Close to Death

1

Hawthorne was as unhappy with the second instalment as he had been with the first . . . and I hadn’t even shown him the whole thing. I had deliberately kept back one or two sections that I knew he wouldn’t like and there were some parts I hadn’t written yet. I would add them later.

Our next session was particularly awkward. The weather didn’t help. It was another one of those uncomfortably warm days that occasionally take hold of London, a city that was never really built to handle intense weather, so we had met on the balcony of my Clerkenwell flat, where a line of olive trees separated us from the traffic and there was at least a hint of a breeze. A fountain that had looked good in the catalogue but in fact resembled an oversized latrine tinkled to one side, providing an illusion of coolness.

Hawthorne didn’t like the way I was writing the story. Perhaps neither of us had quite understood the power of the third person. I was describing what people were saying, thinking, where they had come from, how other people saw them – even though, unlike Hawthorne, I had never met them. I was using the notes, pictures and recordings that he had given me, but I was interpreting them my own way and he was insisting that was a departure from the truth. So which one of us was actually in control? We were beginning to see that neither of us was. It was as if the characters themselves had taken control.

I still had absolutely no idea who had committed the murder.

The material he’d given me did not include the arrest report and I’d probably need to meet him three or four more times to get to the end of the book. At this stage, I couldn’t even be certain that the story would be worth telling. For example, I was very much hoping that Sarah Baines wasn’t going to be revealed as the killer. With her prison record, her tattoos and her possible involvement in the death of Ellery, she was frankly too obvious a suspect and if it did turn out to be her, the solution would be much less of a surprise than if it was, say, Andrew Pennington who was revealed. Unfortunately, things seemed to be pointing that way. She had access to the garage. She knew about the crossbow. She had just lost her job. I also wondered how she had managed to sweet-talk an old lady who was also an ex-nun into giving her the job in the first place.

Sitting on my terrace, Hawthorne poured himself a black coffee and lit his first cigarette. Curiously, what upset him most was the way I’d described John Dudley. He still hadn’t answered any of the questions about the man I had effectively replaced and he was as reluctant to talk about him as he was to tell me anything about himself. I’d scribbled a series of questions on a sheet of paper. How long had they known each other? Where did they meet? Where was he now? What had happened to Dudley in Bristol? I was still waiting for the opportunity to ask them.

‘You’ve got him all wrong, mate,’ Hawthorne said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well . . . the description. Scruffy, sloping shoulders, lank hair. What does “lank” mean, anyway?’

‘It means limp. Lifeless.’

‘That’s wrong for a start. There was nothing wrong with his hair. And why do you say he wore scuffed shoes? John always wore trainers.’

‘Well, I may have just imagined the shoes, but I think the general picture is accurate.’ I searched around all the documents spread out on the table in front of us and pulled out a photograph. It was the only picture of Dudley I had found in the bundle he had given me. It must have been taken by a police photographer and showed Hawthorne and Dudley standing outside Riverview Lodge. Khan was in the background too, slightly out of focus.

‘His hair definitely looks a bit lank,’ I said. ‘Those trousers of his are shapeless. And I’ve heard his voice on the recordings. I think my description fits him pretty well.’

‘You keep trying to make him seem stupid. Yes, he had a strange sense of humour. But I’m telling you, he was sharp as a knife. In fact, I’d never have solved the case without him.’

‘So you did solve it!’

‘Of course I solved it. You think I’d be sitting here talking about it if I hadn’t? But Dudley was always on the money. He was the one who saw the packed suitcase in the hallway of the dentist’s house, for example. Not me. That turned out to be important. And he also worked out that Sarah Baines had been in prison.’ He paused. ‘I know you’ve been out with me a few times and you’ve never noticed a thing. In fact, you’ve helped the killers more than you’ve helped me. But he’s not the same.’

‘So what happened?’ I asked. I refused to rise to the bait. ‘If he’s so brilliant, how come he’s not working with you any more? Why did you have to come to me?’

‘I came to you because Peter James turned me down.’

‘Only Peter James? I thought you approached half the crime writers in London!’

‘I approached a few of them.’

‘That’s not the point. What I’m asking is – where is he?’

‘I already told you. I haven’t seen him for a while.’ He looked at me angrily. ‘Maybe this is a mistake.’ He contemplated his cigarette. ‘But it’s not too late to stop.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s about forty thousand words too late! I’m not stopping now.’ I forced myself to calm down. ‘Why can’t I meet him?’ I asked.

‘Why would you want to?’

