The Sentence Is Death

5 Masefield Pryce Turnbull

The Old Vic has a special place in my affections. It’s the most beautiful theatre in London and I’ve been going there since I was a teenager. Even now, I can remember queuing up to get standing tickets to see Maggie Smith in Hedda Gabler, Laurence Olivier in The Party and Diana Rigg in the world premiere of Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers. Long before I published my first children’s book, I wanted to write plays. I found the draw of the theatre quite magical and when I was asked to join its board, I accepted at once – even though I didn’t know anything very much about finance, health and safety or charity law.

But I didn’t have a meeting there on that Tuesday morning. I had said that to give myself an excuse to drop in on River Court, which was where Hawthorne lived and which was only ten minutes from my own flat, on the other side of Blackfriars Bridge.

I wanted to know more about Hawthorne. I wanted to know why he had destroyed his career by pushing a paedophile down a flight of stairs and how he had come to be living on his own in an empty flat, caretaking for the owners who were in Singapore. He had told me that he had a half-brother who was an estate agent but it still seemed an unusual arrangement. I also knew that he was separated from his wife and that she lived in Gants Hill with an eleven-year-old son who didn’t read my books. Apparently, the two of them were still seeing each other from time to time. Hawthorne had two hobbies. He liked constructing Airfix models, mainly from the Second World War. If this wasn’t unlikely enough, he was also a member of a book group.

And yet all this felt like window dressing . . . the outer costume rather than the man himself. If I was going to write three books about him (and possibly more if he came to me with further investigations), I needed to know more. I was already quite sure that something must have happened to him, that he was in some way damaged, and I wanted to discover what it was if only to justify some of the extremes of his behaviour. You cannot have a central character who is simply, by his very nature, unpleasant, and although I wouldn’t have used that word to describe Hawthorne there were moments – that ‘limp-wristed’ remark, for example – when he came close. In a way, I was trying to help him. He had chosen me as his biographer and I saw it as my job to picture him in the most sympathetic light. The trouble was, he was almost fanatical about keeping any personal or private details away from me. By inveigling myself into his flat for a second time, I hoped I might stumble on some clue that would explain what had turned him into the man he was and why, despite everything and against my better instincts, I was beginning to like him.

River Court is a low-rise block built in the seventies, a symphony of not terribly attractive beige-coloured balconies and rectangular windows that has somehow managed to find itself in the most wonderful position, right on the edge of the Thames. I’d walked past it dozens of times on the way to the National Theatre and the South Bank without even noticing it was there. That’s one of the pleasures of living in London. It’s so huge, so jammed with interesting buildings, that it’s always taking you by surprise. Even now I can stroll down an alleyway and realise I’m seeing it for the first time even though it’s only a few minutes from where I live.

I had turned up twenty minutes early. I knew that if I rang the bell, Hawthorne wouldn’t let me in; he would call down on the intercom system and keep me waiting in the street. But I was smarter than that. I waited until another resident emerged. At that moment, I reached out with a set of keys that wouldn’t actually have fitted the lock and, with a smile, stopped the door from fully closing and went in.

I was feeling quite pleased with myself as I took the lift up to the twelfth floor but it was only as I stood there, on my own, that I began to feel uneasy. Hawthorne would know perfectly well what I was up to and although he had often been sarcastic or irritable, I had never yet been a target of his anger. That might be about to change. Well, it was too bad. I just had to remember that he needed me. Despite his occasional threats, I didn’t think he would find it easy to get anyone else to write about him.

The lift door opened and at once I heard voices, one of which was Hawthorne’s. He was saying goodbye to someone who had visited him in his flat, even though it was still early – nine forty-five in the morning. I peeked round the corner, doing my best to stay out of sight, and saw a young man, about eighteen or nineteen years old. It was hard to be sure of his age, partly because he was some distance away but also because he was in a motorised wheelchair. If that in itself wasn’t surprising enough, he was also of Indian, perhaps Bengali, descent and, I could tell at a glance, he had some form of muscular dystrophy. One of his hands was holding an electric control, the other was resting on his lap. He was not on a ventilator but there was a plastic bottle attached to his chest with a drinking pipe reaching up to his lips. He had dark hair cut short and a wispy beard and moustache that spoiled what might otherwise have been film-star good looks: chiselled cheekbones, intense eyes, Valentino lips.

‘All right then, I’ll see you.’ That was Hawthorne speaking.

‘Thank you, Mr Hawthorne.’

‘Thank you, Kevin, mate. I couldn’t do it without you.’

Couldn’t do what? Was this something to do with model-making? No. That was impossible. But what could Hawthorne possibly need a young man in a wheelchair to help him with? I’d come for clues but all I’d got for my pains was another mystery.

