The Word Is Murder Read online

  So when my mobile rang and I didn’t recognise the number, I wondered if it might be one of them – not, of course, that they would call me personally. An assistant would check it was me and then pass me across. It was about ten o’clock in the morning and I was sitting in my office on the top floor of my flat, reading The Meaning of Treason, by Rebecca West, a classic study of life in Britain after the Second World War. I was beginning to think that this might be the right direction for Foyle. Cold War. I would throw him into the world of spies, traitors, communists, atomic scientists. I closed the book and picked up my mobile.

  ‘Tony?’ a voice asked.

  It certainly wasn’t Spielberg. Very few people call me Tony. To be honest, I don’t like it. I’ve always been Anthony or, to some of my friends, Ant.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘How are you doing, mate? This is Hawthorne.’

  In fact, I’d known who he was before he’d spoken his name. There could be no mistaking those flat vowels, that strangely misplaced accent, part cockney, part northern. Or the word ‘mate’.

  ‘Mr Hawthorne,’ I said. He had been introduced to me as Daniel but from the very first I had felt uncomfortable using his first name. He never used it himself … in fact I never heard anyone else use it either. ‘It’s nice to hear from you.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah.’ He sounded impatient. ‘Look – you got a minute?’

  ‘I’m sorry? What’s this about?’

  ‘I was wondering if we could meet. What are you doing this afternoon?’

  That, incidentally, was typical of him. He had a sort of myopia whereby the world would arrange itself to his vision of how things should be. He wasn’t asking if I could meet him tomorrow or next week. It had to be immediately, according to his needs. As I’ve explained, I wasn’t doing anything very much that afternoon but I wasn’t going to tell him that. ‘Well, I’m not sure …’ I began.

  ‘How about three o’clock at that café where we used to go?’

  ‘J&A?’

  ‘That’s the one. There’s something I need to ask you. I really would appreciate it.’

  J&A was in Clerkenwell, a ten-minute walk from where I lived. If he had wanted me to cross London I might have hesitated, but the truth is I was intrigued. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Three o’clock.’

  ‘That’s great, mate. I’ll see you there.’

  He rang off. The Tintin script was still on the computer screen in front of me. I closed it down and thought about Hawthorne.

  I’d first met him the year before when I was working on a five-part television series which was due to be screened in a few months’ time. It was called Injustice, a legal drama, starring James Purefoy.

  Injustice was inspired by one of those perennial questions screenwriters sometimes ask themselves when they’re casting around for a new idea. How can a barrister defend someone when they know they’re guilty? The short answer, incidentally, is that they can’t. If the client confesses to the crime before the trial, the barrister will refuse to represent him … there has to be at least a presumption of innocence. So I came up with a story about an animal rights activist who gleefully confesses to the murder of a child shortly after his barrister – William Travers (Purefoy) – has managed to get him acquitted. As a result, Travers suffers a nervous breakdown and moves to Suffolk. Then, one day, waiting for a train at Ipswich station he happens to see the activist again. A few days later, the activist is himself killed and the question is: was Travers responsible?

  The story boiled down to a duel between the barrister and the detective inspector who was investigating him. Travers was a dark character, damaged and quite possibly dangerous, but he was still the hero and the audience had to root for him. So I deliberately set out to create a detective who would be as unpleasant as possible. The audience would find him menacing, borderline racist, chippy and aggressive. I based him on Hawthorne.

  To be fair, Hawthorne was none of those things. Well, he wasn’t racist, anyway. He was, however, extremely annoying to the extent that I used to dread my meetings with him. He and I were complete opposites. I just couldn’t make out where he was coming from.

  He had been found for me by the production supervisor working on the series. I was told that he’d been a detective inspector with the Metropolitan Police Service in London, working out of the sub-command in Putney. He was a murder specialist with ten years on the force which had come to an abrupt end when he had been kicked out for reasons that weren’t made clear. There are a surprising number of ex-policemen helping production companies make police dramas. They provide the little details that make the story ring true and, to be fair, Hawthorne was very good at the job. He had an instinctive understanding of what I needed and what would work on-screen. I remember one example. In an early scene, when my (fictitious) detective is examining a week-old corpse, the crime scene examiner hands him a tub of Vicks VapoRub to smear under his nose. The mentholatum covers the smell. It was Hawthorne who told me that, and if you watch the scene you’ll see how that moment somehow makes it come alive.

  The first time I saw him was at the production office of Eleventh Hour Films, which was the company making the series. Once we got started, I’d be able to contact him at any time of the day to throw questions at him and would then weave the answers into the script. All of this could be done over the telephone. This meeting was really just a formality, to introduce us. When I arrived he was already sitting in the reception area with one leg crossed over the other and his coat folded over his lap. I knew at once that he was the person I had come to meet.

