Carol took a ball of yarn and looked at it closely.
“This wool, it’s quite different, isn’t it?” The wool came in quarter-inch-long bands of fluorescent yellow, blue, and lime green. “It’s very loud, Polly.”
“I like the way it makes me feel when I’m knitting. I get lost in the colors. I suppose you might call it psychedelic.”
“It’s very unusual, but, do you know, I think I’ve seen it somewhere before?”
Polly said nothing. Just looked at Carol with a rigid smile.
“On your ex-husband’s dead body.”
Polly blinked, the accusation of murder shifting her out of whatever stupor she was in. Until now, though the two had hardly ever spoken, Carol had been surprised by how happily Polly had accepted the interrogation. Suddenly the mood was different.
“How strange.”
“It would make perfect sense if you were the one who killed him.”
Polly took a bite from a slice of cake in her handbag. Her hand shook.
“Would you like a bite, dear?” Polly whispered. “It’s called a ‘hash’ cake.” She must have caught Carol’s quizzical look. “At our age it’s silly not to enjoy yourself, I think.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “I can get us some spice if you want. It’s sort of like LSD but really packs a punch. I took a shower while I was on it once, and I used a whole bar of soap. A whole bar of soap in one shower! I was just terrifically wired. I have a connection for the good stuff. I can hook you up if you like.”
Carol remembered their interaction by the lift on the day her secret had come out and the entire home had discovered her murderous past. She’d thought that Polly was a terrified old lady. Now she realized she had most likely been out of her mind on drugs.
“So you and Desmond were married, huh?”
“That was a very long time ago.”
“Why did you divorce?”
“He was a complicated man.” Polly took another nibble of her cake, wiped her hands with a napkin, and then corrected herself: “Actually, no. He was a very simple man. That was his problem. Only interested in simple pleasures. Like sex with other women. He got someone pregnant, and that was my cue to leave.”
“Must have been difficult to see him here every day.”
Polly let out a genuine laugh. “Ha! Difficult forme? You think I was still crying myself to sleep every night over Desmond? Half a century later? We were only married for a year. I got away quickly but stayed long enough for his job to inspire me into writing crime. That worked out rather nicely for me. Have you met his awful daughter? If I’d been enough of an idiot to stick around, she could have been mine!”
“I thought he got someone pregnantbeforeyou left?”
“No, that was somebody else. He managed to do it with some poor waitress when we were on our honeymoon and I was asleep in the hotel room. She traveled all the way to London to find us. She was holding a beautiful little baby girl and he wasn’t interested. I’m not sure he ever saw that poor little girl ever again. And he didn’t see me until we bumped into each other in the sauna here one day. Seeing his body at eighty made him a lot easier to resist, I can tell you.”
“Polly Slaughter?”
Polly looked up hazily, hearing another voice. “Yes, dear?”
Carol turned.
“Oh, hello, Carol,” said DS Laura Welsh. “What a surprise to see that you two are friends. Polly, I’ve come into some informationthat concerns you, and I’d like you to come with me to the station to assist me with my inquiries, please.”
“Is it about Desmond being her ex-husband?” said Carol.
“No. What?” Laura failed to disguise that this was a completely new piece of information to her.
“Is it about her drug use?”
“No. What?”
“Ah, I see,” said Carol, lifting up the ball of yarn. “It’s about the fiber. That bright yarn she’s holding is the fiber you found on Desmond’s corpse, isn’t it?”
Laura frowned, unable to stop herself from nodding.