‘I’ll see you, then.’

‘Yeah. Give my best to your mum.’

Hawthorne didn’t go back into the flat. He stood there, watching Kevin as he made his way towards the lift.

I was lucky that this part of the corridor was in shadow or he would have spotted me for sure but even so I was still there, hiding inside the lift, and I realised that I’d put myself in a difficult position. If I stepped out and revealed myself, Hawthorne would see me and know I had been spying on him. At the same time, Kevin was rolling steadily towards me and would surely wonder what I was doing, lurking there, refusing to come out. I decided to stay where I was. As he manoeuvred himself into the lift, I studied the buttons as if I had just got in ahead of him and had forgotten where I wanted to go. I pressed Ground.

‘Third floor, please.’ Kevin was next to me, facing out. The doors slid shut and suddenly we were alone together in the confined space, he in a sitting position and so some distance below me. There were two leather pads holding his head in place. I pressed the button for him. Painfully slowly, the lift began to descend.

‘I could have done it myself,’ he said. ‘It’s only getting up to the twelfth that I find difficult.’

‘Why is that?’ I asked.

‘The button’s too high.’

It took me a moment to work out that this was a variation on an old joke. ‘Do you live here?’ I asked.

‘I live on the third.’

‘Nice place.’

‘It’s got nice views,’ he agreed.

‘The river,’ I said.

He frowned. ‘What river?’

Briefly, I froze. How could he not have noticed it? Was it something to do with his disability? Then I saw him grinning at me and realised he was joking again. We lapsed into silence until, with a slight jerk, we arrived and the doors opened. Kevin pushed the lever forward and rolled out.

‘Have a nice day,’ I said. It’s an Americanism but one I find myself using more and more these days.

‘You too.’

The lift continued on its journey, taking me down to the ground floor. There were two people, perhaps a husband and wife, waiting to go up, and they too were puzzled when I refused to get out. ‘Wrong floor!’ I muttered, weakly. They stepped in and took the lift up to the ninth floor, which must have been where they lived. The doors closed again and finally, after what seemed like a very long time, I arrived back where I wanted to be.

I went straight to Hawthorne’s flat and rang the bell. The door opened almost at once and there he was, with his raincoat over his arm, ready to go out. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. I had intended to arrive early but with all the fuss going up and down in the lift, I was more or less on time.

‘You should have rung the bell outside,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘It would have saved you coming up.’ He led me back down the corridor and called the lift. ‘How was the Old Vic?’

‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘There’s a board meeting next week.’

‘So long as you’ve got time to write our book . . .’

‘My first thought exactly.’ Sarcasm was wasted on Hawthorne. For someone who used it so often, it was remarkable that he never recognised it.

The lift arrived. I was beginning to get sick of the sight of it. We went back down and my heart sank when we stopped at the ninth floor and the husband and wife that I had just met got in again. They looked at me curiously but said nothing. They didn’t seem to know Hawthorne.

I was glad, finally, to leave the building. ‘Are they expecting us?’ I asked.

‘Masefield Pryce Turnbull? Yes. I spoke to Oliver Masefield. They’re just across the river . . . off Chancery Lane.’

‘Then we can walk.’

Kevin couldn’t walk. A teenager, disabled, from a different culture; what on earth had he been doing in Hawthorne’s flat? The two of them sounded like old friends. I was desperate to ask him but of course I couldn’t.

I thought about nothing else the entire way.

After walking all the way across Blackfriars Bridge to see Hawthorne, I now followed my steps back again. Masefield Pryce Turnbull had offices in Carey Street, behind the Central London County Court and just round the corner from where I live. This part of London is dedicated to the legal profession and wants you to know it. Even the newer, more modern buildings are carefully traditional, utterly discreet.

Masefield Pryce Turnbull occupied the top two floors of a handsome townhouse that they shared with two other boutique firms. It was a twenty-first-century law firm in a nineteenth-century building; sliding glass doors and open-plan offices behind the classical arches and sculpted pediments. A young, smiling secretary took us through to a corner office where Oliver Masefield was waiting for us, sitting behind a massive, highly polished desk. This was a practice that specialised in divorce – matrimonial law, as they called it – and perhaps he needed a solid barrier between himself and the grief and anger of his clients.

He rose to greet us, a very imposing black man in a sleek, tailored suit, about fifty years old with a high, domed forehead and dark hair which was going grey around the temples in a way that entirely suited his profession and status. He had an extraordinarily cheerful disposition which he seemed unable to hide, even though we were here to make enquiries about the violent death of his partner. When I say there was a twinkle in his eye, I mean it quite literally. Perhaps it was the overhead lighting. Even when he arranged his features to show the expected empathy and remorse, he still gave the impression that he wanted to burst out laughing, to sweep us into his embrace and take us out for a drink.