‘To get his side of the story.’

Hawthorne shook his head. ‘You don’t need it. You’ve got mine.’ His voice was bleak. He was warning me not to argue.

‘Well, at least tell me this. How did you meet him?’

‘It’s not relevant.’

‘I’m the one writing the book, Hawthorne. Maybe I should decide what’s relevant or not.’

‘He’d been a police officer, but he was on sick leave. He came to London. We met.’

‘That’s not good enough.’

‘That’s all I’m going to tell you.’

‘Then maybe you should go back to Peter James.’

We had never argued like this before. There was a brief silence while we glowered at each other. I decided to change the subject.

‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘If you won’t talk about John Dudley, let’s talk about you and what was going on in your head.’ I took out another page of notes. ‘Khan had telephoned you. You went round to Riverview Close. You talked to Lynda Kenworthy, Roderick Browne, Gemma Beresford, Andrew Pennington, Adam Strauss and his wife. You didn’t meet May Winslow and Phyllis Moore because they were at their bookshop . . . but I’m not sure they were suspects anyway. So here’s the question. At this stage, on the first day of your investigation, had you guessed who did it?’

‘I never guess!’

‘You know what I mean . . .’

It’s the one thing nobody ever tells you in a detective story. At what point does the detective solve the crime? It’s a remarkable coincidence that he or she only seems to arrive at the solution in the last couple of chapters, but it’s always made clear that the main clues, the ones that gave the whole thing away, turned up long before. Sitting there on the balcony of my flat, with the water trickling down the wall, it quite amused me to put Hawthorne on the spot. At this point, how much had he worked out?

‘I didn’t know who killed Giles Kenworthy,’ he admitted. ‘It’s not like that. You don’t just meet someone and say, “Oh – he’s the killer!” You’ve got to talk to everyone, see how they fit together, and at the point you’ve reached, there were people we hadn’t even spoken to. May Winslow and Phyllis Moore, for a start – and they were just as much suspects as everyone else. Dr Beresford. Kylie the nanny. Damien the carer. Jean-François the French teacher. The picture’s not complete. But I’ll tell you this, Tony. By the end of that first day, the finger was definitely pointing in one direction.’

‘Who?’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t have a name. I just had an idea of what might have happened.’

‘Tell me!’ He didn’t answer. ‘Hawthorne! It’s great if the readers don’t guess who did it. It’s not so brilliant if the author doesn’t know either.’

He took pity on me.

‘Look, mate. I’ve told you everything that happened and you’ve written it down. And if you just read it all again, there’s stuff that should be obvious to you. Things that don’t make any sense.’

‘Such as?’

‘All right. Two purported attacks in the space of a weekend. The old woman in Hampton Wick and Adam Strauss at Richmond station.’

‘You say “purported”. Do you think Adam Strauss falling down the stairs could have just been an accident?’

‘Whatever happened at the station had to be a part of it . . .’

‘That’s why you wanted to see the CCTV footage.’

‘Exactly – although it didn’t help in the end. Anyway, that’s not so important. What you should really be focusing on are the two meetings.’

‘What two meetings?’

He paused, then continued patiently. ‘There were two meetings in Riverview Close. The first one happened six weeks before the murder.’

‘Yes. I’ve described that one. They all got together at The Stables, but the Kenworthys didn’t show up.’

‘That’s right. But what’s interesting is to look at the events before that meeting and then compare them with what happened afterwards.’ I still didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘There was an escalation,’ he explained. ‘Andrew Pennington’s flowers got torn to shreds. The dog got put in the well.’

‘Adam Strauss’s best chess set got smashed. And a man died.’

Hawthorne nodded. ‘Three deaths. Giles Kenworthy. Ellery the French bulldog. And Raymond Shaw, a patient of Dr Beresford.’

I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, listing them like that. ‘Was Raymond Shaw deliberately killed? I don’t know anything about him. I don’t even know who he is.’

‘He had a heart attack in Dr Beresford’s surgery. It was a natural death.’

I gave up. ‘So when was the second meeting?’ I asked. ‘How do you even know it happened?’

He looked at me a little sadly. ‘You wrote it. Didn’t you see it?’

‘No!’

He looked at me like a teacher with a difficult child. ‘When I was with Roderick Browne, he mentioned that there had been a meeting and the moment he said it, he looked scared. You described it perfectly. “Something close to panic flitted across his eyes . . .” He thought he’d given away too much and he quickly added that this was a meeting that had happened a long time ago. Six weeks.’ Hawthorne waited for me to react. ‘He wanted us to know it had happened a long time ago. It was obvious to me that he was deliberately steering us away from a more recent meeting to one that had happened earlier.

