The Sentence is Death Page 6

  ‘He rang you.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Oliver Masefield sighed loudly. Everything he did was just a little bit larger than life. ‘I can’t tell you how bad I feel. He was worried about something. He phoned me for advice. But I wasn’t able to speak to him.’ He grimaced. ‘I was going out with my wife to a concert at the Albert Hall. Mozart’s Requiem. He couldn’t have chosen a worse time to ring me.’

  ‘So what did he say?’

  ‘Not very much. He had already mentioned to me on one or two occasions that he had concerns about a recent hearing.’ Before Hawthorne could interrupt, he continued. ‘The Lockwood divorce. You do understand, gentlemen, that I have a duty to protect client confidentiality, but many of the facts are on public record and anything I’m telling you now you can find out for yourselves.’

  With this established, he began.

  ‘In this instance, our client was Adrian Lockwood, who was seeking a divorce from his wife, Akira Anno, on grounds of unreasonable behaviour. I don’t need to go into details, the more salient of which appeared in the newspapers. We came to an agreement at the Central Family Court and I have to say that it was very much in our client’s favour. This was on Wednesday the sixteenth. You’ll be aware that Ms Anno was put out – to say the least – by the way things had proceeded and happened to see Richard in a restaurant four or five days later. It was The Delaunay in the Aldwych. What followed was a common assault and could have landed her in serious trouble if Richard had chosen to pursue the matter further.’

  ‘She threw wine at him.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘She also threatened him.’

  ‘She swore at him and said words to the effect that she would like to attack him with a bottle. It was a very foolish thing to do but I understand that she is a highly strung woman.’

  ‘You say he had concerns. What were they?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘I never found out exactly because I wasn’t directly involved. But I can tell you that Richard suspected there had been fraudulent disclosure and it concerned him to the extent that he was even prepared to consider a set-aside.’

  ‘It would help if you could speak in English, Mr Masefield.’

  The lawyer’s eyes narrowed and some of his bonhomie departed the room. ‘I think I was doing precisely that, Mr Hawthorne. But I will try to explain it to you in language that a police officer, retired or otherwise, might understand.’

  I smiled at that, then looked away so that Hawthorne wouldn’t see.

  Masefield continued. ‘In the case of a high-income divorce, both sides have to make a full account of their income, their pensions, savings, property … their entire net value. This is all laid out in what we call a Form E. It does sometimes happen that one side may try to conceal some aspect of his or her wealth and were that to be discovered, the agreement – whether it was made inside or outside the court – might well be overturned and effectively both parties would have to begin again.’ He coughed. ‘We call that a set-aside. I know that Richard did have some concerns that Ms Anno might have an income stream which she had failed to declare and he had been in touch with Navigant—’

  ‘Navigant?’

  ‘They are a consultancy in London. They have a first-class team of forensic accountants and we use them quite frequently.’

  ‘And they were investigating Akira Anno?’

  ‘To begin with, yes. But in the end their services were no longer required as Ms Anno, presumably being advised by her own counsel, accepted Mr Lockwood’s terms quite soon after the FDR.’

  ‘What’s an FDR?’ This time I was the one who asked, saving Hawthorne any further confrontation.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s the Financial Dispute Resolution. You have to understand that we do everything we can to dissuade our clients from proceeding all the way to the final hearing. If they can come to an agreement before that, it will save them many thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of pounds. That was the case here. Richard had persuaded Ms Anno’s team that they might as well quit while they were ahead. He had made a reasonable offer and in the end they agreed.’ Masefield clasped his hands together. ‘Clearly she wasn’t entirely happy about it – witness what happened a few days later. But although she might not have believed it, it was almost certainly in her best interests.’

  ‘So this is what I don’t get,’ Hawthorne said. ‘It’s a done deal. Richard Pryce has got the agreement he wanted. His client’s happy—’

  ‘Mr Lockwood was delighted.’

  ‘So what’s he doing calling you on that Sunday when the whole thing’s over?’

