The Sentence is Death Read online

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ I said, as I climbed back inside.

  ‘You don’t seem too pleased.’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I’m quite busy … although you probably didn’t notice that when you drove straight into the middle of the set.’

  ‘I wanted to see you.’ He waited until I had sat down opposite him. ‘How’s the book going?’

  ‘I’ve finished it.’

  ‘I still don’t like the title.’

  ‘I’m still not giving you any choice.’

  ‘All right! All right!’ He looked up at me as if I had somehow, and for no good reason, offended him. He had mud-brown eyes but it was remarkable how they still managed to appear so clear, so completely innocent. ‘I can see you’re in a bad mood today, but you know it’s not my fault you overslept.’

  ‘Who told you I’d overslept?’ I asked, falling into the obvious trap.

  ‘And you still haven’t found your phone.’

  ‘Hawthorne … !’

  ‘You didn’t lose it in the street,’ he went on. ‘I think you’ll find it’s somewhere in your flat. And I’ll give you a word of advice. If Michael Kitchen doesn’t like your script, maybe you should think about hiring another actor. Don’t take it out on me!’

  I stared at him, playing back what he had just said and wondering what evidence he could possibly have for any of it. Michael Kitchen was the star of Foyle’s War and although it was true we’d had a lot of discussion about the new episode, I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone apart from Jill, who knew anyway. And I certainly hadn’t brought up my sleeping patterns or the fact that I had been unable to find my phone when I got up that morning.

  ‘What are you doing here, Hawthorne?’ I demanded. I had never once called him by his first name, not from the day I had met him. I’m not sure anybody did. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘There’s been another murder,’ he said. He stretched out the last word in that odd accent of his. Another murrrr-der. It was almost as if he was relishing it.

  ‘And?’

  He blinked at me. Wasn’t it obvious? ‘I thought you’d want to write about it.’

  If you’ve read The Word is Murder, you’ll know that Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne was first introduced to me as a consultant on a television series I was writing: Injustice. He had once worked for Scotland Yard but that had come to an end following an incident in which a suspect, a man dealing in child pornography, had taken a tumble down a flight of concrete stairs. Hawthorne had been standing right behind him at the time. As a result, he had been fired and since then had been forced to earn a living on his own. He could have gone into security like many ex-detectives but instead he’d turned his talents to helping film and television companies producing dramas about crime and that was how we met. But, as I soon discovered, it turned out that the force hadn’t quite finished with him after all.

  He was called in when the police got what they called a ‘sticker’ – that is, a case which presented obvious difficulties from the start. Most murderers are brutal and unthinking. A husband and wife have an argument. Perhaps they’ve been drinking too much. One of them picks up a hammer and – bang – that’s it. With fingerprints, blood splatter and all the other forensic evidence, the whole thing will be solved within twenty-four hours. And these days, with so much CCTV, it’s hard even to escape a crime scene without leaving a cheerful snapshot of yourself behind.

  Much rarer are the premeditated murders, where the perpetrators actually put a bit of thought into their crimes, and curiously, perhaps because they rely so heavily on technology, modern detectives find these much harder to solve. I remember a clue I put into an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot when I was writing it for ITV. A woman’s glove embroidered with the letter H is left at the crime scene. Modern detectives would be able to tell you where and when it was made, what fabric was used, what size it was and everything it had touched in the last few weeks. But they might not recognise that the H was actually the Russian letter for N and that it had been deliberately dropped to frame somebody else. For these esoteric insights, they needed someone like Hawthorne.

  The trouble was, they didn’t pay him a great deal and after we had finished Injustice he got in touch with me, asking me if I would be interested in writing a book about him. It was a straightforward commercial proposition. My name would go on the cover but we would share the proceeds fifty-fifty. I knew from the start that it was a bad idea. I make up stories; I prefer not to follow them around town. More to the point, I like to be in control of my books. I had no wish to turn myself into a character, and a secondary one at that: the perennial sidekick.