‘The same thing happened with Gemma Beresford, the doctor’s wife. Dudley asked her if she and the neighbours had ever talked about killing Giles Kenworthy and straight away, she went on the defensive. “No. Of course not. When would anyone ever say something like that? I never heard anything!” Too much denial! She went on to say I couldn’t turn her against her friends. She was protecting them. They’d met and they’d talked about murder.

‘And then there was the clincher. I asked Andrew Pennington about the meeting when the Kenworthys didn’t show up and he said: “You’re referring to the meeting we had six weeks ago.” Not a meeting. The meeting. Because there was more than one.’

‘Surely that’s just semantics.’

‘The trouble with you, Tony, is that you’re great with long words, but you never think them through. The semantics! It’s the small things that matter. That’s how criminals give themselves away.’

‘So what happened at this second meeting?’

‘You can find out for yourself . . .’

He produced another sheaf of interviews and hand-written notes and handed them to me. ‘You take a look at all this and put something together – maybe without the parakeets and the climbing roses – and we can meet in a couple of weeks and see where we are.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘What else do you need?’

‘I told you. I’d like to meet John Dudley.’

‘That’s not going to happen.’

2

I wasn’t going to let it go.

Hawthorne’s remark had annoyed me. It was unfair to say that I’d never noticed anything when I’d followed him on his investigations. I noticed and described lots of things; it’s just that I wasn’t always aware of their significance. Yes, I did make mistakes. Getting a senior police officer to arrest the wrong person was certainly one of them. My questions did sometimes have unintended consequences: an old man’s house got burned down, for example. And I’d been stabbed twice. Even so, I’d say that I was often quite helpful, especially considering that, unlike Dudley, I had never been in the police force.

I had very little to go on. I had heard Dudley’s voice on the recordings he had made throughout the day, but he had no discernible accent and although he had travelled in and out of London with Hawthorne, I couldn’t be sure he even lived in the city. He had mentioned working in Bristol. I thought briefly of using a computer search engine to track him down, but there seemed little point: I couldn’t even be sure I’d been given his real name.

That gave me another idea.

I’ve already mentioned the book I was working on, Murder at the Vaudeville Theatre. In it, I had described how I had been forced into hiding in Hawthorne’s flat, fearing that I was about to be arrested for the murder of theatre critic Harriet Throsby. While I was there, I had been discovered by a man who had called in, using his own key. This was Roland Hawthorne, who turned out to be Hawthorne’s adoptive brother. It had always infuriated me that I knew so little about the man I was supposed to be writing about, so of course I had used the chance meeting to get some information out of him. It wasn’t easy. Roland knew who I was and he was careful not to give too much away.

However, he had confirmed that his father – another policeman – had adopted Hawthorne, whose own parents had died in a place called Reeth. The two of them worked for an organisation that Roland described as ‘a creative and business development service’, but which sounded like a high-end security firm, employing private detectives and investigators. They also seemed to own several flats in the same block where Hawthorne lived.

Roland had told me very little more, but he had been carrying an envelope with him: it contained details of Hawthorne’s next case. I had seen the name BARRACLOUGH written on the outside and Roland had mentioned that it concerned a husband who had run off with another woman and who was now holed up in Grand Cayman. That was all he had said. But it was enough.

If I could find Barraclough’s wife, I might be able to track down the organisation she had hired to help her. It might be an opportunity to find out more about Hawthorne, and there was a good chance that John Dudley was working for this organisation too. I should have thought of all this sooner. It was time to get out from behind my desk.

I went back to my computer.

With the information I already had, tracking down Mrs Barraclough wouldn’t be too difficult. For a start, her husband must have worked in the world of finance. There are over six hundred banks and trust companies in Grand Cayman, even though the entire island only stretches some twenty miles. Fraud and white-collar crime are as much part of the landscape as coral reefs and cocktails at sunset. I could easily see Mr Barraclough as a crooked financier, cheating on his wife. She would live in Mayfair or Belgravia. She would have a little black book with the names of several discreet detective agencies. She could lead me to the one that had employed Hawthorne.

It helped that she had a fairly uncommon surname. I opened a search engine and found it almost at once, on the second page. There was a report published in the Daily Mail with the headline: BARRACLOUGH ‘FISH & CHIPS’ DIVORCE. It referred to a hearing that had taken place just a few months before and the timeline fitted exactly with my visit to Hawthorne’s flat. I read:

The American wife of a well-known international financier has been awarded a remarkable £230 million in a High Court divorce case which the judge described as ‘one of the most acrimonious I have ever heard’.

