Close to Death

1

Anyone who has read the four books I have written about my adventures with ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne, may be surprised by this one. Where is Hawthorne? Where am I? What’s going on with the third-person narrative?

None of this was exactly my choice.

More than a year had passed since my play, Mindgame, had been produced, largely trashed by the critics and tucked away in that file marked ‘Unlikely to be revived by the National Theatre’. Was I depressed by what had happened? Not really. If you’re going to spend your entire life writing, you have to accept the possibility of failure and live with it when it arrives. There’s an old saying ‘You’re only as good as your last script’, but that’s not true. You’re only as good as your next one. Writing is all about looking ahead. The worst thing that had happened to me as a result of Mindgame was being arrested for the violent murder of Harriet Throsby, the critic who had given the play its most venomous review. Frankly, of the two of us, I think she came out of it worse.

My agent, Hilda Starke, knew nothing of this. I hadn’t sent her the novel yet and she’d only seen a brief synopsis of Murder at the Vaudeville Theatre, which was my working title. She would certainly be delighted that I had cleared my name, if only because it wouldn’t have been easy to get books out of me if I’d been banged up in Wormwood Scrubs. I’ve never been quite sure if literary agents work for their writers or the other way round. Hilda had already twisted my arm into signing a four-book deal with Penguin Random House, arranging delivery dates that even an AI-powered neural network machine would have had difficulty meeting. Either I’m too weak or I like writing too much, but I always seem to be locked in a room with a ream of A4 while other writers are out and about having a good time.

There had, however, been a development that even Hilda could not have foreseen.

I couldn’t write another murder story for the simple reason that nobody had been murdered. I hadn’t heard from Hawthorne for months.

That’s the trouble with writing what I suppose I must call true crime. When I was working on the television programme Midsomer Murders, nobody so much as blinked if there were four or five homicides in a single episode. Hercule Poirot investigated no fewer than eighty-five mysterious deaths (starting with the one at Styles) during his career. Real life is not like that. There are seven or eight hundred murders a year in the United Kingdom, but most of them aren’t mysteries at all. A fight in a pub. A domestic argument that turns violent. Knife crime. These are all horrible, but nobody wants to read about them. Even journalists find them pedestrian. The police don’t need to call Hawthorne when the killer is sitting in the kitchen with a meat tenderiser in one hand, a bottle of whisky in the other and blood all over the walls.

None of this had occurred to Hilda when she called me unexpectedly, around noon. I was, as usual, in my office in Clerkenwell, listening to the thud of jackhammers and the endless whine of huge industrial drills as the new Crossrail underground was constructed just across the road. Everywhere I looked, there were cranes circling one another like prehistoric beasts deep in conversation. All the activity, the sense of London reinventing itself, only made me feel more isolated, which was one of the reasons I never failed to answer my phone.

‘How are you getting on with the next book?’ the familiar voice barked into my ear.

‘Hello, Hilda,’ I said. ‘Which book are you talking about?’

‘The new Hawthorne. We need the fifth in the series.’

She always called them the Hawthorne books. Everyone did. It was strange the way I did all the work but never got a mention.

‘Why are you asking? We’ve got plenty of time. And I still haven’t finished Murder at the Vaudeville Theatre.’

‘I really don’t like that title. It’s too old-fashioned. Hawthorne has a much better one . . .’

‘When did you see him?’ I had that strange sense of unreality that seemed to have taken over my life from the day I’d met Hawthorne.

‘He called in last week. They want him to appear on the Today programme.’

‘Talking about what, exactly?’

‘Working with you, I suppose.’

Shouldn’t it have been the other way round? I decided not to go there. ‘Why are you asking me about a book I haven’t even started writing?’ I demanded.

‘Because you’ve got to deliver it by Christmas.’

‘Who said that?’

‘Didn’t you read your contract?’

‘I never read my contracts. That’s your job.’

‘Well, I agreed to a December delivery. It’s ahead of the game, but it shows how much confidence they have in you. They want to publish in time for spring.’ I heard a bump and a rustling sound at Hilda’s end, and her voice became distant as she lowered her mobile into her lap. ‘I’ll have a tuna fish baguette, a flat white and a peppermint Aero.’

