The Last Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

We’ll talk to her again. Besides, we’ve still got Philip Kennford to interview.’
    Godley laughed without humour. ‘I hope you’re not pinning your hopes on that.’
    ‘He’ll want to help us, won’t he?’
    ‘I wouldn’t count on it.’ Godley looked down at me but I had a feeling he wasn’t seeing me. ‘There are people who find lying as natural as breathing.’
    ‘And Philip Kennford is one of them,’ I said.
    ‘Philip Kennford is the biggest liar of them all.’
    Philip Kennford looked remarkably composed for a man who had recently lost his wife and daughter and who was still dealing with the after-effects of being knocked unconscious. He had been waiting for us to get around to interviewing him for a couple of hours, but he didn’t seem to be irritated by the delay. The bandage on his forehead couldn’t spoil the patrician elegance of his looks: a strong nose, piercing blue eyes and thick grey-and-black hair that he wore slightly longer than I expected, curling over his collar. A square jaw offset the full mouth, undercutting any suggestion of weakness. He was look-twice handsome, I thought, and seemed younger than his forty-five years. At one time he would have been seriously athletic, and he still evidently kept himself in shape. His polo shirt and jeans were pristine, although his feet were bare. I wondered if it was habit or a sign of being more distressed than he at first appeared.
    He sat in a wing-backed leather armchair that was easily the most traditional thing I’d seen in his house so far, leaning into it as if he was too exhausted to think about standing. He had crossed his legs and the upper foot swung like a pendulum in an unhurried rhythm. One hand held a cigarette that sent a thin blue plume of smoke into the already stuffy study, while the other rested on the head of a black-and-white dog, a collie. It was leaning against him and didn’t move from its post as we trooped in and arranged ourselves in a semi-circle in front of him. The dog craned its head to look at us, showing a good deal of white around its eye as it did so. I liked dogs but collies tended towards the unpredictable, which was another way of saying most of them were borderline psychotic, and I would no more have attempted to pat its head than I would have put my hand in a fire.
    While Godley was doing polite preamble and introductions, I took the opportunity to stare around the room. It looked to me as if it was meant for a different house altogether, one that was closer to the traditional English country estate than the twenty-first century minimalist chic we’d seen up until then. The walls were lined with books, mostly leather-bound hardbacks, and a giant mahogany desk dominated the space. Over the fireplace hung a deeply sentimental Victorian oil painting depicting a ragged boy in the hands of two uniformed policemen while his mother sobbed in the background. The bread he had stolen lay on the ground in front of him, while a meagre cottage behind the little group suggested extreme poverty. It was called
Taken in Charge
, I saw, leaning in to read the little gold nameplate, and I seriously doubted the same person would have liked this and the acid-bright geometric abstraction of tapestry that hung in the hall. This was Kennford’s territory. His wife had been allowed to do what she liked up to the door of his study; after that it was his taste that mattered.
    ‘That looks painful.’ Godley was standing closer to Kennford than me and had bent down to look at his feet. Craning to see what he had noticed, I realised there was an untidy collection of cuts on the sole of Kennford’s foot. His skin looked reddish and bruised around the cuts. All at once the lack of footwear made sense.
    ‘They’re unlikely to be fatal. There was glass on the floor of my bedroom and I didn’t realise in time.’ Kennford’s voice was mellow and deep, but to my surprise he didn’t have the public-school vowels that were usual at