Sir Jack Barraclough and his wife, Greta, 59, were arguing over assets believed to be worth more than £500 million, including properties in New York, London and Grand Cayman. Their nineteen-year marriage came to an end earlier this year after Lady Barraclough discovered her husband was having an affair, but he made headlines when he publicly announced that she deserved ‘the price of a fish and chip supper and nothing more’.

Greta Barraclough remains in the family home in Knightsbridge, London. The couple have four children.

Hawthorne was wrong. I wouldn’t have made a bad detective after all. I was fairly sure I had found the right name and after several more searches I came across an article in Hello! Magazine, that well-known shop window for the wealthy and famous, dated August 2009. The Barracloughs (‘socialites, philanthropists and entrepreneurs’) were showing off the house they had just bought and redecorated. Sir Jack was solid and pugnacious. His wife tended more to the glamorous and artistic. Were they already unhappy in each other’s company? It was hard to tell. They had been photographed together and apart in several of the rooms, surrounded by vast stretches of marble, gilt-edged mirrors, chandeliers and a grand piano that didn’t look as if it had ever been played. Everything, including them, had been airbrushed to perfection. There was no dust or dirty laundry anywhere to be seen. Their four sons – the youngest six months, the oldest eight years – had been arranged like stuffed toys on a velvet sofa, collector’s items, with even the baby displaying that easy self-confidence that comes when you know Daddy has millions in the bank.

Lady Barraclough loved the house. ‘It’s so marvellous being just a minute’s walk from Harrods,’ she told the magazine, which provided me with the next piece of the puzzle. I launched Zoopla, the property website, and – street by street – searched for houses in the immediate vicinity of Harrods department store in Knightsbridge. This took a bit longer, but eventually I came across a property in Trevor Square, just the other side of Brompton Road. It had sold for £18 million in 2008, and comparing it with the pictures of the Barracloughs’ home in Hello!, I could see that they were one and the same.

I went over there straight away.

3

‘You wrote this?’ Greta Barraclough asked.

She was holding a copy of The Word is Murder, the first book I had written about Hawthorne.

‘Yes. I thought you might like a copy.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’ She set it down beside her in a way that somehow told me she would never open it. Like the piano. It didn’t matter. The book had been the calling card that had got me in.

I’d been very lucky.

Lady Barraclough could have been in her second home in Barbados. She could have been in any one of the five-star hotels she frequented all over the world or cruising with friends in the Mediterranean or out riding in the countryside. But that same afternoon, I’d tracked her down to the five-bedroom, £18 million house that she had bought close to Harrods and which she had wrestled from her ex-husband. Not only that, I’d managed to talk my way past her unsmiling butler and even less amicable personal assistant and into one of her half-dozen living rooms, where we were sitting now, perched on velvet sofas, facing each other and separated by a monstrous Indonesian coffee table with an assortment of quite unappetising biscuits and small cups of tea laid out in front of us. But then she knew my books. Her children were all boys, now aged nine to seventeen, and at least one of them had read Alex Rider. It’s one of the things I’ve found throughout my career. Being a children’s author opens doors.

For a woman who had ended her marriage with £230 million in her pocket, she seemed extraordinarily damaged. Had Sir Jack’s betrayal really been that bad? The different parts of her body didn’t seem to fit together properly, her knees barely carrying her across the room and her hands swivelling unnecessarily as she sat down. She had the sort of self-awareness that suggested she might once have been beautiful, that heads would have turned as she entered the room – but that had been another room and a long time ago. What remained were sad, empty eyes, thin strands of colourless hair hanging down to her shoulders, a long neck and a hollowed-out throat. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten in days. Expensive jewellery clung to every possible part of her body – ears, wrists, fingers, neck – but only put me in mind of an Aztec mummy. Something in her had died.

At the door, I had given my name – and my book – to a severe young woman who was either Spanish or Portuguese. This was Maria, Lady Barraclough’s personal assistant. I had explained who I was and asked to speak to Lady Barraclough on an important personal matter, assuring her that it would take no more than ten minutes and that the book was a gift to show my appreciation for her time. Maria had made me wait while she disappeared into the inner recesses of the house. I was quite surprised when, fifteen minutes later, I was invited up to the first floor. We took the stairs, although I noticed what looked like an antique French lift to one side.

