Page 13 of Murder in the Family

GUY HOWARD – off

For our American viewers, that’s sitting the entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge, so staying on an extra term.

MAURA HOWARD

Right. Anyway, he was still way out of our league and patronizing the arse off us, for no other reason than because he could. Not that I realized that at the time. I just thought he was ‘sophisticated’. Mum only ever used that word about people she approved of.

(laughs)

But maybe it was just the tie.

I do remember envying Rup – that he was going to university and not having to live at home and get told what to do all the time. He’d passed that magic line that separates kids from grown-ups.

(takes a breath)

And of course he was a pall-bearer. For Dad. Son and heir, and all that.

(looks directly at Guy then turns away)

CUT TO: Guy, same room, different angle.

GUY HOWARD

No one really explained to us about the funeral. I remember there was a huge row the day before between Mum and Dad’s sister, Alice. I found out later that Alice didn’t think we should go. That we were too young. And looking back, she was right.

The girls were 11 and 9, but I was only 6. Old enough to know something really bad had happened but way too young to process it properly. All those people in black, that weird car they took him away in, the hole in the ground. It was like one of my kids’ books come to life.The Hobbitor something. But not in a good way.

I don’t remember Rupert talking to me much. I didn’t expect him to – I might have been miserable and lost and confused, but I was just a kid. I didn’t matter. Why would he bother with me?

It was only years later that I realized he knew exactly what I was going through, because it had happened to him. He was the same age as me when his mother died. And that happened out of the blue, too, just like Dad. And yet he never talked to me about it. I was his brother, but he never sat me down and asked if I was OK, never even gave me a hug.

(looks down)

CUT TO: Maura.

MAURA HOWARD

Things went to shit a bit after that. The house emptied out until there was only us. Us and Mum. She’d have ‘meetings’ with some of the suits, and she still went out to her lunches. But there were no more parties.

She smoked a lot, had more of her ‘headaches’. The staff looked after us. The housekeeper – I can’t remember her name, she left soon after – and the woman who came to clean and do the laundry. Mum hated doing that so she always got someone in. Beatriz, that was her name. We liked her. I guess she spoiled us a bit. Especially Guy.

And then, of course, there was Rup. One way or another we started seeing alotof Rup.

CUT TO: MONTAGE: Rupert Howard as a child – at Dorney Place, with his parents, at Eton, as a young man at Cambridge.

VOICEOVER – narrator

Rupert Howard was born in 1980, Andrew’s only child with his first wife, Amanda. He was barely 6 when his mother died in a car crash. There were rumours she’d been drinking, but the official verdict was an accident caused by icy roads.

Caroline had been the Howards’s au pair, and there was quite a scandal when Andrew Howard married her within weeks of his wife’s death.

CUT TO: IMAGE of diary page of the Daily Mail.

VOICEOVER – narrator

Many people – perhaps unsurprisingly – concluded that Andrew must have been having an affair with Caroline long before Amanda died, something he always denied.

Some even suggested that the car accident may not have been an ‘accident’ at all. Not that they said so in public, of course. That’s not how things are done in London W8.

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