The Sentence Is Death

23 Partners in Crime?

It’s not easy to describe what happened in the next few minutes. It may well be that I was in shock and I was certainly in no mood to take notes. I remember Davina, sitting slumped and helpless at the table, hitting the vodka while Hawthorne took out his mobile phone. He called for an ambulance but not, at this stage, the police. I kept on staring at the knife, which looked like some alien object, and I couldn’t quite get my head around the fact that it was, at least for the moment, part of me. I wanted to pull it out but Hawthorne warned me not to touch it. He helped me into a chair and grabbed hold of the vodka bottle, pouring me a large shot. I needed it. I was feeling completely sick and with every minute that passed, the pain was getting worse. This wasn’t, of course, the first time I had been stabbed. I suppose that, looked at another way, the scene might have had a certain comic edge – but I certainly didn’t see it that way.

The ambulance arrived in less than ten minutes, although it felt a lot longer. I heard its siren as it raced towards us along Priory Gardens. I kept looking at my shirt, depressed that I had put on a new Paul Smith and it was ruined. At least there didn’t seem to be a great deal of blood and there was some relief in that. I don’t like the sight of blood at the best of times, particularly if it’s my own. Hawthorne was sitting close to me. Am I misremembering or did he actually hold on to my arm for a time? He really did seem to be concerned.

Meanwhile, Davina was completely out of it. ‘We need to find Colin!’ Her words drifted across the kitchen.

‘Not now,’ Hawthorne said.

She stood up. ‘I’m going to find him.’

Hawthorne pointed a finger at her. He didn’t shout, but there was such controlled fury in his voice that there could be no argument. ‘You stay right there!’

She sat down again.

And then the door opened and a team of paramedics came bursting in and hurried over to examine me. I have a feeling they took the knife out there and then, but again, I can’t be sure. They injected me with something and a few minutes later I was lying on my back with an oxygen mask on my face, being loaded into the ambulance for the short journey to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.

As it turned out, the wound was nowhere near as bad as it looked. It was on the other side of my chest, away from my heart and it had missed all my other vital organs too. In fact it was only two inches deep. By the time Jill came to visit me later that evening, I was already sitting up in bed with a couple of stitches and a thick wodge of bandages, watching the news on TV.

She wasn’t amused. ‘You can’t keep ending your books with somebody trying to kill you,’ she said.

‘It’s only the second time it’s happened and anyway, he wasn’t trying to kill me,’ I told her. ‘He was just a kid. He thought I was going to grab hold of him and he panicked.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘I don’t know. I imagine the police will be looking for him.’

‘What about his mother?’

What about her? I supposed there was every chance she would be charged as an accessory to murder. I wouldn’t know until I’d spoken to Hawthorne. ‘She’s being questioned.’

Jill sat down on the end of the bed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘When are they going to let you come home?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘Is there anything you need?’

‘No. I’m fine.’

She looked at me with a mixture of worry and exasperation. ‘If you want my advice, you’ll leave this out of the book. People aren’t going to believe it and you’re going to look ridiculous.’

‘I’m not even thinking about the book at the moment.’

‘I wish you’d never met Hawthorne.’

‘Me too.’

I said that. And I was beginning to think I meant it.

Sure enough, I was discharged from the hospital after breakfast and the first thing I did when I got home was to ring Hawthorne. He didn’t ask me how I was but I got the impression he had made enquiries at the hospital and already knew. We arranged to meet at a coffee shop midway between our two flats just this side of Blackfriars Bridge.

‘You’re sure you’re up to it?’ he asked.

‘I need to know what happened after I left in the ambulance.’

‘Bring an umbrella. It looks like rain.’

He was right. It was pouring down by the time I set out and the weight of the umbrella pulled at my chest, making the wound throb. Farringdon Road, never handsome at the best of times, was an oily black streak with the traffic sitting, ill-tempered, at the lights and cyclists wrapped in bright plastic weaving their way through. We arrived at the same time. Hawthorne picked out a table in the window and as I took my place the rain was hammering against the glass, then sliding down in a series of oscillations like the screen of an old black-and-white TV. It wasn’t winter yet. It had been warm outside and the coffee shop had a muggy feel, although we were almost alone.

Water dripped off Hawthorne’s raincoat as he hung it on a hook behind his chair. Underneath, his suit was dry. The journey had worn me out and for once he bought the drinks: a double espresso for him, hot chocolate for me. I needed the comfort. He brought them over to the table and sat down.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, at last.

‘Not great,’ I said. The stitches were hurting more than the original knife wound. I hadn’t slept well. ‘Have they found him yet?’ I asked.

‘Colin? Yes. He went round to a friend’s house and the police picked him up this morning.’

‘What will happen to him?’

‘He’ll be charged with murder.’ Hawthorne shrugged. ‘But he’s under sixteen so they’ll probably go easy on him.’

