CHAPTER 15
Prichard’s face was incredulous as the police car pulled up outside Ivy Cottage and Pat got out of the passenger seat, still dressed in her dryrobe with her black bobble hat and litter-picker.
He watched through the window, craning his neck over the sink for a better view, as she appeared to walk round to the open driver’s door and chat, nodding and turning before giving a little wave and making her way through the gate, down the path and in through the kitchen door.
‘Have you been arrested?!’ he exclaimed as she pulled off her hat. ‘Don’t tell me, you’ve been accosting tourists again, or shouting at people who don’t have their dogs on leads, or bothering the police with your enquiries.’
‘Well, actually, the police have been helping me with my enquiries.’ Pat pulled out a chair and sat down at the kitchen table. ‘I’ve been to Fin du Monde to check out the last place Henry was seen alive.’
‘How exciting,’ replied Prichard, turning round and picking up a bottle. ‘Wine?’
Pat paused. This was always the risk of having Prichard over for a TV supper; he never minded hugely about tomorrow so lived very much for today. A bon viveur was probably a good way of describing him. But she didn’t take much persuading to join him.
‘Elderflower,’ he added hopefully. ‘I’ve changed the recipe. It’s a lot less sweet than it was last time.’
‘Sure,’ said Pat. ‘Just a little one.’
For the next half-hour, Pat and Prichard sipped their acid-reflux wine while the chilli con carne simmered and fogged up the kitchen windows.
They discussed the merits of the red marker pen, and Prichard, after two glasses of elderflower, decided it would be good to dramatise the act of leaving the bedroom to head for the clifftop.
‘If he were sad, Henry would have walked straight past the hall table and out onto the cliff. Surely? Once your mind is made up to do something like that, there’s little that can distract you.’
‘Well, yes,’ said Pat, staring at the corkboard on the wall.
‘There’s often a kind of hyper-focus, a narrowing of perspective.
People who are suicidal can become so internally withdrawn that all they can hear are the critical thoughts, looping endlessly.
It can feel like there’s no other voice left. ’
‘So you wouldn’t notice the red pen on your way out, pick it up, go back upstairs, write the note and put the pen back on the table on your way to the cliff’s edge.’
‘Unlikely.’
‘How do you know he didn’t take it when he first arrived at the Airbnb?’
‘I don’t, but I think Grace, the landlady, would have noticed and said something. She was there when Henry checked in. In fact, she checked him in.’
‘OK, so the note is bogus,’ declared Prichard. ‘We should write that on the board.’
‘Do,’ agreed Pat. ‘There was something else too. Grace said Henry left the Airbnb with another man.’
‘Well, Derek,’ said Prichard, as he wrote Suicide note = bogus on a Post-it note.
‘Except she said she couldn’t remember him being blonde, nor having blue eyes.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you think you could miss the hair colour in poor lighting?’
‘His hair is fair and his eyes are blue. You don’t forget those in a hurry. But I suppose in the dark it’s all much of a muchness.’
Pat nodded and took a sip of her wine, then winced a little. ‘How dark is it at five p.m.?’
‘I mean, the clocks have just gone forward. I could probably tell someone’s hair colour at that time of the afternoon.
The light isn’t even fading, is it?’ He looked out of the window at the mottled purple sky.
‘Though Derek’s not a white blonde, a sort of Boris Johnson blonde, is he?
Do you think Boris dyes his hair, by the way?
It’s very blonde for someone of his age.
I know he always says he’s got Scandi roots, but I’m prepared to wager he does something to it! ’ Prichard laughed.
‘Let’s not get distracted. Our two prime suspects have more than enough evidence stacked against them,’ said Pat, still mulling.
‘And yet Derek is still here, as is Dorna. If I’d killed someone, I would put a big distance between myself and the scene of the crime.
Unless I didn’t think I was guilty, of course.
I suppose if someone believes they’re above everyone else – above consequences, above the law – they’d have a sense of entitlement, even superiority.
They’d expect special treatment, they wouldn’t see a problem with using people to get what they want.
’ She exhaled. ‘Henry was in the way. That’s what it comes down to. Collateral damage.’
She paused. ‘Derek was exploiting him long before that, emotionally and probably financially. He was controlling. Henry had been diminished for some time. I doubt Derek even saw him as a full person, just a means to an end. And when empathy’s missing, when you stop recognising the other person’s needs or value, it doesn’t take much to cross the line.
Especially if you’ve built your identity on being powerful, admired, exceptional.
You don’t see a life, you see an obstacle. ’
‘Well, yes, now you put it like that,’ said Prichard. ‘Poor Henry.’
‘Poor Henry indeed.’
Prichard walked over to the bubbling pot on the stove. ‘Are we eating Jamie’s chilli in here? Or are we having supper on our knees?’
There was always something a little rebellious for Pat about watching television while eating off her knees.
She had not been brought up that way. In that large, draughty house just outside Macclesfield, down the lengthy tree-lined drive, they hadn’t quite dressed for dinner, but they’d certainly put on a cardigan (mainly for the warmth) and washed their hands.
Meals were not meant to be enjoyed; they were to be tolerated and got through, with a straight back and no elbows on the table.
So to sit watching The Apprentice with a glass of wine, even if it was elderflower, and a bowl of chilli on a tray felt like indulgence.
They had a sofa each, and they sat discussing the quality of the candidates, the extremely glamorous outfits the ladies were wearing, the impressive eyelash engineering, and how many times everyone could say ‘Lord Sugar’ or ‘Suralan’, which now seemed to have fused into one breathless word.
