by Karen Swan
‘Which one?’
‘The bald one.’
‘And the other one?’
‘He was getting out his clubs.’
The detective’s eyes narrowed and Ro got the impression he was holding his breath. ‘And then what?’
‘Well, that’s when my boyfriend picked up and we started chatting.’
‘That exact moment?’
‘That exact one, yes. He gave me a bit of a fright, you see. I hadn’t realized he’d picked up.’
‘You didn’t see anything further on the green?’
Ro shrugged, feeling thoroughly useless. ‘No. My boyfriend wanted to see the dress I’d worn last night, so I left the window to show it to him and then I flopped on the bed.’
‘Flopped?’
‘Mmm-hmm.’ She nodded vigorously and bit her lip.
‘And then?’
‘And then we finished chatting and said goodbye, and I went downstairs to see how Greg was doing. It stank of booze down here, though, so I opened the door first to let in some fresh air, and that’s when I saw the police cars going past. I ran back in and woke up the boys, and then you started knocking on all the doors. And now here we are.’ She shifted position, on tenterhooks to know what all this was really about. She’d told him hers; now it was only fair he told her his. ‘Can you tell me what this is about now? I know it must be bad. I mean, the tent – I’ve seen those on the telly. They only go up when . . . when there’s . . .’ She swallowed hard, unable to get the words out. She’d been so focused on trying to help she hadn’t allowed herself to think about what had actually happened.
The officer closed his notebook. ‘We’re investigating a homicide at the Maidstone Club.’
Ro sucked in her breath, feeling her blood pool at her feet. Oh God. Oh God. ‘You mean . . . he d-died?’
‘Someone died?’
They both turned to find Bobbi standing in the hallway, tying her dressing gown around her, her face puffy with sleep, but her dark eyes already slitted suspiciously.
The police officer stood up. ‘Detective Bryant, ma’am. We’re just making some routine enquiries for a live investigation. Could you come in here, please, and take a seat? I need to ask you some questions.’
‘What’s happened? Who’s died?’
‘There’s been a homicide at the Maidstone.’
‘The Maidstone?’ Bobbi spluttered, almost laughing from the shock of it, as though the idea of anything so messy happening there was inconceivable.
‘Take a seat, please,’ he repeated, standing until the smile died on her lips and she walked in slowly, silently, her dark eyes moving between Ro and the policeman. She sat down on the sofa beside Ro, their legs touching. Ro felt a strong urge to reach out and take Bobbi’s hand, but she didn’t. She didn’t dare.
‘What is your name?’ the detective asked Bobbi, sitting down himself and opening his notebook again.
‘Bobbi Winkleman.’
‘I understand you had a guest last night,’ the policeman began.
Bobbi’s eyes narrowed dangerously. ‘Has my mother sent you?’
‘Please just answer the question.’
Ro put her hand on Bobbi’s leg. ‘It’s important, Bobbi.’
Bobbi took in the expression on Ro’s face and looked back at the police officer. ‘My boyfriend was with me.’
‘And what’s his name?’
Bobbi hesitated. ‘Kevin Bradley.’
‘How old is Mr Bradley?’
‘Fifty-one.’
The police officer opened his notepad again and looked down at his notes. ‘And at what time did Mr Bradley leave here?’
‘Just after six this morning. Why are you asking me about Kevin? What is this about?’
But the detective ignored her. Right now, it was his questions that needed to be answered. ‘Do you know where he was going?’
Bobbi scowled. She didn’t take well to being ignored (as Greg had discovered to his cost). ‘He said he had a meeting.’
‘At six o’clock on a Sunday morning?’
‘He’s not a nine-to-fiver,’ Bobbi retorted. ‘He’s a successful businessman. He works round the clock, round the world and not necessarily out of an office.’
Ro bit her lip, knowing the detective could be heading in one of two directions with these questions, and she hoped now – hoped really, really badly – that Kevin was going to turn out to be married with kids after all – that he’d left here to go back to his family, not some dodgy meeting or a game of golf. Especially not that.
