‘The police?’
‘Yes. They told me that you were interviewed on the morning they found Amelia.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘So they did. A man in uniform knocked on our door to ask if we’d seen anyone unfamiliar in the village during the previous twenty-four hours. Or anyone at all near your house.’
‘And had you?’ I asked.
‘No. We’d seen nothing. Not until an ambulance and the police turned up anyway. I remember asking him why he wanted to know but he wouldn’t say. I only found out what had happened to Amelia much later, when all the TV people started arriving.’
I thought she was going to cry again.
‘But you didn’t say anything to the police about Amelia’s suspicions that Joe Bradbury stole the money?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t even tell Dave. It didn’t seem important compared to...’ She tailed off.
I personally thought it might be very important but I didn’t say so to Nancy. She was distressed enough.
‘Do you think that I should tell them?’ she asked.
‘No, not just yet,’ I said. ‘I’ll do a bit of digging first and find out if there’s anything to it.’
She seemed relieved. ‘I don’t want to make an unsubstantiated accusation to the police, now do I?’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘You don’t.’
We’d had quite enough of those already.
But what if this one wasn’t unsubstantiated?
What if it were true?
Nancy never did come in. Instead, she made her excuses and went back across the road to her own house, no doubt to prepare a sumptuous supper for Dave, for when he came home from work after another busy day buying and selling jewellery in Hatton Garden.
Her obsession with food preparation had been a source of secret amusement between Amelia and myself but there was no question that she was an excellent cook, and I greatly enjoyed some of her delicious sponge cake while I continued to watch afternoon TV.
But I found I couldn’t concentrate on anything except what Nancy had told me.
What if the hundred thousand shortfall in the sale price of Mary Bradbury’s home had not been down to Joe’s incompetence, as I’d imagined, but was really due to him stealing the difference?
I wanted to believe it. Of course I did. But I couldn’t see how it could have been done without the collusion of both the purchasers and the lawyers. Not that that would stop me investigating.
I had nothing else to do.
There was no sign of any paid employment coming my way. My email inbox, as accessed via my new phone, remained stubbornly empty, and the old phone, with the number that everyone knew, resided unanswered in some police forensic laboratory.
And on this day, I had originally been scheduled to be acting as a steward at Stratford-on-Avon Races, but I feared that that aspect of my life had now gone forever. Even if I could establish my innocence beyond any doubt, and find the true killer of Amelia, the horseracing authority was looking for a way to ‘retire’ most, if not all, its volunteer honorary stewards and to make the whole thing appear more businesslike, and I was likely to be a permanent casualty of that plan.
It was a move that many people in racing had been trying to resist, not least the honorary stewards themselves. It was felt that we brought a wealth of different experiences to the sport but, while there was no suggestion that our integrity was in question, the powers that be had decided that full-time ‘professional’ stewards were the best way forward.
I, personally, thought it would be a shame and a major loss. Many of the honoraries, myself included, had been former active participants in the sport rather than purely lifelong administrators, and I believed that a combination of the two should be the preferred solution, whether or not I was involved.
So here I was at a loose end, flapping wildly in the wind, and anything I could get my teeth into would be a distraction from the dreadful heartache in my chest.
I ate another slice of Nancy’s cake but I was still hungry. I’d had no lunch, and breakfast seemed nothing more than a distant memory. I went back into the kitchen and opened the fridge, but I was out of luck. There was very little and what there was had a ring of green mould round the edges.
The freezer was not much better.
As I’d told the detective, Wednesday had always been Amelia’s favourite day for food shopping. She would maintain that, by then, all the supermarket shelves had been restocked after the previous weekend’s rush and it wasn’t yet close to the following weekend to make the store too busy.
Hence, the fact that she had died early on a Wednesday morning meant that the cupboards, while not being totally bare, were severely limited.
I took out a frozen loaf and put it on the worktop to defrost, but man shall not live by bread alone, nor even by cake, so I backed Amelia’s much-loved cream Fiat 500 out of the garage and went into Banbury for some fish and chips.
21
Early on Saturday morning I went to see Mary Bradbury after yet another restless night.
I had, of course, often slept alone in our house, not least when Amelia had been in hospital, but this time it was totally different. There had been no one to call to say good night to, no loving moments on the telephone to make up for her absence, no warmth in my bed, or in my heart.
I had cried myself to sleep and then, to compound my suffering, I had dreamed about her murder, reliving the horrors that must have occurred in our kitchen on that awful morning.
I woke suddenly, in a cold sweat, and then I cried some more, so much so that I ended up with a thumping headache.
I got up and went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom looking for some painkillers and, after much rummaging among tubes of foot cream, sticky plasters, eye makeup removal pads and numerous other bits and bobs, I found a bubble pack of paracetamol at the back with a couple of pills still left in it.
I swallowed them.
Having a supply of painkillers in the house had always been an area of contention between Amelia and myself, and I had finally tried to lay down the law by banning her from buying them.
I had not taken that step without good reason.
Twice she had tried to do herself harm by swallowing handfuls of pills and, thankfully, the only ones she could find at the time were her own anti-depressants and my statins, neither of which did her any permanent damage.
I thought about going back to bed but it was already getting light and I didn’t want a repeat performance of the nightmare. So I had a shower, got dressed and went downstairs.
I then spent some time searching through the Queen Anne kneehole desk in the sitting room, which Amelia had used to store all her papers. I was looking for something specific and I found it at the back of the second drawer down on the left-hand side — information concerning the sale of her parents’ Weybridge home.
There was a copy of a letter sent to Mary from the lawyer that Joe had engaged, together with the final statement of price and fees, both theirs and those of the estate agent.
The original listing had been at £3.2million but the final agreed purchase price, as I’d remembered, had been a hundred thousand less than that. The letter further stated that that amount had been paid to Mary Bradbury’s bank account, minus the combined fees and disbursement charges of almost fifty thousand pounds.
I sat for a while memorising the figures and then, with my headache now fading away, I backed Amelia’s Fiat out of the driveway and set off to Mary’s cottage.
She had moved to a village near Chipping Norton, twenty-five minutes drive from us. ‘Close but not too close,’ she’d said at the time. ‘Otherwise neither of us will get any privacy.’