Page 21 of Murder in the Family

How do you explain it then?

RUPERT HOWARD

(raises his eyebrows)

Search me. I don’t know, maybe he had Mummy issues? After all, his mother had died when he wasn’t much more than a kid.

Maybe it really waslurve, but I don’t buy it. I never did. And of course everyone thought it was the money. That he was just a gold-digger.

NICK VINCENT (Producer) – off

And you agreed?

RUPERT HOWARD

(laughs disdainfully)

What do you think?

CUT TO: MONTAGE of images of Luke Ryder’s wedding to Caroline Howard. They’re artistic shots, mostly black and white, clearly done by a top-class photographer. The ceremony is in the Dorney Place garden, with chairs set in a semi-circle around a flower-covered pergola. Caroline wears a silk dress just below the knee and carries white roses. Luke is in a pale suit and open-neck shirt with a white rose in the buttonhole. He has short blond hair and he’s smiling in every picture. Rupert is a rather tight-lipped best man, and Caroline’s daughters appear in several shots, wearing identical bridesmaids’ dresses. Their expressions are hard to read. Guy only appears in the background of one shot, kicking at a stone urn, his head turned away.

NARRATOR

Luke Ryder and Caroline Howard were married in the garden of her house in the summer of 2002, in front of a small group of family and closefriends. The honeymoon was in the Maldives, and when they returned three weeks later there was nothing to suggest that the new couple weren’t as blissfully happy as they appeared on the surface.

But that didn’t stop the gossip.

CUT TO: Madeleine Downing, sub-captioned ‘Friend of Caroline Howard’. She’s late sixties, with well-styled grey hair and a grey cashmere sweater a few shades darker. She’s sitting in a country-style kitchen with a rack of copper pans and dried herbs hanging over a central wooden table; there are gingham tablecloths drying on a red Aga, and a sleeping black Labrador.

MADELEINE DOWNING

Yes, people did talk. I suppose it was inevitable. I know it’s become quite fashionable since, but women dating much younger men wasn’t quite the thing back then. Though if you ask me most of the women who bitched about Caroline behind her back were just plain envious: Luke was very good-looking, andreallyfit – in both senses of the word. All that working out he did.

And he wasn’t at all full of himself, either – he was very sweet, and very attentive. Who wouldn’t want a partner like that? And as for the age difference, I just kept reminding people what Joan Collins said when she was asked about the young guy she married about the same time – ‘if he dies, he dies’.

(laughs)

And in her case the age gap was thirty years or something. With Caroline it was only fourteen. That’s not all that much, not these days. And in any case Luke always struck me as very mature for his age. Caroline used to call him an ‘old soul’.

GUY HOWARD – off

There was speculation in the press at the time of his murder that he might have been cheating onher – that infidelity might have given her a motive to kill him. Did you ever see any suggestion of that?

MADELEINE DOWNING

Absolutely not. She certainly never said anything to me.

GUY HOWARD – off

But she did talk to you about their relationship?

MADELEINE DOWNING

Sometimes. I mean, they had the odd row, of course they did. All couples row. But she certainly never gave me any reason to believe there was anything seriously wrong.

GUY HOWARD – off

A lot of people thought he was a gold-digger. Did you?