The Sentence Is Death

14 Daunt’s Bookshop

Daunt’s is one of my favourite bookshops in London. It’s halfway down Marylebone High Street, which itself has a pleasant, old-fashioned feel; more a neighbourhood than a shopping precinct. Every time I go in – and it’s not that far from where I live – I get a sense that I’m stepping back into a more civilised city. (Charing Cross Road used to be the same until high rents drove most of the second-hand bookshops away.) It actually occupies two shops, 83 and 84, knocked together with two doorways and two corridors, one on either side of a sales desk that forms a sort of island in between. The interior has the feel of a Methodist chapel, complete with the reticulated window at the end. The books are stacked on old wooden shelves and as an added quirk they are listed not by author or by subject but by country. Everything feels very narrow. About halfway in, a staircase disappears down to a basement, leaving a rectangular space on the other side where authors are invited to give talks. I have given one or two there myself.

This was where Akira Anno was speaking at half past six that evening. Hawthorne and I arrived in time to get a couple of seats at the back. It was interesting to see how relaxed he was inside the bookshop; certainly more than he had been in Yorkshire. He was completely cheerful as we sat down and it reminded me that he was a member of a book club, one which I would be joining on Monday night. I hadn’t read A Study in Scarlet for some time. I’d have to spend a few hours with it on Sunday.

About a hundred people had turned up for Akira’s event and every seat was taken. There were more people standing at the back. When she finally appeared, making her way down the side, the applause was loud and enthusiastic. I was quite surprised. She didn’t have a new book out so there was actually no reason for her – or her audience – to be there. And the title of the talk certainly wouldn’t have dragged me out on a miserable November evening.

She was interviewed by a slim man with a tangle of black hair, black glasses, a black jacket and a black polo neck, a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies whose name I didn’t catch. He spent much of the hour discussing her earlier work, A Cool Breeze in Hiroshima. The main character, a Korean comfort woman called Jung-soon, finds redemption in the days after the atom bomb is dropped, only to die a few chapters later of leukaemia. I knew the book from the blurb on the back cover and drifted in and out during the next forty minutes, but I did manage to jot down some of what she said.

‘The sexualisation of the nuclear arsenal, as a trope, is of course self-evident. It is no coincidence that the first two bombs were Fat Man and Little Boy, while both the cities have inherently feminine-sounding names, particularly with the unvoiced phoneme at the start of “Hiroshima”. As I’ve explained, I use the rape of Jung-soon that opens the book to some extent to prefigure what history informs us will come. History or, in this case, her story. But I think we have to be careful. For too long we have allowed such issues as missile proliferation, cyberwarfare and nuclear strategy to be seen from a state-centric and male-dominated perspective. If we accept the masculinised identity of the discussion, then it becomes more difficult to challenge it. We cannot allow politics to become gender hierarchical and I think that language can all too easily affect the very way we think.’

All of this may be true but I’m afraid it went right over my head. It wasn’t just the sense of what Akira was saying that lost me, it was the manner of her delivery. She spoke very softly and with almost no emotion so that if her talk had been translated into one of those wavelengths you see in medical dramas, it would have appeared as an almost flat line.

The audience loved it. That line about the unvoiced phoneme even got a laugh and the university man was nodding so much his glasses almost fell off. There’s no lonelier place than an audience where you’re the only person having a bad time – I’ve often felt this in the theatre – and I was glad when the first part of the talk came to an end and Akira took questions from the floor. At the same time, Hawthorne (who had been blank-faced throughout) nudged me and pointed to a pair of seats about five rows in front of us.

I felt my stomach shrink as I recognised Detective Inspector Cara Grunshaw and her leather-jacketed assistant. They had come to the talk as well, presumably planning to interview Akira a second time when it was over. My worry was that I hadn’t informed them we would be there and the moment they saw me they would know I wasn’t living up to my side of the agreement that had been forced on me. Worse still, what would I do if she referred to our recent telephone conversation in front of Hawthorne?

