The Sentence Is Death

12 The Haiku

I could tell things were still going wrong as soon as I walked into the Foyle’s War production base later that same day. Jangling phones, printers churning out fresh paperwork, accountants staring desperately into computer screens, runners chasing around as if being chased themselves, a sense of tightly controlled panic . . . All that was normal. It was the silence that worried me, the way everyone avoided my eye as I made my way into Jill’s office.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked.

She was standing at her desk (she never sits), just ending a phone call, checking her emails and dictating a note to her assistant, all at the same time. As she has often told me, only women know how to multitask. ‘Nothing you need to worry about,’ she said.

‘No. Tell me!’

‘We’ve lost a location,’ she said.

‘Which one?’

‘The chase. All of it.’ It was a rare moment of action in the series, with Foyle and Sam being tracked through London streets by an armed Russian assassin. ‘The police have withdrawn permission,’ she went on. ‘They won’t even give us a sensible reason.’

‘What did they say?’ I asked. There was an unpleasant feeling in the pit of my stomach.

‘I don’t know. It was something about a murder inquiry. It sounds completely unlikely. They say someone’s been killed and they’ve had to cordon off a whole load of streets. There’s nothing we can do. They won’t let us shoot there.’

Cara Grunshaw. It had to be. That mention of a murder inquiry was a direct shot across my bows. I didn’t dare say anything to Jill but crept back to my desk, which was tucked away in a corner. The business card that Cara had given me was still in my pocket. I took it out and stared at it for a long time, then picked up the phone and dialled. It rang twice before she answered. I had hoped it would go straight to voicemail.

‘Yes?’ Her voice was curt, almost brutal.

‘This is Anthony—’

‘I know who it is. What do you want?’

‘Have you stopped our production team filming in Hackney?’

There was a brief pause, an intake of breath, then . . . ‘Are you phoning me to ask me that? Who the fuck do you think you are?’

‘I’m phoning you to give you information!’ I cut in quickly. I didn’t want her to go on shouting at me.

‘What information?’ The voice was utterly disembodied. It wasn’t just the phone line. It didn’t seem to be connected to a human being.

‘We’ve just been to Yorkshire . . . Hawthorne and me. It may be that Pryce’s murder is connected to a caving accident that happened there six years ago.’

I felt horrible betraying Hawthorne, but if it was a choice between him and Jill what else could I do? The production had to come first. But even as I spoke, I was choosing my words carefully, determined not to give too much away.

‘We know about the accident.’ Now she sounded flat, bored, but I wondered if she was telling the truth. She certainly hadn’t been to Ingleton ahead of us. Susan Taylor would have said.

‘A man called Gregory Taylor fell under a train at King’s Cross station on Saturday, the day before Richard Pryce was murdered,’ I went on. ‘Hawthorne thinks that he knew something about what happened and that maybe he was pushed. Someone didn’t want him to talk.’

This wasn’t true. It was actually my own theory and although Hawthorne hadn’t completely dismissed it, he most certainly hadn’t accepted it either. It seemed a reasonable bone to throw Grunshaw’s way. If she did decide to check up on it, she might discover that we had arranged to see Davina Richardson again that very afternoon.

‘Gregory Taylor’s got nothing to do with the fucking case,’ Grunshaw said. I hated the way she swore all the time. Hawthorne was almost as bad but somehow she made it uglier and more personal.

‘What makes you say that?’

‘You don’t ask the questions! And if you do ask them, don’t think I’m going to fucking answer them. Hawthorne’s in Yorkshire?’

‘We were there yesterday.’

‘He’s wasting his time. What else can you tell me?’

I tried to think of everything that had happened, searching for something innocuous. ‘Someone broke into Adrian Lockwood’s office the week before the murder,’ I said. ‘There may be a connection.’

‘We know about that too.’ I didn’t need to see the contempt on her face. I could hear it in her voice. ‘Don’t ring me again until you’ve got something I actually want to hear.’

‘Someone has stopped us filming—’ I tried again.

She wasn’t having any of it. The phone went dead.

For a while I sat there, doing very little. I couldn’t focus on my work, not after that conversation with Grunshaw. But slowly I came to a resolution. Thinking about her and the way she was treating me, I was more determined than ever to solve the case myself. In fact, Hawthorne was almost as bad as her and it occurred to me how much it would satisfy me to put a finger up to both of them and find the killer on my own. That would certainly be one way to get them both off my back.

