The Word Is Murder(20)
The one thing that stood out was the fact that she had killed a little boy and badly injured his brother. The accident had been caused by her own carelessness – she hadn’t been wearing her spectacles – and, worse still, she had driven away without stopping. Despite all this, she had walked free. If I had been Timothy and Jeremy Godwin’s father, if I had been related to them in any way, I might have been tempted to kill her myself. And all of this had happened exactly ten years ago: well, nine years and eleven months. Close enough.
It was an obvious motive for murder. If the Godwin family was living in north London, in Harrow-on-the-Hill, I couldn’t understand why we weren’t heading there straight away and I said as much to Hawthorne.
‘One step at a time,’ he replied. ‘There are other people I want to talk to first.’
‘The cleaner?’ We were actually sitting in a taxi that was taking us around Shepherd’s Bush roundabout on our way to Acton, which was where Andrea Kluvánek lived. Hawthorne had also telephoned Raymond Clunes and we were seeing him later. ‘You don’t suspect her, do you?’
‘I suspect her of lying to the police, yes.’
‘And Clunes? What’s he got to do with this?’
‘He knew Mrs Cowper. Seventy-eight per cent of female victims are killed by someone they know,’ he went on before I could interrupt.
‘Really?’
‘I thought you’d have known that, you being a TV writer.’ Ignoring the no-smoking sign, he pressed the button to lower the window of the cab and lit a cigarette. ‘Husband, stepfather, lover … speaking statistically, they’re the most likely killers.’
‘Raymond Clunes wasn’t any of those things.’
‘He could have been her lover.’
‘She saw the boy with the lacerations, Jeremy Godwin! She said she was afraid. I don’t know why you’re wasting your time.’
‘There’s no smoking!’ the driver complained over the intercom.
‘Fuck off. I’m a police officer,’ Hawthorne replied, equanimously. ‘What were those words you used? Modus operandi. This is mine.’ He blew smoke out of the window but the wind just whipped it back into the cab. ‘Start with the people who were closest to her and work outwards from there. It’s like doing a house-to-house. You start with the neighbours. You don’t start at the end of the street.’ He turned his eyes on me, once again interrogating. ‘You got a problem with that?’
‘It just seems a bit crazy to be haring around London. And at my expense,’ I added quietly.
Hawthorne said nothing more.
After what seemed like a very long drive, the taxi pulled up on the edge of the South Acton Estate, a sprawling collection of slab blocks and high-rise towers that had sprung up over the decades, starting at the end of the war. There was some landscaping – lawns, trees and pedestrian walkways – but the overall effect was dispiriting if only because there were so many homes packed together. We walked beside a skateboard park that looked as if it hadn’t been used for years and then down into an underpass, the walls covered with crude graffiti images, bleeding garishly into one another. No Banksies here.
A huddle of twenty-somethings in hoodies and sweatshirts were sitting in the shadows, watching us with sullen, suspicious eyes. Fortunately, Hawthorne seemed to know where he was going and I stayed close to him, thinking back to what the woman at Hay-on-Wye had said to me. Perhaps this was the dose of reality she had prescribed.
Andrea Kluvánek lived on the second floor of one of the towers. Hawthorne had telephoned ahead and she was expecting us. I knew from the police files that she had two children, but it was one thirty in the afternoon and I guessed they were both at school. Her flat was clean but it was very small, with no more furniture than was needed: three chairs at the kitchen table, a single sofa in front of the TV. Even the most optimistic estate agent wouldn’t have called the living room open-plan. The kitchen simply blended into it with no way of saying where one ended and the other began. This was a one-bedroom flat and I have no idea how they managed at night. Maybe the children had the bedroom and she slept on the sofa.
We sat down, facing her across the table. There were pots and pans hanging on hooks, inches behind our heads. Andrea did not offer us tea or coffee. She gazed at us suspiciously across the Formica surface of her kitchen table, a small, dark woman who looked even tougher in real life than she had in the photograph I had seen. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans that had been torn in a way that wasn’t a fashion statement. Hawthorne had lit a cigarette and she had taken one off him too, so I was sitting there surrounded by smoke, wondering if I would actually manage to finish the book before I died of some secondary-smoking-related disease.
To begin with, Hawthorne was quite pleasant with her. His tone was conversational as he took her through the statement she had given to the police and which I have already described. She had come into the house, seen the dead woman, gone straight outside and called the police. She had waited until they arrived.
‘You must have got very wet,’ Hawthorne said.
‘What?’ She looked at him suspiciously.
‘It was raining that morning, when you discovered the body. If I’d been you, I’d have waited in the kitchen. Nice and warm and there’s a phone in there too. No need to use your mobile.’