The Sentence Is Death

17 The Chase

I slept badly that night. I had a bad dream that turned the book group into something out of Rosemary’s Baby – which actually wasn’t too much of a transformation. Hawthorne and Kevin were at the centre of it, crouched over a computer screen that was running a compilation of all the worst moments of my life. Even while I was asleep, I was surprised how many of them there were.

I was woken by the sound of my mobile phone ringing and was grateful to find myself in bed, in my own room. Jill had already gone. I reached out and answered it, thinking it would be Hawthorne, and I half groaned when I heard Cara Grunshaw’s voice at the other end.

‘Did I wake you up?’ she asked, with mock concern. It was a little after seven o’clock, the sun struggling to make itself known.

‘No,’ I said.

‘I thought you’d like to know. I’ve spoken to Daunt’s. They don’t want to press charges.’

‘That’s good news.’

‘I’m trying to persuade them otherwise.’ She paused. ‘Nothing personal. I just don’t think we should be encouraging petty crime.’

I closed my eyes, my head sinking back into the pillows. ‘What do you want?’ I asked.

‘You know what I want.’

I took a breath. ‘Hawthorne is going back to see Adrian Lockwood today,’ I said. I knew that because he’d texted me before I got home. There had been a name, an address in Curzon Street and a time. Nothing more. No question that I wouldn’t be there. As much as I disliked sharing the information with Grunshaw, I couldn’t see any harm in it. After all, Hawthorne had given me permission.

‘We’ve already spoken to him twice,’ Grunshaw said. ‘He didn’t have any reason to kill his lawyer.’

‘Yes, he did, as a matter of fact.’

‘What?’

Maybe it was because I had just woken up or maybe it was just my deep fear of annoying Grunshaw, but suddenly the answer came to me. Was this the ‘shape’ that Hawthorne had been talking about? Even as I blurted out the words, I knew they made sense.

‘Richard Pryce was known as the Blunt Razor because he was completely honest,’ I began. ‘He was worried about Akira Anno because he thought she was concealing part of her income.’

‘I know that.’ Grunshaw sounded bored again.

‘Wait a minute. It’s possible that Pryce had got fresh information about Akira. He was going to ring the Law Society. According to Stephen Spencer, she might even have been involved in something illegal.’

‘So what?’

‘So if she was, Richard wouldn’t have hesitated. He’d have upturned the entire judgement even though it would have harmed his own client. Adrian Lockwood wasn’t going to allow that to happen. He hated Akira and he didn’t want anything more to do with her. He may not have gone to the house meaning to kill Richard Pryce. The two of them could have had an argument. Akira told us he was violent. He could have picked up the bottle and—’

‘Wait a minute,’ Grunshaw cut in. ‘Lockwood had an alibi. He was with Davina Richardson in Highgate.’

‘He was only a few minutes away in a fast car.’

There was a brief silence at the end. Then: ‘Adrian Lockwood didn’t kill Richard Pryce,’ Cara said, flatly.

‘Do you know who did?’

‘I’m close. I could be making an arrest any time.’

Hawthorne had told me that he had narrowed the identity of the killer down to two possible suspects but I didn’t tell her that. Nor did I mention that I had myself narrowed it down to a possible five. DI Grunshaw had set this up as a race to the truth and she had decided to cheat every step of the way.

‘Keep in touch,’ she said and rang off.

I slunk out of bed and got into the shower. The conversation with Cara Grunshaw had unnerved me. As I stood there with the water hammering down, it all seemed so unfair. I had managed to spend fifty years without ever encountering people like her and now, suddenly, I was being threatened and roughed up in my own home. I was also seriously worried about Daunt’s. I had told Hawthorne that the story could destroy my career and it was true. For twenty years, the press had ignored me. Then, when Alex Rider began to sell in large numbers, and particularly after the film, they had been broadly supportive. But more recently it was as if someone had decided I had got too big for my boots and I had noticed my name turning up in diary pieces that were half true and resolutely hostile. A children’s author caught stealing from a much-loved bookshop would be more than a diary piece. This was 2013 and we were already moving towards the atmosphere of the bear pit where anyone who was even slightly in the public spotlight could find themselves torn down on the strength of a single accusation long before the allegations could actually be disproved.

Perhaps Grunshaw had been lying. It might be that the whole thing would go away, but in the end I decided I couldn’t take that chance. I got out of the shower, dried myself and got dressed. Then I went to see Hilda Starke.