‘Why have you come here?’ Lady Barraclough asked me now. She had a throaty voice and when she spoke, something in her throat rippled like a miniature keyboard. ‘What is it you wish to know?’

‘Did you ever meet a man called Daniel Hawthorne?’ I asked her.

She nodded. ‘Of course I met him. I hired him.’

I was surprised she was so matter-of-fact. From the day Hawthorne had walked into my life, he had shrouded himself in mystery, but to her he was just another employee. I wondered what the relationship between them had been like. ‘He investigated your husband,’ I said.

‘Do you really expect me to talk about this with you?’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to intrude—’

‘You are intruding. This is still extremely painful for me. It’s all public knowledge. I’ve had my whole life eviscerated in the tabloid press. Did you read what they wrote?’

‘Some of it.’

‘They are beasts. They have no humanity.’

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then slowly opened them.

‘My husband had an affair with my son’s Russian tutor. Can you imagine that? This woman came into our house. She sat at our table and she ate our food. She taught our son! I call her a woman, but she was only a girl, twenty years younger than my husband. He took her to Grand Cayman. I did not know this, but I suspected it. Men are like schoolboys. Their whole life, they are schoolboys. He lied to me, but I knew he was lying and I was determined to discover the truth.’

She paused and I saw a shroud of puzzlement cross her face and for a brief moment she had forgotten who I was.

‘Why are you asking about him?’ she demanded. ‘What has it got to do with you?’

‘I’m not here about your husband,’ I assured her. ‘I need to contact the agency that you used . . . the one that employed Mr Hawthorne. It’s difficult to explain, but I’d be very grateful if you could give me their address.’

‘What do you need them for?’

‘I’m looking for someone. I’m hoping they may be able to help.’

‘Someone you know?’

‘Someone I want to know.’

She thought for a moment. ‘Marcus always liked your books,’ she said. ‘So did Harry, my youngest son. I don’t see the two of them very much. Marcus went to Montenegro with his father, and Harry . . .’ She tried to summon up a memory of where Harry had gone. It didn’t come. She reached forward and pressed a remote control resting on the table.

‘I think you are making a mistake,’ she said. ‘The company that I used was extremely efficient. They tracked my husband down. They managed to hack into his telephone, although I thought it was meant to be impossible.’ I had an idea who might have done that for them. It had to be Kevin Chakraborty. But I said nothing. ‘They gave me a printout of every single message he had sent his mistress. They even provided me with filmed footage of the two of them in bed together, first in a hotel in London, later in Grand Cayman. When we divorced, they tracked down all his assets, including properties I didn’t even know we had. There was nothing he could hide from them. They delivered him to me, signed and sealed, tied with a red ribbon.

‘But this is what I want you to know. They enjoyed what they did. I asked them for the truth, but they didn’t need to rub my face in it. They spared me no details of my husband’s infidelity—’

‘Are you talking about Hawthorne?’ I interrupted.

‘Not Hawthorne. No. I liked him. He’s a good man, a kind man – not at all like the people he was working for. I sometimes got the feeling that I wasn’t so much their client as their victim. They belong to a different world to you and me and if you employ them, you will understand what I’m saying. My advice to you would be to stay well away. They will cost you a great deal. How many of these books have you sold? You will have to be very wealthy indeed to afford them, but it is not just your money that they will take from you. They’re like vampires. They’ll suck you dry.’

A door opened at the back of the room and the personal assistant appeared.

‘My guest is leaving,’ Lady Barraclough announced. Then, just as I thought she wasn’t going to give me the information I needed . . . ‘The company is called Fenchurch International. Maria will give you their contact details and their address.’

I got to my feet. ‘Thank you, Lady Barraclough.’

She shuddered. ‘Don’t call me that! I lost the title along with everything else.’ She took one last look at me. ‘Thank you for the book. I would ask you not to return here. I really want nothing more to do with you. Now, I’ll wish you a good day.’

Maria showed me out of the house. When I got to the end of the street, I turned round and looked back. She was still there, watching me, making sure I wasn’t going to come back.

4

I’m not sure what I was expecting from Fenchurch International, but I walked past the drab three-storey building twice before I noticed it was there and even then I wasn’t sure I was right: it didn’t have any signage and one of the numbers had fallen off. The area was prestigious enough – this was, after all, the financial district of the City of London – but the office had all the charm of a civic building put up on the cheap back in the seventies. The architecture was strikingly utilitarian, all concrete and glass, with four rows of identical windows and a nasty revolving door. This led into a cramped reception area with a single woman working on her nails, a headset connecting her to an old-fashioned console on a faux-marble desk.

