The Sentence is Death Page 7

  She had a strange accent, largely American but with a slight Japanese inflexion. Her voice was soft and completely emotionless. She sounded bored.

  ‘You threatened him.’

  ‘No. I did not.’

  ‘With respect, Ms Anno, we have several witnesses who were present at The Delaunay restaurant on the twenty-first of October. You had been having dinner there. As you left the restaurant, you saw Mr Pryce, who was sitting with his husband. You threw a glass of wine at him.’

  ‘I poured it over his head. He deserved it.’

  ‘You called him a pig and you threatened to hit him with a bottle.’

  ‘It was a joke!’ There was an extraordinary malevolence in the four words, as if Grunshaw was deliberately overlooking something that was painfully obvious to everyone else. ‘I poured maybe two, three inches of wine and I said he was lucky he hadn’t ordered a bottle or I’d have used that. My meaning was quite clear. It was that I would have poured more of the wine over him. Not that I would have used the bottle to injure him.’

  ‘Given the way he died, it was still an unfortunate choice of words.’

  She considered. I could see her replaying and analysing the scene at the restaurant as if she was going to turn it into a short story. Or a haiku. It was all there in those deep black eyes. She arrived at a conclusion. ‘I don’t regret anything that I said. I told you. It was a joke.’

  ‘Not a very funny one.’

  ‘I don’t think a joke has to be funny, Detective Inspector. In my books, I use humour only to subvert the status quo. If you’ve ever read the French philosopher Alain Badiou, you’ll know that he defines jokes as a type of rupture that opens up truths. I actually met him at the Sorbonne, by the way. He was a remarkable man. By ridiculing my enemy, I defeat him. That was the insight that Alain gave me and although I see no need to justify myself, that was precisely the mechanism I was using at The Delaunay.’

  I could imagine Akira Anno and Alain Badiou together, talking into the small hours. I’m sure it would have been a barrel of laughs.

  ‘Who had you been having dinner with, Ms Anno?’

  ‘A friend of mine.’

  ‘It might be helpful if you gave us his name.’

  ‘It might be preferable not to. Anyway, it wasn’t a man. It was a woman.’

  DI Grunshaw took a breath. Next to her, Darren was scribbling away, his pen scratching at the paper. They weren’t used to being spoken to in this way. ‘If your dinner companion overheard the comments you made and if they were intended as a joke, then we might ask her for a statement and that might actually be helpful to you.’

  ‘All right.’ Akira shrugged. ‘It was a publisher. Dawn Adams.’

  ‘Is she your publisher?’

  ‘No. She’s just a friend.’

  Darren added the name to his notebook and underlined it. I wondered why Akira had been so reluctant to provide such an irrelevant piece of information.

  ‘Where were you last weekend, Ms Anno?’

  ‘I was in a cottage near Lyndhurst. It belongs to another friend of mine. My yoga teacher.’

  ‘And he will confirm this?’

  ‘If someone hasn’t murdered him with a wine bottle, I expect so.’

  There she was, subverting the status quo again.

  ‘Was anyone with you in Lyndhurst?’ Hawthorne cut in.

  ‘Near Lyndhurst.’ Akira underlined the word with her voice. ‘The cottage is actually very remote and I was alone.’

  ‘What time did you leave?’ Hawthorne again. I could tell that he didn’t believe her story.

  ‘I left on Monday morning at about half past seven. I stopped for a coffee near Fleet but after that I went straight home. I showered and changed and then I went out again. I was giving a lecture at Oxford University and I stayed there overnight. I came back to London this morning and was told that the police had been looking for me and wanted to see me.’ She levelled her eyes at Grunshaw. ‘In all truth, I don’t think I was so difficult to find. I hope you have more success with whoever committed the crime.’

  ‘Where did you have the coffee?’ Darren asked.

