alone, even though he knew the camera in the corner of the square room was watching him. He knew what they were talking about. He knew they wanted to pin everything on him, and that included what had happened to Michelle. But that wasn’t him—it was Richard—and they needed to understand that. His stomach started to hurt, and he knew that if he pressed against it he’d feel better, but they were watching and he didn’t want them to see that.
Some time later Detective Shaheen and Detective Martinez reentered the room, the man carrying a bottle of water. He pushed it across the table to Matthew as they both took seats.
“Hi, again,” the detective said. “You remember me?”
“Of course. Detective Martinez, right?” Matthew twisted the top off the water and took a long swig. It was lukewarm.
“Right. I’ve been told you waived your right to an attorney. Is that correct?”
“Yes. I don’t need an attorney right now. I just want to tell the truth.”
“I understand.” Detective Martinez was tall and rangy, and he made the molded plastic chair he was sitting on look small. “We have a lot of things to get to, Matthew, but for right now, I was wondering if you could tell me about what happened between you and Lloyd Harding today.”
“He broke into my house and attacked me. I was defending myself.”
“Why did he break into your house, you think?”
“Hen must have told him everything. This all started when they came over to our house for dinner.”
“What all started?”
Matthew took another long drink of his water. “Hen and Lloyd came to dinner. Just a neighborly thing. As you know, Hen spotted Dustin Miller’s fencing trophy that I’d left out in my office, and it made her suspicious. That’s why she called you. I should never have left that trophy out. It was arrogant of me, but I have to wonder if maybe, just a little bit, I wanted someone like Hen to come along and see it. That I wanted someone to know.”
“Matthew, I don’t want to interrupt, and I eventually want to hear all about Dustin Miller, but right now I’d like to hear more about Lloyd.”
“I didn’t mean to kill him—not that I don’t think he probably deserved it, in some way—but I didn’t mean to do it. He attacked me, and I defended myself.”
Matthew thought of the sound of the billy club as it hit the side of Lloyd’s head, then the way he had dropped to the floor, his legs giving way as though their tendons had been sliced.
“Why was he in your house?” Detective Martinez asked.
“He was probably trying to win Hen back, trying to find something on me. I don’t think he was planning on attacking me, because he was hiding. I found him because I heard him upstairs. He came out of one of the spare room closets and just attacked me. I hit him in the shoulder, and I thought that might be it, but he kept coming. So I hit him in the head.”
“Why did you wrap him up the way you did with the duct tape?”
Matthew was quiet, looked at the ceiling.
“You with us, Matthew?”
“I am. There was a lot of blood coming from his head, where I hit him, so that’s why I used the duct tape. At first it was just around his face, but then I figured why not cover his whole body? It looked better that way.”
“And after you did this you went directly to Henrietta Mazur’s art studio and threatened her?”
“That wasn’t me. That was Richard.”
“Richard’s your brother?”
“Right.”
“Do you want to know why I came out here to Dartford, Matthew, today? Hen called me, and one of the things she told me was that you’d mentioned a brother and that you were worried about him, and I think it kind of freaked her out. So I looked into it. There were police reports on both of your parents’ deaths, and both of those reports only mentioned you, Matthew. Neither mentioned a brother. Neither mentioned any siblings. I called the detective who investigated your father’s death—he’s retired now—and he remembered the case, only because he said he suspected that you had something to do with it, even though he could never prove it. I asked him if you were the only child, and he said that you were, that there had been a brother called Richard, but that Richard had died in infancy. It was a crib death, he said, sudden infant