The Sentence Is Death

3 Heron’s Wake

Richard Pryce’s home was in Fitzroy Park, one of the most exclusive streets in the whole of London, nestling on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Actually, it hardly looks like a street at all. When you enter it from the Heath, particularly during the summer months, you pass through an old-fashioned gate that could have come straight out of Arthur Rackham, with so much vegetation on all sides that it’s hard to believe you’re anywhere near the city. Trees, bushes, roses, clematis, wisteria, honeysuckle and every other climbing plant fight for space in the north London equivalent of Never Land, and the very light is tinted green. The houses are all detached and make a point of bearing no resemblance to each other at all. They range in style from mock Elizabethan to art deco to pure Cluedo – all chimneys and sloping eaves and gables – with Colonel Mustard mowing the lawn and Mrs Peacock taking tea with Reverend Green.

As if to contradict all this, Pryce’s house was aggressively modern, designed perhaps by someone who had spent too much time at the National Theatre. It had the same brutalist architecture, with stretches of prefabricated concrete and triple-height windows more suited to an institution than to somebody’s home. Even the Japanese-style bulrushes in the front garden had been planted at exact intervals and grown to the same height. There was a wood-fronted balcony on the first floor but the wood was Scandinavian pine or birch, unrelated to any tree growing in the immediate area.

The house wasn’t huge – I guessed it would have three or four bedrooms – but the way it was constructed, all cubes, rectangles and cantilevered roofs, made it seem bigger than it was. I wouldn’t have wanted to live there. I’ve got nothing against modern architecture in places like Los Angeles or Miami but in a London suburb, next to a bowling club? I felt it was trying too hard.

Hawthorne and I had taken a taxi from Bermondsey, climbing up Hampstead Lane towards Highgate before suddenly turning off and heading steeply down and away from reality into this fantastical rus in urbe. The hill brought us to a crossroads with a sign pointing to the North London Bowling Club straight ahead. We turned right. Pryce’s house was called Heron’s Wake and it was easy enough to spot. It was the one with the police cars in front of it, the plastic tape across the front door, the forensic officers dressed in white moving in what looked like slow motion around the garden, the uniformed policemen and the gaggle of journalists. Fitzroy Park had no pavements and no street lights. Several of the houses had burglar alarms but there were surprisingly few CCTV cameras. All in all, you could hardly have chosen a better location to commit murder.

We got out and Hawthorne instructed the driver to wait for us. We must have made an odd couple. He was looking smart and professional in his suit and tie while it was only now that I realised I had come straight from the set and that I was wearing jeans and a padded jacket with FOYLE’S WAR embroidered on the back. A couple of the journalists glanced my way and I was afraid I would end up on the front page of the local newspaper so I went in sideways, keeping the back of my jacket away from them, wishing I’d had time to change.

Meanwhile, Hawthorne had forgotten me, marching up the driveway as if he were a long-lost son returning to the family home. Murder always had this effect on him, drawing him in to the exclusion of everything else. I don’t think I’d ever met anyone quite so focused. He stopped briefly to examine two cars, parked side by side. One was a black S-class Mercedes coupé; a solid, executive car. The other, sitting there like a younger, snappier brother, was a classic MG Roadster, dating back to the seventies. It was a collector’s car: pillar-box red with a black hood and gleaming wire wheels. I saw him place a hand on the bonnet and hurried over to join him.

‘It hasn’t been here long,’ he said.

‘The engine’s still warm . . .’

He nodded. ‘Got it in one, Tony.’

He glanced at the passenger window, which was open a couple of inches, sniffed the air, then continued towards the front door of the house and the constable who was guarding it. I thought he would go straight in but now his attention was drawn to the perfectly rectangular flower beds beside the entrance. There were two of them, one on each side, with bulrushes standing dead straight, like soldiers on parade. Hawthorne crouched down and I noticed that, to the right of the door, a few of the plants had been broken, as if someone had stumbled and stepped on them. The killer? Before I could ask him, he straightened up again, gave his name to the constable and disappeared into the building.

