I was about to protest: I hadn’t been driving fast, around thirty, but I remembered my official story and I nodded and looked at her, as if I were keen for the next part.
“The most interesting injury is this one,” she said, pointing to the neck on the diagram.
“Whiplash?” I guessed.
“No, a broken hyoid.”
“Oh, of course!” I’d forgotten that; it had been a clue in many a police drama.
They all looked at me in surprise. I realized why:
“Hang on a minute,” I said. “That’s for when someone is strangled.”
After that the whole thing descended into mayhem, in my head at least. I didn’t strangle Lennie! I never touched his neck. Strangling was the last thing he needed; I’d been trying to help him.
The two detectives were looking at me, waiting for clarity I couldn’t give. I was so surprised, it took me a minute to realize that, if I hadn’t killed him, someone else had done so, and done it deliberately. I turned to Tarquin, who looked equally dumbfounded.
“Are you saying he was killed by strangulation and not by the collision?” he asked.
“It certainly looks that way,” DS Khan said.
I thought back to the moment I’d returned to the drawing room after looking for first aid supplies: James bending over Lennie, “checking for breath,” he had said.
James jumping when he realized I was back in the room. The way Lennie’s head hung so loosely.
“Do you think my client could strangle a grown man?” Tarquin asked.
“A grown man who was already seriously injured.”
I could hardly hear them, my head was spinning, but I remembered a gem from a number of murder mysteries: “I believe it takes a long time to strangle someone,” I said. “I don’t have the patience.”
James was a killer: a murderer. As well as a fraudster. I was just accident-prone. Tarquin was speaking again, but I was hardly hearing.
“And what are you suggesting she did with the body?” he asked them. “I think we’re in agreement that Mr. Green didn’t die where he was found.”
“We agree the body was moved.”
“Do you agree that even if my client could have strangled him, which a jury would find hard to believe, it would be impossible for her to move a man of his size for any distance? Look at her…”
They all looked at me, in a shirt that had started life as a Welsh flag.
“Look at her size, not at her clothes,” Tarquin clarified, but instead we all looked at the stub of his tie.
“We think she had help.”
I came back to attention at this. At last, we were getting to James and his part in it.
Khan continued. “Your husband tells us you are having an affair.”
James had told them that? From what was on the forum, I’d thought James wanted to steer them away from that.
“An affair?” I repeated. “Who with?” With whom, I should have said.
“That’s for you to tell us.”
“I don’t know. I never meet anyone I could be having an affair with.” Although I thought wistfully of Arty. “Who does James think?”
“He doesn’t know, but certain people in the village have said it might be Doug Newman,” DS Khan said. “Can you shed any light on that?”
