Page 12 of Murder in the Family

And all this at a time when as the London we know now – the London of railway stations and shopping streets – was just starting to emerge.

By 1900, the green fields around Dorney Place had long since disappeared. Roads had replaced the lanes, and shiny new terraces had surrounded the garden on all sides. So much so, that you couldn’t even see the house from the street.

And the same is still true today.

Camera tracks up the street to the Dorney Place entrance then zooms in. NB No security camera is visible.

There’s this discreet gateway onto Larbert Road, but even when the gates are open you can’t see more than a few yards down the drive. There’s no name, just the number 2, and an entry keypad. If you didn’t know the house was there, you’d almost certainly miss it.

With so much housing springing up around it in the late 1800s, it’s some sort of miracle that Dorney Place survived at all. Even back then, developers would have been knocking the door down – always assuming they could find it – and you can imagine what a site this size would be worth today. But survive it did, and by the First World War ownership had passed to the Howard family.

Camera pans round to Guy, standing by the entrance.

GUY HOWARD

Myfamily.

Cut to MONTAGE of home videos showing Guy as a child: on a swing, with a puppy, playing with other children in a paddling pool. Various adults are visible in the background, including Caroline and Andrew Howard.

VOICEOVER – GUY HOWARD

I was born in Dorney Place. So were my older sisters. It was a fabulous place to grow up. The house was a bit of a rabbit warren inside, at least upstairs – loads of staircases and passageways and attics and odd corners where the house had been extended over the years. For a kid like me it seemed like an enchanted castle – there was even a basement we pretended was a dungeon, though it was actually Dad’s wine cellar.

In the summer, when the trees were out, you couldn’t even see any other houses, so it was like we had a secret garden where you could almost forget you were in London at all. The grounds were so big my sisters even had a pony. OK, it was just one of those little Shetland things, but it was still a pony. InLondon. All their friends would come round and take turns riding it. Made them super-popular at school, I can tell you.

IMAGES of the Howards’s wedding with text below ‘Andrew and Caroline Howard’, then various family portraits with the children as babies, toddlers, in school uniform, and as a family.

My parents married in 1987, it was Dad’s second marriage. He was 39, Mum was 24.

CUT TO: Howard family tree

Maura was born a year or so after they married, Amelie in 1990, and me in 1993. We had an older half-brother too, though he was at school most of the time. Eton.

I remember my parents entertaining a lot – there were always people in the house in the evenings. We’d get sent upstairs. The girls used to sneak out sometimes to look, but I just found it all completely boring.

RECONSTRUCTION: Two small girls looking through banisters at a group of adults drinking in a large hall below. ‘Caroline’ animated and laughing at one end of the room, ‘Andrew’ reserved and silent at the other.

The following day the place would stink of smoke, there’d be a stack of empty bottles by the bins, and Mum would ‘have a headache’. I don’t know if she actually enjoyed all that hostessing – most of the people who came weren’t what you’d call ‘friends’. They didn’t really have any friends, at least not any joint friends. Dad would play golf with men who never got invited in, and Mum would go out during the day and tell us she wasseeing her ‘ladies who lunched’. We never saw them at the house either.

The people who came for the dinner parties were business contacts of Dad’s. Bankers, lawyers, finance people. He was ‘something in the City’. At least that’s what Mum used to say whenever it came up. I had no idea what that meant, of course – it was years before I discovered what he was really doing. All I knew, as a child, was that he was hardly ever home, except on weekends, and not always then.

But when he was around he was always prepared to make time for us. Though I obviously didn’t think about it in those terms then. I just remember him playing with me.

CLIP of Guy playing cricket with his father in the Dorney Place garden. Guy bowls to his father and Andrew deliberately skies the ball so Guy can easily catch it. Guy runs around cheering and Andrew sweeps him up and gives him a hug. Caroline and the girls are watching, the girls on a rug and Caroline in a garden chair. Caroline is wearing a large hat that shades her face and has a glass in her hand. She looks distracted.

That’s the summer of 1999. The Millennium Dome had just been opened, Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial had failed, and there was a war in Kosovo. But that’s not how I know it was 1999. It’s because we didn’t have another summer. Not as a family. By that Christmas Dad was dead.

RECONSTRUCTION: B/w FOOTAGE of small boy sitting on a sofa as adults swirl about him. PoV is such that only the bottom half of the adults is visible. Low lighting so the figures cast long shadows.

It was like an asteroid hit – completely out of the blue. Years later Mum told me he’d been ill for a while but no one had ever said anything to us at the time. It actually happened when he’d taken meto Holland Park one weekend, just the two of us. He had a massive heart attack and that was it. At least that’s what they told me later – to be honest, I don’t remember anything about it. I mean I must haveseenit, but I have no memory of it. But I do remember everyone kept asking me if I was OK.

Anyway, after he died the house filled up with people – his sister and her kids who we hardly ever saw. Men in suits we’d never seen at all. And Rupert. Our half-brother. That’s the first real memory I have of him.

CUT TO: Maura Howard, sitting room at Dorney Place. She’s 35 now, slender, well-groomed in a shabby chic sort of way. She’s wearing a pale turquoise shirt, long silver earrings and a matching pendant. She has the confident manner of her class but seems fragile all the same; there are dark circles under her eyes and she fidgets with her necklace as she speaks.

MAURA HOWARD

Rupert would have been 19 then. Still at school, technically, but only because he was ‘doing Oxbridge’—

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