The Sentence Is Death

15 Rum and Coke

I didn’t see Hawthorne again until Monday evening, when, instead of going to see Ghosts at the Almeida, I rang the doorbell at River Court to join him at his book club. At least this time I was expected. Normally, which is to say on the last two occasions, I had to resort to subterfuge to get anywhere near the flat where he lived. We’d arranged to meet at seven o’clock and the idea was that we would go together to wherever the group met.

He was standing in the corridor when the lift doors opened and I was afraid he was going to step in and take me straight back down. But his own front door was open and he seemed quite genial as he led me back towards the flat.

‘How are you, Tony?’

‘I’m all right.’ But I wasn’t, not after what had happened at Daunt’s and I wanted him to know it.

‘You sound like you got out of bed on the wrong side. Come in and have a rum and Coke. That’ll cheer you up.’

I hardly ever drink Coca-Cola and I don’t much like rum, but the invitation intrigued me on all sorts of levels. I followed him in.

Hawthorne’s flat would have told me more about him if it had actually belonged to him but it was exactly as I remembered from the one time I’d been there, bare to the point of depressing with windows that were too narrow for the wonderful view they could have provided: the River Thames flowing darkly through the evening gloom. There were still no pictures, no flowers, no clutter . . . nothing that would suggest he did anything but sleep here.

Except, of course, for the models. I had discovered Hawthorne’s liking for Airfix kits on my first visit and although he had been sheepish at first, he had allowed his enthusiasm to take over and this had led to one of our very few conversations that wasn’t about crime. The surfaces were crowded with tanks, jeeps, ambulances, anti-aircraft guns, battleships, aircraft carriers and so on, while dozens of different aircraft dangled from the ceiling on wires. I noticed the Chieftain Mark 10 that he had been working on the last time I came. It had been perfectly assembled, with not a smear of glue nor a paint stroke out of place. The collection must have taken up thousands of hours of his time. I could imagine Hawthorne, hunched over the table, working into the night. They would also be hours when he could completely cut himself off from the world outside.

I had asked him when he had started model-making. It was a hobby when I was a kid. The more time I spent with Hawthorne, the more I suspected that something traumatic must have happened to him when he was young and it had created the adult he had become. I don’t just mean the casual homophobia, the moodiness, his attitude to me. Becoming a detective, marrying, separating, living alone in an empty flat, making models . . . all of it seemed to be driven by the same catastrophe, which might have happened in Yorkshire and which might have led him to change his name.

‘You’ve started a new model,’ I said.

It was spread out on the table, a helicopter with RAF RESCUE printed on the side.

‘Westland Sea King,’ he said. ‘WS-61. Used in the Falklands, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan . . . Search and Rescue. You want that drink?’

‘Do you have any wine?’

‘No. I’ve got some rum.’

‘That’s fine.’

Hawthorne didn’t drink. He had never told me that but nor had I ever seen him with anything alcoholic. Even at the Station Inn in Ribblehead he’d stuck to water. I followed him into the kitchen, which connected to the living area through a wide doorway. You can learn a lot about someone from their kitchen – but this one was useless. Everything was high-end, brand new and looked as clean as the day it had been fitted. It doesn’t matter how many times I clean my own flat, I’m always embarrassed by the oven, which greets visitors with the carbonised memories of a hundred meals. Hawthorne’s oven had pristine glass doors and silver gas rings that I doubted had ever been switched on.

And there, standing on a marble counter, was the bottle of rum he had offered me. Had he gone out and bought it? I thought it was more likely that he had been given it by someone as a gift, like Richard Pryce and his £2,000 bottle of wine. Either way, the plastic around the cap was unbroken. Along with the single glass that had been placed next to it, it was somehow totemic. I knew at once that this was the only alcohol in the house and that it had been placed there deliberately for me.