Prichard, being a retired successful businessman, was mostly hypercritical of their business plans, their apparent lack of financial nous, their shaky grip on accounting, and their inability to pitch the idea they’d supposedly nurtured for years like a beloved house plant.
Pat, meanwhile, was quietly fascinated. She couldn’t help admiring the sheer nerve, the willingness to be judged publicly in pursuit of a dream or maybe just a decent Instagram following. There was something almost endearing in the mix of blind ambition and telegenic meltdowns.
‘Honestly,’ declared Prichard, a spoon of chilli poised, ‘is that the best they can do?’ He shook his head sadly at one of the teams’ non-existent profit. Then his expression changed, spoon of chilli still in mid-air.
He turned to look at Pat. ‘Did you hear that?’
‘What?’
‘That squeal?’
‘Yes, I thought it was on the television,’ replied Pat.
‘No, listen.’ Prichard’s head slowly moved to the side. ‘There! I think it’s outside.’
‘I definitely heard that,’ replied Pat. ‘That’s proper squealing and laughing, and I would say the sound of … what?’
‘High jinks!’ pronounced Prichard. ‘And it’s coming from Mal and Fi’s garden. I wonder what they’re doing?’
Pat looked at him and raised her eyebrows. ‘Want to find out?’
Prichard followed Pat up the stairs and into the avocado-coloured bathroom, which she had meant to have renovated over ten years ago but had since become resigned to, and in fact rather fond of.
It was a small room with a long, narrow window above the bath that looked out onto Mal and Fi’s garden.
However, to admire the view required a certain amount of gymnastic balance and skill, which Pat had mastered over time.
One had to stand on the side of the bath while holding onto the windowsill with one hand and crunching the neck at the same time to get the correct angle.
She assumed the position with the speed and agility of an arthritic mountain goat, then slipped her free hand behind the short white curtains and pulled out her binoculars.
‘Well I never, Patricia Phillips,’ said Prichard with a wide grin, nodding his head. ‘I never had you down as a peeping Tom.’
‘Piss off, Prich,’ hissed Pat, squinting. ‘They’re all naked in the hot tub.’
‘They’re what?’ he exclaimed.
‘Naked. All of them.’
‘Who’s “them”? How many of them?’
‘Eight? Ten? I can’t really count as they keep moving around.’
‘Budge up,’ said Prichard. ‘Surely there’s room for two up here.’
‘There is,’ she replied. ‘It’ll be a tight squeeze, but not as tight as the hot tub.’
He clambered up next to her, clinging onto the windowsill, his chin on the edge of the open window. ‘Crikey,’ he whispered, ‘is that what an orgy looks like?’
‘I’m not sure why you’re asking me,’ Pat replied. ‘I’m an authority on many things, but orgies are not one of them. But I can possibly, probably, assert that this might be the start of one.’
‘Impressive.’ Prichard stared. ‘Is that Fiona?’
‘It sure is.’
Pat and Prichard watched as a lithe, naked Fiona leapt out of the hot tub and ran across the garden and back into the house, cheered on by her fellow swingers.
It was hard to tell who was who in the pale blue uplight of the bubbling jacuzzi, or which arm or leg belonged to which person as they bobbed up and down in the water like lobsters in a pot.
Or indeed a human soup. A few seconds later, she reappeared by the large sliding doors, her figure silhouetted in the light from the kitchen.
She shrieked loudly to garner the attention of the hot tub, then waved two bottles of champagne in the air and jogged towards it, bosom bouncing up and down, to the delight of the occupants.
She leapt into the bowl of bubbles and bodies, and resurfaced in the middle still holding her two bottles of champagne.
Pat and Prichard looked on in stunned and fascinated silence.
‘Here,’ said Pat eventually, handing over the binoculars.
‘Thanks,’ replied Prichard, placing them up against his eyes and then quickly removing them. ‘Crikey,’ he added, ‘it all looks a bit much in close-up.’
‘It does,’ agreed Pat.
‘How often do they do this?’ he asked, looking through the glasses again.
‘Quite often. Every few weeks or so.’
‘You’ve told me about it before, but I never really believed you. I’ve got all the sexuality of a spider plant, but even I can see this is a swingers’ party! I thought you were exaggerating.’
‘Me!’ Pat looked surprised. ‘Exaggerate?’
‘You’re the only one who doesn’t. I thought they just liked a knees-up in their jacuzzi.’
‘I think this is a little more than a knees-up,’ replied Pat, just as one naked man scrambled out of the tub to chase an equally naked squealing woman around the garden.
His stomach was fortunately low and large enough to cover his swinging nether regions.
‘Christ,’ she whispered. ‘Is that Malcolm?’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Prichard, lowering the binoculars.
As Malcolm and his catch leapt back into the tub, to much applause, an athletic young man eased himself out of the water and walked across the garden towards the house.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Pat.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Prichard, his elbow on the windowsill, the binoculars trained on the garden. ‘I can only see his back.’
‘Let me have a look,’ said Pat, grabbing the glasses. But she was too late; the shiny wet body had disappeared into the house.
They were both silent for a few minutes, watching the sliding doors. At last the young man reappeared, carrying several wine glasses in his big hands.
‘Wow!’ said Pat, slowly lowering the binoculars and looking across at Prichard with a feverish glimmer in her eyes.
‘What?’
‘It’s Derek.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘It is. Take a look.’ She handed over the binoculars.
‘Gosh,’ said Prichard. ‘You’re correct.’ He glanced across at the hot tub. ‘And Fi can’t take her eyes off him. Look at her!’
‘They certainly appear to be working well together.’
‘They do,’ agreed Prichard as the naked Derek slipped back into the bubbling water.
‘And he doesn’t look like a man who’s grieving, that’s for sure.’