‘Please! Please, come in,’ he began, although we already had. He had a loud, booming voice, on the edge of theatrical. ‘Take a seat. I spoke to the police yesterday evening . . . An absolutely terrible business. Poor Richard! We’d worked together for many years, you know, and I want to say straight away that anything I can do to help you, I will do! Will you have a coffee or tea? No? This weather is so very damp and unpleasant. Perhaps a glass of water?’

There was a bottle on a sideboard and he poured two glasses while we sat down. He handed them to us, then went back to his place on the other side of the desk. ‘Where do you want to start?’

‘When was the last time you spoke to Mr Pryce?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘That would have been on Sunday, the day that it happened. We spoke at about six o’clock in the evening.’

‘He rang you.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Oliver Masefield sighed loudly. Everything he did was just a little bit larger than life. ‘I can’t tell you how bad I feel. He was worried about something. He phoned me for advice. But I wasn’t able to speak to him.’ He grimaced. ‘I was going out with my wife to a concert at the Albert Hall. Mozart’s Requiem. He couldn’t have chosen a worse time to ring me.’

‘So what did he say?’

‘Not very much. He had already mentioned to me on one or two occasions that he had concerns about a recent hearing.’ Before Hawthorne could interrupt, he continued. ‘The Lockwood divorce. You do understand, gentlemen, that I have a duty to protect client confidentiality, but many of the facts are on public record and anything I’m telling you now you can find out for yourselves.’

With this established, he began.

‘In this instance, our client was Adrian Lockwood, who was seeking a divorce from his wife, Akira Anno, on grounds of unreasonable behaviour. I don’t need to go into details, the more salient of which appeared in the newspapers. We came to an agreement at the Central Family Court and I have to say that it was very much in our client’s favour. This was on Wednesday the sixteenth. You’ll be aware that Ms Anno was put out – to say the least – by the way things had proceeded and happened to see Richard in a restaurant four or five days later. It was The Delaunay in the Aldwych. What followed was a common assault and could have landed her in serious trouble if Richard had chosen to pursue the matter further.’

‘She threw wine at him.’

‘That’s right.’

‘She also threatened him.’

‘She swore at him and said words to the effect that she would like to attack him with a bottle. It was a very foolish thing to do but I understand that she is a highly strung woman.’

‘You say he had concerns. What were they?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘I never found out exactly because I wasn’t directly involved. But I can tell you that Richard suspected there had been fraudulent disclosure and it concerned him to the extent that he was even prepared to consider a set-aside.’

‘It would help if you could speak in English, Mr Masefield.’

The lawyer’s eyes narrowed and some of his bonhomie departed the room. ‘I think I was doing precisely that, Mr Hawthorne. But I will try to explain it to you in language that a police officer, retired or otherwise, might understand.’

I smiled at that, then looked away so that Hawthorne wouldn’t see.

Masefield continued. ‘In the case of a high-income divorce, both sides have to make a full account of their income, their pensions, savings, property . . . their entire net value. This is all laid out in what we call a Form E. It does sometimes happen that one side may try to conceal some aspect of his or her wealth and were that to be discovered, the agreement – whether it was made inside or outside the court – might well be overturned and effectively both parties would have to begin again.’ He coughed. ‘We call that a set-aside. I know that Richard did have some concerns that Ms Anno might have an income stream which she had failed to declare and he had been in touch with Navigant—’

‘Navigant?’

‘They are a consultancy in London. They have a first-class team of forensic accountants and we use them quite frequently.’

‘And they were investigating Akira Anno?’

‘To begin with, yes. But in the end their services were no longer required as Ms Anno, presumably being advised by her own counsel, accepted Mr Lockwood’s terms quite soon after the FDR.’

‘What’s an FDR?’ This time I was the one who asked, saving Hawthorne any further confrontation.

‘I’m sorry. It’s the Financial Dispute Resolution. You have to understand that we do everything we can to dissuade our clients from proceeding all the way to the final hearing. If they can come to an agreement before that, it will save them many thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands, of pounds. That was the case here. Richard had persuaded Ms Anno’s team that they might as well quit while they were ahead. He had made a reasonable offer and in the end they agreed.’ Masefield clasped his hands together. ‘Clearly she wasn’t entirely happy about it – witness what happened a few days later. But although she might not have believed it, it was almost certainly in her best interests.’

‘So this is what I don’t get,’ Hawthorne said. ‘It’s a done deal. Richard Pryce has got the agreement he wanted. His client’s happy—’

‘Mr Lockwood was delighted.’

