Oh, that makes me so sad. For her to see me that way. To bring the cygnet but be too shy to ring the bell. That makes me so sad.”

  “It’s been an upsetting time,” DC Shah agreed.

  * * *

  —

  She contacted Daisy to babysit and booked a table at the Fox.

  Finn was a little discombobulated by the proceedings, she could tell. He was probably thinking, This is where I come with Ralph, and out of sheer bloody-mindedness she tried to avoid what Ralph would order from the menu—something demonstrably male, a pie maybe.

  “I’ll have the mackerel and beetroot salad,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s what Ralph always goes for,” Finn said.

  “Really? I’m surprised. He must be worried about middle-age spread.”

  “Or Naomi is. I’ll have the beef.”

  Extraordinary though it was, Ralph had apologized to Tess for excluding her from his plans to buy number 1. He’d seen her as a risk to his anonymity, he explained, too likely to confide in Em in earshot of the enemy. “I shouldn’t have come between you and Finn,” he said. “You have my word I won’t do it again.”

  Wonders would never cease, but then he was in excellent spirits now that Booth had been removed (dead or alive—it was only the removal that counted to Ralph).

  Finn had apologized too, of course. Had he not, they would now be discussing divorce.

  “So, what’s this about?” Finn paused. “Hang on, is the fact that I even have to ask the problem? We don’t go out enough on our own?”

  Tess smiled. “You’re becoming quite fluent in passive-aggressive, I see. I do want to talk, though.” She took a few fortifying gulps of her Sauvignon Blanc. “About moving.”

  “OK.” Finn rolled a piece of bread between finger and thumb, creating a marble-size doughball. “Actually, I have a proposal for you on that. A deal.”

  He was quite serious. Once, a proposal had involved champagne and diamonds, but this was what marriage was by this stage. Deals and negotia
tions. Because people tended to agree less as they advanced, not more. They came to trust their own judgment over others’, to feel they’d earned the right to what they wanted, not what someone else did.

  “I’m happy to put the house on the market whenever you think will work,” Finn said. “Bearing in mind there’s a murder inquiry going on on the street.”

  “Two—if they really do think someone broke into number 1 and turned on the gas.”

  “That won’t come to anything,” Finn said, placing the doughball back in the basket, as if one of them might want to eat it. “He must have done it himself. Passed out in a drunken stupor without smelling it. Ralph thinks they’re only questioning us in the hope of scaring out information about Amy and the scaffolding. Now we’re off our guard a bit.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. If it weren’t for the fact that they haven’t actually solved the case, I’d say these detectives are pretty clever.” Tess topped up their wine, icy water from the outside of the bottle running down her wrist. “What’s the other bit of the deal?” she asked.

  “I leave my job and go and work for Ralph.”

  Unable to tell whether she’d been expecting this and, if so, when it was that she’d stopped fearing it, she offered a noncommittal “Hmm.”

  Finn continued. “Before you say it, I won’t do that until we’ve had an offer on our place and decided where we want to go. Otherwise . . .”

  Otherwise, the moment he was working with Ralph, Ralph would be working on getting him to reconsider the move. She imagined their desks set side by side, their satisfied faces turning as one when some underling delivered their bean-to-cup coffees.

  “The day we complete the sale,” she said, “you can resign. No sooner. And I’m going to be working as well, once we’ve got the kids settled in new schools.”

  Obviously relieved by the ease of the negotiation, Finn struggled to conceal his elation. “Maybe we can find something for you at the business?”

  Tess raised her dripping wineglass to her husband. “Let’s not get carried away here,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  34

  ANT

  Though he said so himself, Ant was doing an excellent job of acting as if a police visit to his home at eight in the evening was nothing outlandish, or at least nothing to provoke any urgent desire to abscond. It helped that he’d already downed two large glasses of red by the time the doorbell went. Since Em had left—again—it was his habit to pick up wine on the way home from work, usually from the Tesco Metro by the station and never more than two bottles. “If it’s in the house, I’ll drink it,” he’d told his colleagues just that day, and they’d sympathized, as if they too had dependency issues. “Only way to cope,” they agreed.

  DC Shah explained that he’d called by twice earlier, without success, and was trying one last time on his way home.

  Not an arrest, then, Ant stopped himself from joking. He was third in this new round of police inquiries, as he understood it, after Ralph and Tess, who reported that Naomi and Finn hadn’t yet made the cut. But Em would, surely. The Kendalls were the Booths’ nearest neighbors and their actions on Thursday night had been irregular by anyone’s standards. Perhaps police had also traveled down to Gloucestershire this evening, and he and Em were being interviewed simultaneously so they couldn’t tip each other off.

  “I heard a gas ring was left on and you want to know where we all were on Thursday night?” he said, on the front foot.

  It was the first time in all his conversations with the police that he had rehearsed what he was going to say. He and Em had gone over it while walking through the park in the late afternoon on the day of Booth’s death, Sam strapped into the racing green push-along car they’d just bought from the toy shop next to the brasserie. (Did that look suspect? Too callous? Buying toys within hours of a neighbor suffocating to death?) Though they’d interacted quite naturally with their son, they must have looked like spies when they addressed each other, speaking sideways while staring at the path ahead.

