“Nope,” she says. “I don’t think so. But then again, I can only see their front door from here. Not their side door.”
“What about this woman?” I thrust a color photocopy of Sophia’s driving license in her direction. “Seen her before?”
Mrs. Scott-Thomas studies Sophia’s face with great interest. But she shakes her head again.
“Nope.”
I ought to try a different questioning tack. Because tiny departures from the norm can sometimes be significant.
“Was there anything that didn’t happen as usual, then?”
Her eyes light up.
“I don’t think Mark left the house yesterday. But maybe I just didn’t notice him leaving.”
“Is it unusual for him to stay put at home?”
“Let me check.” She walks over to a handbag lying on the sofa and extracts her iDiary for confirmation. “Ah, yes…my diary says that Mark always goes for a long run on Tuesday and Friday mornings. Goes to Waterbeach and back each time. I once asked him why, why he’s always pounding pavements on these two days. He said that writers need to keep on the move, to keep ideas moving in their heads. Fascinating, eh? That’s probably why I wrote this down.”
This is indeed interesting. If Mark’s Friday runs are such an integral part of his weekly existence, something unexpected might have detained him at home yesterday. He said he wanted to keep an eye on his wife. But there may have been more to it. Something he didn’t tell me.
“Anything else that didn’t happen as usual?”
“The Fiat passed by two days ago. But it didn’t come by yesterday.”
“An old black Fiat?”
She nods, surprise coloring her face.
“When was that?”
“Sometime early evening. It was headed in that direction.” She points to the west end of Grantchester Meadows, the direction of the pull-off area where the public footpath to Grantchester starts.
“Did you see who was inside?”
“A woman, for sure. Blond, maybe. Couldn’t quite see her face, as the windows were tinted.”
“Does she go by often?”
“Oh, yes.” Mrs. Scott-Thomas nods vigorously. “She usually slows down in front of their home before speeding up again. Weird, eh? But a fact for sure. Oh, look, there’s Mark again.”
She points out the window. Mark Evans is pulling up outside his mansion in a dusty black Jaguar. He jumps out of the vehicle, casting a long suspicious glare at my driver and the patrol car parked just yards away. He scans the surroundings with a deep frown before walking to the back of his car and pulling a door open. My eyes widen as he retrieves a gigantic bouquet of burgundy-colored roses from the backseat. There must be at least a hundred of them.
“Oh, my God, Inspector.” Mrs. Scott-Thomas draws in an incredulous breath, her eyes as round as the crystal plates on her wall. “That must surely be the largest bunch of roses I’ve ever seen.”
“Quite so.”
“Mark must be in trouble with his wife. Like, real trouble. Serious shit.”
“How do you know?”
“The darker the shade, the deeper the shit. The larger the bouquet, the bigger the shit pile. Just two random facts that stick in my mind. Mark’s prone to grand gestures, just like my mother. Theatrical ones. I wish my husband could be more like him. But my husband never buys me flowers—”
“Please excuse me,” I say, heading for the door. “I would really like an urgent word with Mr. Evans.”
There are three types of men in this world: womanizing bastards, sophisticated cads, and grotesque slimeballs. I once had the misfortune of meeting a man who turned out to be all three.
—Diary of Sophia Ayling
Chapter Ten
Mark
A man should never carry a hundred roses when he’s struggling with his own front door (and I thought it was a good idea to empty the racks of the only florist in Newnham on my way back from the Guildhall). The key’s refusing to turn, and the flowers are threatening to fall out of my arms. I can already picture them hitting the ground in an eruption of flying stalks and decapitated buds. To make things worse, their cloying, sickly sweet odor is causing my head to spin.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Evans,” says a familiar voice. “You have a lot of flowers. They look nice.”
My key clangs to the ground. I spin around; my nemesis is marching up to me with a slightly amused expression on his face. Fear surges to my chest. What’s Richardson doing here? Surely the detective hasn’t already found out what happened to…is he here to arrest me?
I will not tremble. I won’t.
“What…what are you doing here?”
“I just wanted to ask you another question about On Death’s Door,” he says.
The detective must surely be pulling my leg. It’s entirely his fault that one hundred roses are weighing my arms down, smothering me with the desperation they represent, their tumescent blooms epitomizing everything that has blown up spectacularly since the morning. After all, I owe the imminent collapse of my marriage and longed-for political career to Richardson’s pointed remark about Sophia, the one he was tactless enough to make in front of my wife. The man’s making me terrified and annoyed at the same time.
Maybe it’s deliberate.
“I’ve already told you everything I know about Sophia.” I’m gritting my teeth so hard that my words spill out in a hiss.
“Oh.” He shrugs. “I wasn’t planning to ask you about Miss Ayling. I wanted to find out why Gunnar and Sigrid went all the way to Svalbard during their honeymoon in 2000, just to see the northern lights.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Svalbard’s too far north. It isn’t the best place in the world for auroras at the height of the solar cycle. Statistically speaking, they were more likely to see the northern lights in Gunnar’s own hometown of Valberg than in Svalbard.”
Damn it. I’m going to have to improvise.
“They thought they could see the aurora there. I never said they did.”
The detective pulls out a dog-eared copy of On Death’s Door from his briefcase and riffles through it.
“But there’s a line in the book that says: ‘The sky came alive as Gunnar took her into his arms.’ Page sixteen.”
“It was just…er…a figure of speech.”
“Then why does the next line say, ‘Dark emerald pennants flickered above their heads, cleaving the heavens with golden-opal scythes before dancing away as billowing curtains of green fire’?”
A bead of sweat is forming on my forehead. It isn’t caused by the exertion of carrying a hundred roses. I should be thinking faster and harder, otherwise the detective will definitely get the better of me.
I have four options:
(A) say that I can’t remember everything I’ve written—that’s why I always page back when writing my damned novels;
(B) admit that I know absolutely nothing about Svalbard, let alone the likelihood of seeing the northern lights there;
(C) tell him I was just being poetic;
(D) all of the above.
But a sudden brain wave strikes me.
“The only people who subject my books to such careful line-by-line analysis are Monos. But surely you can’t be a Mono, Inspector.”