Ignoring all the activity around me, I opened my laptop and quietly set about typing up all my notes from the meetings in Yorkshire. I produced hard copies on the office printer, then laid the pages out – chapter by chapter – so that I could read everything that had happened in sequence, up to the point where I was now. My hope was that I could work out where I might be heading next.

The first question. Was this one murder or two? Had Gregory Taylor been pushed under a train, had he fallen – or had he jumped?

If he had been killed, then the two deaths had to be related. Hawthorne had said as much when he was interviewing Susan Taylor: Because like it or not, both of them have died in unusual circumstances almost within twenty-four hours of one another, Mrs Taylor. And Long Way Hole seems to be the one thing that connects them. I had written it down, word for word, in my notebook. He had said much the same thing to me outside Euston station: It’s not a coincidence. So if Richard Pryce and Gregory Taylor had been targeted for the same reason, then everything went back to the accident and the killer surely had to be one of the two widows: Davina Richardson or Susan Taylor. Both of them had been in London on the day, although Davina had an alibi. She had been with Adrian Lockwood around the time the murder had taken place.

And then there was Dave Gallivan’s extraordinary revelation: He said he wanted to talk to me about Long Way Hole – about what really happened. But if Taylor had been killed to stop him from talking, surely that ruled out Davina and Susan? Might there be someone else – perhaps Chris Jackson, the farmer we’d met in Yorkshire, or someone involved in what had happened – who urgently wanted to keep him silent?

But then again, the entire scenario, the accident at Long Way Hole, could be completely irrelevant. That was a worrying thought. Was I going to end up writing two or three chapters – the visit to Ribblehead, the Station Inn and all the rest of it – when actually it was a giant red herring and a complete waste of time? Hawthorne had almost suggested as much before we’d got on the train back to London. It doesn’t quite stack up, mate. Suppose I took the entire Yorkshire sequence out of consideration. Where did that leave me?

Richard Pryce, a wealthy divorce lawyer, had been murdered in his own house. Just a few days before, Akira Anno, a woman he had deliberately set out to humiliate, had threatened to smash a bottle over his head and that was exactly how he had died. Then she killed him! Those were my words. I had spoken them to Hawthorne when he had first outlined the case and at the time the conclusion had seemed inescapable. Had she really been in a remote cottage near Lyndhurst on the Sunday evening? Hawthorne seemed to doubt it. And what about the secret income stream that Oliver Masefield had mentioned and which Richard had been investigating?

And then there was her ex-husband, Adrian Lockwood. As far as I could see, he had no motive to kill his lawyer: Pryce had managed to get him exactly the divorce he wanted; indeed, he had rewarded him with that very expensive bottle of wine. It was also impossible for Lockwood to have committed the murder, at least on his own. He had been with Davina until just after eight o’clock in the evening. Pryce’s neighbour, the unpleasant Mr Fairchild, had seen someone approaching the house (holding a torch) around five to eight and there had been the timing of the telephone call too. There was no way he could have got there in time.

Ignoring him, I turned to Stephen Spencer, Richard’s husband. He had almost certainly been lying when he said he was in Frinton with his sick mother and it did make me wonder. Why does nobody ever tell the truth when a murder has been committed? You’d have thought people would have fallen over themselves to co-operate – but no, not a bit of it. It was almost as if they were all queuing up to be suspects. So where was he? With another man . . . or with a woman? Richard Pryce had been talking about his will quite recently. Could Stephen have discovered he was about to be cut out?

I thought about Davina Richardson. She had told us that she had forgiven Richard Pryce for his part in her husband’s death and I believed her. She had taken money from him and allowed him to become a second father to her son. She seemed to get many of her clients from him and she had even been redecorating his house. Was it possible that she was harbouring some secret hatred for him and if so, why? No one had ever suggested that he had been responsible for what happened at Long Way Hole. Quite the contrary. This is my fault. That was what Gregory Taylor had said – repeatedly – when he reached Ing Lane Farm. If she had any argument, it was with him.

Finally, there was the man with the blue glasses and the rash or whatever it was on his face who had broken into Adrian Lockwood’s office. I still had no idea who he was but it seemed probable that he was the same man whom Richard Pryce had mentioned to Colin Richardson, Davina’s son. There was something wrong with his face. According to Colin, Pryce had been worried about the mystery man for some time. Suppose the man worked for Akira Anno? She knew that both Adrian and Richard Pryce were investigating her. She could have hired him to find out what they knew.