I waited for him to go on. ‘Are you going to tell me the rest of it?’ I said. ‘It’s the only reason I’ve come here. I’d have much rather stayed in bed.’

‘What’s the matter with you, Tony, mate? You don’t need to sound so bloody miserable. We solved it!’

‘You solved the crime,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything. I just made a complete fool of myself.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘Well what would you say?’

He considered. ‘You put Grunshaw in her place.’

It wasn’t enough. ‘Just tell me,’ I said. ‘Colin killed Richard Pryce. How did you work it out?’

He looked at me quizzically, as if he didn’t quite understand me. Then he told me what I wanted to hear.

‘I said to you that I’d narrowed it down to one of two people,’ he began. ‘I always had a feeling that it had to be Davina Richardson or her son – but at the end of the day, the murder of Richard Pryce had the kid’s fingerprints all over it. What I told Davina yesterday – the death of Charles Richardson, Gregory Taylor coming round to the house – that was all true. But she never went round to Heron’s Wake with a knife. She was only saying that to protect Colin. She’s a good mum. I’ll say that for her. She’s been protecting him all along.

‘You see, what happened was that Colin must have eavesdropped on the conversation between Gregory Taylor and his mother. Don’t you remember the first time we went round? She told him off for listening at the door. He did it again last night. I knew he was outside. It was a habit of his. Well, it was bad enough for Davina listening to what Gregory had to tell her about Long Way Hole. All those lies. The cowardice. But think of it from a fifteen-year-old’s point of view. Richard had become a second dad to him. Of course, he didn’t have any kids of his own. He put Colin through school. He bought him expensive presents – that telescope, for example. He was always there for him and when Colin finally heard the truth, what do you think he felt? It must have driven him mad.

‘And the next night, he did something about it. We know Colin wasn’t in the house—’

‘How do we know that?’ I interrupted.

‘Because Davina was in bed with Adrian Lockwood. She told us they could never get up to that sort of thing when Colin was around, so he must have said he was staying with a friend or something. In fact, he cycled over to Fitzroy Park, taking a short cut across the Heath.’

I had seen the bicycle in Davina’s hallway. I had walked straight past it three or four times.

‘The light that Henry Fairchild saw wasn’t a torch. There was no need for it with a full moon.’

‘It was a bicycle light.’

‘That’s right. There was a big puddle by the gate so Colin had to dismount and he was pushing the bike through. He continued down to Heron’s Wake and dumped the bike by the front door. My kid does that with his bike all the time. He’s too lazy to prop it up against the wall, especially when he’s in a hurry. He just lets it fall.’

‘The bike fell onto the bulrushes.’

‘That’s right. And it was the pedal that made that hole in the soil. Then Colin rang the door. Richard opened it and of course he was surprised to see him. “It’s a bit late.” Yes, it was. Eight o’clock at night in a quiet part of Hampstead. That is late for a kid to be out on his own.

‘Richard invited him in. He could probably see that Colin was upset, although he had no idea what had brought him to the house. He got them both a drink. You remember what we saw on the table in his study?’

‘Two cans of Coke.’

‘Exactly. There was alcohol in the house but Richard didn’t drink it – and nor did his visitor. That’s one of the reasons I figured it wasn’t Davina. She drinks like a fish. Again, who drinks Coca-Cola at eight o’clock in the evening?’

‘A child.’

‘To be honest with you, Tony, there were a lot of things about this murder that struck me as childish. I mean, that number on the wall for a start! What sort of person bludgeons someone to death and then wastes time painting cryptic messages for the police to find?’

‘But what did it mean? Had he read the haiku?’

‘No, no, no, one eight two had nothing to do with the haiku. That was just Davina making things up. You’ve got to get inside Colin’s head. When I first walked into that room, before we’d even heard of Akira Anno and her stupid poetry, I told you what it might mean.’

‘You said it could be a bus route, the name of a restaurant . . .’

‘. . . or an abbreviation used in texting. That’s something a teenager would know all about, isn’t it ?’

‘What does one eight two mean? In texting.’

‘I hate you.’ Hawthorne smiled. ‘He couldn’t really have put it more clearly, could he?’

‘But why did he do that? You say you understand the way he was thinking. But I can’t imagine why any kid would do a thing like that.’

‘Who was Colin’s favourite author – after he stopped reading your books?’ Hawthorne asked. ‘His mum told you. And the funny thing is, the same writer seems to have been tiptoeing along three paces behind us ever since we started this investigation.’

‘Conan Doyle!’

‘Sherlock bloody Holmes. That’s right! Didn’t the parallels jump out at you when we were reading A Study in Scarlet at the book group? I quite liked the book, by the way. I think the others were a bit hard on it and for what it’s worth, A Multitude of Gods is fucking unreadable. I’m not sure I’ll get to the end . . .’