‘Do you have any photographs of Mr Bradley?’
Bobbi crossed her arms. ‘Not that I’m prepared to show you until you tell me what’s going on. I don’t understand why you’re asking me all these questions about Kevin.’
The police officer stared back at Bobbi levelly. ‘If you could show me a photograph of your boyfriend, ma’am, it would help us in our enquiries.’
There was a long pause and Ro could see the pennies slowly beginning to drop in Bobbi’s mind. ‘It’s on my cell,’ she murmured finally, pointing vaguely to the ceiling.
‘Do you want me to get it for you?’ Ro asked her.
Bobbi looked across at her, but Ro wasn’t sure her housemate was actually seeing her. Panic was beginning to set in with the understanding.
Ro looked at the police officer, who saw what Ro saw and nodded subtly. Ro ran quickly up the stairs, her heart pounding as she darted into Bobbi’s room and found the iPhone on the bedside table. She descended the stairs two at a time and handed it over to Bobbi, panting.
Bobbi scrolled through her picture gallery in silence. ‘There. I took that last night. We had a reservation at Nick & Toni’s. Table nineteen. You can check. And he was with me till an hour ago.’
The police officer took the phone, his eyes flicking from the screen to Bobbi and back again.
‘Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.’
Bobbi stood up, anger bursting through her in one last defiant stand. ‘Why? He hasn’t done anything – I can tell you that for sure. I’ve given you an alibi for him. I know he sails pretty close to the wind at times, bu—’
‘Ma’am, you’ve misunderstood. Your boyfriend isn’t a suspect in this investigation.’
‘But . . .’ Bobbi visibly paled. Ro threw her arm around her, squeezing her tightly, too tightly, but Bobbi didn’t notice. Every fibre of her being was focused on the police officer.
The detective – for the first time since entering – looked apprehensive, his closed, suspicious demeanour giving way to something closer to regret. ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you to come with me to the morgue. We need you to formally identify the body.’
The house had never been so quiet. Not a door had been slammed all day; the stairs didn’t creak with one housemate or another bounding up three at a time, picking something up from their room en route to the beach or the club.
Greg stood by the window, looking like hell, his forehead pressed to the cool pane and enjoying the momentary chill. Temperatures had risen quickly once the sea mist had rolled back and the day’s grisly proceedings had been revealed.
Hump was perched on the bottom step of the stairs, his elbows on his knees and his head dropped low. Ro was pacing. She reckoned she must have walked three miles just in the sitting room, trying to burn off her agitation as they all waited for Bobbi to be dropped back in the patrol car.
She had chosen to go to the mortuary alone, her manner subdued but efficient as she’d gone upstairs to get dressed, her eyes down and, when they did meet anyone’s, dim. She hadn’t cried, hadn’t even gasped; her pretty knees had just discreetly buckled at the detective’s words and she’d sunk softly back down on the sofa like a marionette whose strings had been cut.
Greg straightened up suddenly. ‘She’s here.’
They all stood up, ramrod straight and nervous, clustering together in the hallway, not wanting to crowd her on the porch. There were huge numbers of people alre
ady gathered at the police cordons further up the street, at the Egypt Lane junction, all wanting to find out what had happened and to whom, and how and why.
Ro watched Bobbi stop at the sight of their small gaggle through the porch screen, the lot of them divided by more than mesh now, united by more than an address. Bobbi blinked, her bottom lip trembling, as Greg opened the door and she crossed the threshold into six arms, tears running down eight cheeks, two hearts broken – a motley crew that had started out as strangers but somewhere along the line, through all the bickering and noise and mess, had become a family of sorts.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
‘Are you telling me you actually witnessed the murder?’ Florence asked, her voice restored to its former power now that she was almost fully recovered. ‘You actually saw the victim clubbed to death?’ Her questions were back to full-strength directness too.