‘Hilda? Are you ordering lunch?’

She either didn’t hear what I said or ignored it. ‘So when are you going to get started?’ she demanded.

‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen Hawthorne in months. And unless he told you something different, he hasn’t investigated any new cases.’

There was a pause as she digested this.

‘Well, you’ll have to write about an old one,’ she said. ‘Talk to Hawthorne. He must have solved half a dozen murders before he met you. Give it a think, Tony, and get back to me.’

Tony! Was she really calling me that too? I opened my mouth to protest, but she had already hung up.

Several thoughts went through my head.

I had always liked the security of a multiple book deal. It effectively meant that I was being paid for four bites of the cherry. Even if my next book was a disaster, I’d be guaranteed three more. Most writers live with what is known as ‘imposter syndrome’, a chronic fear that at any moment they’ll be found out and their books will be unceremoniously taken off the shelves and pulped, reduced to a milky white substance that will then be reconstituted into new paper and used for somebody else’s book. My deal pushed that possibility further into the future.

The downside was that it tied me to my publisher, making me almost a full-time employee. It committed me to another lorry-load of words, three hundred thousand of them, or maybe even five hundred thousand by the time I’d done second drafts and edits. It was a mountain to climb, and given that Hawthorne hadn’t so much as sent me an email or a text since Harriet Throsby’s killer had been arrested (life in jail with a minimum of twenty-three years), I couldn’t so much as take the first step. It was as if I was suffering from somebody else’s writer’s block.

I flicked on the kettle and considered what Hilda had suggested. An old case . . . a murder that Hawthorne had solved before he had forced his way into my life. It did have some attractions.

It would be much easier to write. All the facts would have been set out, the clues assembled, the killer already known. This would be, for me, a huge relief. I wouldn’t have to follow half a dozen steps behind Hawthorne for several weeks, desperately hoping he would find the solution so that I’d be able to finish the book. I wouldn’t get everything wrong like a real-life Watson or Hastings and nor would I get stabbed . . . as had happened on two occasions. All I would have to do was sit down with Hawthorne, listen to him set out the main beats of the story, examine any case notes he might have, maybe visit the crime scene to get the atmosphere and physical description, and then sit down quietly and write the whole thing in the comfort of my own home.

The timing could hardly be better. Eleventh Hour Films, the television production company run by wife, had just started developing Alex Rider for Amazon TV, but I’d decided not to write the scripts. There were two reasons for this. The first was that I was writing a new book, Nightshade. But I was also thinking of Stormbreaker, the feature film that had been made sixteen years earlier in 2003. The experience of working with a certain Harvey Weinstein, our American producer, had not been an altogether happy one and I thought it might be more sensible to let someone else have a crack of the whip. We’d found a great writer who was about twenty years younger than me: he’d bring his own vision to the character, and although I’d help shape some of the episodes, I would be free to focus on other things.

One of these was a new James Bond novel. Trigger Mortis had come out and had done well, and to my surprise, the Ian Fleming estate had offered me the chance to write a second. My first instinct had been to say no. Bond novels demanded an enormous amount of work: doing the research, getting the language right, avoiding the obvious pitfalls of bringing a 1950s character to life for a twenty-first-century audience with a whole new set of values. I wasn’t even sure I had a second story in me.

Then something had happened. A first line fell into my head. I have no idea where it came from. I sometimes think that all writers are like radio receivers, picking up signals from . . . who knows where? ‘So, 007 is dead.’ It was M talking. One of his agents had been killed, but it wasn’t Bond. This would be an origin story, predating Casino Royale, telling how Bond got his licence to kill, inherited the number and was sent on his first mission. I’m not saying it’s the most brilliant idea anyone’s ever had, but that’s how it works for me. I knew I had to write it.

I was thinking about setting it in the South of France. It would involve the CIA and the true scandal of American involvement with heroin traffickers back in the fifties. I already had some thoughts about the main villain, Jean-Paul Scipio. Fleming had a penchant for physical peculiarities, from Dr No’s contact lenses to Scaramanga’s third nipple. Scipio would be massively, unnaturally obese and that would also play a part in the way he died.

I wasn’t writing it yet, although I was thinking about it all the time. This meant my desk was clear and there might just be time to get Hilda off my back.