  He wasn’t a large man. He didn’t look particularly threatening. But even that single movement, the way he got to his feet, gave me pause for thought. He had the same silken quality as a panther or a leopard, and there was a strange malevolence in his eyes – they were a soft brown – that seemed to challenge, even to threaten, me. He was about forty years old with hair of an indeterminate colour that was cut very short around the ears and was just beginning to turn grey. He was clean-shaven. His skin was pale. I got the feeling that he might have been very handsome as a child but something had happened to him at some time in his life so that, although he still wasn’t ugly, he was curiously unattractive. It was as if he had become a bad photograph of himself. He was smartly dressed in a suit, white shirt and tie, the raincoat now held over his arm. He looked at me with almost exaggerated interest, as if I had somehow surprised him. Even as I came in, I got the feeling that he was emptying me out.

  ‘Hello, Anthony,’ he said. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  How did he even know who I was? There were lots of people coming in and out of the office and nobody had announced me. Nor had I told him my name.

  ‘I’m a great admirer of your work,’ he said, in a way that told me he’d never read anything I’d written and that actually he didn’t care if I knew it.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve been hearing about this programme you want to make. It sounds really interesting.’ Was he deliberately being sarcastic? He managed to look bored even as he spoke the words.

  I smiled. ‘I’m looking forward to working with you.’

  ‘It’ll be fun,’ he said.

  But it never was.

  We spoke on the phone quite often but we also had about half a dozen meetings, mainly at the office or in the courtyard outside J&A (he smoked all the time, sometimes roll-ups but if not, cheap brands like Lambert & Butler or Richmond). I had heard that Hawthorne lived in Essex but I had no idea where. He never talked about himself or his time in the police force and certainly not how it had ended. The production supervisor who had contacted him in the first place told me that he had worked on a number of high-profile murder investigations and had quite a reputation but I couldn’t find anything about him on Google. He clearly had a remarkable mind. Although he made it clear that he was no writer himself and showed no interest at all in the series that I was trying to create, he always came up with exactly the right scenarios b
efore I even asked for them. There’s another example of his work in the opening scenes. William Travers is defending a black kid who has been framed by the police for the theft of a medal which, they claim, they found in the boy’s jacket. But the medal had recently been cleaned and, when the boy’s pockets are examined, there are no traces of sulphamic acid or ammonia – the most common ingredients in silver polish – proving that it couldn’t have been there. All of that was his idea.

  I can’t deny that he helped me, and yet I slightly dreaded meeting him. He always got straight down to business with almost no small talk. You’d have thought he would have an opinion about something – the weather, the government, the earthquake in Fukushima, the marriage of Prince William. But he never talked about anything except the matter in hand. He drank coffee (black, two sugars) and he smoked but never ate when he was with me, not so much as a biscuit. And he always wore exactly the same clothes. Quite honestly, I could have been looking at the same photograph of him every time he came in. He was as unchanging as that.

  And yet here’s the funny thing. He seemed to know an awful lot about me. I’d been out drinking the night before. My assistant was ill. I’d spent the whole weekend writing. I didn’t need to tell him these things. He told me! I used to wonder if he’d been talking to someone in the office but the information he came up with was completely random and seemed spontaneous. I never quite worked him out.

  The biggest mistake I made was to show him the second draft of the script. I usually write about a dozen drafts before an episode is filmed. I get notes from the producer, from the broadcaster (ITV in this case), from my agent – and later on from the director and the star. It’s a collaborative process although one that can sometimes leave me overwhelmed. Won’t the bloody thing ever be right? But it works so long as I feel that the project is moving forward, that each draft is better than the one before. There has to be a certain amount of give and take and there’s some comfort in the fact that, at the end of the day, everyone involved is trying to make the script more effective.

  Hawthorne didn’t understand this. He was like a brick wall and once he’d decided that something was wrong, nothing was going to get past him. There was a scene I’d written where my detective meets his senior officer, a chief superintendent. This is shortly after the dead body of the animal rights activist has been found in a remote farmhouse. The CS invites him to sit down and the detective replies, ‘I’ll stand if you don’t mind, sir.’ It was a tiny point. I was just trying to show that my character was a man who had problems with authority, but Hawthorne wouldn’t have any of it.

  ‘That wouldn’t happen,’ he said, flatly. We were sitting outside a Starbucks – I forget exactly where – with the script on a table between us. As usual, he was wearing a suit and tie. He was smoking his last cigarette, using the empty packet as an ashtray.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because if your governor tells you to sit down, you sit down.’

  ‘He does sit down.’

  ‘Yeah. But he argues about it first. What’s the fucking point? He just makes himself look stupid.’

  Hawthorne swore all the time, by the way. If I was going to replicate his language exactly, I’d be writing the f-word every other line.

  I tried to explain. ‘The actors will understand what I’m trying to get at,’ I said. ‘It’s just a detail. It introduces the scene but it’s a key to how the two men relate to each other.’

  ‘But it’s not true, Tony. It’s a load of cobblers.’