‘What parallels, Hawthorne?’

‘The writing on the wall! Enoch Drebber is poisoned in Lauriston Gardens and the killer writes “RACHE” on the wall . . . not in paint but in blood. And then at the end of the book, in Utah, numbers keep appearing all over John Ferrier’s house. It’s a warning from the Mormon elders.’

‘What? He copied it?’

‘Or he could have been thinking of The Sign of Four.’

Hawthorne sighed, then began again.

‘Look, maybe Colin didn’t mean to kill Richard Pryce. Maybe he went over there just to shout at him. He probably wanted to get a bit of teenaged angst off his chest and tell his loving godfather to fuck off out of his life. But you can imagine it. Things get out of hand. Colin starts by accusing him of leaving his dad on his own in the bottom of a flooded cave. To start with, Richard denies it, but he’s smart enough to know that the game is up. So he tries to explain himself – but that just makes things worse. Colin is shouting at him. Richard tries to calm him down. Maybe he even puts a hand on him and that makes Colin think he’s gay and that he’s trying it on. Anything’s possible. But the point is, he completely loses it and then he sees the bottle of wine that Richard’s got on his desk or somewhere in the room. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He picks it up and he smashes it into his godfather’s face and then he stabs him and he stabs him and the next thing he knows, he’s standing over a dead body with blood and wine everywhere.

‘What next? Now he’s scared. He’s committed murder. He’s got to cover his tracks and because he’s a kid, and not even a very bright kid, he thinks of Sherlock Holmes. He remembers the paint pots he saw in the hallway and he gets a brush and paints a number on the wall, just like in a Sherlock Holmes story. And the first number that comes into his head is one that he knows well and exactly expresses what he’s feeling. I hate you.’

He stopped. I couldn’t have written it any better than the way it had just been described.

‘It didn’t end there,’ Hawthorne went on. ‘When we went to see Davina Richardson, he came into the kitchen and he couldn’t resist joining in. By now the cocky little sod probably thought he’d got away with it, so he decided to spin us a story, again straight out of Sherlock Holmes. Richard Pryce is being followed. And it can’t be anyone normal. There’s something wrong with his face. That was what he told us.’

‘I thought he was talking about Lofty.’

‘Lofty won’t win any beauty prizes but there’s nothing particularly wrong with his appearance. And also he wasn’t following Richard Pryce. He was working for him! No. There’s a story – ‘The Yellow Face’. It starts with a client, Grant Munro, who says he’s seen a ghastly face watching him from an upstairs window. You look in your notes. I think you’ll find Colin used almost exactly those words.’

I was embarrassed. I should have been the one to know all this, not Hawthorne. I was the one who had written about Sherlock Holmes. His shadow had been there the whole time. I’d even spent a whole evening talking about the books. But maybe because they were written more than a century ago, I hadn’t seen their relevance to the case we were pursuing.

‘When did his mother know?’ I asked. ‘Was she protecting him all along?’

Hawthorne hesitated and I realised he wished I hadn’t asked that. And suddenly I was wishing it too. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘she only found out when you told her.’

My wound was throbbing. I could taste the sugar in the hot chocolate sticking to my lips. ‘Go on,’ I said.

‘I did warn you about chipping in when I’m interviewing someone,’ Hawthorne said. ‘And the thing is, the first time we were with Davina Richardson, without meaning to you changed everything.’

‘What did I say?’

‘You told her about the number written on the wall. And you said it was written in green paint.’

‘What was so bad about that?’

‘Do you remember what was happening in the kitchen when we were there?’

I cast my mind back. ‘She was smoking. There were plates in the sink.’

‘And the washing machine was on. She was washing Colin’s clothes. She’d already told us that he couldn’t look after himself, that he was always in a mess. My guess is that he’d come home on Sunday night with green paint on his jacket or shirt and probably quite a lot of blood and wine too. He’d have washed those out himself in the sink or covered them with mud or whatever – but the green paint he couldn’t get rid of. Mum found the clothes, still stained, and put them in the wash. It explains why, the moment you mentioned green paint, she got up and stood against the washing machine and she never moved, as if she didn’t want us to see what was on the other side of the round window. She also got Colin out of the room as fast as she possibly could. She’d been pleased enough to see him when he came down, but suddenly it was bath night and homework and all the rest of it. She was terrified he would give himself away.

‘That was when she started changing her story – or adapting it. All of a sudden, Colin – who’s tall for his age and can certainly look after himself – is being bullied at school. It was darling uncle Richard who sorted it out. Richard and Colin were inseparable. He was just a sweet kid in need of a dad. No way the little chap would go round and batter him to death with a bottle.

