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He licked his lips. His head was still throbbing, but the pain was displaced by a sudden sense of panic. ‘I didn’t kill them, I swear,’ he insisted.
Sarah looked at her husband again, trying to see into his head. Was he capable of murder, she wondered. She doubted it. When push came to shove, he was one of the shiftiest of shits, but a killer? That was harder to believe. Mind you, she had a theory that in the right circumstances anyone could commit murder. Absolutely anyone. And that would, by definition, include him.
‘So, husband, what was your cut for finding a buyer for Maria’s painting?’
He looked at her, puzzled. ‘What does that matter? She’s dead. She never paid me a penny. And the police have got the picture.’
‘I’m interested to know how much you charged her?’
Again he looked at her, though this time his brain was trying hard to engage. What was his wife’s angle? ‘Ten per cent,’ he said.
‘Ten per cent! Is that all?’
‘It only took two phone calls.’
Sarah Russell picked up the glass she had earlier placed on the coffee table, and surveyed it, as if inspecting it for faults. Then, in a single whiplash of her arm she hurled it across the room so it crashed against the marble of the fireplace, exploding spectacularly into fragments.
Dominic almost jumped in his chair. He struggled to get up, but she had advanced close to him and her left hand pushed him back down.
‘Were you sleeping with her? Was that part of your business deal? Was that why you only charged her ten fucking per cent?’
Dominic Russell’s red face had grown pale again. His head was throbbing like hell, his wife wouldn’t go away, and all he wanted was to go to sleep. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘You know that was ages ago. That’s ancient history, you know it is.’
‘Too old for you, is she?’ Her face was now close up to his, so he could feel her breath as she spat her words at him. ‘You like them young, and pretty and foolish, don’t you, Dominic. We’re no use to you when we have to start dying our hair to hide the grey ones, and booking ourselves in for botox treatment. When the centre of gravity starts to slip south, you start to look elsewhere.’ She fell silent then, still looming over him, but there was a coldness in her eyes as she assessed him and found him wanting. ‘Tell me, Dominic, did you manage to get your grubby little hands inside Minette’s knickers?’
‘No,’ he said very quickly, and truthfully. Though it wasn’t for the want of trying.
‘But you would have done, wouldn’t you. I could see it in your eyes. Which is why I told her we could no longer afford to pay her.’
‘You told her what?’
‘Well, it’s not entirely a lie. Besides, would you rather I’d told her all about you?’
Dominic shook his head, but that only made his head hurt more and he groaned feebly. ‘I thought she was homesick.’
‘Actually, she said she’d be prepared to take a pay cut. The last place she wanted to go was home. But that’s her problem. I’ve got plenty of my own.’
Dominic was beyond protesting. The pain in his head had got worse, not better. The paracetamols had been absolutely useless. ‘I need to go to bed,’ he moaned.
‘Just as long as it isn’t mine, you can do what the hell you like,’ came the reply.
At much the same time as this rather nasty scene was being enacted in the Russells’ home in North Oxford, a rather different domestic get-together was taking place in Chilswell Road, South Oxford, where Susan Holden was giving supper to her mother, Mrs Jane Holden, and Dr Karen Pointer.
It was not Susan Holden’s normal practice to offer her mother supper during the week. In fact, because of Susan’s work, it was so rare as to be abnormal. Which is why Jane Holden was so surprised to get a phone call at 12.30 that lunchtime asking her if she would like to come to supper that evening.
‘Tonight?’ she had said, not sure that she had heard right.
‘Yes, if you can make it. I’ve got someone else coming.’
‘Who?’ she had said eagerly.
‘You’ll have to come to find out.’
That, of course, had been the clincher. Whatever curiosity does to cats, it certainly gets its hooks deep into humans too, and Jane Holden was human enough to be fascinated with every facet of her only daughter’s private life.
She was, if truth be told, disappointed to discover that the mystery guest was female. She had hoped that the third person would be a man. Indeed, by the time she had knocked on the door of her daughter’s Victorian house, she had convinced herself that he or she was unequivocally a he. So when she found Karen Pointer already ensconced in the kitchen dining room, drinking a glass of white wine, her excitement took a brief nosedive. She hoped it didn’t show. She accepted a small glass of the same wine, and soon recovered when she discovered that Karen was a pathologist, and moreover a pathologist prepared to share the more gruesome details of her work.
Later, after supper and teas all round – ‘much too late for coffee for me’ Mrs Holden had said, and the two younger women had tactfully followed suit – the three of them walked round to Grandpont Grange.
