we weren’t close, don’t you?’
The uniformed WPCs (were they still called that?) had taken him to a police station, where he had been asked a lot of questions. He had already been interrogated once that morning, twice in one day seemed unfair. He had been surrounded all day by women with odd names asking him questions, although he had begun to think almost fondly of the two bird-like detectives and their fascination with the Belvedere. In retrospect their questions seemed almost innocuous, and at least they hadn’t suspected him of murder. Just golfing, apparently.
DI Marriot was interested in golf too, she kept asking him about his golf clubs. They were kept at the Belvedere, he told her. They had a (costly) storage facility for members, which was just as well as there was no room in the flat. No room for anything, hardly any room for Vince himself. Certainly not enough room for Vince and four policewomen, no matter how small they were. He had felt as if he was suffocating. I’m afraid we have some bad news about Ms Easton.
‘Attacked,’ they said at first, as if working their way up to the really bad word. Murdered. The house had been quiet when he’d gone there last night. Was she already dead? If he’d gone round to the back, looked in the garden, would he have found her? That was where she’d been discovered this morning, apparently. He thought of all that internet dating Wendy had been doing. Was it some stranger she had picked up and brought back to the marital bed? Was she in the middle of being murdered when he had been peering through the living-room curtains? Could he have stopped it? But then wouldn’t Sparky have been barking his head off? He was a good guard dog, it would have been curious for him not to react to a stranger.
‘Mr Ives? Sir?’
‘Yes, sorry.’
It had taken a while for it to dawn on Vince that he might be a suspect. When it did dawn, it seemed such an astonishing idea that he tripped up in the middle of the answer to one of their questions (‘And is there someone, Mr Ives, who can verify where you were last night? Or in the early hours of this morning?’) and he started to babble nonsense. ‘Asleep, I was asleep, I’d only just dropped off, because the amusement arcade is so noisy. I sleep alone, so no, no one can verify my alibi.’ Oh, God – I sleep alone. It sounded so pathetic.
‘Alibi?’ the inspector said placidly. ‘No one’s talking about alibis, Mr Ives. Only you.’
He felt a fleeting frisson of fear, as if he perhaps had murdered Wendy and then somehow forgotten all about it, his usually good memory failing in the face of trauma.
‘The Belvedere,’ he said. ‘I was in the clubhouse, drinking with friends. Tommy Holroyd and Andy Bragg.’
He didn’t mention to DI Marriot that he’d been there, at the house. It was stupid of him, he realized now. He’d been seen, after all, he’d talked to Benny next door, there was probably CCTV everywhere that he hadn’t noticed. Unfortunately, by the time he thought to correct his mistake they had moved on and Inspector Marriot was asking for his DNA, ‘for elimination’. His fingerprints too. ‘While you’re here,’ she said, as if it was for his convenience.
That used to be a joke between him and Wendy. They’d be sitting on the sofa together watching TV and she’d say, ‘While you’re up, love, can you make me a cup of tea?’ somehow managing to make it sound as if she was the one doing him a favour. He used to respond like one of Pavlov’s dogs, jumping up and putting the kettle on before he’d even realized he had been no more ‘up’ than Wendy had been. He could hear her laughing (fondly, or so he’d thought at the time) as he dutifully got the tea-bags out of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee commemoration caddy that she had sent off for. She was a faithful monarchist. She did bonsai. She went to a twice-weekly Callanetics class and liked television programmes about women seeking revenge. And she was dead. She would never sit on the sofa again.
They had spent a lot of time on that sofa together, watched a lot of television on it, eaten a lot of takeaways on it, drunk a lot of tea, not to mention wine, on it. The dog used to lie flopped between