  She almost yawned. ‘It was a Welcome Break service station and it was busy. I’m sure quite a few people will have seen me. You can ask.’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘What did you have against Richard Pryce?’ Hawthorne cut in. Akira threw a contemptuous glance in his direction but before she could answer, he went on. ‘You said just now that you hardly knew him and you never spoke. He represented your husband and from what I hear your husband came away from his divorce with a big smile on his face. Did you blame Pryce for that? He could have done you for assault in that restaurant. Why did you attack him?’

  She rearranged the pashmina before she answered, wrapping it more tightly around herself. ‘Richard Pryce was a liar,’ she said. ‘He represented my ex-husband and deliberately lied and intimidated me to protect him.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Hawthorne looked genuinely sympathetic and sounded so interested that even Akira was taken by surprise. That was another of his tricks. He had a way of getting people to tell him perhaps more than they intended.

  ‘I will tell you,’ she said. ‘I don’t care if you know because it’s behind me now. I look on my divorce as a cleansing process. The water runs foul only when you step into the shower.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  She composed herself. ‘I never married Adrian Lockwood. I married the image, the smiling Cheshire cat, that I made of him. That’s the truth even if it took me three years to see it. My first marriage was a degradation. Marcus, my first husband, was a professional narcissist, and I never knew where I was with him, in every sense. Moving with him to London took me not just from my place of birth, Tokyo, but from my home, New York. It was like falling through concentric circles, disappearing down a spiral that increasingly alienated me. In the end, there was only Marcus and he knew it. It was what gave him his power over me. He made my life miserable and when I found the strength to leave him, I had nothing.’

  ‘You had your books,’ I suggested, surprising myself. I hadn’t intended to speak.

  ‘The writer is only the shadow on the page. Yes. My books were appreciated all over the world, translated into forty-seven languages. I received many awards. I am sure you are familiar with my work.’

  ‘Well, actually—’

  ‘But I was nothing.’ She brought her fist crashing down on the table but it was so small, her fingers so slender, that it made almost no sound. ‘I had no inner life in myself, no confidence.

  ‘And then, at a party, I met Adrian. A property developer! It would be hard to imagine any occupation more alien to my sensibilities. I did not find him attractive and yet I will admit that I was attracted to him. He was so loud and cheerful. And rich. Yes. He had houses all over the world, beautiful cars, a yacht in the Camargue. He never read, of course. He had no interest in literature. He went to the theatre and to the opera when he was taken there by his corporate friends, but he didn’t care what he was seeing. It meant nothing to him.

  ‘He provided me with a safe space in which I was able to rebuild my confidence, to discover something of my inner self. I found his very ignorance a solace. He looked up to me, of course. He admired me. Perhaps, in his own way, he loved me. But his love was never more than skin-deep.’ She swept a hand through her hair. ‘I could live with that.’

  ‘So what went wrong?’ Hawthorne asked.

  She shrugged. ‘I got bored. I found it increasingly difficult to reconcile my life as a serious writer, critic and performance poet with my role as his wife. Also, he was having affairs. He had nothing interesting to say. All he ever talked about was his business! He was a brute.’ She shuddered. ‘He had a foul temper and he could be violent. He made demands of my body which made me feel sick.’

  ‘But it wasn’t your husband you attacked in a restaurant, Ms Anno,’ Grunshaw reminded her. ‘It was his solicitor.’

  �
��I already told you. Richard Pryce lied.’ She closed her eyes. Her hair was hanging loose, her hands palms up on the table. For that brief moment, she could have been in one of her yoga classes. ‘First, there was the question of the settlement. I was not acquisitive. I was not unreasonable. I can live without money. My currency is invested in the words that I write. I asked only for enough to support my lifestyle, my two houses, my travel and other expenses. I was fully prepared to go to court to fight for what was rightfully mine.