I smiled vaguely, nervous that I would be stopped, but the policeman seemed to be expecting me too. I went in.

Heron’s Wake wasn’t built like an ordinary house. The main rooms weren’t divided by walls and doors. Instead, one area seemed to morph into another with a wide entrance hall opening into a state-of-the-art kitchen on one side and a spacious living room on the other. The back wall was made almost entirely of glass, giving lovely views of the garden. There were no carpets; just expensive rugs of various sizes artfully strewn over American oak floors. The furniture was modern, designer-made, the art on the walls mainly abstract. It was obvious that a great deal of care had been lavished on the interior, even if the overall impression was one of simplicity. All the door handles and light switches, for example, were brushed steel, not plastic, and whispered of Paris or Milan. I could imagine them being carefully chosen from catalogues. Most of the house was white but Pryce had recently decided to add a few splashes of colour. There were paint pots and brushes arranged on dust sheets in the hall. An open doorway led into a cloakroom that had become an eye-catching canary yellow. The windows in the kitchen were now framed in terracotta red. I had assumed that the lawyer was married, but the house had the feel of a very expensive bachelor pad.

I caught up with Hawthorne just as a large, unattractive woman appeared, elbowing her way out of the kitchen, dressed in a bright mauve trouser suit with a black polo-neck sweater. What made her unattractive? It wasn’t her clothes or her size, although she was overweight with round shoulders and a face that was thick and fleshy. No. It was mainly her attitude. She hadn’t spoken a word to us but she was already scowling. Either her spectacles were too big or her eyes were too small, but she had managed to make herself look mean and hostile, peering at the world with a malevolence that she wore like mascara. What struck me most about her, though, was her hair. I’m sure it was real but it resembled one of those cheap wigs worn by department-store mannequins, jet black and as glossy as nylon. It didn’t seem to belong to her head. She had a gold necklace around her neck and below that a lanyard resting horizontally on an ample chest identified her as DI Cara Grunshaw of the Metropolitan Police. She moved quickly, aggressively, like a wrestler entering an arena. If I were a criminal, I’d be afraid of her. I hadn’t done anything wrong but she still made me nervous.

‘Hello, Hawthorne,’ she said. To my surprise and despite her appearance, she was quite jocular. ‘They told me you were on your way.’

‘Hello, Cara.’

They knew each other. They seemed to like each other. Hawthorne turned to me. ‘This is Detective Inspector Cara Grunshaw,’ he said, unnecessarily. He didn’t tell her who I was. Nor did she seem particularly interested.

‘They sent over the details?’ She had come straight to the point, without any small talk. Her voice was heavy and emotionless, with no particular accent. ‘Initial report? Photographs?’

‘Yes.’

‘They didn’t waste any time! He was only found this morning.’

‘Who found him?’

‘The cleaner. Bulgarian. Mariella Petrov. You can talk to her if you want to but you’ll be wasting your time. She doesn’t know anything. She’d only worked for Pryce for six weeks . . . came through a good agency in Knightsbridge. Lives in Bethnal Green with a husband and two kids. Her first job was to come down from Highgate, bringing in fresh bread and milk for his breakfast. She went into the kitchen and got everything ready. Then she walked into the study and that was where she found him. We’ve moved the body but you can take a look if you like.’

‘Sure.’

‘Here . . .’ She had produced plastic shoe covers and handed them to us casually, like serviettes before a meal.

I was a little disappointed. In the back of my mind, I had been hoping that the investigating officer would be DI Meadows. He was the detective I’d met when Diana Cowper was murdered and later on the two of us had even had a drink at my club. I had been interested in his relationship with Hawthorne. The two of them had worked together and there was clearly no love lost between them. I wanted to know more about Hawthorne and although Meadows had been both reticent and expensive (he had charged me for his time), I was sure he had more information he could have given me.

More than that, he would have been a useful character if I really was going to continue writing about Hawthorne. Holmes has Lestrade. Poirot has Japp. Morse often tussled with Chief Superintendent Strange. It’s a simple fact of life that a clever private detective needs a much less clever police officer in much the same way as a photograph needs both light and darkness. Otherwise, there’s no definition. I’m not saying that Meadows was unintelligent, by the way, but he did think Mrs Cowper had been killed by a burglar and in that he was most certainly wrong.