When I next looked at my watch, a couple of hours had passed and I was still no nearer the truth. There were notes and scribbles everywhere: it’s funny how the surface of my desk always reflects the state of my mind. Right now, it was a mess. I snatched hold of a page and read: What are you doing here? It’s a bit late.

Richard Pryce’s last words, overheard on the telephone by his husband, Stephen Spencer. But it had only been eight o’clock. So whoever had come to the door had arrived too late in another sense.

I took out a red pen and underlined the words that had been spoken. I knew they were important. I just couldn’t figure out why.

Hawthorne wasn’t there when I reached Davina Richardson’s house but it was only ten to five: I had arrived a few minutes early. I was standing in the street looking out for him when the front door opened and Davina appeared on the doorstep, calling me in.

‘I saw you out of the window,’ she explained. ‘Are you waiting for your friend?’

‘He’s not exactly my friend,’ I said.

‘You said you were writing a book about him. Does that mean I’m going to be one of the characters?’

‘Not if you don’t want to be.’

She smiled. ‘It doesn’t bother me at all. Why don’t you come in?’

It was drizzling again – this horrible autumn weather. There seemed no point hanging around in the street so I followed her through the cluttered hallway and back into the kitchen. The smell of cigarette smoke was everywhere. I gave up cigarettes thirty years ago but even when I smoked it was never inside the house and I wondered how she lived with it. I sat down at the kitchen table, at the same time noticing that she had been reading Two Hundred Haikus by Akira Anno. There was a brand-new copy that had been left face down, with the pages fanning out.

‘Will you have some tea?’

‘Not for me, thank you.’

‘The kettle’s just boiled.’ She brought a plate of chocolate digestives to the table. ‘I shouldn’t really be eating these but Colin loves them and you know how it is once you’ve opened the packet . . .’

‘Where is Colin?’ I asked.

‘He’s doing his homework with a friend.’ She bit into a biscuit. By the time I left, she would have eaten four or five. She was wearing a baggy mohair jersey but I didn’t think she had chosen it to hide her shape. For all her apologies, she didn’t strike me as a woman who was particularly self-conscious. She was completely comfortable with who and what she was. I still didn’t know for certain that she had been having an affair with Adrian Lockwood, but if she had, I was sure she would have been better suited to him than Akira Anno. She would have looked after him like she looked after Colin – nagging him, cajoling him, but at the end of the day doing everything she could to make him happy.

‘How well do you know Adrian Lockwood?’ I asked.

She stopped mid-bite. ‘I thought I told you that the last time you were here. He was introduced to me as a client but he’s become a sort of friend. Why do you ask?’

‘No particular reason.’

‘I miss having a man in the house.’ She looked genuinely wistful. ‘I know I shouldn’t say it in this day and age but I’m absolutely useless without a man. There isn’t a moment I don’t miss Charlie. I never get anything right. I can’t work out the buttons on the TV remote control. Parking the car is a nightmare even though it’s only a Toyota Prius and it isn’t that big. I forget to put the clocks back and I wake up an hour early or an hour late or whatever it is. I hate taking the rubbish out, and you try putting on a duvet cover by yourself!’ She sighed. ‘Adrian was never happy with Akira. He never said as much to me, not in so many words, but I could tell. Women can, you know. We always know when something’s not right.’

While she was talking, I was nervously listening out for Hawthorne. He probably wouldn’t be too happy, me being here without him. He hated me asking questions even when he was in the room and I certainly didn’t want to say anything that might undermine his investigation, not after what had happened before. So I glanced at the book on the table and asked conversationally, ‘Have you been reading these?’

‘Oh yes. Someone gave them to me because they knew I was friends with Adrian.’ She gestured at it vaguely. ‘I don’t really understand them, to be honest with you. She’s far too clever for me.’

I picked it up. Like many books of poetry, Two Hundred Haikus was a fairly slim volume – only about forty pages long – and at £15 it wasn’t cheap either. But I suppose that’s fair enough. Poetry has limited sales and it’s rare that you’re going to find any poet’s work with a half-price sticker on the front table at Waterstones. It was a hardback with a tiny detail taken from a woodblock, I think by Hokusai, on the front cover. The haikus were arranged in groups of four or five on high-quality paper. There was a black and white photograph of Akira Anno on the back. She wasn’t smiling.

