you, with your 1.2-million-pound house?’
‘Completely unaffordable 1.2-million-pound house,’ Fran is quick to say. It bothers her that Kit and I are better off than she and Anton are, though I’m not sure she would admit it to herself. It’s been worse since Kit left Deloitte and we started our own business. If Nulli came a cropper, Fran would be sympathetic, upset on our behalf, but also relieved. I’m certain of this, but I can’t prove it. I can’t prove a lot of things at the moment.
Fran and Anton live in a cottage called Thatchers that’s smaller than my house, and closer to my parents – almost directly opposite Thorrold House, across the green. Like Melrose Cottage, Thatchers is a two-up two-down, but the kitchen is no more than a tiny strip at one end of the lounge, and the bedrooms are in the thatched roof and therefore triangular, difficult to stand up in. As it happens, Anton and Fran suffer hardly at all from a lack of space – effectively, they have lived with Mum and Dad since Benji was born. Thatchers, which they persist in referring to as ‘home’, is empty almost all the time.
Why does nobody ever point out how crazy it is to have an empty house just standing there? Crazier than looking at houses in Cambridge on the internet. Crazier than considering moving to one of England’s most beautiful, vibrant cities instead of spending the rest of your life in Little Holling, Silsford, with its one pub and its population of fewer than a thousand people.
‘Ignore Connie, Anton,’ Mum says. ‘She’s clearly taken leave of her senses.’
‘She can make it up to me.’ Anton winks at me. ‘Extra babysitting, Con, yeah?’
I try to smile, though the prospect of any more babysitting makes me swell with resentment. I already babysit for Benji every Tuesday night. In my family, if something happens once and goes well, it’s only a matter of time before someone suggests that it ought to become a tradition.
‘One choccie finger, two choccie fingers, three choccie fingers!’ Fran is hamming up her dealings with Benji now, to demonstrate her support for Anton and his silly voices. She’s on his side, Dad and Mum are on each other’s, and nobody’s on mine. Suits me fine; anything that makes me feel less like one of the Little Holling Monks has to be a good thing.
‘There’s nothing wrong with my senses,’ I tell Mum. ‘I know what I saw. I saw a dead woman in that room, lying in a pool of her own blood. The detective I spoke to this morning is taking it seriously. If you don’t want to, that’s up to you.’
‘Oh, Connie, listen to yourself!’ Mum says sorrowfully.
‘Don’t waste your breath, Val,’ Dad mutters. ‘When does she ever pay attention to what we say?’ He lifts his right arm and studies the table beneath as if he expects to find something there. ‘What happened to that cuppa you were making?’
‘I’m sorry, but it makes no sense, love,’ Mum says to me in a hushed voice as she refills the kettle, shooting guilty glances in Dad’s direction, hoping he won’t notice her continued willingness to engage with the daughter he just dismissed as not worth bothering with. ‘I mean, you only have to think about it for two seconds to realise it’s a non-starter, don’t you? Why would anyone put a murdered woman’s body on a property website? A murderer wouldn’t do it, would he, because he’d want to hide what he’d done. An estate agent wouldn’t do it because he’d want to sell the house, and no one’s going to buy a—’
‘Except my eldest daughter,’ Dad announces loudly. ‘Not only my daughter – also my book-keeper, which is even more worrying. Oh, she’s more than happy to mortgage herself into penury to buy the gruesome death house for 1.2 million pounds!’ I don’t know why he’s glaring at Benji as he says this, as if it’s his fault.
‘Dad, I don’t want to buy 11 Bentley Grove. I can’t afford to buy it. You’re not listening to me.’ As usual. What did he mean by the book-keeper comment? That he’s afraid I might steal from Monk & Sons? That my profligate tendencies are likely to bankrupt the family business? I’ve never done anything but a brilliant job for him, and it counts for nothing. I needn’t have bothered.
And now I’m thinking like a martyr. Don’t they say all women turn into their mothers?
Tell them all