‘It’s one theory.’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me. Everything she wrote was a pack of lies.’
He took us in through the front door, into a hall with gilt mirrors, a modern steel and glass chandelier, Persian rugs … all of them as soulless as the showrooms from which they had come. Too much money had been spent on the house, making it too perfect. The paintings were not just abstract. They were indecipherable. None of the furniture quite matched. Lamprey led us into a kitchen that reminded me of Hawthorne’s except that it was three times bigger. It was too clean and strangely uncomfortable. There was a fireplace, but no evidence that it had ever been used for a fire. If it hadn’t been for the lawns visible on the other side of the windows, we could have been in Belgravia. We could have been anywhere.
‘You live here?’ Hawthorne asked. Perhaps he was thinking the same as me.
‘I have a room in the annexe. There’s a separate kitchen there too, but I thought I’d spare you the walk.’
‘And you worked for the Longhursts.’
Lamprey nodded. ‘I was one of the gardeners back then. After they left, I stayed on to look after the place. It was empty for three years. After that, it was owned by a local family, but it was too big for them and eventually they moved on. Then the Russians came. They completely renovated the house … put all this stuff inside. Spent a fortune! If they didn’t like it, back it went again. Staircases, bathrooms, the lot! And now it is how it is.’ He had made his judgement. There was nothing more to add.
‘Were you here when the teacher, Major Alden, was killed?’
Another slow nod. ‘I used to know the major. The whole village did. He was what you would call a bit of a character. Bald, moustache. Always wore a three-piece suit. A big supporter of the local hunt until the day he died. Not such a bad old stick really, although some of the kids might have thought otherwise.’
‘You said that Harriet Throsby wrote a pack of lies. I’d be interested to know what you meant by that.’
‘You’ve read her book?’
‘Some of it.’
‘She came over here from Bristol. She had a friend in the village – Frank Heywood – and he introduced her to me. That was my mistake. I assumed, because she came recommended, that I could trust her. I sat down and talked to her in this very kitchen … not that it looked like this then. The Hall was already being emptied by the time she arrived. The Longhursts had gone. Anyway, I couldn’t have been more wrong. She took what I said, used the bits she wanted and distorted the rest. I reckon she’d already made up her mind what she wanted to write long before she got here.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘I told her about the family. About the boys. I knew Stephen Longhurst, of course, but the other kid, Wayne Howard, was often round here and I got to know him too. The school. The village. Two hours we spoke, and it all went down in that little notebook of hers. Scribble, scribble, scribble. You’re not taking notes?’
‘I don’t need notes, Mr Lamprey. What did she get wrong?’
‘Everything!’ He sniffed, then pinched his nose between finger and thumb. ‘First, Trevor and Annabel weren’t that bad. They were incomers and that was always going to lead to trouble in a place like Moxham. You know the trouble with this part of the world? It’s full of retired bankers and lawyers with too much time on their hands. People who used to be important but now they’ve got nothing to do, so they just get busy blowing everything out of proportion. You know about all those disagreements she put in her book? The way she described them, they could have been the start of a third world war. But they didn’t amount to much at the time.
‘I mean, let’s start with the village fête. If Mr Longhurst didn’t want it on his front lawn just a few months after he’d moved in, that was his business. He’d have come round in time if they’d only sat down and talked about it. And the footpath! You could see right into the swimming pool, and Mrs Longhurst, she liked to go skinny-dipping first thing in the morning. Hardly surprising she wanted to divert the footpath – but she was only asking for it to be moved a few metres. She wasn’t trying to redraw the map! If the two of them had a fault, it was just that they were in too much of a hurry, but then they were Londoners. Everyone does everything at the double in London. You have to slow down if you want to get used to the country way.
‘As for the villagers, you read Throsby’s book, you’d think they’d all banded together with flaming torches and pitchforks and come round here to burn down the house. It wasn’t like that either. There were a few mutterings at The Bridge – the local pub – and at the golf club. The Longhursts weren’t the most popular people in the county. They were rich and they were a bit brash, so of course there were some who were jealous. But I said this to the Throsby woman. You choose any village you want, you’re going to get your moaners. People need something to complain about. But come the weekend, it’s all forgotten. It comes and goes with the wind.’