I sweated out the question-and-answer session and didn’t hear very much of it. I’ve admired the work of feminist writers from Virginia Woolf to Doris Lessing and Angela Carter, but Akira’s brand of humourless introspection – along with her audience’s appreciation of it – left me cold. At long last there was a round of applause, an announcement that Akira would be signing books, including her recent collection of haikus, and everyone got to their feet. Hawthorne and I stayed where we were, watching as a short line formed. For all their enthusiasm, not many people stayed to buy books, but presumably they had them already. Grunshaw and her friend Darren were sitting with their backs to us. I wondered if they knew we were there.

We waited until everyone had gone, then moved forward, all four of us descending on Akira in a pincer movement, coming at her from both sides. She was clearly alarmed to see us, giving the lecturer a quick peck on each cheek and sending him hastily on his way. Grunshaw noticed Hawthorne and turned to him first.

‘I didn’t expect to see you here.’ She glanced at me and I couldn’t escape the glint in her eye which underlined what she had just said with a streak of malevolence.

‘You don’t mind if we join you, do you?’ Hawthorne asked, indifferently.

‘Not at all.’ Now she focused on Akira. ‘We need to have a few more words, Ms Anno. Do you mind?’

‘Does my opinion really matter?’

‘Not really. Is there somewhere we can go?’

One of the managers showed us downstairs. It wasn’t completely private but there was a wicker table and some chairs tucked away in an alcove and it was at least a little quieter. Grunshaw had come on her own, leaving Darren upstairs. Hawthorne took the chair next to her, facing Akira, who sat with her legs crossed, glowering behind her mauve spectacles. I stood leaning against West Africa with South Africa in front of me and Italy just across the corridor. There was little natural light down here. Glass tiles in the ceiling gave a blurry view of the area where Akira had just been speaking.

Once we were settled, Grunshaw weighed in with the obvious question that had brought her here. ‘So where were you on Sunday night, Miss Anno?’

‘I told you . . .’ Akira began.

‘We know that you weren’t at Glasshayes Cottage in Lyndhurst. Did you really think we wouldn’t check what you’d said?’

Akira shrugged as if to suggest that was exactly what she’d expected.

‘You realise that lying to a police officer involved in a murder investigation is a very serious offence?’

‘I didn’t lie to you, Detective Inspector. My life is a very busy one. I sometimes have difficulty remembering.’

It wasn’t true. She didn’t even try to make it sound so.

‘So where were you?’

She blinked a couple of times, then pointed at me. ‘I’m not talking in front of him. He is a commercial writer. He has no business here.’

I had never heard anyone make the word ‘commercial’ sound so dirty.

‘He’s staying,’ Hawthorne said. I was surprised he had taken my side, but then of course he would want me to write what happened.

‘Where were you?’ Grunshaw repeated the question. I was quite surprised she didn’t try to get rid of me.

Akira, too, had seen that she wasn’t going to get her way. She shrugged a second time. ‘With a friend. In London.’

‘And the name of your friend?’

Still Akira hesitated and I wondered what she was so desperate to hide. But she had no choice. ‘Dawn Adams.’

That was the publisher she had been having dinner with the night she threw a glass of wine over Richard Pryce.

‘You were with her for the whole weekend?’

‘No. On Sunday. She lives in Wimbledon.’

This last piece of information was offered grudgingly, as if it would get Grunshaw off her back. But the detective inspector had only just started. ‘What time did you arrive? What time did you leave?’

Akira sighed in an ill-natured way. She would rather have been answering questions about unvoiced phonemes. I wondered if she and Dawn Adams had been having an affair, although I’d have thought she would have volunteered such information willingly. Still, there was definitely something she didn’t want us to know. ‘I arrived maybe six o’clock. I left the next day.’

‘You stayed overnight?’

‘We talked. We had too much to drink. I didn’t want to drive. So she put me up.’

‘You do realise we’ll ask Ms Adams for a statement.’

‘I’m not lying to you!’ Akira scowled. ‘I don’t like telling you about my private life. Certainly not in front of him.’ Again the finger with its long, pointed nail jabbed in my direction. ‘She’s a friend of mine. That’s all. She got divorced last year and now she’s on her own.’

‘She went to court?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who represented her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who represented her ex-husband?’