There was something else I remembered. When Hawthorne and I visited Alderney for the literary festival that had led to the first murder on that island for a thousand years, he had mentioned something that had taken place in a close or a crescent of houses in Richmond, on the edge of London. It was one of the first cases he had solved as a private detective after he had been thrown out of the police force following an ‘accident’ that had led to the hospitalisation of a suspect he’d been questioning. Those inverted commas are well deserved. The man in question was a vile human being dealing in child pornography and Hawthorne had been right behind him on a steep flight of stairs when the man had somehow tripped and fallen.

I hadn’t seen Hawthorne for some time and it occurred to me that in a strange way I was missing him. I wouldn’t have described him as a friend, but after four outings together we were becoming something that vaguely resembled a team. It was also true that but for him, I would have been writing this from inside a prison cell. Even while I’d been talking to Hilda, I’d been thinking how good it would be to see him again.

I picked up the phone and called.

2

We met, as usual, in one of those coffee bars that have managed to get a stranglehold on the streets of London, each one of them not just identical to each other but, perversely, to the coffee bars owned by their competitors. Hawthorne’s flat was only a fifteen-minute walk from where I lived, but it was equally uninviting: perhaps one of the reasons why he seldom invited me there. We ended up at a Starbucks – or was it a Costa? – nearby, sitting outside in the not very fresh air so that he could smoke.

I’ve described Hawthorne’s London home often enough: the emptiness and lack of any personal touches apart from his extensive model collection – the planes, tanks, battleships and transport vehicles from two world wars that he had painstakingly assembled there. Hawthorne was so reluctant to tell me anything about himself that I had taken an almost unhealthy interest in where – and how – he lived, hoping it might provide me with a few clues. Take his hobby, for example. Was it a throwback to a childhood that had been damaged in some way or just an enjoyable way to pass the time?

And what about his book club, the weird group of people who met every month in a flat one floor below? I had been introduced to a vet, a retired concert pianist and a psychiatrist who had taken an almost perverse pleasure in dismantling the work of my literary hero, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. After just a short while in their company, I wondered if any of them were quite what they seemed. It was as if they were united by some ghastly secret, like the cast of Rosemary’s Baby. Not one of the people I met there had been straightforward.

Take Kevin Chakraborty, Lisa’s son. He was Hawthorne’s teenaged friend, confined to a wheelchair with Duchenne muscular dystrophy and quite possibly one of the most dangerous young men in the world. He regularly helped Hawthorne by hacking into computer systems and, when necessary, causing them to crash. He had access to the entire UK CCTV camera network and could find anyone, anywhere, with a single twitch of his mouse. I had no doubt that he could bring the whole country to a standstill or cause planes to drop out of the sky if he was so minded, and it was fortunate that the two of them were, at least to an extent, on the side of the angels. Hawthorne solved murders. He believed in justice. The only trouble was that he didn’t care how he achieved it.

When I was a fugitive from the police, I had spent a night at his flat, tucked into William Hawthorne’s bed. Or as much of me as would fit. William was Hawthorne’s fourteen-year-old son and his bed was about a metre too short for me. That was something else I didn’t understand. Hawthorne was still married. He clearly saw a lot of his son. But he was on his own. How did that work?

And how did he come to be living in that architecturally incongruous, vaguely brutalist apartment block on the edge of the River Thames, close to Blackfriars Bridge? His flat didn’t belong to him. He had told me that he was living there as a caretaker, working for his half-brother who was an estate agent, but neither of these statements was true. It was all quite complicated, but as far as I could see, the facts were as follows:

Roland Hawthorne was not an estate agent.

Roland worked for some sort of shadowy security organisation that owned flats throughout the building.

The organisation was run by a man called Morton who also employed Hawthorne as an investigator whenever he wasn’t working for the police.

Roland was not Hawthorne’s half-brother. His father, a police officer, had adopted Hawthorne after his parents died in mysterious circumstances.

The more I learned about Hawthorne, the less I knew him. He was a brilliant detective. Four times, I’d watched him pluck solutions out of the air, knitting together clues I hadn’t noticed even as I’d described them. But his private life, in so far as he had one, was peculiar, quite possibly dangerous, and I’d be perfectly happy if I never went anywhere near Hawthorne’s flat again.