‘Hello. Can I help you?’ She brightened up when she saw me. I got the impression that despite her job description, this was a receptionist who didn’t have that many guests to receive.

‘I’m here to see Mr Morton.’

‘And you are?’

‘Anthony Green.’ It was probably stupid of me to use my wife’s name. I’d be found out eventually. But it had occurred to me that if I had gone in as myself, they would almost certainly have known my connection with Hawthorne and might have refused to see me.

‘Fourth floor. Room five. You can use the lift.’

The lift was as out of date as the rest of the building, with solid aluminium doors and chunky buttons that sprang back when they were pushed. It moved slowly. The fourth-floor corridor was equally disappointing: not shabby or cheap – despite everything, the rent on this place must have been astronomical – but almost deliberately unimpressive. It must have been years since I had last walked on parquet flooring. A woman with spectacles and her hair tied in a bun hurried past me, nervous and unsmiling, clutching a bundle of papers. I walked past Rooms 1 to 4 and knocked at the one at the end of the corridor.

‘Come!’

Why do some people use that construction? Why do they drop the ‘in’? The voice had come from the other side of the door and I opened it to find myself in a small, square room with a window looking out over railway lines branching out from Fenchurch Street Station, which was about five minutes’ walk away. A man was sitting behind the sort of desk a child or a cartoonist might draw. He had been typing on a laptop computer, but he closed the lid as I came in and looked up affably.

‘Mr Green?’

‘Mr Morton?’

‘Alastair Morton. Please . . .’ He gestured me towards the two identical armchairs that faced each other across an ugly glass coffee table with a couple of files on top.

I examined him as we sat down. He was not an attractive man; somewhere in his forties, out of shape, with a sprouting of hair on his chin that was too scrappy to be a beard, but which nonetheless must have been grown by design. His eyes were tired and his skin was not good. He was wearing a dark jacket and jeans with an open-neck shirt – the same uniform as those Californian tech entrepreneurs who are worth billions and are brilliant enough to have invented some new algorithm or sent tourists into space, but who work on their appearance to suggest the opposite. He had difficulty breathing. Even the short journey from the desk to the chair had tired him. I wondered if he was ill.

Certainly, it was hard to believe that this was the man who employed Hawthorne, his adoptive brother, Roland, and quite possibly John Dudley too. Nothing about him fitted what Lady Barraclough had told me – her sense of being victimised and humiliated. Perhaps she’d met someone else.

‘So you’re looking for a missing person,’ he began. His voice was throaty. He licked his lips at the end of the sentence.

‘Yes.’

‘And you were recommended to us by Lady Barraclough.’

‘That’s right. She spoke very highly of you.’

‘That’s very good of her. How is she?’

‘Not terribly well, I’m afraid.’

‘Well, it was an unpleasant business.’ He sniffed apologetically, took out a paper tissue and wiped his nose. ‘Who is it you want to find?’

‘His name is John Dudley. He used to be a police officer. I know very little about him. He may have worked in Bristol. When I met him, he was working as a private detective and it occurred to me that he might be employed by you.’

‘There’s no John Dudley working here as far as I know. Why do you need to find him?’

‘I can’t really explain. There’s something I want to ask him.’

Morton considered this. ‘What else can you tell me?’

‘I have his photograph.’ I took out the picture I had been given by Hawthorne. It showed the two of them together. ‘This was taken five years ago. John Dudley is standing on the left. The man who’s with him is called Daniel Hawthorne.’

‘Mr Hawthorne can’t help you?’

‘He won’t help me. He doesn’t want me to meet Dudley.’ Morton had only glanced at the photograph. He didn’t seem to have recognised Hawthorne and hadn’t reacted at all to his name.

‘Where was this taken?’ he asked.

‘Riverview Close. It’s a private street in Richmond.’

He laid the picture down. ‘I’d have thought it would be a simple matter to find him,’ he said.

‘For you, perhaps. But I’m certain that Hawthorne works for you. Lady Barraclough told me that she met him. I’d be interested to know anything you can tell me about him.’

‘What, exactly?’

‘I want to know how his parents died and what happened in Reeth.’

That was the moment when the pretence ended. I saw it in his eyes: a flash of intelligence, even cruelty. Alistair Morton had known who I was before I even walked into the room. All along, he’d been toying with me, seeing where this was going to lead. We looked at each other like two actors who have come to the end of a rehearsal and can now put down their lines.