I was introduced to haikus when I was at school. I wasn’t a particularly bright child and I remember liking them because they were so short. It was Matsuo Bashō in the seventeenth century who made them famous. An ancient pond / A frog jumps in / The splash of water. It’s one of the few poems I can still quote in its entirety, although in the original Japanese it has five syllables in the first line, seven in the second and then another five in the third. That’s the whole point.

I cast my eye over Akira’s efforts, which were in English, though printed in curving black letters that imitated Japanese calligraphy. The book had been left open on haikus 174–181 (each one was numbered, with no title). On an impulse, I turned the page and my eye was immediately drawn to haiku 182 at the top of the page.

You breathe in my ear

Your every word a trial

The sentence is death

182.

The number painted on the wall next to the dead body of Richard Pryce.

My head was spinning. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. Akira Anno hadn’t just threatened Pryce with murder, she had written about it in a book of poetry. No. That wasn’t fair. She had written a poem about the nature of murder . . . if that was what the haiku meant. I wasn’t completely sure. Even so, the words had to relate to what had happened in the room. The number couldn’t be a clearer signpost.

But if she had killed Richard Pryce, would she have left a clue that incriminated herself so obviously? And if she hadn’t painted the number, who had and why? I wanted to ask Davina if she had read the haiku but she was looking at me completely innocently, wondering why I was so flabbergasted.

It was at that precise moment that the doorbell rang and I realised Hawthorne had arrived. I was relieved. This was one of those few moments when I actually wanted to see him. He could deal with Davina and ask the questions that needed to be asked, and when we left he could make sense of what I had just discovered.

‘That’s your friend!’

‘Yes.’ The doorbell rang a second time. ‘You’d better let him in,’ I said.

Davina seemed unwilling to leave me on my own but got up and drifted out of the room.

I read the haiku three more times, turning all sorts of possibilities over in my mind. At the same time, I heard Davina’s voice out in the hall, explaining that I was already here, and I wasn’t surprised a few moments later to see Hawthorne glowering at me from the doorway.

‘You’re early,’ he said. Not a statement. An accusation.

‘I was waiting outside—’ I began.

‘I saw him and I invited him in.’ Davina came to my rescue.

‘We’ve just been chatting.’ I was trying to reassure him. ‘Mrs Richardson was showing me some poetry.’

Hawthorne still looked suspicious. He sat down, folding his ever-present raincoat over the arm of the sofa. Davina offered him tea, which he refused, plunging straight in as if to make up for lost time. ‘Did you by any chance see Gregory Taylor last weekend? Possibly sometime late afternoon?’

‘Who?’ She looked perplexed.

‘The man who went caving with your husband.’

‘I know who he is. Of course I know who you mean. Why are you asking me about him?’

‘I don’t want to upset you, Mrs Richardson, but he died last Saturday . . . one day before the murder of Richard Pryce.’

She wasn’t upset. She was shocked. ‘Gregory’s dead?’

‘He fell under a train,’ I said and immediately wished I hadn’t as it drew another baleful glance from Hawthorne.

‘You didn’t see it in the newspapers?’

‘I don’t really read the newspapers. It’s all so gloomy. I sometimes watch the news on the TV but I didn’t see anything. Well, they probably wouldn’t report it, would they? If a man falls under a train . . .’

‘I’m not entirely sure he fell.’ Hawthorne was sitting very straight, his legs apart, gazing at her with what might have been a sympathetic smile. With his hair cut so close around the ears and his black suit and tie, he managed to look both innocent and aggressive.

‘What? I don’t understand . . .’

‘He didn’t come here?’

‘No. I’ve just told you. I wasn’t here anyway. I went out at half past four. No. I mean half past three. I don’t know what I mean . . . I keep getting confused! It was half past three and I went over to Brent Cross. I took Colin with me. He’s growing so fast, he needed new football kit. What makes you think Gregory was here?’

‘One of the last things he did before he died was to send his wife a selfie he took on Hornsey Lane.’

She thought about that. ‘That’s quite near here,’ she admitted. ‘I can’t imagine what he’d be doing there. He was still living in Yorkshire as far as I knew.’ She shook her head. ‘I hadn’t seen or heard from him for six years. He sent me a letter after the inquest, offering his condolences, but otherwise we’d had no contact and to be honest with you I’m not sure I would have wanted him to come into my home. I already told you. Richard wasn’t to blame for what happened that day, when Charlie died. But Gregory Taylor was supposed to be in charge. He was the one who decided they should go ahead even though the forecast predicted rain. I don’t think I’d have had anything to say to him.’