  ‘Mr Pryce characterised me in a way that made that impossible. He belittled me. He made it seem that I had brought nothing to the marriage but had used Adrian as some sort of emotional crutch. I was not the one who was disabled! Yes, I will admit that he had filled a need, but I brought much into his life that had not been there before and he drank deep from the fountainhead that I provided. I was not a parasite!’ These last words were spoken with a blaze of anger. ‘My lawyers were concerned that I was unlikely to be viewed sympathetically if I insisted on a hearing and I needed little persuasion. The law has always been fundamental in the suppression of women. Why should I think it would treat me any differently?’

  She fell silent, but DI Grunshaw hadn’t finished yet. ‘Were you aware that Richard Pryce had investigated you?’ she asked. I was surprised she knew that. She must have spoken to Oliver Masefield.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you quite sure?’

  ‘I was advised that he might be interested in my royalties and other earnings, but I didn’t care. I had nothing to hide.’

  Grunshaw glanced at Hawthorne, who briefly shook his head. There was nothing more he wanted to ask. ‘We may need to speak to you again, Ms Anno,’ she said. ‘Do you have any plans to leave London?’

  ‘I’m at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival next week.’

  ‘But you’re not leaving the country?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then we’ll be in touch with you soon.’

  It might have ended there but suddenly I noticed that Akira Anno was staring at me. I turned away, trying to make myself invisible, but it was already too late. I actually saw the moment when she remembered who I was.

  ‘I know you!’ she exclaimed. ‘We’ve met before.’

  I said nothing. I was extremely uncomfortable but neither Hawthorne nor Grunshaw chose to help me out.

  ‘You’re a writer!’ She was not using the word as a compliment. She stood up, her hands resting on the table, balled into fists. ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded. Her accent, which had been Japanese American, now veered further towards Japanese.

  ‘Well …’ I began, still hoping Hawthorne would step in.

  ‘Why is he here?’ She turned vengefully on DI Grunshaw.

  Grunshaw shrugged. ‘I didn’t invite him. He’s writing a book.’

  ‘A book about me? He’s putting me in his book? I don’t want to be in his fucking book! I want my lawyer in this room. If he puts me in his book, I’ll fucking sue him.’

  ‘I think you’d better go,’ Grunshaw said to me.

  ‘This is a fucking outrage! I don’t give him permission. Do you hear me? If he writes about me, I’ll kill him!’

  She was screaming, her voice not exactly loud but high-pitched, her entire body shaking as Hawthorne and I excused ourselves and hurried out as quickly as we could. I had never seen anyone so angry and at that moment it was easy to imagine her picking up the bottle of wine, smashing it over Richard Pryce’s head and then using the jagged end to make mincemeat of his neck.

  If there had been another bottle handy, I had no doubt at all, she would have done the same to me.

  7

  His Story

  ‘I should never have married her!’ Adrian Lockwood threw his head back and roared with laughter. ‘It was one of my biggest mistakes, and God knows, I’ve made plenty of those. Mind you, she was a very sexy little piece … bloody attractive and the toast of the town. Everyone was talking about her. It was only when we got back from the honeymoon that I discovered she was totally self-obsessed and boring! Actually, I think I may have spotted it on the plane out now I come to think of it. I was on my third G and T before we were at the end of the runway – and I needed it.

  ‘I really should have seen her for what she was from the start, but, you see, she was an intellectual. I never went to university myself and I’ve always had a respect for people who are good with words. But with her … well, there was no stopping her. It was all words, words, words, and I’m not just talking about her writing habits, although God knows she would lock herself away for hours at a time even when she was writing those bloody poems of hers. They only had three lines but I’d hear her pounding away at the computer from dawn to dusk.’

  ‘Did you take an interest in her work?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘I’m not sure “interest” is the word I’d use. I read one of her novels but I’m more of a John Grisham fan myself and I couldn’t really see the point of it. She gave me a copy of that haiku book of hers but by then things were already going off the rails. She signed it for me so maybe I can get a couple of quid for it on eBay. I’ve certainly got no other use for the bloody thing.’