  ‘I have no answer to that, I’m afraid.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything at all?’

  I didn’t think Masefield would answer. He clearly didn’t want to, torn between client confidentiality, his own sense of responsibility and, I think, a mild dislike of Hawthorne. But in the end, it was his sense of guilt that persuaded him.

  ‘I should have listened to him!’ he exclaimed. ‘I blame myself – but as I say, I was on my way to a concert and I didn’t want to be late. We spoke briefly and I could tell Richard was upset. He talked about consulting the Law Society ethics hotline. The Law Society is, as it were, our governing body and that would have been a very serious step.’

  ‘It might have led to a set-aside.’

  ‘It might indeed. And what is the point of having a set-aside if your side has already won? I’m not even sure it would have made any difference to the settlement if Ms Anno had been sitting on a vast pile of money, unless of course she had somehow extorted it or defrauded it from her ex-husband and even then it was no real concern of ours.’

  ‘So what did you say to him?’

  ‘Broadly, I said there was no point raking over the coals and that we would talk about it first thing Monday. I wished him a pleasant evening and rang off.’

  Richard Pryce had not had a pleasant evening. And for him, Monday had never come.

  ‘Why was he called the Blunt Razor?’ I asked – as much to fill the silence that had suddenly descended as anything else.

  It made Masefield smile. He nodded at me. ‘That’s a very good question,’ he said. ‘And one that may explain a great deal of what we’ve been discussing. We don’t normally take notice of these epithets but Richard had been involved in one or two high-profile cases and he was described that way by some journalist or other and it stuck. The thing about him is that he was razor-sharp but he was also scrupulously honest. He would be very reluctant to take on a client if he thought they were in any way compromised and he always spoke his mind. That was what upset Ms Anno so much. He wrote to her, as was completely normal and proper in such proceedings, but his language was, I imagine, very blunt.’

  ‘He called a spade a spade,’ Hawthorne said.

  ‘Those aren’t the words I would choose. But yes. He was forthright. And it was completely in character for him to call me over a weekend if there was something that was worrying him.’ He shook his head. ‘I will never forgive myself for not giving him my full attention. Richard and I had worked together for almost twenty years. We met at Clifford Chance before we decided to set up together. Maurice was too upset even to come in today.’

  ‘Maurice?’

  ‘Maurice Turnbull. My other senior partner.’

  For a moment nobody spoke and I was aware how quiet it was in this office. If there was any traffic in Carey Street, the sound was being effectively blocked by the double glazing and although I could see secretaries and paralegals in the area on the other side of the glass partition, they could have been actors in a film with the volume turned down. From my experience, law firms are always quiet places. Maybe it’s because they make words so expensive that they tend to use them sparingly among themselves.

  I thought we had finished and would leave but Hawthorne took me by surprise with his next question. ‘One last thing, Mr Masefield. I don’t suppose you could tell us anything about your colleague’s will?’
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  His will. That had never occurred to me but of course Richard Pryce was a wealthy man. There was the house in Fitzroy Park with its expensive art on the walls, the second home in Clacton-on-Sea, two luxury cars and almost certainly a whole lot more.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I was discussing it with Richard only a few weeks ago. I am his executor so I’m very well acquainted with his last wishes.’

  Hawthorne waited. ‘And what were they?’

  Once again, Masefield was hesitant. He had taken against Hawthorne but at the same time he was smart enough to know that in the end he would have no choice. ‘The bulk of his estate is left to his husband,’ he said. ‘That includes the property in north London and the house in Clacton-on-Sea. He named a number of charities. But the only other large bequest, and I’m referring to a sum of about £100,000, goes to a Mrs Davina Richardson. If you wish to speak to her, my secretary can give you her address.’

  ‘I do wish to speak to her,’ Hawthorne said. There was a gleam in his eyes that I knew well, the awareness of another door opening, another line of enquiry for him to pursue. ‘But maybe you can tell me why he should have been so generous to her.’