Hilda had been my literary agent for about two years. It was she who had sold my novel The House of Silk to Orion Books as part of a three-book deal. A small, grey-haired woman with beady eyes and a fondness for quite masculine clothes, she ran her own agency with offices in Greek Street, Soho. I had only been there a couple of times – we usually met at restaurants or at my publishers – and I hadn’t been too impressed. Hilda occupied the third and fourth floors of a building above an Italian café, reached by a narrow and uneven flight of stairs. Today, there were no more than half a dozen people in the office, including two junior agents, a receptionist and a couple of assistants – but with small rooms and little light it still felt crowded.

I had rung ahead, of course, but she seemed surprised to see me. ‘What are you doing here? How’s the next book?’

For someone so petite, she had an extraordinary presence. I found her wearing a double-breasted jacket and wide-collared shirt, hunched over her desk, gazing into a laptop computer like a fortune-teller with a crystal ball – and I wouldn’t have put it past her to divine the future with her exhaustive knowledge of past deals, Nielsen charts and international trends. Ask her how many copies the last Harlan Coben has sold or what titles are trending on Amazon and she would have the answer without so much as touching the keypad. If Hilda was married – and she had never told me – her husband wouldn’t have got a word in edgeways. This was a woman who didn’t just go to bed with a book. She went to bed with a library.

I sat down opposite her. ‘I may have a problem.’

‘Have you started the next Sherlock Holmes?’

‘No.’

‘That is a problem. You know that Orion wants it by March. The House of Silk is doing well. You’ve slipped off the bestseller list but it’s a very crowded week.’ There was always a reason for a fall in sales: the weather, the time of year, other writers. I was still disappointed.

‘I’m writing another book about Hawthorne,’ I said.

She glared at me. She hadn’t actually been too pleased when I had told her the idea in the first place and she had only come round when she had managed to get a contract with Penguin Random House. ‘Why are you doing that?’ she asked. ‘They haven’t even published the first one yet.’

‘I didn’t really have any choice,’ I said. ‘Someone got killed.’

‘Who?’

‘His name was Richard Pryce. He was a divorce lawyer.’

She didn’t like the sound of that. ‘I don’t think readers will give a damn about a divorce lawyer,’ she said. ‘Can’t you make him something more interesting . . . like an actor or a musician?’

‘It was an actor who got killed last time,’ I reminded her. ‘And anyway it doesn’t work like that. I don’t have any choice in the matter. I’m just writing what happens.’

‘Oh yes.’ She was gloomy. And in a hurry to get on with whatever she was doing. ‘So what’s the problem?’

I told her what had happened at Daunt’s bookshop.

‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Anthony. You could have stolen something a bit classier. The Doomworld series is complete crap – even if it has sold fifty-three million copies. Lucky Dawn Adams is all I can say. Kingston Press was about to go out of business before she stumbled onto that one. But it’s not the sort of thing I’d expect to find up your sleeve.’

‘It never was up my sleeve, Hilda. I just explained to you. The police framed me.’

‘That’s not going to make any difference, I’m afraid. It’s your word against a respected police officer and you know which side the papers are going to take.’

‘I’m not even sure anyone respects Detective Inspector Cara Grunshaw.’

‘Well, I’d be very careful before you write anything derogatory about her. You don’t want to get yourself sued.’

‘I’m the one who’s being victimised!’ I was about to storm out of the room – not something I’m very good at doing, incidentally – but then I played back what Hilda had just said. ‘Dawn Adams,’ I muttered. ‘She published Doomworld.’

‘What about it?’

From the very start, I’d known the name. Dawn Adams was the publisher Akira Anno had been having dinner with on the night she had threatened Richard Pryce. She had also been with Dawn (or so she claimed) on the night he was killed. And Akira had told us that Dawn had come up against Richard Pryce at the time of her own divorce. Forget the fact that Gregory Taylor had bought the third volume just before he died. He had simply wanted a long book for a long journey. But I suddenly saw that Dawn Adams had to be part of Hawthorne’s investigation, even though he hadn’t yet said he intended to see her.

Well, at least something good had come out of my turning up here. And there was more to come. Hilda relented. ‘I suppose I can have a word with James,’ she said.

‘James?’

‘James Daunt of Daunt Books. He knows your work and maybe we can persuade him that there was a misunderstanding.’

‘It wasn’t a misunderstanding!’

‘Whatever. In the meantime, you really ought to be getting on with that second book for Orion. What happened to that idea of yours about Moriarty?’

‘I’m thinking about it.’

‘Well if I were you, I’d stop thinking and start writing.’

‘Thanks, Hilda.’

‘You know the way out . . .’