Ro saw a couple of well-dressed visitors twitch in their chairs slightly as Florence’s voice carried over the tartan carpets, and she moved her chair closer to Florence’s. ‘No,’ she said in a quieter voice. ‘But the police think I would have done if I hadn’t started talking to Matt and moved away from the window.’
‘So then, technically, you were the last person to see that poor man alive.’
Ro paused, before nodding with a shudder. It was a hard thing to accept – that she had been the last person to see a dead man walking. ‘Apart from the . . .’ she couldn’t bring herself to say the word ‘murderer’, ‘perpetrator, obviously.’
Kevin’s death had cast a shadow over the entire house. Fear and violence wasn’t just something that lurked behind shadows or in the dark anymore; it was right in front of them, in the blazing sunlight, outside their own windows and part of the innocuous inanities of going about life – drinking coffee, taking showers, playing golf . . .
The story had dominated the local news every day for weeks now – many of the headlines focusing on the shock that this could have happened at the elitist and secretive Maidstone Club, rather than the horror of a life brutally cut short – and the police were convinced that the murderer was known to Kevin, either through his business or personal life. The police had spent a couple more days interviewing Bobbi about the relationship, and her recollections tallied with their own checks – Kevin hadn’t been seeing anyone else, it appeared, and he wasn’t married either, although he’d been divorced three times – and the police had concluded the murderer was most likely a business associate.
It was a relief of sorts, but Bobbi’s grief was complicated and hard to manage for them all, especially in the first week after the killing, when both she and Greg had stayed down in East Hampton (Greg’s own heartbreak a hidden torment that he suppressed after the humiliation of his vodka binge): the relationship had only been going a short while, Bobbi’s motives for the hook-up had been more rooted in ambition than attraction (or at least they had started out that way), and her moods were erratic – shock blending with anger mingling with fear. Mainly fear: fear that the killing had happened within metres of where she slept, fear that it had happened within minutes of her kissing him, fear that her own ambition had propelled her towards someone whose even greater ambition had crossed lines where murder was the only answer. She had suffered from nightmares for the first few days and they had all taken it in turns to sit by her bed as she slept, Bobbi even accepting Greg’s solicitations without rancour.
Florence twisted carefully in her position on the wood-trimmed sofa and rested her hand firmly upon Ro’s. ‘Ro dear, I don’t want to alarm you, but . . . I do have to ask you something: you are quite sure the murderer didn’t see you, aren’t you?’
Ro stared back, dumbstruck. That thought had never occurred to her. ‘Well . . . y-yes. I mean, I never had any sense that either one of them looked my way or saw me . . . I don’t think.’ She frowned. Was she absolutely sure about that? Could she swear to it? She hadn’t tried to hide herself at the window after all. What if her movements had been picked up as she’d left the window to show Matt the dress?
Florence lowered her voice cautiously as a nurse passed by. ‘I only ask because if the murderer is still at large . . . Well, you know what I’m saying.’
Ro stared at her, feeling her heart beginning to gallop. ‘But . . .’ Ro swallowed. ‘What happened to you and what happened to Kevin are entirely unrelated. There’s no suggestion, is there, that—’
‘No, no. I’m not suggesting that. It’s just that violence, once unleashed, seems to always drag innocents into its path. Just look at what happened to you in the cafe, when that coffee was intended for me. There’s been too much suffering already, Ro. I couldn’t bear it if you were to get hurt again. Just be alert.’
‘I was just sitting quietly at the window,’ she murmured, thinking how she had yet again been at the wrong place at the wrong time. If only she had stayed sleeping, if only Ted Connor hadn’t invaded her dreams and made her waken with such a fright . . .
‘I’m not trying to frighten you. Be safe, that’s all I’m saying. Both you and I have found to our cost that some people will stop at nothing to get what they want. Keep out of their way.’
Ro looked at Florence quizzically, a furrow deepening in her brow. That sounded like surrender if ever she heard it. Did Florence still think that selling the house was the only way to secure her safety? ‘You have reconsidered on selling the house, haven’t you?’
