The Dinner Guest by B Walter (best short books to read txt) 📕

Once the police had arrived, I would find him there later, before we were led away to the police station for questioning, an officer behind me, making it clear we needed to leave.

‘Rachel’s confessed,’ I told him, his tear-filled eyes staring back at me.

Then he asked the question that had been burning through me over the past half hour. The question that probably helped plant the seed of doubt into the police’s investigation.

‘But … why?’

Chapter Forty-Eight Charlie

Seven months after the murder

It’s an unseasonably hot day in April and I’m driving from London to Oxford. I even have the window down – something that would have seemed like madness the week previously – and I enjoy the light breeze on my face as I move slowly along in the traffic towards the Oxfordshire countryside. I drum my fingers on the steering wheel, listening to an unknown rock track, then switch up the vibe, tapping on my iPhone with one finger, selecting some sweeping piano music which bathes me in its lush, romantic tone and I feel my mood lift. I am, for the first time in a long while, happy.

I drive the car smoothly up to the Ashtons’s manor. I sold the BMW late last year, swapping it for a lower, smaller Porsche. I felt I needed a change. Best leave the past in the past. The house on Carlyle Square has also been sold; I set the ball rolling as soon as I could. I was curious to find how little attachment to it I had after what happened. I just knew that was a section of my life that had come to an end. Titus had no wish to stay there either. After living between my mother’s Wilton Crescent property and the manor in Essex, Titus and I had temporarily moved into a hotel. We needed some space away from my parents, even if they thought it was silly when we could have stayed in either of their properties. But there was something about the impersonal anonymity of hotel life that suited us both in that strange hinterland between Rachel being charged and the trial. Those autumn months where both of us seemed to be sleepwalking through our lives. I think my mother would have liked Titus to move in with her, but the boy was adamant he wanted to stay with me. I don’t know whether she was afraid for his safety, remaining in the care of a murderer, or if she just wanted to keep an eye on him. Whichever it was, she’d finally relented, pleased at least that we’d picked The Hari, a hotel within walking distance of her house.

Last week, however, we’d let our rooms go and had moved – permanently for now – into Marwood Manor. Lord and Lady Ashton had recently decided the place was getting too big for both of them to be rattling round in at their age, and had moved into the still sizable, 1980s-built annex to the north of one of the surrounding fields. They assured us they wouldn’t bother us every day and that Rupert, Titus, and I would more or less have the run of the manor to ourselves.

The question of Elena is a thorny one and something that has been solved only temporarily. On the lucky side, she decided to take a job working for the Republican party in the US. She’ll be out of our hair most of the time, leaving her daughter in the UK to live with her father in his Clerkenwell apartment. It suited their fractured family dynamic just fine. Especially since she and Titus still seemed to be equally keen on spending time with each other.

I arrive at Marwood at about 3pm to find Titus and Rupert playing tennis in one of the courts round the back of the house.

‘Who’s winning?’ I call out as I watch them from the side.

‘We’ve rather lost count,’ shouts a breathless Rupert as he only just catches a ball fired from Titus from the left.

After their tennis match, Rupert and I walk back to the house whilst Titus practises his serve. ‘A letter came for you today,’ he says. ‘I didn’t open it, but I think … I think you should read it immediately.’

I look at him, puzzled. ‘Why?’

‘Because I think it’s come from HMP Graze Field.’

The name doesn’t click for a second. Then one word enters my mind with a combination of a jolt and a shiver. ‘Rachel.’

He nods, then walks over to a wooden tray on a side table near the front door and hands me the envelope. I open it, read for a few seconds, then look back at him and nod. ‘It’s from her.’

Graze Field Prison is an imposing, seventeenth-century manor house, now repurposed to hold female convicts and young offenders. It looks like something out of a horror movie as I approach it in the car and follow the signs to the car park round to the side near some fields. The prison entrance, then the process of signing in and being searched to get inside, is a lot more mundane and routine than I expected, although by the time I’m seated with everybody, the trepidation of what I might find on the other side is starting to get to me. I see Rachel immediately when we’re sent through into a large room resembling a school hall. It’s not that she looks particularly different from the other women in here; it’s her body language that sets her apart. She looks as cool and alert as if she were a manager of a company about to interview a prospective new member of the team.

‘Hi,’ I say, trying to keep my voice as calm as she looks. I’m not sure I succeed, as it comes out as more of a low bark.

‘Hello Charlie,’ she says, and gives me a thin smile. I notice now how