‘It depends on what you tell me.’
‘Still friends, regardless. You know, Wendy, that you are a thoroughly decent person. No wonder my parents liked you, and once this is over, you and your friend Bridget must come up and stay with us, sample my father’s wines, and I’ll take you horse riding.’
‘We’re getting away from what we were talking about.’
‘It was the day before Barry died. We had spent the night together, not that Matilda knew. For some reason, she had come home late the previous day, and Barry had come to my place first. He said that he was in love with me.’
‘Had he said it before?’
‘In the throes of passion, but men tend to do that sort of thing.’
‘This time it wasn’t lust?’
‘Not much of it anyway. We’re sitting downstairs having a glass of wine, and he leans over and says the words. I’m not sure what to say and do.’
‘Why?’
‘Matilda. I knew enough of her to know her reaction. She had to be told before I could reciprocate. I didn’t want to allow what I felt for him to become an overriding obsession, knowing what could happen if we made a mistake. I’ve got my parents as a reference, and I wanted what they had for each other. Matilda could have been a complication that I couldn’t deal with.’
‘Love is blind, conquers all obstacles,’ Wendy said.
‘Poetical, but that’s not reality, is it?’
Wendy thought it was.
‘Why haven’t you told us this before?’
‘I blocked it out. I had to, don’t you understand?’
Wendy could understand that a person might want to; there was only so much bad news that any one person could take.
‘I take it that you confronted Matilda with what Barry had professed to you.’
‘I didn’t know about the other women. If I had, I wouldn’t have fallen in love with him.’
‘Where did you think his money came from?’
‘Matilda had money, and he told me that he did some modelling, not that I had ever seen his work anywhere, and that he helped out a friend with his business. Quite frankly, I wasn’t overthinking about it. He always dressed well, he didn’t have a car, and he stayed with Matilda most of the time, and I’m sure he never gave her any money.’
‘She could have given him some.’
‘I never asked. It wasn’t my business to pry, and the two of them were my friends.’
‘One was more than that.’
‘A good friend, yes.’
‘Matilda?’
‘She came over, and we sat around the kitchen table. I asked her if she would object if Barry moved in with me.’
‘Her reaction?’
‘At first, she was supportive. She said she understood, and that she was pleased for us.’
‘Did you believe her?’
‘I was initially pleased with her reaction, but then she started to throw up negatives. How were we going to survive financially? How could we maintain a relationship with me away modelling? Barry without a career? Her mood was becoming morose. We both could see that she had only wished us well out of courtesy, the same as you do when a work colleague tells you she’s pregnant or getting married.’
‘It ended badly?’
‘Matilda started to become animated. And remember, this is a woman who rarely showed emotion.’
‘She became violent?’
‘She accused me of being a bitch for seducing her brother, and Barry for being such a fool. Her anger was directed against me, not against him.’
‘We believed you weren’t in the country.’
‘I didn’t openly deceive you or your fellow officers. I just preferred to forget, and then, Barry disappears, and I find out he’s dead, and Matilda’s hanged herself. It was just too much to comprehend.’
‘Let’s come back to when you told Matilda about you and Barry,’ Wendy said. She waved over to the waitress, two fingers, not in an offensive salute, but as an indicator for two coffees to be brought to the table. She also pointed to cheesecake in a glass-fronted cabinet, two fingers again.
‘Matilda started accusing Barry of deserting her. He stayed calm, brooding under the surface. I don’t believe he could ever say a word against her, not to me, never to her. I could see that the bond was unbreakable between the two and that it would have been a marriage of three. I accused Barry of not being a man, irrational on reflection, but he wasn’t under the thumb of an oppressive parent, he was under Matilda’s thumb.’
‘Is that it?’
‘Not totally. Barry left in a huff, not saying a word to me. I swore at him. Matilda stayed with me, and within ten minutes, she’s talking about this and that, not looking smug, nothing that you would sense as unusual. The Chinese might call it inscrutable, but to me, she was still seething. She left soon after to go to her cottage, and I hailed a taxi for the airport. That was the last time I saw either of them alive.’
‘What’s missing?’
‘Nothing,’ Amelia said as she drank her coffee, prodded her cheesecake. Wendy imagined that she would be a secret food purger if she felt that her weight was increasing.
‘You’ve thrown the investigation wide open by telling me all this. You’d better tell me the rest.’
‘I was livid, and I told Barry that he had destroyed my life, and if I ever saw him again, I’d kill him.’
‘Angry people say stupid things. Were you that angry? Did you kill him?’
‘I was overseas when he died. I wanted Barry, more than anything else in the world.’
‘Matilda?’
‘Who knows what was going through her mind. Did anyone ever know? The next time I saw her was when I found her hanging from that beam. It still gives me nightmares.’
‘Could Matilda have killed Barry?’
‘I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t.’
‘Could she swim?’
‘Not a