  ‘I really don’t see that it’s any of my business.’ Oliver Masefield was much less jovial than he had been when we came in. I’m afraid Hawthorne did have this effect on people. You could say that he was the needle and every witness, every suspect, the balloon. ‘Mrs Richardson is an interior decorator. She and Richard were close friends. He was also godfather to her son. I’ll give you her telephone number.’ He brought it up on his computer screen, then scribbled it down on a sheet of paper and handed it across. ‘Anything more than that, you’ll have to get from her.’

  As we left the office, Hawthorne’s mobile rang. It was Detective Inspector Grunshaw. She was ringing to let him know that Akira Anno had turned up and was ready to talk.

  6

  Her Story

  Akira Anno lived somewhere in Holland Park but we didn’t meet her at her home. Presumably because she didn’t want her privacy invaded, she had chosen to be interviewed at Notting Hill Gate police station, a rather handsome and imposing building that stood at the corner of Ladbroke Grove. It’s been shut down now, part of a brilliant scheme to close half of London’s police stations and reduce uniformed officers on the street that has seen a surge in knife crime and made it impossible to use a mobile phone without the risk of it being snatched by thieves on motorbikes.

  I was puzzled why Detective Inspector Grunshaw had invited us over, given that she had made it clear she viewed the investigation as a competition which she was determined to win.

  ‘She thinks the Anno woman did it,’ Hawthorne explained.

  ‘How does that work?’

  ‘She makes the arrest. She makes me look bad. I was there – but she was one step ahead of me.’

  ‘You don’t like her.’

  ‘Nobody does.’

  We showed our ID and were eventually allowed into the police station. Grunshaw had booked a grim, magnolia-painted interview room on the ground floor. The windows were frosted glass, blanking out any view. There was a table bolted into the floor. No Farrow & Ball here. A collection of health and safety posters on the walls were the only decoration.

  Akira Anno was sitting uncomfortably, poised on the edge of a particularly brutal wooden chair. She was a small woman, quite boyish, not exactly short but somehow unreal, as if she were a scaled-down model of herself. Her eyes were very dark and intense and only partially concealed by her round, mauve-tinted glasses. These were perched on porcelain cheeks and a sharply contoured nose that might have seen the edge of a plastic surgeon’s knife. Her hair was black and too straight, hanging down to her shoulders and framing a face that was old and young at the same time. She gave the impression that she was extremely wise and knowledgeable, partly because she never smiled. She was sulking now. It turned out that she had just driven back from Oxford. She showed no sign of remorse that her ex-husband’s lawyer had been brutally murdered, but she was indignant that anyone should think she had anything to do with it.

  I had already met Akira Anno twice before.

  As I write this, I don’t want to give the impression that I had any animosity towards her or her work. In fact, at the time of Richard Pryce’s death I’d never actually read anything she’d written apart from a couple of poems that had been published in the New Statesman and they hadn’t made a word of sense. The first time I had come across her had been at the Edinburgh Book Festival and then, six months later, I had seen her at a launch party in London. Afterwards, I looked her up on the Virago website. That was the impression she made on me.

  She was born in Tokyo in 1963, an only child. Her father was a banker who was transferred to New York when she was nine and that was where she was brought up. In 1986, she graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts and shortly afterwards published her first novel, A Multitude of Gods, ‘a story of female submission and religious patriarchy set during the Kamakura period in Japan’. It catapulted her to international acclaim and received rave reviews, although the feature film adaptation starring Meryl Streep did less well. Among her other books, the best known were: The Temizu Basin, A Cool Breeze in Hiroshima and My Father Never Knew Me, a semi-autobiographical memoir of her early days in America. She had also published two volumes of poetry, the most recent of which had come out earlier in the year. It was called Two Hundred Haikus and contained exactly that. She had famously said that it could take her several years to write a novel because she treated every word not just as a stitch in a tapestry but as a tapestry in itself. I’m not entirely sure what she meant by that either.