  “I suggest we say nothing beyond going over to Sissy’s,” Em said. “We got there; we settled Sam; we went to bed. End of story. If anyone says they saw one of us in the street later, we were nipping back to fetch Sam’s giraffe. I’ve told Sissy the same.”

  She was confident she could dictate to Sissy what she should and shouldn’t say to the police, but Ant was warier. Sissy was not the woman they’d known six months ago, decent to a fault, shatterproof. She was vulnerable now, if not already broken.

  “Let’s go back a bit, if that’s all right,” DC Shah said. They were sitting in the living room, mugs of tea on the coffee table—black, because in Em’s absence Ant had run out of milk. He had half-seriously offered wine but of course been refused, and he had left his own glass in the kitchen. His reunion with it couldn’t come soon enough.

  “We’re interested in a text Ralph Morgan sent you on the Monday before Darren Booth’s death. ‘Nice work re Booth’? What did he mean by that?”

  Ant blinked. “Oh, OK. Well, it was because I’d smashed a window next door.” Did that sound too cavalier? He altered his tone. “You probably know about that from Jodie. I shouldn’t have done it. I’m very sorry.”

  The notebook was open, the pen sliding left to right. In an idle moment, Ant had Googled “police supplies” and found the model: Investigator’s Notebook, it was called, though civilians were free to order it too. “You’re saying you’re responsible for damage to Mr. Booth’s property?”

  “Yes, and no doubt you’ll want to prosecute me for it, but before you do, let me ask you this: Is what I did really worse than damaging the health of a young child?” The alcohol was causing his tongue to outpace his brain. “D’you want to know what my wife and I are doing next week? Taking our son to a pediatric audiovestibular clinic. Know what that is? It’s a clinic that treats kids with hearing problems. The day I smashed the window, she’d just sent me a text saying we needed to get a referral. I’d been so restrained till then, and I just lost it. I took out his camera and a car windscreen as well. I would have done more if he hadn’t come out.”

  DC Shah raised his gaze from his notes. “No complaint has been made about the incident, but that doesn’t mean we can’t choose to investigate it.” He tilted his head, thoughtfully, as if assessing whether to do so there and then.

  Ant nodded, feeling wretched. “That’s good of Jodie not to report it.” And Booth: there’d been four days between the attack and his death.

  “We understand that you and your family slept at Ms. Watkins’s home on the night of Thursday the sixth?”

  Ant reached for his tea, to buy himself a few seconds, but immediately wondered if this were a known sign of incipient dishonesty and put it down again without taking a sip. “That’s right. She came over late, maybe about eleven? She was in a bit of a state because she’d had an intruder a couple of weeks earlier and she thought she’d heard a disturbance. It was obvious she couldn’t be in the house alone, so we suggested we stay with her.”

  “Had you ever done that before?”

  “No, but as I say she’d only recently had the break-in and so hadn’t been nervous about being on her own before. She used to have B and B guests a lot too, but that’s all changed. I think she’s lonely.”

  If there was any sense that Ant was leading the subject in a different direction, DC Shah was having none of it. “You and your wife had been under a lot of strain following a noisy party, I believe. You didn’t call on your neighbors earlier in the evening, did you?”

  “No. Definitely not. And it’s neighbor, not neighbors. Jodie wasn’t home, only Booth.” He picked up his tea more confidently now and drank, feeling the hot liquid surge through his gullet.

  “It’s quite a coincidence that you weren’t there on the night of a life-threatening gas leak,” DC Shah remarked.

  “You could say that,
” Ant agreed. “Personally, I’d call it a stroke of luck. A rare stroke of luck. I’d say it was about time the cards fell in our favor. You know they’ve done this before? Left flames unattended, that sort of thing. Anyway, Tess said the firemen told her we would most likely have been fine at our place if we’d been sleeping there—so long as the gas wasn’t ignited.”

  “Did you go back to your own home in the morning for any reason?”

  “No, I’d taken my work clothes and laptop with me, so I went straight to work. I get the overland train into Victoria, if you want to check. Then my wife phoned me later in the morning, said they’d all been evacuated.”

  “What was your reaction to that news?” The detective laid his pen on the open pad in an unnerving gesture, as if he wanted to listen to Ant’s answer with particular attention.

  “Well, once I was sure she and my son were fine, I was sad,” Ant said, and the wine exaggerated his account, made a child’s story of it. “I didn’t like Booth, but it’s still horrible. I also thought it could have been worse.”

  “How so?”

  “It could have been both of them. But like I said, Jodie was away.”

  “Yes, you did say that,” DC Shah said.

  * * *

  —

  Em was staying with her parents. It was only time apart, she had said, at the close of that walk in the park, with Sam squealing away in his little green car. Nothing as formal as a separation and as much for Ant’s benefit as for hers.

  Ant thought time apart and separation amounted to the same thing.

  “I’m worried about myself, the way I spoke to you last night,” she said. “The way I spoke to Sissy. That whole ridiculous plan. What if she had gone in? Not smelled the gas and lit a cigarette like I told her to? She’d have blown them both up!”

  “She would have smelled it,” Ant said. “And so would Booth if he hadn’t been drunk as a skunk. He was a danger to himself, first with the scaffolding and then with the gas.” He paused. “How long will you be away this time?”