Reluctantly she took the seat opposite and he put a pain au chocolat on a napkin and slid it across. ‘Tell me,’ he said.
She did, watching his face. His eyes narrowed as he concentrated, shutting out distraction, and he leaned forward, elbows on the table, fingertips pressed against his lips. When she finished, he was silent for several seconds and she imagined his brain flushing with colour, electrical impulses humming as he processed it all.
‘What if someone else knows?’ he said.
Nausea washed over her. It was her own thought, one of the three a.m. horrors, but spoken aloud, it had an authority, a reality, that she had managed to deny until now. ‘Knows what?’
Cory gave her a look: Come on.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No. What you said yesterday – it’s . . . ludicrous.’
He shook his head. ‘No. And you don’t think so, either.’
‘Don’t tell me what I think.’ A surge of anger. ‘It’s crazy talk – dangerous. What evidence have you got? I mean, for Christ’s sake – you can’t go around making those kinds of allegations. People loved Marianne – they still love her. Her family – James Greenwood. Do you have any idea how much hurt you could cause them? Or do you just not care?’
‘I don’t have any evidence,’ he said, apparently unfazed. ‘Apart from the fact that she’s dead in circumstances that make no sense to either of us,’ he waved his hand across the table between them, ‘she was talking cross-wise about something that was evidently troubling her on a deep level, and now you’re telling me that someone is hanging round her house at night.’
‘There are any number of reasons someone might hang round.’
Cory raised an eyebrow.
‘Burglars – she thought someone was getting in here anyway. And everyone knows she’s dead, it’s been splashed across the front page of all the papers. The Mail even had a picture of the house so it would hardly be difficult to find it. It could be ghoulish teenagers, thrill-seekers, freaking themselves out by coming to sit where she died. A dare. He was right there,’ she jabbed a finger towards the window, ‘feet from where she fell.’ In the small hours, the idea had afforded her a brief match-flare of hope but now, in the frank light of day, it burned and died in a second.
Cory wasn’t buying it.
‘It might also be a nutty fan,’ Rowan said. ‘Someone who saw her in the papers when the story about her relationship with Greenwood came out, got obsessed. That happened to Seb once. Or a hanger-on.’ She eyeballed him. ‘Marianne had a lot of hangers-on.’
If he heard the insult, he ignored it. ‘You know, I’ve been wondering if someone was threatening her,’ he said. ‘Maybe they came here to try and scare her.’ He frowned. ‘But as you say, unless they’ve been hiding under a rock, they must know she’s dead. So why would they still be coming?’
Before they could get any further, they were interrupted by the doorbell and the arrival of the man from Savills. Rowan saw the flicker of interest in Cory’s eyes when she told him the Glasses were going to put the house on the market but he stayed in the kitchen while she let the estate agent in and took him upstairs.
As she showed Cory out a few minutes later, he stepped close to her and murmured, ‘Look, you have doubts: that’s fine.’ He stopped, hearing the man moving around in Seb and Jacqueline’s bedroom overhead. ‘She was your friend, it makes sense you don’t want to believe it. But the fact is, something happened and I need to find out what.’
‘Why?’ she challenged, her voice as low as his.
Again he looked at her as if she were completely alien. ‘Because she was my friend, too,’ he said. ‘Because it seems wrong that no one knows the truth about how she died.’
‘Have you considered that they might not want to know? That Jacqueline might prefer to believe it was an accident?’