There was a long pause. Akira really didn’t want to tell us. ‘It was Richard Pryce.’

I didn’t like to admit it, but DI Grunshaw had certainly hit the nail on the head. Two women, one a writer, the other a publisher, had both come up against the same lawyer. At least one of them had been trashed by him and had threatened to kill him. And now the other one was providing an alibi for her.

I managed to catch Hawthorne’s eye and silently urged him to ask the one thing I wanted to know. For once, he obliged. ‘I’ve been reading your poetry,’ he said brightly, addressing Akira.

Akira might have been flattered but she said nothing.

‘I was interested in one of your haikus . . .’

‘Are you taking the piss?’ Grunshaw demanded.

‘It was haiku number one eight two.’

That surprised her. She waited for Hawthorne to continue but in fact I was the one who recited it.

‘Your breath in my ear / Your every word a trial / The sentence is death.’

‘What does that mean?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘What do you think it means?’ Akira returned.

Hawthorne shrugged, unfazed. ‘It could mean all sorts of things. If it was about Richard Pryce, it could be that you didn’t like what he said about you. He was going to lie about you in court. That’s what you told us. So you decided to kill him.’

There was a brief silence. Then Akira laughed. It was strange because there was absolutely no humour in it at all. If she had grabbed hold of a stinging nettle and gasped in pain, it would have sounded much the same.

‘You have not understood a single word I wrote,’ she said. She turned to me. ‘And the first line is You breathe in my ear. If you’re going to quote my work, you could at least get it right!’ She was pleased with herself, scoring a point. ‘Do I really have to explain it to you?’ she continued. ‘The haiku was not about Richard Pryce. I wrote it before I knew of his existence. It’s about my marriage. It was written for Adrian Lockwood. I read it to him! He was the one who demeaned me, who humiliated me with his self-regard and his indifference to my needs. The imagery is obvious.’ Her nostrils flared. ‘The first line is sexual. It is Claudius with Gertrude. He is lying next to me in bed, close enough for me to feel his breath. It is not just what he says. It is what he is. I have come to realise that by marrying a second time, I have placed myself in the condemned cell. I use the word “trial” in two senses. It refers to my day-to-day suffering but also to the fact that I am legally his wife, that this is my status in a court of law. And I am not sentencing him to death. In fact, it is exactly the other way round. I am the one who is dying, although the last line is of course a paraprosdokian, with the double entendre in “sentence” – which gives rise to the suggestion that, despite all the evidence, I will survive.’

All of this had come out in a flat sort of whisper but she raised her voice for the last three words, adding a touch of Gloria Gaynor. Grunshaw was uninterested but Hawthorne ploughed on anyway.

‘Were you aware that Richard Pryce was investigating you?’

‘He was fascinated by me. He wanted to understand me.’

‘That’s not what I mean. He had employed a forensic accountant called Graham Hain to look into your finances. He thought you were fiddling him.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘But it’s true.’

‘He would have found nothing. I have nothing to hide.’ But both her eyes and her lips had narrowed and her body language was defensive.

‘I’d like a contact number for Dawn Adams,’ Grunshaw said, taking over the interview once again.

‘You can reach her at Kingston Press.’

Kingston Press was an independent publishing house. I’d vaguely heard of them.

‘She works there?’

‘She owns it.’

‘Thank you, Ms Anno.’ That was Grunshaw talking. I got the feeling that she had come to her own conclusions about Akira and the verdict was ‘Not guilty’.

We stood up and made our way back to street level. Akira went first, with Hawthorne next to her and then Cara Grunshaw a few steps behind. I was last and so I was isolated, with nowhere to go, when Grunshaw suddenly stopped and turned on me, halfway up the stairs.

‘You didn’t tell me you were coming here,’ she said. Her body seemed massive, blocking the stairwell, and her eyes behind those chunky black spectacles were extraordinarily aggressive.

I looked for Hawthorne but he had disappeared ahead. ‘I was going to call you this evening,’ I said. ‘It’s a complete waste of time trying to get information out of me. Hawthorne never tells me anything.’

‘You’ve got ears. You’ve got eyes. Use them.’ She glared at me. ‘This is your last warning.’