‘It didn’t stop there. The next time we went round to Priory Gardens – and this time she made sure Colin wasn’t there – she had it all set up. She had to divert our attention. If we weren’t going to suspect her son, there had to be someone else in the frame. The person she picked was Adrian Lockwood. He might have been her lover but she would sacrifice him in the blink of an eye to save her kid. Maybe she knew the significance of one eight two. Maybe Colin had told her what it meant. Well, she’d got an answer for that too. First of all she fed you that haiku. Did you really think that book, brand new by the way, just happened to be lying there – and just one page away from the poem she wanted you to see?’

‘I was the one who turned the page.’

‘If you hadn’t, she’d have done it for you. But you were looking at haiku 181. It was in front of your eyes. Even an idiot would have thought of seeing what came next.’

‘Thank you.’

‘She knew the poem connected with Adrian Lockwood because the eighteenth of February was the date of his wedding. And then she gave you that spiel about how hard it was to live alone, how she always forgot to put the clocks back. And if that wasn’t enough, just in case you hadn’t picked up on it the first time, she said it again while I was there. “I went out at half past four. No! I mean half past three. I keep getting confused!” Laying it on with a trowel! What she was doing, of course, was deliberately destroying Adrian Lockwood’s alibi. She wanted us to believe that he had left an hour earlier, which would have given him plenty of time to pop in and murder Richard Pryce. She even mentioned he was angry with Richard, although she didn’t say why. She was just feeding him to us, bit by bit.’

‘And she put green paint on his sleeve.’

‘I wondered if you’d noticed it. Yes. That was her – what do you call it? French word . . .’

‘Her pièce de résistance.’

‘That’s the one.’ Hawthorne smiled.

‘You saw it too. You might have mentioned it.’

‘It was too bloody obvious, mate. There were only two ways it could have got there. Adrian Lockwood could have killed Richard Pryce and splattered paint on his shirt when he wrote the message . . .’

‘. . . or she could have put it there.’

‘If they were sleeping together, she’d have had easy access to his clothes. And of course, she knew what colour to choose.’

‘Because I’d told her.’

Hawthorne finished his coffee and glanced out of the window. The rain was beginning to ease off but grey pebbles of water still clung to the glass. ‘You don’t need to be so hard on yourself, Tony. We solved it. I get paid – and you get your book. By the way, I still haven’t seen the first one. Have they sent it to you yet?’

‘No. I haven’t seen anything.’

‘I hope it’s a good cover. Nothing too arty. Maybe a bit of blood.’

‘Hawthorne . . .’ I began.

Somehow I had known before I even sat down that I was going to say this. I had decided that Jill was right.

‘I think this is a bad idea. These books, I mean. I’m a fiction writer, not a biographer, and I don’t feel comfortable doing this. I’m sorry. I’ll finish this one . . . I might as well since I’ve got all the material. But I’m going to ring Hilda Starke and ask her to cancel the contract for the third.’

His face fell. ‘Why would you do that?’

‘Because of what you just said! We’ve investigated two cases together and both times I’ve said something stupid that’s completely mucked it up, and both times I’ve almost managed to get myself killed. It doesn’t make me feel any better that I made a complete fool of myself. You used me. You deliberately set me up to get back at DI Grunshaw, but it’s worse than that. You actually congratulated me. You persuaded me that I’d managed to work it out when everything I’d said was wrong.’

‘Not everything. I checked. Adrian Lockwood does have an eye problem.’

‘Fuck off! I admit it. I’m not clever enough to be Holmes, but if you want the truth, I don’t much enjoy being Watson either. I don’t think this is working. I think we’d be better off going our separate ways.’

He didn’t say anything for a moment. He looked upset.

‘You’re just saying that because you’re in pain,’ he muttered eventually. ‘You’ve been stabbed. I’m amazed they even let you out of the hospital so quickly.’

‘It’s not just that—’

‘And it’s a bloody horrible day.’ He cut in quickly, not wanting me to say any more. ‘If it was bright sunshine out there, that would change your mind.’ He pointed. ‘That’s an example of that thing authors put in books when the weather makes a difference to the way people feel.’

‘The pathetic fallacy,’ I said.

‘Exactly!’ He brightened up. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. You know about that stuff. You’re a writer. And I bet when you get home tonight and start doing your notes, you’ll enjoy describing just how shitty it is out there. Blackfriars Bridge. Farringdon Street. You’ll choose all the right words and you’ll make it come to life. There’s no way I could do anything like that. Which is why it’s such a great partnership. I do the legwork. You do the rest.’ He smiled. ‘Partners in Crime. That’s what you should call the book.’

‘There’s already a book with that title, Hawthorne.’

‘I trust you, mate. You’ll think of a better one.’

I looked out of the window. I still wasn’t sure. But on the other hand, the rain had finally stopped and it seemed to me that a few rays of sunlight were beginning to break through.