At Twining’s suggestion — and Twining was making all the running, but it probably eased his stress — they took their drinks out to the garden at the back. The pastel softness of the Somerset scenery was worth it. A groundsman was using the mower on the village cricket green beside the church and the smell of cut grass wafted up to them.
‘Good to be alive, looking out at this,’ Diamond said to get the conversation under way. It was a distortion of his true state of mind. Having just put his hand in his pocket for the drinks he didn’t feel it was good to be alive at all.
‘Is it?’ Twining said. ‘I’m used to it. Lived here all my life.’
‘Do you teach here as well?’
‘In Norton?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Too close to home. Maths and physics at Frome.’
‘When you’re fit.’
‘Quite.’
‘How long have you been off work?’ All thoughts of giving this freeloader a stress-free time had gone.
For the first time since their arrival, Harold Twining’s smile deserted him. ‘I thought you were here to talk about my brother.’
‘We are. I’m being friendly. Can’t dive straight in.’
‘It doesn’t sound friendly when the first thing you mention is my problem. People don’t understand psychosomatic illness. It isn’t obvious, like mumps or asthma, but it’s just as real. Some of those buggers at work believe I’m having a high old time of it.’
‘There’s no accounting for human nature,’ Diamond said and turned to Leaman. ‘Did it cross your mind that Mr Twining was skiving off, John?’
‘I take people as I find them, guv.’
‘There you are.’ Diamond smiled at Twining. ‘Let’s talk about your brother, then. And his wife. Because I understand it was a double tragedy.’
‘Dreadful,’ Twining said. ‘Afterwards you ask yourself if you could have helped in some way, but I had no inkling they were so unhappy.’
‘Were they?’ Diamond said. ‘You’ll have to give us some background. We don’t know the full circumstances.’
‘I doubt if anyone did. The coroner couldn’t work it out. Mentally my brother John was a hundred per cent and so was Chrissie. They had no money problems. Each of them was earning more than I ever will. Alpha people. You asked on the phone if I could bring a picture and I dug one out.’ He took a postcard-sized photo from his pocket and flicked it across the table in a way that seemed to express his contempt for the couple.
Diamond picked it up. It had been taken with flash at some party. A good-looking couple with drinks in front of them. John Twining had receding hair and a thick moustache; she was blonde, the hair scrunched back. They both looked comfortable being photographed. The smiles weren’t at all forced.
‘What did they do?’
‘She was a buyer for Marks and Spencer, a high-powered job. And John was an architect. They had a beautiful property he designed for himself in Hinton Charterhouse, just down the road from here. Holidays in the Caribbean, a sports car each. No kids. No ties, not even a budgie to look after.’
‘They seem happy with each other in the photo.’
‘I never saw a sign that they weren’t.’
‘So what was said at the inquest? How was it explained?’
‘I don’t think it was. The coroner came out with some claptrap about successful, wealthy people suddenly realising that their lives were vacuous. His word. Vacuous. It’s not in my vocabulary. I can tell you what a vacuum is because I’m a physicist. But a vacuous life is an unscientific term. He reckoned they must have made a pact to put an end to themselves. He said if they’d had children, or even a dependent relative, they might have felt their lives had more purpose. I’ll be honest with you, I would have volunteered to be a dependent relative. No problem.’
Diamond didn’t need convincing of that. ‘They left no note?’
‘Nothing was ever found.’
‘Did they write wills?’
‘Yes, that was taken care of, but not as a last-minute thing. They’d drawn them up four years before they died. Everything went to charity except what the government took. I didn’t get a penny.’
‘Were they religious?’
‘John and Chrissie? The only thing they believed in was their bank account. They might have gone to the Christmas midnight service, but you do in a village. It’s a social thing.’
‘Is it possible that they wanted a child and couldn’t have one?’
‘Another misguided theory. She had a baby stopped a year after they married. They “slipped up”, John told me. No question they could have started a family if they’d wanted.’
‘So do you have a theory of your own?’
‘I can tell you why my brother took his life. He was heartbroken after Chrissie hanged herself. It’s obvious, isn’t it? But what her problem was, I haven’t the faintest. As I said, I always thought of her as sensible.’
‘She wasn’t in trouble at work?’
‘No. The coroner read out a statement from Marks and Spencer. They valued her contribution. She was going to be difficult to replace. Stuff like that.’
‘Did she have family — parents, siblings?’
‘She was Australian.’
‘Even Australians have parents.’
‘What I mean is that they were half the world away. Nothing was said about them troubling her.’
‘She hanged herself in Henrietta Park, I understand. That’s the one at the back of Great Pulteney Street. Why would she choose there?’
‘You mean why didn’t she go to another park? Don’t know. Because she knew of it, I suppose. She’d walk a lot in her lunch breaks, the only exercise she had time for. She was found hanging from a tree. They tried to inform John, but he’d gone missing. They got onto me, and I couldn’t tell them anything. We weren’t close. He was found up at Sham Castle two days later, as you probably know. My guess is that he knew what she’d done. Maybe she left him a note. He was so shocked that he simply walked around in a dazed state and finally decided he couldn’t face life without her.’
‘Was Sham Castle a place he knew well?’
‘No idea. You know what it is, literally a sham. You’re meant to see it from down in the city and think it’s a real castle when all it is is a facade. As an architect he may have been making some sort of point.’
‘What sort of point, Mr Twining?’
‘About his life being empty.’
‘Vacuous,’ Leaman said.
Twining frowned and said, ‘What did you say?’
‘Never mind,’ Diamond said with a glare at Leaman.
But Twining didn’t take offence. He’d launched into yet another theory. ‘Some time after it happened I heard the old story of why Sham Castle was put there.’
‘As a trompe l’oeil?’ Leaman said.
‘Come again,’ Diamond said. His sidekick might need a kick if he carried on like this.
‘An eye-catcher, anyway.’
‘That’s only part of the story,’ Harold Twining said. ‘Ralph Allen, the quarry owner who provided the stone for Regency Bath, had it built on the skyline so he could see it from his town house. Everyone knows that much. But local tradition has it that he had the thing built for another reason — this was in the seventeen-hundreds, remember — to conceal a dead highwayman hung in chains on a gibbet. By law the corpse was left dangling there as a warning. Ralph Allen thought it was gross, but he couldn’t change the law, so he did the next best thing and screened it off with his so-called castle.’
‘Is that well known?’ Diamond asked.
‘Not to me until I heard about it from some Job’s comforter.
My brother may have known the story.’
‘And decided to go up there out of some sense of history?’