  But somehow he persuaded me and even though, quite literally, it had almost killed me, the first book was now finished, although it had yet to be published. There was a further issue. My new publisher – Selina Walker at Random House – had insisted on a three-book contract and, urged on by my agent, I had agreed. I think it’s the same for every writer, no matter how many books they have sold. A three-book contract represents stability. It means that you can plan your time, knowing exactly what you’re going to be doing. But it also means you’re committed to writing them. No rest for the insecure.

  Hawthorne knew this, of course, so all through the summer I had been waiting for the telephone to ring, at the same time hoping that it wouldn’t. Hawthorne was undoubtedly brilliant. He had solved the first mystery in a way that made it seem child’s play even though I had missed every one of the clues that had been presented to me. But on a personal level I found him extremely trying. He was dark and solitary, refusing to tell me anything about himself even though I was supposed to be his biographer. I found some of his attitudes disconcerting to say the least. He swore all the time, he smoked and he called me ‘Tony’. If I had chosen to pluck a hero from real life, it certainly wouldn’t have been him.

  And here he was, stalking me again just weeks after I had finished writing The Word is Murder. I hadn’t shown it to him yet and he didn’t know what I’d written about him. I had decided to keep it that way for as long as possible.

  ‘So who’s been murdered?’ I asked.

  ‘His name is Richard Pryce.’ Hawthorne stopped as if he expected me to know who he was talking about. I didn’t. ‘He’s a lawyer,’ he went on. ‘A divorce lawyer. He’s been in the papers quite a bit. A lot of his clients have been well known. Celebrities … that sort of thing.’

  As he spoke, I realised that I did know the name after all. There had been something about him on the radio as I was being driven to the set but, half asleep, I hadn’t really listened. Richard Pryce lived in Hampstead, which is somewhere I often go when I’m walking the dog. According to the report, he’d been attacked in his own home, hit with a wine bottle. And there was something else. He’d had a nickname. Was it ‘Steel Magnolia’? No. That was Fiona Shackleton, who had famously represented Sir Paul McCartney in his acrimonious split from Heather Mills. Pryce was known as ‘the Blunt Razor’. I had no idea why.

  ‘Who killed him?’ I asked.

  Hawthorne looked at me sadly. ‘If I knew that, mate, I wouldn’t be here.’

  He was right about one thing. I was overtired. ‘The police want you to look into it?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s right. I got the call this morning. And immediately I thought of you.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you. But what makes it so special?’

  To answer my question, Hawthorne pulled a stack of photographs out of his inside jacket pocket. I steeled myself. I’ve often seen crime-scene images as part of my research and I can never quite get over how shockingly violent they are. It’s the artlessness of them, the fact that everything is presented without any sensitivity. There’s something about the lack of colour too. Blood looks even more horrible when it’s dark black. The dead bodies you see on a television screen are just actors lying on their side. They have almost nothing in common with real corpses.

  The first picture was all right, though. I
t was a posed, portrait shot of Richard Pryce taken while he was still alive and showed a handsome, rather debonair man with an aquiline nose and long, grey hair sweeping back over a high forehead. He was wearing a jersey and half smiling as if he was pleased with himself, and certainly had no inkling that he was about to find himself the subject of a murder investigation. His left hand was folded over his right arm and I noticed a gold band on his fourth finger. So, he was married.

  In the next shots, he was dead. This time his hands were stretched out over his head as he lay on a bare wooden floor, contorted in a way that only a corpse can be. He was surrounded by fragments of glass and a large quantity of liquid that looked too thin to be blood and which would turn out to be blood mixed with wine. The photographs had been taken from the left and from the right and from above, leaving nothing to the imagination. I moved on to the other images: jagged wounds around his neck and throat, staring eyes, claw-like fingers. Death close up. I wondered how Hawthorne had got them so quickly but guessed that he had been sent them electronically and had printed them at home.