Given a choice, I would have been happy to bump into Meadows at every crime scene I visited, but of course there are more than thirty thousand police officers in London and the chances of his turning up in both Chelsea (the scene of the first murder) and Hampstead were non-existent. As I followed Grunshaw through the living room, I had already decided that she was going to be less useful to me. She was completely businesslike and seemed to know what she was doing. She had shown no interest in me at all.

We went through the living area and down two steps to the study, which, with its wooden floor and minimal decoration, actually had the appearance of a conference room. There was no desk. Instead, four white leather and steel chairs had been arranged around a glass table framed by bookshelves on one side and windows on the other. Another glass panel ran the full length of the ceiling, allowing the light to flood in. There were two cans of Coke on the table, one of them open.

The body had already been removed but there could be no doubt that this was where Richard Pryce had died. A sticky, dark red pool stretched out across the floor; a mixture of red wine and blood. Rather horribly, I could make out the lawyer’s head, his shoulders and one outstretched arm in the shape left behind when the body had been removed. The broken bottle, parts of it still held together by the label, lay in the middle of the mess.

My eyes were drawn to the wall between two of the bookshelves. There was the three-digit number that Hawthorne had shown me, daubed hastily in green paint: 182. The paint had trickled down, as if in a poster for a horror film. The digits were crude and uneven, the eight quite a bit larger than the one and the two. The brush that had been used to write them had been left on the floor, leaving a green smudge on the wood.

‘He was killed between eight o’clock and eight thirty. He was alone in the house but we know he had a visitor just after five to eight. A neighbour, Henry Fairchild, was walking his dog and saw someone coming off the Heath. I’m sure you’ll want to talk to him. He lives at the other end of the street. It’s a pink building . . . Rose Cottage. The houses round here don’t have numbers. They’re too fucking posh for that.’ She smiled very briefly. ‘It’s all just fancy names . . . like Heron’s Wake. What does that even mean? Anyway, Mr Fairchild is retired. He’s a charming man. I’m sure you’ll enjoy talking to him.’

‘Was Pryce alone in the house?’

‘He was last night. He was married but his husband was away. They have a second home in Clacton-on-Sea. He got back about an hour ago and found us all here, which must have been a bit of a shock for him. He’s upstairs now.’ That explained the red MG with an engine that hadn’t had time to cool down. ‘He’s not in a good way,’ she went on. ‘I only spoke to him for a few minutes and he didn’t make much sense. He was crying his eyes out so I got someone to make him a cup of tea.’ She paused and sniffed. ‘He asked for camomile.’

I was listening to this with a sense of dread. I remembered well that one of Hawthorne’s less endearing traits was an unapologetic homophobia, which he had expressed after we had visited a suspect together during our first case. And from the way she had pronounced that last word, Cara Grunshaw might have had similar feelings. But then again, maybe it was just Hampstead folk that she didn’t like.

‘The husband’s name is Stephen Spencer,’ she went on. ‘I can’t tell you very much more about him yet. I haven’t had a chance to talk properly to him. But it’s fairly certain that he was the last person to speak to Pryce before he died.’

‘He phoned?’

‘At eight o’clock last night.’ She watched as Hawthorne digested this. ‘Yes. The killer must have been just outside the house, maybe approaching it, when the call took place. The neighbour, Mr Fairchild, saw someone going in at more or less exactly that time, although he can’t provide any description. It was too dark. He was too far away. Pryce ended the call and let them in – it looks like it was someone he knew. He offered him a drink.’

I glanced at the two cans of Coke on the glass table.

‘They didn’t drink any of the wine, then,’ Hawthorne said.

‘The bottle hadn’t been opened. You saw the report? It came with a price tag of two thousand quid!’ Grunshaw shook her head. ‘That’s what’s wrong with this country. You’ve got food banks in the north and down here in Hampstead there are people who don’t think twice about spending a fortune on a fucking bottle of wine. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Richard Pryce didn’t drink.’

