‘Do we have to do this now?’
‘If we’re going to find out who killed her, we need to move fast.’
I hardly needed reminding. The DNA, the fingerprints, the Japanese blossoms, the witness statements. Cara Grunshaw could be at my front door at any time.
Hawthorne had evidently created some sort of bond of trust with the accountant. Longhurst nodded slowly and put the water down. ‘Very well.’
We waited.
‘I can’t tell you everything you want to know about the summer of 1998,’ Longhurst began at last. ‘You have to remember that this comes from the perspective of an eighteen-year-old boy and I wasn’t even in Moxham when most of this happened. My parents had sent me to boarding school, to Marlborough College, and when this business with Stephen took place I was on my gap year, teaching football to children in Namibia. They wrote me a letter, explaining what had happened and urging me not to come home, even though that was my first instinct. They wanted to keep me out of the spotlight, to protect me, and they were largely successful … at least until that book came out.
‘As I’m sure you’re aware, my parents were fairly well known around the time of the millennium, which is to say they often appeared in the newspapers, in diaries or gossip columns. They had set up a business that started with children’s clothes but then branched out into a much wider range of products – toys, books, furniture. You may remember the name. It was called Red Button. There were Red Button shops, Red Button restaurants and even Red Button holiday resorts and adventure centres by the time they finished. They were extremely wealthy and they were closely connected to centre-left politics, by which I mean, of course, New Labour. This was the same year that Peter Mandelson made that famous remark about being relaxed with people getting filthy rich, or words to that effect. He spoke for the prime minister … and it could have been my mother and father he had in mind.
‘They had already given large sums of money to New Labour. They were major supporters of Tony Blair when he mounted his leadership bid in 1994, and they’d been with him in Downing Street when he won the election three years later. My father was involved in early talks relating to the Millennium Dome and might well have gone into the House of Lords if … things hadn’t happened the way they did.
‘My parents had moved to the village of Moxham Heath in the early nineties. I’m afraid I can’t really describe what it was like, living in the middle of Wiltshire, because I wasn’t there very much. I was either at school or I stayed in London. We’d kept our house off Sloane Square. To this day, I’m not sure why they’d decided that country life would suit them, particularly as they were opposed to so many of its traditions, but let me say at once that it was without any question the worst decision they ever made. It all went wrong from the moment they bought Moxham Hall, which was a quite unnecessarily large country house with a hundred acres just outside the village. Arriving by helicopter didn’t help either. My father flew it himself.
‘It was them and us – although not perhaps drawn across classical lines. This was a time when the Tories were losing power, and maybe there was a degree of resentment in what had always been a true-blue Tory shire. I don’t know. My parents weren’t just rich. There were plenty of rich people in Moxham. They were rich socialists. They supported the Labour opposition to hunting. They wanted to build a wind turbine, and you can imagine that that put a great many people’s backs up. Spoiling the view! Killing a few birds before the locals had a chance to gun them down! My father had been part of the Campaign for Lead-Free Air, so having their own helicopter pad made them hypocrites too. I kept out of it, but I still remember there was one squabble after another. The swimming pool. The footpath they wanted to move ten metres. The church-hall restoration fund. The annual village fête. This was little England and the two of them were incomers and hypocrites … at least, that was the perception. Nothing they did was ever right.
‘Maybe that was why they decided to send Stephen to the village school – Moxham Heath Primary. That was one of the things that Throsby suggested in her book. They were using him to ingratiate themselves with the villagers, to prove that they were “one of them”。 It was complete nonsense, it goes without saying. But she wrote it anyway.
‘I need to describe my younger brother to you. Up to the age of nine – before he left London – he was a very quiet boy. He loved reading. He did well at school. He had plenty of friends. Harriet Throsby described him as spoilt and although it’s not a word I would have used, he was certainly indulged. This was because to all intents and purposes he was an only child. My parents always used to say he was an afterthought – although he was much loved and cherished.