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sitting room?’ Derwent asked.
    ‘I didn’t stop to listen. I wouldn’t have expected to. As far as I knew, Vita was in there on her own.’
    ‘What was she doing with her evening?’
    ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’
    ‘Reading? Watching telly? Phoning her friends? Embroidery? Surfing the Internet?’
    There was obvious irritation in Kennford’s voice when he answered. ‘There’s very little point in naming pastimes to see if any of them ring a bell. I didn’t ask her how she planned to occupy herself and she didn’t tell me.’
    ‘Didn’t you care?’
    ‘I respected her privacy.’ He looked at Derwent’s left hand. ‘You’re not married, are you? I wouldn’t expect you to understand, but sometimes you need to give each other space to breathe. Too much interest in each other’s lives can be smothering.’
    ‘Sounds like someone’s been reading the Relate handbook.’
    ‘Let’s move on,’ Godley said hastily. ‘Did you see anyone strange hanging around in the last few weeks? Anyone you didn’t recognise? Anything that made you suspicious?’
    ‘I’ve been racking my brains, but no.’
    ‘You’ve got a very serious alarm system,’ I said. ‘Did you use it when you were in the house?’
    ‘Not when the door to the garden was open. When we were upstairs at night, yes. But the alarm is based on the perimeter being secure, so we couldn’t have ground-floor windows or doors open when it was on. In this heat we never bothered with it.’
    ‘Were you worried about anyone in particular?’ Godley asked. ‘Was that why you had the alarm put in?’
    ‘My wife had it installed. I assumed it was to reduce the cost of our insurance, but I never asked. We had to pay through the nose because of all the art she bought.’
    ‘I noticed you have quite an impressive collection.’
    ‘If you like that sort of thing.’ He sounded bored. ‘I didn’t pay too much attention to what she wanted to hang on the walls. She knew her stuff, though. She ran a gallery before we were married.’
    ‘Successfully?’ Derwent demanded.
    ‘Yes, if you mean that it was a very successful way of losing money.’
    ‘So you made her give it up.’
    For his next birthday I was definitely going to buy Derwent a copy of
Charm for Beginners
.
    ‘I never made Vita do anything. She sold the gallery when she found out she was pregnant with the twins. She only ever wanted to be a housewife, it transpired, and the twins were a very good reason to avoid going back to work.’
    ‘Would you have preferred her to work?’ Godley asked.
    ‘It would have given her an interest outside the family.’
    ‘Even if it cost you money?’ Derwent again.
    ‘It never cost me a penny, mainly because I don’t have two coins to rub together.’ He laughed. ‘Don’t be fooled by the big house and the fact I’m a QC. I’m still a criminal barrister, when all’s said and done, and no one gets rich off legal aid, especially not when they’re paying income tax at the level I do. My first wife takes whatever I manage to keep from the taxman. The money is all Vita’s. Or it was, I suppose.’
    ‘And now it’s yours.’ Derwent sounded exceedingly smug as he pointed it out.
    ‘Indeed. And what a perfect motive for murder. But you need to come up with a reason why I would have killed my daughter as well.’ For the first time I picked up on a thread of raw emotion that roughened his voice. ‘And then you have to explain why I didn’t go the whole hog and kill the other one too. It’s not as if I didn’t know where she was.’
    ‘Leave it with me.’
    Before Kennford could snap back, Godley leapt in with, ‘You know we have to look at all the angles, even the ones that are unlikely.’
    ‘And I know that husbands kill wives. They even kill their kids too, sometimes. But I didn’t.’ He rolled his cigarette against the edge of the ashtray, moulding the ash into a cone. ‘You said Laura had her throat cut. Didn’t you?’
    Derwent