‘How so?’
‘I met Oliver in a bar. I meet a lot of my clients in bars, Parker included. There’s something about alcohol that causes men to open up about their relationships, even to complete strangers. I’ve never understood it myself.’ He pauses. ‘Anyway, that night Oliver was extremely drunk. He was also extremely keen to get something off his chest about his wife Alexa. He was convinced she was cheating on him. And so I offered to investigate on his behalf.’
‘Investigate? You mean like a private detective?’
‘Precisely.’
‘I still don’t understand. Why would you do that? What’s it got to do with you?’
‘I’ve already told you, Cody. It’s what I do. I provide a service for the broken-hearted. I made that my mission a long, long time ago.’
‘Yeah,’ Webley says. ‘You’re such a kind soul.’
Cody quickly adds another question. ‘So, what did you find out when you investigated?’
‘A lot of things. The chief one being that Oliver Selby wasn’t exactly an innocent party. I discovered he was having an affair with Claire Somerville. He put lust before love. If there’s one thing that upsets me, it’s when people try to blame others for a failed relationship when they are so full of guilt themselves.’
‘And, in your eyes, that meant he and Claire deserved to die?’
‘Of course! They were both guilty as sin.’
The answer is so devoid of any doubt. Cody thinks there are no shades of grey with this man. Put one foot outside his rules for love and you condemn yourself to summary execution.
‘Why like that, though? Why not just kill them? Did you have to cut them open?’
‘I liked the symbolism. There was no love either in Oliver’s marriage or in his affair. They were both empty shells. Now Oliver himself is an empty shell. Did you notice how I gave them each other’s hearts? I thought that was a nice touch.’
‘It’s a sick fucking touch, is what it is,’ says Webley.
‘Oh, Megan. Where’s your romance?’
Cody says, ‘What about Alexa? I assume you’re responsible for her murder too. Why did she have to die?’
‘Because she was as bad as her husband. She was using Oliver. She married him for his looks and his money, but there was no love in her either. She had slept with others. She flirted with many.’
‘You didn’t cut her up, though.’
‘No. I wanted to make it look as though Oliver might have killed her and run away. I decided that evisceration probably wasn’t Oliver’s style.’
‘And Sam Ridley? What about him?’
‘Oliver told me about Sam. He said that Sam had done things that nearly destroyed their marriage. When Oliver found the doctored photographs that Sam had created and passed around, he had a huge fight with Alexa. It even came to blows. Oliver eventually accepted Alexa’s word that she’d never had any kind of relationship with Sam, but that doesn’t excuse Sam’s actions. You can’t go around doing things like that to couples.’
‘Whereas murdering them is acceptable in your book?’
‘The difference is that I knew there was no love left in that marriage. Sam Ridley had no such knowledge. He deliberately set out to wreck a marriage that, for all he knew, could have been beautiful.’
‘So you issued and then carried out his death sentence?’
‘He left with me no choice.’
‘You don’t think it was a little extreme?’
‘Of course not. Love is precious. It’s sacred. Don’t you agree?’
Cody looks across at Webley, who is shaking her head in despair. Bobby’s way of thinking is so divorced from normality that attempting to make him see the unacceptability of his behaviour would be a waste of breath.
‘So you pretended to be a police officer to find out where Sam lived, and then you killed him?’
‘Correct.’
‘And I suppose you left Oliver’s necklace at the scene to throw us off the scent?’
‘Actually, I thought of it more as a clue to help you out. After all, Oliver was at the root of all this. You’re only in that house now because you’ve been searching for him. On which note, I must congratulate you both. You got to this point much quicker than I thought you might. It was a good job I didn’t hang around any longer.’
‘How long were you here?’
‘A few days. It was quite a full house. The others didn’t bother me too much, though. They just stayed in their rooms. But I kept popping upstairs to keep them entertained.’
Cody doesn’t want to know what form this entertainment took. He suspects it wasn’t to play a round of bridge.
‘Claire has been here the whole time?’
‘Yes. She has spent more time in bed with Oliver than ever before.’
‘But it was her I spoke to on the phone?’
‘Yes, it was. Of course, she was only telling you what I had instructed her to say. I was standing over her with a scalpel at the time, so I think she saw the wisdom of going along with the charade.’
