The Word Is Murder(54)
Fourteen
Willesden Green
It was a 1950s semi-detached house, red brick on the first floor, then off-white stucco topped with a gabled roof. It was as if three architects had worked on it at the same time without ever being introduced to one another but they must have been pleased with their work because they’d replicated it on the house next door, which was an exact mirror of its neighbour, with a wooden fence dividing the drives and a single chimney shared between the two properties. Each one of them had a bay window which looked out over an area of crazy-paving running down to a low wall, with the street, Sneyd Road, on the other side. I guessed it had about four bedrooms. A poster in the front window advertised a fun run for the North London Hospice. A garage stood open to one side, with a bright green Vauxhall Astra, a tricycle and a motorbike fighting for space.
The doorway was arched, the door fake-medieval with thick panels of frosted glass. There was a novelty welcome mat which read: ‘Never mind the dog – beware of the owner!’ When Hawthorne pressed the doorbell, it played the opening notes of the theme from Star Wars. Chopin’s Funeral March might have been more appropriate. For this was where Robert Cornwallis lived.
The woman who opened the door was almost aggressively cheerful, as if she had been looking forward to our visit all week. There you are, at last, she seemed to say as she beamed out at us. What took you so long?
She was about forty years old and was hurtling into middle age with complete recklessness, actually embracing it with a baggy, out-of-shape jersey, ill-fitting jeans (with a flower embroidered on one knee), frizzy hair and cheap, chunky jewellery. She was overweight – an earth mother, she might call herself. She had a huge pile of laundry under one arm and a cordless telephone in her hand but didn’t seem to notice either of them. I could imagine her balancing the laundry on her raised thigh with the phone squeezed between her ear and her shoulder as she struggled to open the door.
‘Mr Hawthorne?’ she asked, looking at me. She had a pleasant, well-educated voice.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s him.’
‘I’m Barbara. Please come in. I’m afraid you’re going to have to excuse the state of the house. It’s six o’clock and we’re just putting the children to bed. Robert’s in the other room. I’m sure you’ll understand, we’ve had a bit of a day! Irene told us what happened at the funeral. It’s shocking. You’re with the police. Is that right?’
‘I’m helping the police with this inquiry.’
‘This way! Mind the roller skate. I’ve told the children not to leave them in the hall. One day someone’s going to break their neck!’ She glanced down, noticing the laundry for the first time. ‘Look at me! I’m so sorry. I was just putting on the wash when the door rang. I don’t know what you must think of me!’
We stepped over the loose roller skate and went into a hallway cluttered with coats, wellington boots and different-sized shoes. A motorbike helmet sat on a chair. Two children were racing around the house. We heard them before we saw them – screaming, high-pitched voices. A second later, they came charging out of a doorway, two little boys, both fair-haired, aged about five and seven. They took one look at us, then turned round and disappeared, still screaming.
‘That’s Toby and Sebastian,’ Barbara said. ‘They’ll be going up for their bath in a minute and then maybe we’ll get a bit of peace. Do you have children? Honestly, sometimes this place is like a battlefield.’
The children had taken over the house. There were clothes on radiators, toys everywhere … footballs, plastic swords, stuffed animals, old tennis rackets, scattered playing cards and pieces of Lego. It was difficult to see past the mess but as we were shown through an archway and into the living room I got the impression of a comfortable, old-fashioned home, with dried flowers in the fireplace, seagrass carpets, an upright piano that would almost certainly be out of tune, throws on the sofas and those round paper lampshades that never seem to have gone completely out of fashion. The pictures on the walls were abstract and colourful, the sort of art that might have come out of a department store.
‘Do you work in your husband’s business, Mrs Cornwallis?’ Hawthorne asked as we followed her towards the kitchen.
‘God, no! And call me Barbara.’ She dumped the laundry on a chair. ‘We see enough of each other as it is. I’m a pharmacist … part-time, the local branch of Boots. I can’t say I love that either but we have to pay the bills. Watch out! That’s the other roller skate. Robert’s in here …’
The kitchen was bright and cluttered, with a breakfast bar and a white, rustic-style table. Dirty plates were piled up in the sink with clean ones beside them. I wondered how Barbara would be able to sort out which was which. French windows looked out over a garden that was little more than a green rectangle with a few shrubs growing down one side, boxed in by fences. Even this had been colonised by the children, with a trampoline and a climbing frame occupying – and killing – much of the lawn.
Robert Cornwallis, in the same suit that he had worn at the Brompton chapel but without the tie, was sitting at the table, going through some accounts. It was strange seeing him here, a funeral director outside his parlour. At least, it was strange because I knew he was a funeral director. I wondered what it was like to come home to this cosy, domestic normality after a day stitching up bodies in the morgue. Did he or his wife feel in any way tainted by it? Did his children know what their father did? I’ve never actually had an undertaker as a character in any of my books and I was rather hoping that Hawthorne would ask him more about his work. I store all sorts of information like that. You never know when it may be useful.