‘So what’s he doing calling you on that Sunday when the whole thing’s over?’

‘I have no answer to that, I’m afraid.’

‘He didn’t say anything at all?’

I didn’t think Masefield would answer. He clearly didn’t want to, torn between client confidentiality, his own sense of responsibility and, I think, a mild dislike of Hawthorne. But in the end, it was his sense of guilt that persuaded him.

‘I should have listened to him!’ he exclaimed. ‘I blame myself – but as I say, I was on my way to a concert and I didn’t want to be late. We spoke briefly and I could tell Richard was upset. He talked about consulting the Law Society ethics hotline. The Law Society is, as it were, our governing body and that would have been a very serious step.’

‘It might have led to a set-aside.’

‘It might indeed. And what is the point of having a set-aside if your side has already won? I’m not even sure it would have made any difference to the settlement if Ms Anno had been sitting on a vast pile of money, unless of course she had somehow extorted it or defrauded it from her ex-husband, and even then it was no real concern of ours.’

‘So what did you say to him?’

‘Broadly, I said there was no point raking over the coals and that we would talk about it first thing Monday. I wished him a pleasant evening and rang off.’

Richard Pryce had not had a pleasant evening. And for him, Monday had never come.

‘Why was he called the Blunt Razor?’ I asked – as much to fill the silence that had suddenly descended as anything else.

It made Masefield smile. He nodded at me. ‘That’s a very good question,’ he said. ‘And one that may explain a great deal of what we’ve been discussing. We don’t normally take notice of these epithets but Richard had been involved in one or two high-profile cases and he was described that way by some journalist or other and it stuck. The thing about him is that he was razor-sharp but he was also scrupulously honest. He would be very reluctant to take on a client if he thought they were in any way compromised and he always spoke his mind. That was what upset Ms Anno so much. He wrote to her, as was completely normal and proper in such proceedings, but his language was, I imagine, very blunt.’

‘He called a spade a spade,’ Hawthorne said.

‘Those aren’t the words I would choose. But yes. He was forthright. And it was completely in character for him to call me over a weekend if there was something that was worrying him.’ He shook his head. ‘I will never forgive myself for not giving him my full attention. Richard and I had worked together for almost twenty years. We met at Clifford Chance before we decided to set up together. Maurice was too upset even to come in today.’

‘Maurice?’

‘Maurice Turnbull. My other senior partner.’

For a moment nobody spoke and I was aware how quiet it was in this office. If there was any traffic in Carey Street, the sound was being effectively blocked by the double glazing and although I could see secretaries and paralegals in the area on the other side of the glass partition, they could have been actors in a film with the volume turned down. From my experience, law firms are always quiet places. Maybe it’s because they make words so expensive that they tend to use them sparingly among themselves.

I thought we had finished and would leave but Hawthorne took me by surprise with his next question. ‘One last thing, Mr Masefield. I don’t suppose you could tell us anything about your colleague’s will?’

His will. That had never occurred to me but of course Richard Pryce was a wealthy man. There was the house in Fitzroy Park with its expensive art on the walls, the second home in Clacton-on-Sea, two luxury cars and almost certainly a whole lot more.

‘As a matter of fact, I was discussing it with Richard only a few weeks ago. I am his executor so I’m very well acquainted with his last wishes.’

Hawthorne waited. ‘And what were they?’

Once again, Masefield was hesitant. He had taken against Hawthorne but at the same time he was smart enough to know that in the end he would have no choice. ‘The bulk of his estate is left to his husband,’ he said. ‘That includes the property in north London and the house in Clacton-on-Sea. He named a number of charities. But the only other large bequest, and I’m referring to a sum of about £100,000, goes to a Mrs Davina Richardson. If you wish to speak to her, my secretary can give you her address.’

‘I do wish to speak to her,’ Hawthorne said. There was a gleam in his eyes that I knew well, the awareness of another door opening, another line of enquiry for him to pursue. ‘But maybe you can tell me why he should have been so generous to her.’

‘I really don’t see that it’s any of my business.’ Oliver Masefield was much less jovial than he had been when we came in. I’m afraid Hawthorne did have this effect on people. You could say that he was the needle and every witness, every suspect, the balloon. ‘Mrs Richardson is an interior decorator. She and Richard were close friends. He was also godfather to her son. I’ll give you her telephone number.’ He brought it up on his computer screen, then scribbled it down on a sheet of paper and handed it across. ‘Anything more than that, you’ll have to get from her.’

As we left the office, Hawthorne’s mobile rang. It was Detective Inspector Grunshaw. She was ringing to let him know that Akira Anno had turned up and was ready to talk.