Close to Death

Giles Kenworthy worked in finance, of course. He was one of those people who made money out of money but did nothing for anybody around them. He didn’t save lives, for example, or go into schools to lecture children on healthy eating. But that wasn’t what bothered Tom Beresford. It was the man’s extraordinary sense of entitlement, his utter lack of kindness or empathy. How many times had Tom explained he needed to get in and out whenever he wanted, that he might have to reach his surgery for an emergency? Kenworthy always had an excuse. It was late. I was in a hurry. I was only there for half an hour. You could have got past. But he never listened.

Tom Beresford had taken legal advice. As it happened, one of his neighbours – Andrew Pennington – was a retired barrister and he had examined the management contract they had all signed. The entire driveway, including the section that led to the two garages, belonged to all six houses in the close, meaning that any costs for its maintenance and repair were divided between them. Burrow into the small print and you would discover that everyone was legally obliged ‘to be considerate and not block the driveway from other users’. But what did that mean, exactly? How did you prove a lack of consideration? And if one person was being wilfully obstructive, what could you do about it? Andrew Pennington had advised patience and negotiation.

But it was driving Tom Beresford mad.

He went over to the kitchen window and pressed his face against the glass, looking obliquely out. He saw it at once, exactly where he had expected it to be: facing his garage, its bright green backside visible where the front wall ended, jutting into the middle of the drive. The rage he felt at that moment was almost physical, a wave of nausea and tiredness that shuddered through him. Much of it was caused by his work, the twins, Mrs Leigh, the form-filling, the hours, the bills, the complete helplessness, the sense of being adrift in his own life. But above all it was Giles Kenworthy’s car. It wasn’t fair. He had spent his entire life helping other people. How could one man treat him with such contempt?

They were going to meet tonight. Everyone who lived in Riverview Close. There was to be a reckoning.

For Tom Beresford, it couldn’t come soon enough.

3

Despite its name, Riverview Close had no view of the River Thames.

It stood in the grounds of a former royal residence, Rievaulx Hall, built in 1758 for Jane Rievaulx, a less well-known mistress of King George II. According to contemporary reports, the original house was something of a rarity: a Palladian villa that managed to be asymmetrical and ugly. It was perhaps no surprise that its architect, William de Quincey, eventually died in a prison that, by coincidence, he had also designed. Nothing remained of the old house. It had been damaged by fire in the early nineteenth century, left abandoned for almost a hundred and fifty years and finally bombed in 1941 by the Luftwaffe, who had done the entire neighbourhood a favour by getting rid of what had become a well-known eyesore. At some time during all this, Rievaulx had been distorted into Riverview, either because the locals had no time for fancy French names or simply because they were unable to spell it properly.

What had been left of the estate was an irregular patch of land just off the Petersham Road, separated from the River Thames by a thick ribbon of woodland, with the towpath on the other side and no glimpse of the water, not even in winter when the branches were bare. Even so, the misnomer had stuck and when the area was finally developed with six new houses, the largest of them standing in the footprint of the original villa and two others built where the gardener’s cottage and the stables had been, Riverview Close was what it was called.

The architects had decided on a deliberately picturesque design using traditional stock brick that might have characterised an English village, along with Dutch gables, sash windows and plenty of flowers and shrubbery to help the new owners forget that they were on the edge of a major city and, indeed, in the modern world. Once the gate swung shut, the close lived up to its name in every respect. It was a tightly knit community. In fact, it was almost hermetically sealed. Yes, you could still hear the traffic crawling up and down Richmond Hill – particularly in the morning and evening rush hours. But the sound was counterbalanced by birdsong, the whirr of weekend lawnmowers, the occasional snatch of Bach or Sidney Bechet through an open window. Everyone knew each other. Everyone got on.

At least, they had until the Kenworthys arrived.