Hawthorne went to the fridge and opened the door. Casually, trying not to look too nosy, I turned my head to examine the contents. I wasn’t surprised to see that the interior was as clinical as the rest of the kitchen. In my house, we either have too much food or none at all and there are times when I find myself furiously ransacking the fridge to find the single ingredient I need. Hawthorne’s fridge was monastic by comparison. He mainly seemed to eat ready meals. There were about half a dozen of them in plastic trays, stacked so neatly and with so much space around them that they had become quite unappetising, like an artwork by Damien Hirst. The vegetable trays were half empty, although I could see what looked like a bunch of carrots through the frosted plastic. It was the fridge of a man who had no particular interest in food. He would take out a packet and microwave it and he might not even examine the lid to see what he was going to eat. Now, he plucked a can of Coke out of the door, took some ice from the freezer and brought them over to the table.

‘You’re not going to join me,’ I said.

‘I’ve got some coffee.’ There was a single white mug beside the sink. I hadn’t noticed it before.

Two lumps of ice, about an inch of rum, half the can, a slice of lemon that he produced from somewhere . . . he made the drink mechanically, but slid it towards me with a certain pride. Again, as so often with Hawthorne, I got a sense of a child playing at being an adult.

He took his coffee, then sat down at the table. I produced four folded sheets of paper out of my pocket and slid them across. ‘These are the pages you wanted,’ I said, still keeping my distance.

‘What pages?’

‘From the book. When I met Davina Richardson without you. You said you wanted to see them.’

‘Oh. Right.’ He placed them to one side. He didn’t even open them.

‘You could at least say thank you.’

He looked at me carefully, puzzled as to why I should be so annoyed. Could he really have forgotten what I had been through at Daunt’s? ‘All right,’ he admitted, finally. ‘So you rubbed Cara up the wrong way.’

‘Nice of you to notice.’ I took the first sip of my drink, wishing he could have found it in himself to get me a glass of wine or a gin and tonic.

‘I assumed it was her who slipped that book into your bag. I somehow don’t see you enjoying the Doomworld series.’

‘What? And if it had been Charles Dickens or Sarah Waters, you think I might have been tempted to go on a shoplifting spree?’

‘No, mate. That’s not what I meant.’ His voice was apologetic now but it struck me that he still looked quite amused.

‘You don’t seem to understand. What happened at that bookshop was terrible! It could be the end of my career. If it gets into the papers, I’ll be destroyed.’ I was almost trembling with anger and indignation. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t her. It was her assistant. Mills.’

‘He’s a nasty piece of work too. They suit each other. So what have you done to piss them off?’

I had no choice. I had to explain what had happened, how DI Grunshaw had visited my home and assaulted me. ‘She wants to solve the case before you do,’ I said. ‘She wants me to contact her and tell her everything I know.’

‘That’s ridiculous!’ Hawthorne exclaimed. ‘You don’t know anything!’

‘Wait a minute . . . !’ I found my hand tightening around my glass. ‘I may not know who killed Richard Pryce – but for that matter, nor do you.’

‘I’ve narrowed it down to one of two suspects.’ Hawthorne blinked at me over his coffee.

‘Which two suspects?’

‘That’s my point. You don’t know. So you can’t say.’

‘As a matter of fact, I called her.’ Even in my anger, I felt guilty having to admit it. ‘I didn’t have any choice. She blocked the filming of Foyle’s War. At least, I think she did. I told her that we’d been to Yorkshire and that Gregory Taylor had been killed. I also told her about the break-in at Adrian Lockwood’s office.’ I waited for Hawthorne to respond and when he said nothing, I added: ‘I had to tell her something. And she said she knew all that anyway.’

‘She was lying.’ I had thought Hawthorne would be more annoyed with me, but he was unconcerned. ‘Cara Grunshaw and Darren Mills are both thick as shit. I’ve met police dogs with more intelligence than those two. You could tell them everything we’ve done, down to the last word, and they’d still end up running round in a circle, sniffing each other’s arses.’

‘Do you have to be quite so picturesque?’