  Adrian Lockwood was the sort of man who was hard to dislike although he was doing everything he could to help us on our way. Lying back on the sofa with one denim-covered leg crossed over the other, a shining, black leather Chelsea boot dangling in front of us and his arms spread over the cushions, he looked every inch the shark he undoubtedly was. He had mean eyes that lurked behind sunglasses similar to those of his ex-wife, although in his case they were Porsche or Jaguar: racing-car chic. His black hair was tied back in a ponytail which didn’t suit him at all – he was well into his fifties – and he had a deep tan that must have come from his yacht in the Camargue. As well as designer jeans, he was wearing a dark blue velvet jacket that showed just a few flecks of dandruff on the shoulders, and a soft white shirt, open at the neck.

  We had met him that same afternoon at his home in Edwardes Square, a twenty-minute walk from the police station through Holland Park. It was one of a terrace of houses that were not just similar but seemed to have been purposely designed to have no variations – the same proportions, the same arched doorways, the same black railings and, almost certainly, the same class of multimillionaire owners. We could tell which one was his from the car that was parked outside: a silver Lexus sedan with the registration number RJL 1.

  Lockwood was on his own although the house showed signs of a cleaner and maybe even a housekeeper too, with expensive flower arrangements in vases, rigorously hoovered carpets and not a spot of dust to be seen. He had met us at the door, taking Hawthorne’s coat and hanging it on an art deco coat stand with a skull-handled umbrella – Alexander McQueen no less – poking out beneath. From there we had gone past an office and a home cinema and up to the first floor, which consisted of a single large space stretching the entire length of the building and offering views onto the square with its communal garden at the front and the smaller, very ornate, private garden behind.

  This was the main living area, with an open-plan kitchen attached. A burst of October sunlight had flooded in, illuminating a thick, oyster-pink carpet, solid, quite traditional furniture, heavy, drooping curtains and a scattering of books on shelves. These included Two Hundred Haikus by Akira Anno, the book he had mentioned. A marble counter separated the kitchen from the rest of the room. The units could have come from one of those companies that manage to put three zeros on even a pedal bin and looked as if they had never been used.

  ‘This was your second marriage,’ Hawthorne said. He wasn’t impressed by the house or its owner. He was perched on the edge of the sofa, facing Lockwood, his hands clenched below his knees and his whole body tense, as if about to pounce.

  ‘That’s right.’ He was sober for a moment. ‘As I’m sure you know perfectly well, my first marriage came to a very unhappy end.’

  Lockwood’s first wife had been Stephanie Brook, a Coronati
on Street actress who had reached the finals of Strictly Come Dancing. She had died of a drug overdose while she was on his yacht in Barbados and the tabloid press had been full of gossip about suicide – something he had always denied. I had looked at the stories on my phone before I had got here. Stephanie had been, according to one headline, ‘big, blonde and bubbly’. The opposite of Akira.

  ‘How did you meet your second wife?’ Hawthorne continued.

  ‘At Ronnie Scott’s. Someone introduced us.’

  ‘And you were married … ?’

  ‘On the eighteenth of February 2010, three days after my birthday, as it happened. That was the last happy birthday I was going to have for a while! Westminster registry office and then lunch at the Dorchester for two hundred people. It’s lucky I stipulated no presents or I’d have to send them all back!’ Again, he laughed at his own joke. ‘I have to tell you that when the police told me they were investigating a murder, for one brief, joyous moment I assumed someone must have done her in.’

  ‘Why is that?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘Because she’s horrible, that’s why! She reminds me of a cat I used to have … a Siamese. It looked beautiful curled up in front of the fire and it would purr when you reached out to stroke it. But then a minute later, for no reason at all, it could twist round and sink its teeth into your hand. You never knew what was on its bloody mind.’

  I remembered the way Akira had turned on me. ‘What happened to the cat?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh. I had it put down.’

  ‘So you must have been surprised when you were told that the victim was your solicitor, Richard Pryce,’ Hawthorne said.

  ‘I’ll say!’ He held up a finger, contradicting himself. ‘Well, he was a lawyer. And you know what they say about lawyers! What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean?’