“A fresh start,” she’d told Charlie when he’d tried to talk her out of it. But she’d found herself starting more and more sentences lately with the words, “Do you remember . . . ?” The carefully edited anecdotes she’d told over a hundred Hampstead dining tables came tumbling out to the cleaner now—a washing line of rinsed-out big moments, disasters, loves, bereavements, and triumphs—each slightly overused.
Today she sat at the kitchen table in her old slippers, their froufrou limp with age and wear, and cried. Here she was, a woman on the outer edge of middle age and still desired, but all this business with Charlie and the police was taking its toll. The handsome DI Ward had been very kind but there had still been questions to bat away.
She had no idea what Bram might say. He hadn’t been near her since the police arrived. No one had. She felt alone and vulnerable. Even when she slipped on her Louboutins, she didn’t feel fabulous anymore. She felt fake.
She sat staring at the skin forming on her frigid cup of tea, thinking about her next move. She couldn’t go it alone at her age. She’d need someone to cherish her. She loved the word “cherish,” rolling it round her mouth and through her pouting lips. She just needed to find the will and sort out the insurance money.
The doorbell rang—three short rings. Bram? And she rose, straightening her spine and tugging her neckline down an inch farther.
“Mrs. Perry,” the police officer on her doorstep said, “we need you to come with us to the station.”
Forty-four
THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2019
Elise
Pauline Perry sashayed in on high heels. Elise had seen the word written down somewhere—never heard it—but she hadn’t really understood the movement until that moment. The widow Perry had come prepared. At her elbow was a local solicitor—Mr. Grimes, a pink-faced individual in a linen suit with an office over a charity shop. He looked more nervous than his client and Elise wondered how long he’d been qualified. He looked completely in awe of Pauline and her hypnotic hips, and he held her handbag while she took off her jacket.
“Good morning,” Pauline said as she entered the room.
“Oh,” she said when she spotted Elise, “what are you doing here?”
“I’m now leading the investigation into your husband’s death,” Elise said, holding her eye, and Pauline put on her sad face again.
“What’s happened to the lovely DI Ward?” she said.
“I’m afraid he’s off sick.”
“Goodness, you’re an unhealthy lot, aren’t you?” Pauline patted Mr. Grimes’s knee.
“Shall we concentrate on the matter in hand?” Elise carried on.
“Well, I can’t help you,” Pauline said, tapping her nails on the table. “The story keeps changing, doesn’t it? First, I’m told Charlie went to a pop festival, got drunk, and fell down the cellar hatch, then that he had a heart attack and someone hit him over the head. Then his body was moved. It’s making my head spin.”
Elise doubted it. “Well, let’s start again, shall we? When first interviewed, you said you last saw your husband at six o’clock on Friday night. You watched some television on your own and then went to bed with a sleeping pill.”
Pauline looked down at her hands.
“Then you reported your husband missing to me on Saturday morning,” Caro said. “At nine fifty-nine, according to my notes. Yes?”
“And on Monday at about eleven thirty, you told me that you’d had a phone call from him earlier that day,” Elise pushed on, “telling you he was fine.”
Pauline looked at Elise defiantly, her jaw working.
“But that call came when he was already dead. In the cellar of your house. So he wasn’t fine, was he?”
“Look, I’ve been over this with Hugh,” Pauline mumbled. “I told him that it sounded like his voice. But it was a bad line. . . .”
“I see. Well, DI Ward isn’t here and I’d like to hear what was said,” Elise pressed. “Your husband had been missing for more than forty-eight hours by then. You were concerned enough after twelve hours to report his disappearance to the police. You must have asked him where he was, where he’d been, what he’d been doing? Why he’d gone off? When he was coming home? Any concerned spouse would.”
“I didn’t get a chance,” Pauline snapped. “I told you he just said he was fine and not to worry and rang off.”