‘You can call them every day if it’ll keep them off your back. You should have told me about this sooner. Honestly, mate. We’re streets ahead of them. You’ll have your book finished and in the Oxfam shops before they work out who did it. That’s why I was called in. The police know they’re going nowhere with this one. They need all the help they can get.’

There was a long pause. I drank some more. He had used real Coke and it was horribly sweet. Sugar with sugar.

‘Do you really know who killed Richard Pryce?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘One of two.’

‘Well, at least give me a little help! I’ve been everywhere you’ve been. I’ve seen everything you’ve seen. And yet I haven’t got the faintest idea who killed him. Just tell me one clue that I’ve missed – one clue that makes it all make sense.’

‘It’s not like that, Tony.’ I could tell that Hawthorne wanted a cigarette but he couldn’t smoke, not when he was surrounded by someone else’s fittings and furniture. ‘I’ve told you before. You’ve got to find the shape. That’s all.’

I frowned, not following him.

‘I’d have thought it’s the same when you write a book. Isn’t that how you start . . . looking for the shape?’

I was thrown by what Hawthorne had said because he was absolutely right. At the very start of the process, when I’m creating a story, I do think of it as having a particular, geometrical shape. For example, I was about to start work on Moriarty, my Sherlock Holmes sequel, and it had occurred to me that the twisting narrative, which would turn in on itself at the end, was rather like a Möbius strip. The House of Silk had the appearance of a letter Y. A novel is a container for 80,000 to 90,000 words and you might see it as a jelly mould. You pour them all in and hope they’ll set. But it had never occurred to me that a detective might see his world in the same way.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘So exactly what shape does the murder of Richard Pryce have?’

‘It wasn’t just Richard Pryce who died. You’ve got to remember Gregory Taylor went under that train and there are three explanations for that.’

‘It was an accident. It was suicide. Someone deliberately killed him.’

‘That’s right. And each one of those possibilities changes the shape of the whole thing.’

My head was spinning: Hawthorne wasn’t making a great deal of sense. Or perhaps it was the rum. ‘Did you always want to be a detective?’ I asked him.

The question took him by surprise. ‘Yes.’

‘Since you were a child?’

At once he was on the defensive. ‘Why are you asking me that? Why do you want to know?’

‘I’ve told you. Because I’m writing about you.’ I wasn’t sure if I dared ask the next question but this seemed the right moment. I plunged in. ‘Did you know that man in Yorkshire?’

‘Which man?’

‘Mike Carlyle. He called you Billy. Is that really your name?’

Hawthorne said nothing. Briefly, he lowered his head as if wondering what to do. When he looked up at me again, there was something in his eyes that I had never seen before and it took me a few seconds to realise what it was. He was in pain.

‘I told you, I’d never seen him before. He was just someone who was making a mistake.’

‘I’m not sure I believe you.’

And then the shutters came down. That was the thing about Hawthorne. He had a way of cutting off anyone who got too close – he might have been doing it all his life – and when he spoke again it was very softly and with no emotion at all. ‘I’ll tell you something, mate. Suppose I’m having second thoughts about you and me? Suppose I’ve decided this was a bad idea?’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was the one who had been dragged into this. I was the one that didn’t want to be here.

‘This wasn’t my idea,’ I reminded him. ‘It was yours.’

‘We could stop right now. Who gives a toss about another book. There are plenty of books.’ He pointed. ‘You could walk out that door.’

‘It’s a bit late for that. I’ve signed a three-book contract . . . remember? We’ve signed a three-book contract.’

‘You don’t need me. You can make up the next one.’

‘Believe me, I’d love to. It would be an awful lot easier. But I’ve already spent a week on this one and I’m not going to stop until I work out your shape or your pattern, or whatever you want to call it, and find out who killed Richard Pryce.’

We sat there, glaring at each other. Then Hawthorne looked at his watch. ‘We should go downstairs. They’ll be waiting for us.’

‘I’m not your enemy, Hawthorne,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to help you.’

‘Yeah. Well, you’ve been a lot of help so far.’

He walked away. I had drunk less than half of the rum and Coke. I left the rest behind.