I could have invited him over to my own home in Farringdon, but I wasn’t too keen to do that either. For a start, my wife, Jill Green, had a television production company just around the corner and she could have walked in on us at any time. I didn’t want them to meet. Jill had never really approved of Hawthorne – not since he had first tricked his way into my life. She had read The Word is Murder and The Sentence is Death and said she’d enjoyed them, but she had serious reservations about my appearing in them and certainly didn’t want to do so herself. I was still worrying about what I was going to do when the fourth novel, Murder at the Vaudeville Theatre, came out. I had never told her everything that had happened and I wondered how she’d react when she read that I’d been arrested by the police on suspicion of the murder of Harriet Throsby and had spent twenty-four hours being interrogated under caution.

Also, Hawthorne was the only person I knew who still smoked, although he never seemed to enjoy cigarettes. He smoked mechanically: an idiosyncrasy rather than an addiction. If I have one abiding memory of him, it’s watching him hunched over a black coffee in his trademark suit, white shirt and tie, his shoulders hunched, gazing at me with those softly menacing brown eyes whilst tapping ash into the lid of his polystyrene cup. At those moments, he could have walked out of one of those films shot in the forties: a reborn Cagney or Bogart. Nothing about him was black and white. It was all various shades of grey.

So that was where we found ourselves, sitting outside a Starbucks on the Clerkenwell Road. It was the first week in August and I had just five months to produce a book which, at that moment, had no title, no plot, no characters. In fact, I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was going to be about. Hawthorne had agreed to meet me, but I still didn’t know if he was going to help.

‘How are you?’ I began.

He shrugged non-committally, as unwilling as ever to provide any information about himself. I wondered what would happen if he ever got ill. A doctor would have to tie him to a chair to get so much as a blood sample. ‘I’m OK,’ he said, at length.

‘How was Radio 4?’ I was still a little put out that he’d been invited and not me, but did my best not to show it.

He shook his head. ‘I turned them down. I’m not interested in publicity.’

‘Publicity sells books.’

‘Not my job, mate. I should have kept my name out of the books to start with.’ He pulled out a cigarette. ‘Too late now.’

‘So what have you been working on?’

‘Not a lot.’ He looked at me suspiciously. ‘Why are you asking?’

I explained that Hilda had called me and that we needed to start a new book straight away.

Hawthorne already knew. ‘Yeah. She told me she was going to call you,’ he said.

Of course she had told him. He wouldn’t have met me if it was just for coffee and a general chat. I didn’t feel comfortable that he was now represented by my agent, particularly as she seemed rather more invested in him than in me. I bet she hadn’t ordered lunch while she was talking to him. ‘So what do you think?’ I asked.

‘You want to write about a murder that happened before we met?’

‘Well, you said it would be a good idea. When we were at the Alderney Book Festival, you mentioned a case you’d solved in Richmond. Somewhere called Riverside Close.’

He lit the cigarette and took in his first lungful of smoke. ‘It wasn’t Riverside. It was Riverview.’

‘You told me someone was hammered to death.’

‘They were shot with a crossbow.’

I glared at him. ‘Hawthorne! Do you know how many tweets and emails I get when I make mistakes?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t like people knowing too much about me.’

‘That doesn’t mean you can deliberately lie to them.’

He frowned and tapped ash. ‘Things have changed,’ he explained. ‘I never expected we’d get all this attention. Radio 4 and all the rest of it. There are people I know who would prefer me to keep a low profile. And this business in Richmond – if you want the truth, I’m not too happy about the way it all worked out.’

‘But you solved the case . . .’

He was offended. ‘Of course I did.’

‘Would you be prepared to tell me about it?’

‘I don’t know.’ He seemed genuinely pained. I had seen the same look on his face when I had asked him about Reeth, the village in Yorkshire where he had lived as a child. ‘It all happened five years ago. And how can you even write it if you weren’t there?’

‘I’ve just been writing about Alex Rider in outer space . . .’

‘But that’s not real.’

‘So what happened in Riverside . . . or Riverview Close?’ I waited while he smoked in silence. I was actually getting quite annoyed. ‘Who was murdered?’