‘According to Spencer, it was a present from one of his clients. I managed to get that much out of him. The client was called Adrian Lockwood.’

‘Akira Anno’s husband,’ I said. I remembered the name from the report I’d heard on the radio.

‘Her ex-husband. Pryce represented him in the divorce and apparently she wasn’t too happy about the outcome.’

She had threatened to hit him with a bottle of wine. It seemed an extraordinary coincidence. And yet, if she had made such a declaration in public, in a busy restaurant, surely it would have been completely mad to follow through, using exactly that method to kill him.

Meanwhile, Hawthorne had turned his attention to the green figures painted on the wall. ‘What do you make of that?’ he asked.

‘A hundred and eighty-two? I haven’t got the faintest idea.’ DI Grunshaw sniffed. ‘You should be happy about that, Hawthorne. That was why you were called in. We’ve obviously got some tricky bastard who thinks he’s having a laugh.’ She folded her massive arms across her chest. ‘There are two possibilities, the way I see it. One is that Pryce painted it himself, trying to leave some sort of message. But it would have had to be before his head was smashed in. Or more likely, the killer did it after the event. But to be honest, that doesn’t make any sense. What sort of killer leaves an obvious clue? He might as well have signed his initials.’ She paused. ‘I did wonder if it might relate to the wine.’

‘A 1982 Château Lafite,’ I said.

‘It’s the same figures, minus the nine.’ Grunshaw glanced at me as if noticing me for the first time. Her small eyes rested on me for a moment, making me feel distinctly uneasy. Then they flickered away. ‘I’ll leave you to work that one out, Hawthorne,’ she continued. ‘Personally, I don’t like murder when it comes with all these fancy bells and whistles attached. I leave that sort of thing to Mr Foyle’s War here.’

She had noticed the back of my jacket even though I had done my best to keep it concealed from her. I wondered if Hawthorne had told her who I was.

‘Fingerprints?’ Hawthorne asked.

She shook her head. ‘Sod all. Everything has been wiped down, including the unopened Coke can. Pryce was the only one who had any. We’ve got his DNA on the can and there were traces of the liquid on his lips.’

‘So what are your thoughts?’

‘You really think I’m going to share them with you?’ Detective Inspector Cara Grunshaw looked Hawthorne straight in the eyes but there was no real malice in her voice. ‘I’ll leave you to earn your daily rate,’ she went on. ‘If they feel they need you, which, incidentally, I don’t, they might as well get their money’s worth.’

She stood there, her fingers drumming against the side of her arm. Then she seemed to relent.

‘It looks to me as if Miss Anno is going to be our first port of call. We haven’t been able to locate her yet – her mobile is switched off – but I’ll let you know when I’ve tracked her down. I’m going up to talk to Pryce’s husband and you can join me. After that you should have a word with the neighbour. If you need me, you’ve got my mobile, but here’s the deal, Hawthorne.’ She jabbed a stubby finger in his direction. ‘I want to know what you know. All right? You keep me informed if there are any developments and I want to be the one who makes the arrest. If I find you’ve been undermining me, I’ll rip your testicles off and use them as conkers. Is that clear?’

‘You don’t need to worry about me, Cara,’ Hawthorne said, with an innocent, almost beatific smile. ‘I’m only here to help.’

I didn’t believe him. Hawthorne was a lone wolf if ever there was one. I was sure that DI Grunshaw would only know there had been an arrest when she read about it in the newspapers.

‘Let’s do it, then.’

Grunshaw marched off. I was happy to follow her. I had become aware of the sickening smell in the room, the mixture of blood and wine. I was beginning to feel queasy and knew I would be in all sorts of trouble if I actually managed to throw up at the scene of the crime. I couldn’t wait to get out. But Hawthorne was still lingering.

‘I’d watch out for her if I were you,’ he muttered.

‘DI Grunshaw?’

‘Do me a favour and don’t say anything in front of her. Take my word for it. She’s not a nice human being.’

‘She seemed all right to me.’

‘That’s because you don’t know her.’

We went upstairs.