‘I’ve done my mourning, six years ago, so don’t expect me to be the weeping widow.’
‘Mourning?’ Larry said. He looked at the woman, saw that under the apron she was dressed in designer clothes.
‘You’re right, it wasn’t. One day he’s there, scoffing down his eggs and bacon for breakfast, and then nothing. I thought it was another woman at first, but he wasn’t the type, never was.’
‘He’s been murdered,’ Isaac said as he and Larry sat down at a table in the kitchen. Samantha Matthews opened the oven, checked the roast beef and potatoes inside.
‘I take it you want a cup of tea?’ she said. She had put on weight over the years; a photo on one wall of the kitchen showed her as a young woman with a svelte figure and a pretty, not beautiful, face. The pretty face remained, and she looked like a decent woman, someone who’d be at the church helping out of a Sunday, playing cards with her circle of friends, drinking coffee at one of the cafes in the area. Yet she was the daughter of a violent man, the widow of a murder victim and minor villain. It was hard to see her in that light as she busied herself in the kitchen, preparing tea and freshly-baked cake for two men who would not be liked by either of the two men in her life, her father or her husband.
‘The last time you saw your husband, could you tell us about that,’ Isaac said.
‘He was a good father. He spent time with the youngest, asked her what she was going to do at school that day, not that he could have helped much. You see, Marcus wasn’t an educated man, yet I was fond of him.’
‘You’re obviously well educated.’
‘My father ensured that. My mother died when I was in my teens, but my father was always there for me. I can’t feel sorry that Marcus’s dead, not as much as I should; I’ve had six years to get over him and time has moved on.’
‘Your children?’
‘The oldest, Grant, is twenty-one, his own man now, living with his girlfriend. I’ve told him that his father has been found. He took it philosophically. He knows of Marcus and his criminal record. He’s not so keen on my father.’
‘Yet you don’t disapprove?’
‘The men who walked through the door at night were family men, men who loved their children and provided for them. I didn’t disapprove or approve. It was for the women to not ask questions or lecture and demand. My mother accepted that fact, and so do I. Don’t expect me to offer further comment; my father did time for a robbery back when I met Marcus. After that, he was never in trouble with the law again, although he was in court a few times for one reason or another, never convicted.’
‘He has a reputation as a violent man. A man who, it has been suspected, has killed, given orders to others to kill on his behalf. Does that shock you?’
‘I’ve heard it all before. He was a hard-nosed businessman who did business with other hard-nosed men back in the past. Sure, some of his businesses were skirting the edge of legal: gambling clubs, one or two strip joints, a couple of pubs, but none of them was illegal.’
‘Not socially accepted ways of making money, were they?’
‘People don’t care if you’ve got money, and my father has, so have I. No one asks questions around here or sticks their nose in the air as I walk by.’
‘If they did?’ Larry asked. He hadn’t said much so far, preferring to eat the cake on the table in front of them, the third slice so far.
‘They don’t, that’s all I know,’ Samantha said. ‘Let me go back to the day he left.’
It felt strange to Isaac. In another time she would have been referred to disparagingly as a gangster’s moll, yet Samantha Matthews was the perfect hostess.
‘He left the house that morning. He said he’d be back by five in the afternoon. I had no reason to doubt him. I was angry when the days and the weeks went by with no sign of him.’
‘What did you do?’
‘My father was better than anyone at finding missing persons.’
‘The police?’ Larry said.
‘What could you do? Issue a missing person’s bulletin. Marcus was not on your list of someone important, to be found at all costs, and you know I’m right.’
‘Sadly, I’d have to agree with you,’ Isaac said. ‘Very little would have happened, no team of police officers checking known haunts, asking questions in the street.’
‘At least you’re honest. My father looked high and low, got people asking questions, sticking their noses in.’
‘In time?’
‘The weeks stretched to months, and I got used to the fact that he wasn’t coming back. Life moves on whether you want it to or not. I resigned myself to the situation, had the occasional fling, but nothing more. The only one who never came to terms with it was our daughter, the youngest. Annie was only ten years old when Marcus disappeared. She’s sixteen now, and I haven’t told her yet that her father has been found. She’s a sensitive child. I’m not sure how to broach the subject, and there’s bound to be waterworks from her, sorrow from me. I’m sure we’ll huddle in a corner together and cry our eyes out. Strange, isn’t it. Marcus was nothing special to look at, not good at anything much, and if it hadn’t been for my father, he’d have struggled to find decent employment, and we’d not be living here in this house. Yet we all loved him; even Grant and our other son, James, and he’s more than a handful, more like his grandfather than Marcus.’
‘What is it with James?