‘You blocked Foyle’s War—’

‘If you find out who killed Pryce before me, you’ll never shoot a frame of your fucking television series again, I promise you.’

She swivelled round and with her black-clad thighs and buttocks waddling in front of me, continued up to the entrance.

I thought my adventures at Daunt Books were over but there was still one more twist to come. Darren was waiting for us and as I reached the ground floor and hurried over to Hawthorne, he bumped into me, almost knocking me off my feet. ‘Sorry,’ he said, making it quite clear that he had done it deliberately.

Akira Anno was standing at the door. Hawthorne was in front of the sales desk with one of the managers behind. The door to the street was open and it was raining yet again, the rain tapping at the windows. I hadn’t brought an umbrella. I thought we’d have to call a taxi.

I took a step towards the exit and it was then that Cara Grunshaw called out to me, her voice rising in indignation. ‘Excuse me!’

I turned round. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Aren’t you going to pay for that book?’ She said it so loudly that everyone in the shop must have heard.

My head swam. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I saw you pick up a book just now. You put it in your case.’

It was true that I was carrying my black shoulder bag. Jill had given it to me as a birthday present and I nearly always have it with me. Was it heavier than it had been when I came in? My hand dropped to my side and felt the leather. There was something in the outer compartment and, I noticed, the straps had come loose.

‘I didn’t—’ I began.

‘Can I help?’ The manager had come out from behind the sales desk. I had met her before when I had come to give talks at the shop and she had always been very friendly, a bit like a schoolteacher with her closely cropped grey hair and bright, blue eyes.

‘Do you run this place?’ Grunshaw asked.

‘Yes. I’m Rebecca LeFevre. Who are you?’

‘Detective Inspector Cara Grunshaw.’ She gestured at her partner, giving me his full name for the first time. ‘DC Darren Mills.’

LeFevre looked at me with astonishment. ‘Do you mind if we look in your bag?’ she asked.

I glanced at Hawthorne but he wasn’t in any hurry to help. If anything, he was amused. I already knew what had happened. Darren Mills had done this when he bumped into me at the top of the stairs. He had slipped a book into my case to embarrass me, to punish me, perhaps even to have me arrested, and if I had been sensible I would have left it there and simply walked out or at least tried to explain. Instead I opened the case and took out a thick paperback, a book called Excalibur Rising, the second volume in the Doomworld series by Mark Belladonna. This was the same series that Gregory Taylor had bought on the day he died. The book had actually been on display on a table at the front of the shop and there it was, resting in my hand.

Akira Anno was staring at the book with a look of queasy horror on her face. It took her a moment to find the words. ‘He’s a thief!’ she exclaimed.

‘I’m not a thief . . .’ I began. ‘This is a set-up!’ I pointed at Mills. ‘He put it in my case. He barged into me when I came upstairs.’

Mills raised his hands in a show of surrender. ‘Why would I do a thing like that?’ he demanded.

Grunshaw looked at me thunderously. ‘Are you accusing a police officer of planting evidence?’

‘Yes! I am!’

‘You realise I could arrest you?’ She turned to LeFevre. ‘Do you want me to arrest him?’

‘Wait a minute.’ LeFevre was looking at me in dismay. If she had reminded me of a teacher before, she was now more like a headmistress with a child who had once been her favourite. ‘You’ve let the bookshop down. You’ve let your readers down. You’ve let yourself down.’ I could almost hear her saying it. ‘Could I have it back?’ That was what she actually said.

I handed the book to her. I could feel my cheeks burning.

‘The policy at Daunt’s is to refer all shoplifters to the police,’ she went on. ‘I have to say, I’m surprised and very disappointed, but it’s up to the police to decide if they want to take any further action.’

‘I didn’t do it!’ I knew I sounded pathetic. I couldn’t help myself.

‘I will say, though, that you’re not welcome back in this shop, Anthony. I’m very sorry. And I don’t think we’ll be stocking you after this.’

I’d had enough. I really couldn’t take any more. I pushed past Hawthorne and Akira and, with their eyes burning into me, hurried out into the rain.