‘A man called Giles Kenworthy. He wasn’t very nice . . . some sort of hedge fund manager. Old Etonian. Right-wing, borderline racist. He had a wife and a couple of kids, though, and they weren’t too happy about him dying.’

‘It sounds like a great start,’ I said. ‘Why was he killed?’

‘He didn’t get on with his neighbours.’

I wondered if Hawthorne was being sarcastic. ‘Did you keep your notes from the case?’ I asked. ‘Can you remember all the details?’

‘I had an assistant. He took notes. And he recorded the interviews.’

Hawthorne said this in a way that was completely matter-of-fact and didn’t seem to notice how much it affected me. I’d spent weeks with him, following in his footsteps, and then months writing about him. He’d never once mentioned or even hinted that he’d had a different sidekick before he met me.

‘What was his name?’ I asked.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Because if we go ahead with this, I suppose I might just end up writing about him.’

‘John Dudley,’ Hawthorne said, reluctantly. ‘He helped me with the case. He did the same job as you. Not the writing, though. He was more . . . professional.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ I muttered. ‘Where is he now?’

‘We haven’t seen each other for a while.’

‘Why did he stop working with you?’

Hawthorne shrugged. ‘He had other things to do.’

That was a non-answer if ever I’d heard one.

‘Well, I don’t think we have any choice,’ I went on, repeating what Hilda had told me. ‘We’ve only got five months to deliver because the publishers want the next book out at the end of next year. Of course, we could sit back and wait for another murder, but it sounds as if things have been quiet for you recently, and even if someone does get killed, there’s no saying it’ll be interesting enough for book five.’

‘Can’t you make something up?’

‘And put you in it? I don’t think that would work. Look, what we’ve got here is a case you’ve already investigated – and solved. Why can’t you just tell me what happened?’

Hawthorne thought for a few moments as he finished smoking. ‘I suppose I could describe it for you,’ he said eventually. He ground out the cigarette and dropped it into the plastic lid. ‘But I’d want to see what you were writing.’

‘You mean . . . while I was writing it?’

‘Yes.’

The thought horrified me. I wasn’t sure I could work with Hawthorne peering over my shoulder. I’d have to censor half the things I said about him. Worse than that, he would have the upper hand. He had met all the suspects. He’d been there, whereas, to some extent, I would be groping in the dark. Inevitably, I’d have to make a lot of it up and I could see us arguing about every word, every description. It might take years to complete. ‘Why would you want to do that?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘I trust you so much, I don’t even read you. But this time I’d have to make sure you got it right. We’d be writing it together.’

‘That’s not how I work . . .’

‘But this is different!’

He had a point. I could look at photographs, read police reports, listen to recordings, get Hawthorne to describe everything he’d seen . . . but I’d still be writing from a distance. The book would be in the third person (he/they) and not the first (I). As every writer knows, this would completely change the way the story was presented. It would have a universality, a sense of disconnection. It would not be my story, my arrival on the scene, my first impressions. Everything would have to be channelled through Hawthorne and he was right to say that it would be, to some extent, a collaboration.

I still didn’t like the idea.

‘We’re not writing it together,’ I said. ‘You’re supplying the basic information, but I’m the one doing the writing. It’s my style. My descriptions. And,’ I added, ‘my name on the cover.’

He looked at me innocently. ‘I know that, Tony.’

‘No shared credit.’

‘Whatever you say, mate.’

‘And you’ll give me everything you have.’

‘You can have it all.’ He paused. ‘One step at a time.’

My cappuccino had gone cold. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘I just think it’ll be easier that way. I’ll give you everything you need – but in instalments. You write two or three chapters. I read them. Then we talk about them. If you get anything wrong, I can steer you back on the right track. Like – you know – fact-checking.’

‘But you will give me the solution!’

‘No. I won’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘You never know the solution, mate. That’s what makes your writing so special. You don’t have a clue.’

Had any compliment ever been more backhanded? I thought about what he was offering and came to a decision. Like it or not, there was no other way of delivering a book to my publishers in time. I reached down and opened my workbag. I took out a notepad and a pen.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Where do we begin?’