  I tried to explain to him that there are many different sorts of truth and that television truth might have very little connection with real life. I argued that our understanding of policemen, doctors, nurses … even criminals is largely inspired by what we see on the screen, not the other way round. But Hawthorne had made up his mind. He had helped me with the script but now that he was reading it he didn’t believe it and so he didn’t like it. We argued about everything, every scene which involved the police. All he saw was the paperwork, the uniforms, the anglepoise lamps. He couldn’t find his way to the story.

  I was quite relieved when all five scripts were written and handed in and I no longer had to deal with him. When there were further queries I got the production office to email him. We shot the series in Suffolk and in London. The part of the detective was played by a brilliant actor, Charlie Creed-Miles, and the funny thing was that, physically, he was remarkably similar to Hawthorne. But it didn’t end there. Hawthorne had got under my skin and, quite deliberately, I’d put a lot of his darker side into the character. I’d also given him a very similar name. From Daniel to Mark: one biblical character to another. And Wenborn instead of Hawthorne. This is something I often do. When I killed him off at the end of Episode Four, it made me smile.

  I was curious to know what he wanted but at the same time I had a vague sense of misgiving as I strolled down to the café that afternoon. Hawthorne did not belong to my world and frankly I had no need for him just then. On the other hand, I hadn’t had lunch and, as it happens, J&A serve the best cakes in London. They’re in a little alleyway, just off the Clerkenwell Road, and because they’re tucked away they’re usually not too busy. Hawthorne was waiting for me outside, sitting at a table with a coffee and a cigarette. He was wearing exactly the same clothes as the last time I’d seen him: the same suit, tie and raincoat. He looked up as I arrived, and nodded – which was about all I was going to get by way of a greeting.

  ‘How’s the programme?’ he asked.

  ‘You should have come to the cast and crew screening,’ I said. We’d taken over a hotel in London and shown the first two episodes. Hawthorne had been invited.

  ‘I was busy,’ he replied.

  A waitress came out and I ordered tea and a slice of Victoria sponge. I know I shouldn’t eat stuff like that but you try spending eight hours a day on your own. I used to smoke between chapters but gave up thirty years ago. Cake’s probably just as bad.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Can’t complain.’ He glanced at me. ‘You been in the country?’

  As it happened, I’d got back from Suffolk that very morning. My wife and I had just been there for a couple of days. ‘Yes,’ I said, warily.

  ‘And you got a new puppy!’

  I looked at him curiously. This was absolutely typical of him. I hadn’t told anyone that I’d been out of London. I certainly hadn’t tweeted about it. As for the puppy, it belonged to our neighbours. We’d been looking after it while they were away. ‘How do you know all that?’ I asked.

  ‘It was just an educated guess.’ He waved my question aside. ‘I was hoping you could help me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I want you to write about me.’

  Every time I met him, Hawthorne had a way of surprising me. You know where you are with most people. You form a relationship, you get to know them, and after that the rules are more or less set. But it was never like that with him. He had this strange, mercurial quality. Just when I thought I knew where we were going, he would somehow prove me wrong.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I want you to write a book about me.’

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘For money.’

  ‘You want to pay me?’

  ‘No. I thought we’d go fifty-fifty.’

  A couple of people came and sat down at the table next to us. I used the moment, as they made their way past, to work out what to say. I was nervous about turning Hawthorne down. That said, I already knew – I’d known instantly – that was exactly what I was going to do.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘What sort of book are you talking about?’

  Hawthorne gazed at me with those muddy, choirboy eyes. ‘Let me explain it to you,’ he said, as if it were perfectly obvious. ‘You know I do a bit of work here and there for TV, that sort of stuff. You probably heard that I got kicked out of the Met. Well, that’s their loss – and I don’t want t
o go into all that. The thing is, I do a bit of consultancy too. For the police. It’s unofficial. They use me when something unusual happens. Most cases are pretty straightforward but sometimes they aren’t. When something’s outside their everyday experience, that’s when they come to me.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I found it hard to believe.

  ‘That’s how it is with the modern police these days. They’ve made so many cutbacks, there’s no-one left to do the job. You’ve heard of Group 4 and Serco? They’re a bunch of tossers but they’re in and out all the time. They’ve sent in investigators that couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag. And that’s not all. We used to have a big laboratory down at Lambeth – we’d send down blood samples and stuff like that – but they sold it off and now they use private companies. Takes twice as long and costs twice as much but that doesn’t seem to bother them. Same with me. I’m an external resource.’

  He paused as if to be sure that I was following him. I nodded. He lit a cigarette and went on.

  ‘I do well enough out of it. I get a daily rate plus expenses and all that. But the thing is, you see – and to be honest, I don’t like to mention this – I’m a bit short. There just aren’t enough people getting murdered. And when I met you on that TV show of yours and heard that you write books, I had this idea that actually we could help each other. Fifty-fifty. I get sent some really interesting stuff. You can write about me.’

  ‘But I hardly know you,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll get to know me. I’ve got a case on at the moment, as a matter of fact. It’s early days but I think it could be right up your street.’

  The waitress arrived with my cake and tea but now I wished I hadn’t ordered them. I just wanted to get home.