He had been riding for three days, his proud, black destrier picking its way between the Wilder flowers, the twisting thorns and the dense, black forests of the Lands Beyond Time. A silver moon had beckoned him on and the soft breeze from the north had whispered constantly in his ear. He was hungry. He had not eaten since that last feast at the court of King Pellam. But now it was a deeper, more primal hunger that devoured him and his journey was forgotten, the faithful stallion standing idly by.

The girl could only have been twelve or thirteen and yet already she had blossomed into a desirable woman. She had been leaning over a bubbling stream with cupped hands when he had found her but now she lay on her back on the soft grass, exactly where he had thrown her. He leaned down and tore open her woollen shift to reveal her ripe, curvaceous breasts with nipples that matched the delicious red of her lips. The sight of her skin and of the pubic hair just visible above the edge of her shift turned his bowels to water.

‘You are mine,’ he muttered. ‘By the law of the great Table and the might of the magician, Merlin, I claim you as my own.’

‘Yes, my lord.’ She stretched out her arms and her whole body shuddered, waiting to receive him.

Barely able to control himself, he jerked off his gambeson, his belt and then everything else until he stood naked, towering over her.

I had stopped at Waterstones Piccadilly on the way to meet Hawthorne and had picked up a copy of Prisoners of Blood, the third book in the Doomworld series. Mark Belladonna had been given pride of place on one of the tables in the circular entrance hall and, standing there, I read a few pages. I wanted to remind myself just how terrible it was: the awful language, the use of clichés, its near-pornographic relish. The books must have made Dawn Adams a ton of money, and as I’d learned from my time with Hawthorne, money and murder have a way of going hand in hand. I was certain that he would want to interrogate the publisher soon. She was, after all, Akira’s only alibi – and also lingering in my mind was the question of what the two women might have in common. After all, their literary tastes could hardly have been further apart. I had dipped back into Prisoners of Blood in the hope that it might answer, at least in part, some of that question. It hadn’t.

I put the book down, then walked the short distance to Green Park station, thinking about the theory I had outlined to Cara Grunshaw. It was becoming ever more likely that Adrian Lockwood could be the killer. What I had told her was true. He had a motive and according to Akira, he had known haiku 182. I had actually seen a copy of the book in his house. Could he have painted the number on the wall at Heron’s Wake as some bizarre statement of revenge?

Hawthorne was waiting at the station and seeing him I was tempted to ask about his relationship with Kevin, how the two of them had met and what exactly was the arrangement they had made between them. Was he paying the teenager for his work or was it just something Kevin did for fun? And there were wider implications. He always seemed to know where I was and what I was doing. Was this down to brilliant detective work or was he simply hacking into my emails?

I wanted to confront him but decided against it. I could use Kevin to find out about Hawthorne. It would be much easier than the other way round.

We set off together, walking up towards Hyde Park Corner. It wasn’t quite raining but there was a fine mist hanging in the air. This was that dead time of the year, after the summer holidays and before the excitement of Guy Fawkes Night, with the Christmas decorations waiting just round the corner to go up. Every year, they seemed to come sooner.

‘I read what you gave me,’ he said, affably.

It took me a moment to realise that he was talking about the pages I had given him describing my meeting with Davina Richardson and my discovery of the haiku.

‘Oh,’ I said, carefully. ‘Were they helpful?’

‘You seem a bit nervous of me, mate, if you don’t mind my saying so.’ He thought for a moment, then quoted an extract almost word for word: ‘He wouldn’t be too happy, me being here without him. He hated me asking questions even when he was in the room . . .’

‘It’s absolutely true!’ I replied. ‘Every time I open my mouth you stare at me as if I’m a badly behaved schoolboy.’

‘It’s not that.’ He was offended. ‘I just don’t like you interrupting my train of thought. And you have to be careful what you say in front of suspects. You don’t want to give stuff away.’

‘I haven’t done that.’

Hawthorne grimaced.

‘Have I?’ I was alarmed.

‘I hope not. But actually, what you wrote was pretty helpful. The thing about you, Tony, is you write stuff down without even realising its significance. You’re a bit like a travel writer who doesn’t know quite where he is.’

‘That’s not true!’

‘Yeah. It’s like you’re in Paris and you write how you’ve seen this big, tall building made of metal but you forget to mention that it might be worth a visit.’