3

Hawthorne and I spent a couple more hours sitting outside the coffee shop, making us the least profitable customers that particular branch must have ever entertained. The first thing he told me was the location of the private road where the murder had taken place – Riverview Close. He said it was a turning off the Petersham Road, near a pub I vaguely remembered, the Fox and Duck. I was sure I’d gone there for a drink a couple of times when I was living in west London and used to take my dog for walks in Richmond Park. I’d never noticed the close, though.

He described the layout of the buildings, the history of the place, Petersham Road and the immediate surroundings. For the first time, he gave me the names of the people I was going to be living with for the next few months. Tom and Gemma Beresford. Roderick Browne, dentist to the stars, with his invalid wife. Chess mastermind Adam Strauss . . . and so on. He also introduced me to some of the minor characters who would appear later: the lady gardener, the Australian nanny who also looked after an old lady in Hampton Wick, the detective superintendent in charge of the case and a detective constable who worked with him but who just seemed like one officer too many and would barely make it into my second draft.

He was only reticent about one character and that, not surprisingly, was John Dudley. Even a physical description seemed to challenge him. ‘Same age as me. Dark hair. Ordinary-looking.’ That was all he gave me. As we talked, I got the sense that the two of them had parted acrimoniously, or at least that something had come between them, and in a way I found this quite gratifying. Perhaps I hadn’t been such a useless assistant after all.

Hawthorne promised he would dig out more information for me and it arrived the next day by courier: a neatly wrapped parcel that opened to reveal about twenty black-and-white photographs, police reports, typescripts and handwritten notes made by his erstwhile assistant. More surprising was a plastic box full of old-fashioned memory sticks that turned out to contain the recordings of entire conversations. One way and another, I had more than enough material to imagine myself in Riverview Close and even in The Tea Cosy bookshop, which Hawthorne would only visit later.

What’s important is that everything I have written so far (Part One: Riverview Close) is based on fact, with just a few extra flourishes from me. It’s worth remembering, though, that even as I set it all down, I was as much in the dark as I had been when I followed Hawthorne around London after the death of Diana Cowper, or when I travelled to Yorkshire to discover the truth about a potholing accident, or when my visit to the Alderney Literary Festival was rudely interrupted by the main sponsor being tied to a chair and stabbed. This was exactly what Hawthorne wanted. He was still in charge.

And despite my earlier misgivings, I was also quite pleased with what I had written, following the investigation from different perspectives, finishing with the non-appearance of Giles and Lynda Kenworthy at the drinks party and generally making the murder an inevitable consequence. It felt solid to me and entirely accurate. Once I’d got to the end of the section, I sent it off to Hawthorne with a degree of confidence and when it came to our second meeting, I broke my own rules by inviting him over to my flat. Jill was on the set of Safe House, a drama she was making for ITV. I was home alone.

He didn’t like what I’d done.

‘You’ve made half of it up!’ That was the first thing he said. He had printed up the thirty-two pages and spread them in front of me. We were sitting in my office.

‘What do you mean?’

‘That chess game in the first chapter. I never told you about players called Frank or Charmaine. How do you know what May and Phyllis had for breakfast? That business about Roderick Browne’s matron when he was at prep school . . . ? You say she had a gap in her teeth. Where did that come from?’

‘Come on, Hawthorne. I can’t just write the information you gave me. First of all, the whole book would only be thirty pages long and it would be boring! Nobody would read it. I’ve taken what you’ve given me and I’ve added a bit of colour, that’s all.’

‘I get that. But you don’t think people are going to get a bit fed up with it? I mean, there’s even a paragraph about bloody parakeets! You’ve written all these pages and nobody’s been killed.’

‘I have to set the scene! And anyway, you know perfectly well that there’s more to a novel – even a crime novel – than violent death. It’s all about character and atmosphere and language. Why do you think people read Jane Austen? She wrote thousands of pages and she never felt the need to murder anyone.’

‘Actually, that’s not true. Anna Parker murdered both her parents and she was planning to do the same to her sister.’

‘And she’s a character in Jane Austen?’ My head swam. ‘I suppose you came across that in your book club.’

‘Juvenilia and Short Stories.’ Hawthorne was toying with a cigarette, but he’d had the good grace not to light it. ‘Anyway, there are things you’ve left out that are important.’

‘Such as?’