  She married the English cinematographer, Marcus Brandt, who had worked on her film and this was what had brought her to London where she now lived. It was an abusive relationship – described over nine pages in the Sunday Times Magazine and later in a BBC Imagine documentary – and it had come to an end in 2008. There were no children. Two years later, in 2010, much to the surprise of many newspaper pundits, she had married the property developer, Adrian Lockwood.

  At some stage in her life she had embraced Shinto, the traditional religion of Japan, and this was reflected in much of her work, particularly her belief in animism, the idea that inanimate objects contain some sort of spirituality, although as far as I could tell she wasn’t known to visit shrines or, for that matter, to indulge in ritual dance. She also explored the nature of otherness, her own dual ethnicity and the disconnection that came from living in a culture separated from that in which she had been born. I’m quoting here from the flap of one of her books.

  I had been introduced to her in the yurt, the Mongolian-style writers’ tent they put up every year at the Edinburgh Book Festival. It’s not huge but it’s a quiet place to hang out and they serve coffee and snacks all day, with malt whisky in the evening – if they haven’t already packed you off home. I was in Edinburgh to talk about my children’s books. She was doing a poetry recital. I was sitting on my own when she arrived as part of a melee that included her publisher, her agent, her publicist, two journalists, a photographer and the director of the festival. For some reason she was wearing a man’s three-piece suit, complete with bowler hat. Apart from a silver brooch – possibly a letter from the Japanese alphabet – pinned to her shoulder, she could have stepped out of a painting by Magritte.

  There was hardly anyone else in the tent and after Akira had accepted a cup of green tea and refused a rather tired egg and cress sandwich, somebody noticed I was there and introduced me as the author of the Alex Rider series.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  Those were her first two words to me and I will never forget them – nor the handshake that followed. It was utterly indifferent, over in an instant.

  I muttered something about admiring her work, which wasn’t true but was something I felt I ought to say.

  ‘Thank you. It’s very nice to meet you.’ If each word was a tapestry, it had been spun out of razor wire
.

  She was already doing that awful thing of looking over my shoulder to see if there was anyone more interesting in the yurt. When she established that there wasn’t, she turned her back on me to check something with her publicist and a moment later the entire group ebbed away.

  I wasn’t exactly put out although I did think it was strange. The atmosphere at book festivals is nearly always friendly and non-competitive and it’s rare to meet an author who grandstands. I gave Akira the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she was nervous about her session. I’m the same. No matter how often I speak in public, I’m often uneasy before I go onstage and don’t find it easy to make conversation. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think I’m just rude.

  But when I met her a few months later at the book launch, she snubbed me again and this time I was sure it was quite deliberate. She seemed to have no memory of having met me before and the moment she was told (again) that I was a children’s author, she switched off. It really was as if a light had gone out in her eyes. By now she had started affecting those Yoko Ono-style tinted glasses. I thought she was rather ridiculous.

  And here she was again, expensively dressed in a black trouser suit with a pale grey pashmina draped over her shoulders and twisted round one arm. Cara Grunshaw was sitting opposite her and the man I knew only as Darren was standing to one side, either chewing gum or pretending to, still holding his totemic notebook.

  Grunshaw introduced Hawthorne but said nothing about me, which was probably just as well. I wasn’t sure what Akira would have thought of my being there and I very much doubted that she would enjoy ending up in one of my books. This was an informal interview. There was no solicitor, no caution.

  ‘I want to thank you for coming in,’ Grunshaw began, addressing Akira. ‘As you know, Richard Pryce was found dead at his home yesterday morning and we’re hoping you can help us with our enquiries.’

  Akira shrugged. ‘I don’t see why I should be able to help you. I hardly knew Mr Pryce. He represented my ex-husband but we never spoke. I had nothing to say to him. He made his living from the death of love and from the unmaking of people’s dreams. What else is there to say?’