It was one I’d made myself, but it looked fairly normal. It was stitched from one of James’s T-shirts and the only eccentricities were the orange panels I’d added along the sides, bright against the original deep blue, where I’d taken it in to fit me.
I drove home wondering whether to tell James or not to tell James about my afternoon. In the end there was so much I hadn’t told him: the priest hole, Mrs. Billings’s kleptomania, my plans to kill him, the bag, the surveyors, why break the habit now?
Chapter Seven
On Thursday morning I was making my way across the hall when there was a knock on the door. Not thinking, I went to answer it and had the fright of my life when I saw two police officers standing in front of me!
It didn’t seem right, after I’d worked so hard to destroy evidence and had every intention of making amends in a different way. Had we missed something? It was possible, given the number of things there were to think of. Had they found the phone and tracked it back to us? Or sifted their way through a million splinters of headlight cover?
“Morning, morning,” one of them said. “Nothing to worry about, we’re just speaking to everyone who might have seen Lennie Green on the day he went missing. We were given your name by the party hosts. Can we come in?”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“We just need to take a statement. Crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s.”
I let them in because I didn’t think I had a choice, and before I could stop them, they hung a left into the very room in which Lennie had passed. I followed them and took a dust sheet off one of the chairs, sniffing the air as I did for the telltale scent of death I had often heard of. There was nothing discernible, not to me at least. I watched to see if they were going to turn up their noses, but there was no reaction. I looked round to check they hadn’t brought one of those cadaver dogs—that could have been a death blow to us—but there were no pets whatsoever.
“Have a seat,” I said and they said “thank you” and took the sheet off the very chaise longue on which Lennie had expired!
“Everything alright?” one of them asked. He was tall and thin, with a very pasty complexion, but he said to me, “You’re looking pale.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes, I’m alright.”
“Are you sure?”
“That’s a very old piece of furniture,” I said. They both stood up, and I tried to look as if that had solved all my problems.
In the end we went through to the old kitchen. The walk gave me time to take a few deep breaths and get my shaking hands under some control.
There I told them that it was true I had met Lennie at the party; I had been matching the labels to the canapés, and he was looking for a drink. I had a brief wobble here, remembering the drink he’d poured me, but I recovered myself and told them that he and I spoke briefly about canapés, then he’d left to answer his phone. I tripped slightly on the word “phone,” but they didn’t seem to notice. The next time Isaw him, he was presenting a check for a charity. I had never seen him before,or since, I stressed to them.
“I didn’t even know he was the national treasure, Lennie Green,” I said. “I didn’t know we’d had—no, wehave—a national treasure called Lennie Green.”
“Haven’t you found him yet?” Mrs. Billings clattered into the kitchen, seeing the police officers and catching the end of the conversation.
“Not yet,” the first officer said. “And you are?”
“Brenda Billings, head of housekeeping and lifelong fan of Lennie Green.” She put her hand out and shook hands with the officers. “Why are you looking here?”
“We’re just speaking to everyone who was at the same party as Mr. Green,” the officer said, and Mrs. B looked at me.
“You never said you were at the same party,” she said.
I shrugged. “I thought you knew. I thought it was obvious.”
“But you didn’t even know who he was when it was on the radio the next day?”
“I didn’t realize it was him.”
“Young people,” Mrs. B said disparagingly to the police, although they were younger than me.
They said they had no more questions and asked where they could contact James. I gave them his mobile number and saw them out.
I flopped down onto the chaise longue, then remembering once more who the last person to lie there was, leaped back up again. I spent the rest of the afternoon replaying the interview in my head and wondering if they had thought “aha” at the moment I said Lenniehadbeen a national treasure. Or if maybe everyone behaved like thatwhen they were interviewed and they thought nothing of it. Or perhaps they weren’t that experienced and had been overawed by the house. I should have spoken to them in the hall, where they would have had the Elizabethan armor and the empty family tree to take their minds off me. I could have told them about how there once was a beautiful decorated document which started in the fourteenth century and followed the family right down to Lord Ashbury and how James got rid of it.
To see James that evening, you would never have known there was anything to worry about.
“You can tell by how long it’s taken them to get to us how far down we are on the list of priorities. It stands to reason. We’d never met him before that night. Why would we have anything to do with it?” he said, watching me microwave a bowl of Waitrose carbonara, the film of which had been pierced in front of him. Regardless, when I served it up, he peered closely at it, then he poked around at it with his fork.