‘The Union Jack in Giles Kenworthy’s garden. The lighting in Roderick Browne’s house. The state of May Winslow’s flower beds.’

‘Why are any of them relevant?’

‘They’re all clues.’

‘Well, how can I possibly know that when you haven’t even arrived on the scene? And the sooner you arrive the better, by the way. So far, we’ve got a murder mystery with no murder and no one to solve the mystery. Graham’s not going to like it.’ Graham was Graham Lucas, my editor at Penguin Random House. If he’d had his way, Giles Kenworthy would have died in the first paragraph.

‘And why do you say there was a life jacket in Roderick Browne’s garage?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘It’s reasonable enough. He’d been a member of the Richmond Bridge Boat Club. He said so!’

‘There were a lot of things in that garage that really mattered. But he didn’t have a life jacket. Not one that I saw.’

‘I put it in there so people wouldn’t focus on the crossbow.’

‘I’m sorry?’

I sighed. ‘It’s the narrative principle known as Chekhov’s gun. If I simply mention there’s a crossbow in Roderick’s garage, it’ll be obvious that it’s going to be used as the murder weapon.’

‘So why mention it at all?’

‘Because it would be unfair not to! What I’ve done, though, is I’ve disguised it by adding the life jacket and the golf clubs. That way, it might still come as a surprise.’ I watched the cigarette Hawthorne was still twisting between his fingers. ‘Go ahead and light the bloody thing,’ I snapped. I got up and opened a window. ‘Aren’t you worried about your health?’

‘I’m more worried about your prose style, mate.’ Hawthorne flicked his lighter and drew in a lungful of smoke. ‘I mean, reading this, do you really get the position of the houses and what you could see from one to the other? You’ve got to get that right.’

‘We could put a map in at the beginning. Would that make you happy?’

‘It would certainly cheer up some of your readers. I’m not saying it’s confusing, but going through this, I’m not sure I could deliver the mail.’

All my life I’ve been getting notes. I get them from producers in London and New York, from directors, from Jill, from lead actors . . . even, on occasions, from their partners. My books are scrutinised by editors and copy editors and (more recently) sensitivity readers. I sometimes feel that I’m surrounded by notes, like a cloud of midges. But I never lose my temper. I always try to see the alternative point of view.

It wasn’t easy with Hawthorne.

‘I’ll ask Graham to put a map in,’ I said. ‘But he won’t like it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s an extra cost. Is there anything else?’

‘Yes. There is one thing. You say that the barrister – Andrew Pennington – played bridge with the Brownes.’

‘He did.’

‘But he also played with friends who lived outside Riverview Close.’

That was one note too many. ‘Are you really telling me that was relevant to the murder?’ I exploded.

‘That meeting you describe, when all the neighbours got together, which took place on a Monday. Andrew Pennington played bridge every Monday and Wednesday and he had to cancel a game to be there.’

‘So he killed Giles Kenworthy for not showing up? He was upset he’d cancelled his game for no good reason?’

Hawthorne looked at me sadly. ‘Of course not. You’re missing the point.’

‘Well, since I don’t know exactly how or when Giles Kenworthy died, I’m not sure what the point is.’

I stopped. There was one thing Hawthorne had said that worried me slightly. It might be true that the book needed some action. I didn’t want to spend another ten thousand words describing the joys of suburban life.

‘When did he die?’ I asked.

‘You know the answer to that,’ Hawthorne said. ‘You’ve already written it.’

‘Six weeks later.’

‘Yes.’

‘Six weeks after the meeting at The Stables.’

‘Exactly.’ Hawthorne looked around him for an ashtray and found a hollow silver acorn that he used to deposit his ash. It was a children’s book award I’d been given about twenty years before. ‘I got a call from the investigating officer – DS Khan.’

‘Why did he think he needed you?’

Hawthorne gazed at me. ‘Tony, mate! A multimillionaire was found dead in a posh London suburb with a crossbow bolt stuck in his throat. Every single one of his neighbours wanted him dead. It was pretty obvious this wasn’t an ordinary case. It was a sticker if ever there was one, and frankly, the local plod had as much chance of solving it as . . . well, you!’

‘Thanks.’

‘I got the call the same day the body was found. Me and John Dudley.’

‘So what happened next?’