‘Hawthorne isn’t going to be pleased that you came here,’ he said.

‘You know who I am.’

‘You think we’d just let anyone walk in here?’ Now he was having less trouble with his breathing. ‘Who do you think we are? The second you emailed us from your wife’s computer, we knew everything about her – who she was married to and therefore, obviously, who and what you were. For what it’s worth, you also gave us access to the financial accounts of her film production company for the last seven years, her personal bank details, all her email correspondence and seven thousand, two hundred and thirty family snaps. If I were you, I’d think twice before doing that again.’

‘Does Kevin Chakraborty work for you?’ I asked.

He ignored this. ‘We know all about you too. Born in Stanmore in 1955. Unhappy schooldays – you seem to have talked about that at quite worrisome length. Both parents dead of cancer. You ought to have regular scans.’

‘How do you know I don’t?’

‘Your wife, your sons, your Labrador . . . everything. Did you really think it was a good idea walking in here, pretending to be a client?’

‘Well, it seems to have worked,’ I said. ‘I’ve managed to meet you.’

‘You needn’t have bothered. I was going to call you anyway. I was thinking we might have a drink.’

‘You’ve read my books about Hawthorne?’

‘I’ve read all four of them. I can’t say I enjoyed them.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’ Then I remembered. ‘The last one hasn’t been published yet!’

‘I want you to understand that I’m not at all happy about this project of yours: you and Hawthorne. I was very annoyed that he came to you with the idea in the first place. I don’t want to be part of your narrative. In my business, we like to keep a low profile. In fact, no profile at all is preferable.’

‘What exactly is your business?’ I asked.

‘Security.’ He made it sound obvious. ‘I’ve also read some of the book you’re writing at the moment. Do you have a title yet?’

‘I’m thinking about Death Comes to a Close.’

He frowned. ‘I don’t get it.’

‘It’s a play on words.’

‘I see that. But it doesn’t really make any sense. It’s life that normally comes to a close. How about Close to Death? That’s a little more direct.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that it really matters. I’d much rather this book didn’t appear. Don’t you have other fish to fry?’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

‘You’re a busy man. The Ian Fleming estate wants a new Bond novel. You have television projects. You could find yourself doing something more constructive – and safer – than writing about Hawthorne.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

He looked at me blankly. ‘I haven’t said a single word that anyone could say was threatening – and you might as well know that this conversation is being recorded to protect both our interests. Anyway, you’ve missed the point. I’m thinking of what’s best for you. I know what happened at Riverview Close five years ago and let me assure you that the story doesn’t end well. Not for Hawthorne. Not for you. Your readers aren’t going to like it one little bit.’

‘Perhaps I should be the judge of that, Mr Morton.’

‘Do you know who killed Giles Kenworthy?’

That threw me. ‘I have my suspicions,’ I said.

He smiled at that. ‘If you’ll forgive me for saying so, you don’t ever get it right. You don’t even come close.’

‘Do you know?’

‘Of course I do. It’s one of the first rules in my line of business: never ask a question unless you already have the answer.’ He paused. ‘Would you like me to tell you?’

I sat and stared.

It was the most perplexing, the most difficult question I had ever been asked and I didn’t have any idea how to reply. Did I want to know who had killed Giles Kenworthy? Of course I did. It was the whole point of the book and it would be wonderful, just for once, to be ahead of the game – by which I mean, ahead of Hawthorne. I had spent hours and hours raking through the documents he had given me, trying to decipher the information that might be useful and setting aside anything that was not. If I knew the answer, it would save me hours of time – reading, researching, reimagining.

But did I want Morton to tell me? I wasn’t so sure. This felt like the wrong time. The solution comes at the end of a murder mystery, not halfway through. It would be like cheating. It would take away the reason for finishing the book, a bit like being given the bill before the end of a meal. Everything that followed would be an anticlimax. And did I really want to be in debt to a man like this? I understood exactly what Lady Barraclough had said. He had made the offer quite deliberately. He was taunting me with it. And if I accepted, I would make the book his.

And yet I had to know. I couldn’t stop myself.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

He smiled. A vampire smile.

‘It was Roderick Browne, the dentist. He would have done anything to protect his wife and he killed Giles Kenworthy to stop the swimming pool being built. That was the end of the matter. Detective Superintendent Khan was given the credit for a successful investigation. Hawthorne was quietly removed from the case.’