  ‘Richard Pryce was struck with a full wine bottle on the forehead and frontal area of the skull,’ Hawthorne explained. It was interesting how quickly he slipped into officialese. ‘Struck’ instead of ‘hit’, for example. And that ‘frontal area’, which could have come straight out of a weather forecaster’s lexicon. ‘There are severe contusions and a spiderweb fracture of the frontal bone, but that wasn’t what killed him. The bottle smashed, which means that some of the energy was dispersed. Pryce fell to the ground and the killer was left holding the jagged glass neck. He used it as a knife, stabbing at the throat.’ He pointed at one of the close-ups. ‘Here and here. The second blow penetrated the subclavian vein and continued into the pleural cavity.’

  ‘He bled to death,’ I said.

  ‘No.’ Hawthorne shook his head. ‘He probably didn’t have time. My guess is he suffered an air embolism in the heart and that would have finished him.’

  There was no pity in his voice. He was just stating the facts.

  I picked up my coffee meaning to take a sip but it was the same colour as the blood in the picture and I put it down again. ‘He was a rich man living in an expensive house. Anyone could have broken in,’ I said. ‘I don’t see what makes this so special.’

  ‘Well, quite a few things, actually,’ Hawthorne replied cheerfully. ‘Pryce had been working on a big case … a £10 million settlement. Not that the lady in question got very much of it. Akira Anno. Ring any bells?’

  For reasons that will become apparent further down the line, I’ve had to change her name, but I knew her well enough. She was a writer of literary fiction and poetry, a regular speaker at all the main festivals. She had been twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and had actually won the Costa Book Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and, most recently, a PEN/Nabokov Award for achievement in international literature, citing ‘her unique voice and the delicacy of her prose’. She wrote – mainly on feminist issues and sexual politics – for the Sunday Times and other broadsheets. She was often on the radio. I had heard her on Moral Maze and Loose Ends.

  ‘She poured a glass of wine over Pryce’s head,’ I said. That story had been all over social media and I remembered it well.

  ‘She did more than that, mate. She threatened to hit him with the bottle. It was in the middle of a crowded restaurant. Lots of people heard her.’

  ‘Then she killed him!’

  Hawthorne shrugged and I knew what he meant. In real life, it would have been obvious. But in the world that Hawthorne inhabited – and which he wanted me to share – an admission of guilt might well mean the exact opposite.

  ‘Does she have an alibi?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s not at home at the moment. No one’s quite sure where she is.’ Hawthorne took out a cigarette and rolled it between his fingers before lighting it. I slid my polystyrene cup towards him. It was still half full of coffee and he could use it as an ashtray.

  ‘So you’ve got a suspect,’ I said. ‘What else is there?’

  ‘I’m trying to tell you! His house was being redecorated and there were a whole lot of paint pots in the hall. Of course, he didn’t go in for ordinary stuff like Dulux or anything like that. He had to have those poncey colours from Farrow & Ball. Eighty quid a tin with names like Vert De Terre, Ivy and Arsenic.’ He spat out the names with evident distaste.

  ‘You made up the Arsenic,’ I said.

  ‘No. I made up the Ivy. The other two are on their list. The paint he had chosen was actually called Green Smoke. And here’s the thing, Tony. After the killer had bludgeoned Mr Pryce and left him bleeding on his posh American oak floor, he picked up a brush and painted a message on the wall: a three-digit number.’

  ‘What three digits?’

  He slid another photograph forward and I saw it for myself.

  ‘One eight two,’ Hawthorne said.

  ‘I don’t suppose you have any idea what that means?’ I asked.

  ‘It could mean lots of things. There’s a 182 bus that runs in north London, although I don’t suppose Mr Pryce was the sort who had much time for public transport. It’s the name of a restaurant in Wembley. It’s an abbreviation used in texting. It’s a type of four-seater aircraft—’

  ‘All right,’ I stopped him. ‘Are you sure it was left by the killer?’

  ‘Well, it might have been the decorators but I doubt it.’

  ‘What else?’

