‘Yes, oh goodness, sorry. Wait a minute, I’ll put her out.’
Manon takes a seat at the dining table while Davy blows his nose. They are in a sunken kitchen which gives out onto the back garden. The kitchen floor is a grid of terracotta squares and the cupboards are oak. The room smells of boiling lentils and surfaces just wiped with a faintly mildewed cloth. The dishwasher is going. The round dining table, at the garden end of the room, is covered with a wipeable oilcloth in a pale green William Morris design. On the wall is a picture of Mr and Mrs Garfield in shorts and sunglasses, leaning into one another.
‘There, she won’t bother you any more,’ says Mrs Garfield, coming back into the room and brushing at her skirt. ‘Though I can’t guarantee her fur won’t – it’s everywhere, I’m afraid. Now, what can I get you to drink? Tea? Coffee?’
‘Glass of water, if you don’t mind, Mrs Garfield,’ says Davy.
‘Sergeant?’
‘Nothing for me, thank you.’
Mrs Garfield runs the tap, her finger feeling its temperature, saying, ‘I really don’t know why I rang. And you must be absolutely inundated after Crimewatch. The papers are full of it.’
‘Did you remember something that might be important?’ asks Manon.
‘Silly, really, and you’ve come out all this way. I mean, sometimes you think something’s a thing, and then it isn’t a thing. D’you know what I mean?’
‘Something about the night Edith went missing, perhaps?’ says Manon. ‘When your husband came back from The Crown?’
She sets the glass of water in front of Davy, who has his green book out on the dining table. Mrs Garfield doesn’t sit down with them. Instead, she returns to the kitchen counter and busies herself, clattering about with various pans and bowls. They wait.
Davy writes something in his book, the date and time probably. Manon looks out to the garden, the wet-grey paving slabs, soil silted and blown about with fallen leaves. It all seems quite dead.
Manon breaks the silence, ever so gently. ‘Is there something you’re unsure about … about Mr Garfield?’
‘He wipes his Internet history,’ Mrs Garfield says, without looking up, making circular wiping motions on the worktop with a cloth.
‘Go on,’ says Manon.
‘I don’t. I don’t wipe my Internet history. I’m only ever on the John Lewis website looking at table lamps. Or Amazon. I don’t wipe my Internet history – it wouldn’t occur to me. So why does he?’
‘It occurred to you to look for his Internet history, Mrs Garfield. Why was that?’
‘He’s always on his computer – lost in this world that I don’t know anything about. It’s like some secret door he goes through, where he’s unreachable, like the screen has stolen him from me.’ She shakes her head, then adopts a different tone. ‘It’s probably nothing – work or football scores. Reading the New Statesman. But you don’t know, do you?’ And she laughs, but the texture in the room has darkened.
‘Was he with you on the night of the seventeenth of December, after The Crown?’
Mrs Garfield nods. ‘As far as I know.’
‘As far as you know?’
‘I did say at the time, but perhaps I didn’t make myself clear. I was falling asleep when I heard his key in the door. I registered that and then I nodded off. I didn’t actually see him.’
‘And your relationship with Mr Garfield,’ says Manon. ‘How has that been?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Has everything been normal between the two of you? Has he been behaving normally?’
‘As far as I know,’ says Mrs Garfield.
Manon waits. If she waits, something more might come. But Mrs Garfield has become more brisk in her clattering and fussing in the kitchen area, her body language saying: I’m really far too busy for all this.
‘Right, well, thanks very much for your time,’ says Manon, rising from her chair. Davy follows her cue to get up, too. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, the computer stuff, but thanks for letting us know. And do call us if anything else comes to mind, Mrs Garfield. We can see ourselves out.’
They pull their car doors shut with a warming shunk and the sounds of outside are cut off. Their coats rustle and they click their seatbelts down into the red slots.
‘We going to get Garfield’s laptop then?’ asks Davy, before he starts the engine.
She already has her phone to her ear, and after a short preamble – ‘Mr Garfield, yes, sorry to disturb you, it’s Detective Sergeant Bradshaw’ – she says, ‘We’d like to take a look at your laptop.’
‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘Just to eliminate you from our inquiries. It’d be best if you gave it to us voluntarily.’
‘I’m sorry, I do want to help in any way I can, but all you’ll find on my laptop is a series of very dull essays on Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, that sort of thing.’