I sat back, reeling. Could it really be so simple? I couldn’t believe it. All the questions, all the clues, all the dissimulations, all the different smokescreens added up to that? The killer was one of the most obvious suspects with a motive he hadn’t even bothered to hide? I’d almost have preferred Sarah, the gardener. At the same time, I knew that Morton had enjoyed telling me. He had just committed the cardinal crime in crime fiction, the one thing that no critic, however vituperative, has ever done. He had told me the ending before I had got to the end.

‘Why should I believe you . . . ?’ I stammered.

He had been ready for this. ‘Why would I lie?’ he asked. He opened one of the files and took out a clipping from a tabloid newspaper. He turned it round for me to read. I saw that it had been published on 21 July 2014.

CELEBRITY DENTIST FOUND DEAD

Police have today revealed the identity of the man they believe was responsible for the death of Giles Kenworthy, the hedge fund manager found dead in his Richmond home on Tuesday morning. Roderick Browne, 49, who took his own life following the event, was once called a ‘dentist to the stars’ due to the number of well-known personalities who visited his clinic in Cadogan Square, London.

Mr Browne had written a detailed note confessing to the murder of his neighbour, which followed a lengthy dispute. His wife is being looked after by relatives.

Speaking at a press conference held at the scene of the original crime, Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan said: ‘This is a case of a neighbourhood feud spiralling out of control. Mr Browne objected to Mr Kenworthy’s plans for a new Jacuzzi and swimming pool in his garden and this led to a double tragedy. I can confirm that there are no other suspects in this investigation and to all intents and purposes, the case is closed.’

Giles Kenworthy will be cremated at Kingston Crematorium. He leaves behind a wife and two sons.

‘He killed himself!’ It was all I managed to say. In a way, the second death – the suicide of the dentist – was as big a shock as the revelation that he was the one who had killed Giles Kenworthy.

‘That’s right.’ Morton smiled at me. ‘There was a lot of news that week, but still, you’d have thought they’d squeeze out a few more paragraphs. Celebrity dentists. They don’t gas themselves every day.’

‘Is that how he did it? Gas?’

‘Nitrous oxide. Laughing gas. I don’t think he can have found it too amusing, though.’

I sat there, reeling. Part of me was wondering if Morton was tricking me, if he’d produced a fake newspaper report to throw me off the track. But that made no sense. The article felt real and he knew perfectly well that I could cross-check it with other stories on the net. No. This was the solution. I could see it in his eyes, his cold assurance.

‘Can I get you a glass of water?’ Morton asked. ‘You look a bit shocked.’

‘I am shocked,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to blurt it out like that.’

‘It’s too bad. But I’m sure you understand. I needed to prove to you that it’s time to move on. There’s no point writing the book.’

Of course that was why he had done it. He simply wanted me to stop.

‘I don’t agree,’ I said. From shock to dismay to anger and now to recovery, I was running rapidly through the emotions. ‘Just because I know the ending, it doesn’t mean I have to tell the reader. Once the book is finished, I may be able to twist it all round.’ I was already thinking of ways to rewrite the pages I’d done.

‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’

‘I know exactly what I’m doing. Why don’t you want me to write it, Mr Morton? Who exactly are you trying to protect?’

‘I already told you . . .’

‘Is it Hawthorne? You said the story didn’t end well for him. What happened? What did he do?’

‘I think I’ve said enough.’ Morton’s eyes had narrowed. Right then I saw past the appearance and knew that this was one man I wouldn’t want as an enemy. ‘I suggest you think very carefully,’ he went on. ‘The story doesn’t end the way you think it’s going to. You may discover things about Hawthorne that you wish you hadn’t known and once you uncover them, there’ll be no going back. It may end your friendship with him. Hawthorne is clever. He’s very useful to us. But you know as well as I do that there’s a darker side to his nature. You remember how and why he left the police force. Trust me, Anthony. There are plenty of other stories you can tell. Leave this one alone.’

The interview was over. Alastair Morton stood up.

‘It was nice to meet you,’ he said.

I stood up. We did not shake hands. I walked back to the lift, which seemed to take even longer to return to the ground floor. I was totally confused. Roderick Browne was the killer. Roderick Browne was dead. How was I going to write my way around that? And what had Morton meant by those parting words, ‘The story doesn’t end the way you think it’s going to’? What else was going to happen? Suddenly I needed to get back to my office, to break open the next raft of documents. What had started as a simple act of vengeance in a quiet suburban setting had already turned into something much darker – and I couldn’t help wondering . . .

Was there worse still to come?