  Hawthorne stopped with the cigarette halfway to his mouth. His dark eyes challenged me. ‘Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  That was true. I was already looking at the murder of Richard Pryce from a writer’s perspective and the awful truth was that, at this stage anyway, I wasn’t sure I cared who had killed him. Akira Anno was obviously the prime suspect – and that was interesting because although I hadn’t ever managed to read any of her books, I was aware of her name. What mattered more, though, was this. If I was going to write a second book about Hawthorne, it would need to run to at least eighty thousand words and I was already wondering if there would be enough material. Akira had threatened him with a bottle. He had been killed with a bottle. She did it. End of story.

  It also troubled me that it was a divorce lawyer who had been killed. I’ve got nothing against lawyers but at the same time I’ve always done my best to avoid them. I don’t understand the law. I’ve never been able to work out how a simple matter – a trademark registration, for example – can end up eating months out of my life and thousands of pounds. Even making my will was a traumatic experience and there was considerably less to leave to my children once the lawyers had finished with me. I had enjoyed writing about Diana Cowper, the blameless mother of a famous actor, but what sort of inspiration would I get from Richard Pryce, a man who made his living out of other people’s misery?

  ‘There is one other thing,’ Hawthorne muttered. He had been watching me closely as if he could see into my thoughts – which, as he had already demonstrated, he actually could.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The bottle of wine. It was a 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild, Pauillac.’ Hawthorne spoke the foreign words as if each one was an insult. ‘Do you know anything about wine?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither. But I’m told this one would have cost at least two thousand quid.’

  ‘So Richard Pryce had expensive tastes.’

  Hawthorne shook his head. ‘No. He was a teetotaller. He never drank alcohol at all.’

  I thought for a moment. A very public threat from a well-known feminist writer. A mysterious message in green paint. An incredibly expensive bottle of wine. I could just about see all that on the inside flap. And yet …

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I am quite busy at the moment.’

  His face fell. ‘What’s the matter with you, mate? I thought you’d be jumping at this one.’

  ‘Can
you give me time to think about it?’

  ‘I’m heading over there now.’

  I let that hang in the air for a moment.

  ‘I was just wondering,’ I muttered, almost to myself. ‘All that stuff you just said. About Michael Kitchen – and my phone. How did you know?’

  He saw which way I was going. ‘That was nothing.’

  ‘I’m just interested.’ I paused. ‘If there’s going to be another book …’

  ‘All right, mate. But it couldn’t be simpler.’ I wasn’t moving and he knew it. ‘You got dressed in a hurry. The second button of your shirt is tucked into the third buttonhole, which is sort of classic, really. When you shaved this morning, you left a bit of hair under your nose. I can see it right there, next to your nostril, and it doesn’t look very nice, to be honest with you. You’ve also got a smudge of toothpaste on your sleeve, meaning you got dressed before you went into the bathroom. So you woke up, jumped out of bed and got dressed straight away, which sounds to me like your alarm didn’t go off.’

  ‘I don’t have an alarm.’

  ‘But you’ve got an iPhone and you might have set it if you had an important meeting – like a set visit – but for some reason you didn’t use it.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean the phone is lost.’

  ‘Well, I rang you twice to tell you I was coming today but there was no answer. Also, if you had your phone, your driver would have been able to ring you to say he was on his way or he was waiting outside and you wouldn’t have been in such a panic. Nobody else answered it, by the way, although it didn’t go straight to voice message so that means it’s still turned on. The chances are it’s on silent and you’ll find it somewhere at home.’

  Hawthorne hadn’t been on the set when I arrived. He couldn’t possibly have known how I’d got there. ‘What makes you think I had a driver?’ I demanded. ‘I could have just taken the Tube.’

  ‘You’re a big-shot writer on Foyle’s War. Of course they’d send someone. Anyway, it was pissing down this morning until just an hour ago, but you’re bone dry. Look at your shoes! You haven’t walked anywhere today.’