‘On the contrary, being stuck in here has really given me time to think and I’ve completely come round to Ted’s view on this. He’s a prudent man and I’m just being foolish if I think that sentimentality over bricks and mortar is worth dying for.’ She patted Ro’s hand. ‘I’m just so grateful to have been given this chance to move on, Ro. I want to see my grandchildren grow up. There’s still so much I want to do.’
‘I see.’ Ro stared unseeing out of the window, oblivious to the kaleidoscopic patterns of the clouds streaming across the sky. All she could see was Ted Connor. He was everywhere she looked, his all-American smile beaming through the camera as she spent long days in the studio whittling down his radiant family life – bright smiles and in-jokes, beachy weekends and good hair – to a bijoux chunk of perfect moments set to a soundtrack; his persistent stare following her at parties, trying to figure her out. It was no wonder his face was burned on her retina when she closed her eyes at night and in her yoga class. He was always there, standing by her side as the coffee burned, beside Florence’s as the electricity coursed and the water rained down . . .
‘Anyway, I’ve had some good news for a change: the doctors have said I can be discharged next week,’ Florence said, watching the emotions running over Ro’s face and briskly changing the subject.
‘That soon?’ Ro was astonished, even though physically there was little evidence in Florence’s appearance now of her injuries and she was growing visibly stronger by the day.
‘It’d be right this instant if I had my way. I can’t wait to get out of here. From what I’m reading in Dan’s Papers, the Town Board sounds like it’s falling apart with all this in-fighting about the report.’
‘Report?’
‘The Montauk Beach Proposal?’
‘Oh, that.’ Ro felt distracted still.
‘Yes, the sooner I get back there, the better.’
‘You mustn’t overdo it, Florence – you’ve been through so much.’
‘The best thing that could happen to me is to get back to normality. I’ve told the doctors I’ll do whatever they want – physical therapy, meds, diet, you name it – but they have to let me out in time for the Artwalk. It’s one of the highlights of my year.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You’ll love it – you must come. Your friend Melodie runs it, in fact – a prestigious post.’ Ro picked up on the sharp edge to the words. The antipathy between the two women ran both ways, then? ‘It’s an organized evening walk through the town’s art galleries. The artists are there to give talks; drinks and canapés are laid
on. It’s a perfect mix of culture and sociability, and there’s always quite a crowd. I shall look forward to seeing some familiar faces again after this dratted confinement.’
‘It sounds great. Where is it and when?’
‘Next Friday, seven p.m., outside the bookstore. Bring your friends if you would like.’
‘Thanks. I’ll ask them. I think we could all do with something to look forward to.’ That was putting it lightly! She slapped her hands on her thighs, staring into space without moving for a moment. Her head was so full of worries and anxieties and suspicions, sometimes it felt hard to move. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better head off. You are clearly fine and don’t need any bolstering at all, and I’m so behind on work. I need to throw a mattress on the floor and lock myself in the studio for next three weeks.’
It was the last thing she wanted to do. The thought of trawling through the rest of the Connor films and photos was actually depressing her, the perfect family they supposedly reflected nothing more than an empty hologram. She sighed wistfully and got up slowly, feeling older than her years.
Florence was standing now too. ‘Rowena, you look like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders. All this trouble, it’s behind you now.’
‘I know.’
Florence shook her head. ‘You are without question the worst liar I’ve ever known.’ She smiled, kissing her on the cheek. ‘But never change, mine heart, never change.’
04/18/2011
06h49
Baby, swaddled, in a clear plastic hospital crib.
‘World, welcome to the little boy who’s going to rock you off your axis and make you a better place.’ Ted. Whispering. ‘Finlay Patrick Connor. Eight pounds six ounces. Born at eighteen minutes past three this morning, April 18 same date as his grandma. As if his mom wasn’t already clever enough.’