This was completely unfair. I wrote what I saw and almost everything that Hawthorne said. Of course, I had to choose which details I chose to describe – otherwise the book would run into thousands of pages. Take Adrian Lockwood’s house, for example. I had mentioned the bilberries he was eating not because they necessarily had anything to do with the crime – they almost certainly didn’t – but because they were there and seemed vaguely noteworthy. At the same time, I hadn’t mentioned that he had cut himself shaving that morning. There had been a nick on the side of his chin. Of course, if it turned out to be significant, if his hand had been trembling after he murdered Richard Pryce, then I would go back and put it in the second draft. This is how it all works.

‘So how did I help you?’ I asked. ‘Maybe you can let me know which Eiffel Tower I managed to describe without actually knowing it was there?’

‘Well, Davina went on at you about all the things she couldn’t do without a man in her life. I thought that was interesting.’

‘She’s a single mother with a teenaged son.’

‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’

We had crossed Piccadilly and continued up to Curzon Street, heading for Adrian Lockwood’s office. I suddenly became aware that Hawthorne had stopped. He was staring straight ahead of him at a wide corner on the edge of a modern, six-storey building. I could see the name above the front door. Leconfield House. This was where Lockwood had his office suite.

There was a man standing there, smoking a cigarette. I saw hair hanging in damp strands, a flapping, stone-coloured raincoat, some sort of marking on the side of his face. But more prominent than all of these, particularly with the distance between us, were his bright blue spectacles. They were like something a child might wear. They didn’t even look real.

The man had been looking up at the third floor but as he lowered his head, his eyes locked onto mine. Neither of us knew who the other was but we immediately recognised the connection. I sprang forward. The man dropped his cigarette, turned and ran. Before I knew quite what I was doing, I was chasing him.

I have written a great many chases in my time. They are, after all, a staple of television drama. There are only so many scenes you can have with your characters talking to each other in a room. Eventually, you have to break into some piece of action and the most popular choices are: a murder, a fight, an explosion or a chase.

Of these, the chase is probably the most expensive. A fight, unless it’s on the roof of a moving bus or involves an entire gang, is usually fairly self-contained and explosions these days are quite easy to achieve. Almost everything you see is a simple blast of compressed air, some dust and a few scraps of paper. The sound is added later and even the flames can be computer-generated. But a chase is all about movement. The characters move. The cameras move. The entire unit has to move. Worse than that, it’s not enough for two actors to go haring after each other. That soon becomes boring. You have to throw in some action. A near miss in front of a car. A few punches thrown. An old woman shoved out of the way.

All of which is an apology for what I must now describe.

I was in my fifties, on foot, and although I think I’m fairly fit, I was no action hero. The man I was chasing was younger and skinnier than me but his smoking habit had played havoc with his health. From the very start, he didn’t run so much as limp and it would have taken a director with incredible talent, even with all the money in the world, to make the next few minutes remotely watchable.

The man with blue glasses crossed the road and although a white van did hoot at him, it came nowhere close. I looked left and right before I went after him. He reached the other pavement and pushed past a few pedestrians, although there was no actual bodily contact. I already had a stitch and paused to catch my breath. I glanced back, expecting to see Hawthorne right behind me, but he hadn’t even moved. He was standing there, holding his mobile phone. I found that extraordinary and also quite annoying. My quarry had ducked down one of the passageways leading into Shepherd Market, a charming enclave of narrow streets and squares that dates back to the eighteenth century. I saw him hurry past a pub on a corner – Ye Grapes – and I went after him. He must have been running at about 7 mph, although his raincoat was flapping behind him in quite a dramatic way.

He disappeared down another alleyway, past dustbins which he did not knock over. I followed, my feet stamping on the pavement, but I was already falling behind and I was some distance from him when I saw him reach the main road and flag down a taxi. I was sweating. A thin sheen of drizzle was clinging to my face. I arrived and would have jumped into a second taxi if there had been one but there wasn’t. I had to wait about a minute before one mercifully appeared, heading down towards Piccadilly Circus. I hailed it. The driver seemed to take for ever to pull over. I yanked open the door and climbed into the back.

I could still make out the taxi with Blue Spectacles. Because of the heavy traffic, he was only a short distance away.

‘Where to?’ the driver asked.

‘Follow that cab!’ Even as the words left my mouth I realised that I had uttered a cliché more grotesque and overused than anything I would have found in the Doomworld trilogy. ‘Please!’ I added.

Ahead of us, a set of lights changed to green. The taxi we were following indicated and swung right along St James’s Street. We crept towards the same turning but before we could reach them, the lights changed back to red. My driver didn’t perform a breakneck U-turn and find another way. He didn’t cut across the traffic with tyres screeching.

‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, as we came to a gentle halt.