“You think that one of us hurt her?” Nkata saw that Rosie’s hands remained clenched tightly in her lap as she spoke.
Her mother said, “You cannot think—”
“Are we supposed to supply alibis?” Rosie cut in.
“Matter ’f form, but yeah,” Nkata told her.
“And you will want to know if she had enemies,” Solange said.
Cesare Bontempi scoffed. “Teodora had no enemies.”
“Tha’s hard to tell from the outside looking in, innit,” Nkata said. “So we’ll need names of her friends, names of anyone she might’ve been seeing. We got her husband.” He looked through the notes he’d taken during a phone call with Lynley and Havers prior to setting off. “Ross Carver. But tha’s the limit so far.”
All three of them exchanged glances at the name Ross Carver. Nkata was about to ask them about the nature of Teo Bontempi and Ross Carver’s relationship prior to her death, when Rosie spoke.
“You’ll want to know when we last saw her as well.”
“Tha’d be a good place to start.”
“She was here . . . I think it was three weeks ago,” Solange said. “She called in to see about her papá.”
“We watched that film, the old cowboy one where they jump off a cliff,” Cesare said.
“Butch Cassidy, yes, yes. I remember. You two love that film, don’t you. You have seen it so many times together.” She smiled briefly, perhaps at the thought of father and daughter sharing this love of a particular film. She said to Nkata, “It was difficult for Teo to call here as often as she wished. Her work with the police kept her quite busy.”
“She lived for her work,” Rosie added.
“Lots ’f cops do. It’s why cop marriages go bad.”
“Hers did,” Cesare said. “Her marriage. It ended.”
“When was this?”
“Over two years ago.” Rosie was the one who answered, and she added, “They’ve been apart that long, but they haven’t . . . they hadn’t yet divorced. Teo thought it was time, though. Well, it was when you think of it. There’s really no point to hanging on when a marriage has gone dead between two people.”
“They both—”
“Ross—”
Solange and Rosie had spoken at once. Rosie was the one to complete her thought. “They both wanted it,” she said. She kept her gaze fixed on Nkata as she spoke, and her parents kept their gazes fixed on her.
Nkata said, “She seeing anyone?”
“She could have been, but Teo never talked to me about private things. Perhaps that was due to the difference in our ages? She’s seven years older.”
“Her husband, then? He seeing anyone?”
This question was met with silence until Solange said, “You speak of Ross?” as if her daughter had practised polyandry and Ross Carver was only one of her many. She looked at Cesare, then at Rosie. Then back at Nkata when she said, “We see Ross occasionally, but this is something he wouldn’t have told us.”
“Because . . . ?”
“I expect he wouldn’t have wanted Teo to know. As they were still married.”
That made not a jot of sense to Nkata. They were divorcing. They’d been apart two years. What difference could it have made if Teo Bontempi had been told the truth about her estranged husband? He stirred restlessly for a moment as he studied them until he could feel it straight to his fingertips: he wasn’t close to the truth with these people. Something was going on in the family, something more than the death of one of the daughters.
He let a silence hang, as he’d learned from observing Lynley. Most people, he knew, couldn’t cope with silence. But these three, he discovered, were not most people.
Cesare finally said, “I have fatigue. I leave you now,” and his wife was on her feet at once to help him to his.
She said to Nkata, “If you don’t mind, Sergeant? Belle, please give him our mobile numbers. You’ll want them, won’t you, Sergeant?”
He acknowledged this and watched as she helped her husband from the room. He could hear the murmur of their voices. A door opened and shut in another area of the house and they were gone.
Rosie, however, was very much there. He had a feeling about her, a basic uneasiness telling him she was good with secrets: her own and others’。 She knew far more than she was saying, he reckoned. What he couldn’t work out was whether what she knew was about her parents, her sister, or her sister’s husband.