‘So what was he doing on Hornsey Lane?’

‘I have no idea. I’m sorry you’ve wasted your time coming over here today. I could have told you over the phone. I didn’t see him.’

It hadn’t been a waste of time. I couldn’t wait to tell Hawthorne about the haiku.

Hawthorne picked up his raincoat and got to his feet. ‘Thank you for seeing us,’ he said. Then, almost as an afterthought: ‘I’m sorry to have to ask this, Mrs Richardson, but I need you to tell me. What exactly is your relationship with Adrian Lockwood?’

She blushed, just as she had when we were first with her, but this time it was more anger than embarrassment. ‘I really don’t see what business it is of yours, Mr Hawthorne. Adrian is a client but he’s become a friend. A good friend. I tried to support him. He found the divorce proceedings very stressful and he was so angry with Richard. He came here to unwind. That’s all, really. He thought of me as someone he could trust.’

‘Why was he angry with Richard Pryce?’

‘Did I say that? I didn’t mean it. He was angry about the whole thing . . . the amount of time it took . . . Akira. He knew he’d made a mistake marrying her and— You really will have to ask him about it. Not me. I don’t think it’s right for me to talk about him behind his back.’

That was the end of it. She showed us to the door and a few moments later we were back in the street, walking towards Highgate Tube. As soon as I was alone with Hawthorne, I told him what had happened. It seemed inescapable to me that the number 182, painted on the wall at Heron’s Wake, related to the poem. I recited it, emphasising the third line.

‘The sentence is death. She’s saying she has to kill him because she can’t bear living with him. I know it’s crazy but she wanted the whole world to know what she intended to do.’

Hawthorne looked doubtful. ‘When was the book published?’

‘I don’t know. Earlier this year.’

‘So she could have written that poem a long time ago.’

‘She was still married to Lockwood. She still hated him.’

‘But she didn’t kill Lockwood. She killed Richard Pryce. At least, that’s what you’re suggesting.’

‘She wrote a poem about death. And look at that second line! Maybe the trial she’s talking about is her divorce.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you one thing.’ The rain was getting heavier. Hawthorne drew on his coat. ‘On the night of the murder, Akira wasn’t in Lyndhurst or anywhere near it. She lied to us.’

‘How do you know?’

‘CCTV footage from the Welcome Break service station at Fleet. She was never there. And ANPR records on the M27 and the A31.’

‘What’s ANPR?’

‘Automatic number-plate recognition. Ms Anno drives a Jaguar F-Type convertible. There are cameras on both roads and unless she drove the entire journey cross-country, there’s no trace of her.’

‘Did DI Grunshaw tell you that?’

‘That’s right.’

I found that surprising. Grunshaw loathed Hawthorne. She’d allowed him to be present at a couple of interviews – probably because she’d been forced to – but would she share ANPR data with him? I doubted it. On the other hand, what other way could he have got the information?

‘Anyway, Grunshaw spoke to the yoga teacher,’ Hawthorne continued. ‘The man who owns the cottage. At first he said that he’d lent it to Akira but under the first bit of pressure he broke down and said he didn’t know if she’d gone there or not.’

So what did that mean? Suddenly it looked as if the case had nothing to do with Long Way Hole in Yorkshire. We were back to the divorce, the husband and wife at each other’s throats. And the lawyer who had come between them.

‘What about the haiku?’ I asked.

‘How exactly did you come across it?’ He raised a hand, silencing me before I could answer. ‘Do me a favour, Tony. Write the chapter. That’s the easiest way. Describe what happened when you visited Mrs Richardson – without me – and maybe I can work out what actually happened.’

‘I don’t like writing out of sequence.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ll never read the rest of it.’

We had reached the escalators. There were a few people coming up but we were alone as we descended into what felt like the bowels of the earth.

‘Don’t forget the book club,’ Hawthorne said.

‘When is it?’

‘Monday night.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m at the theatre Monday night.’

‘But you said you’d come. What were you seeing?’ In his mind, it had already slipped into the past tense.

‘Ghosts.’ It was a hot ticket. Richard Eyre directing Henrik Ibsen at the Almeida.

He shook his head regretfully. ‘Well, I’ve promised them now. You’ll have to miss it.’

I stood there, a few steps behind him. I wasn’t moving but I was being carried further and further down into the shadows and I remember thinking that I’d put that into Hawthorne’s chapter, right at the end.

It was exactly how I felt.