The Sentence Is Death

6 Her Story

Akira Anno lived somewhere in Holland Park but we didn’t meet her at her home. Presumably because she didn’t want her privacy invaded, she had chosen to be interviewed at Notting Hill Gate police station, a rather handsome and imposing building that stood at the corner of Ladbroke Grove. It’s been shut down now, part of a brilliant scheme to close half of London’s police stations and reduce uniformed officers on the street that has seen a surge in knife crime and made it impossible to use a mobile phone without the risk of it being snatched by thieves on motorbikes.

I was puzzled why Detective Inspector Grunshaw had invited us over, given that she had made it clear she viewed the investigation as a competition which she was determined to win.

‘She thinks the Anno woman did it,’ Hawthorne explained.

‘How does that work?’

‘She makes the arrest. She makes me look bad. I was there – but she was one step ahead of me.’

‘You don’t like her.’

‘Nobody does.’

We showed our IDs and were eventually allowed into the police station. Grunshaw had booked a grim, magnolia-painted interview room on the ground floor. The windows were frosted glass, blanking out any view. There was a table bolted into the floor. No Farrow & Ball here. A collection of health and safety posters on the walls were the only decoration.

Akira Anno was sitting uncomfortably, poised on the edge of a particularly brutal wooden chair. She was a small woman, quite boyish, not exactly short but somehow unreal, as if she were a scaled-down model of herself. Her eyes were very dark and intense and only partially concealed by her round, mauve-tinted glasses. These were perched on porcelain cheeks and a sharply contoured nose that might have seen the edge of a plastic surgeon’s knife. Her hair was black and too straight, hanging down to her shoulders and framing a face that was old and young at the same time. She gave the impression that she was extremely wise and knowledgeable, partly because she never smiled. She was sulking now. It turned out that she had just driven back from Oxford. She showed no sign of remorse that her ex-husband’s lawyer had been brutally murdered, but she was indignant that anyone should think she had anything to do with it.

I had already met Akira Anno twice before.

As I write this, I don’t want to give the impression that I had any animosity towards her or her work. In fact, at the time of Richard Pryce’s death I’d never actually read anything she’d written apart from a couple of poems that had been published in the New Statesman and they hadn’t made a word of sense. The first time I had come across her had been at the Edinburgh Book Festival and then, six months later, I had seen her at a launch party in London. Afterwards, I looked her up on the Virago website. That was the impression she made on me.

She was born in Tokyo in 1963, an only child. Her father was a banker who was transferred to New York when she was nine and that was where she was brought up. In 1986, she graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts and shortly afterwards published her first novel, A Multitude of Gods, ‘a story of female submission and religious patriarchy set during the Kamakura period in Japan’. It catapulted her to international acclaim and received rave reviews, although the feature film adaptation starring Meryl Streep did less well. Among her other books, the best known were: The Temizu Basin, A Cool Breeze in Hiroshima and My Father Never Knew Me, a semi-autobiographical memoir of her early days in America. She had also published two volumes of poetry, the most recent of which had come out earlier in the year. It was called Two Hundred Haikus and contained exactly that. She had famously said that it could take her several years to write a novel because she treated every word not just as a stitch in a tapestry but as a tapestry in itself. I’m not entirely sure what she meant by that either.

She married the English cinematographer Marcus Brandt, who had worked on her film, and this was what had brought her to London where she now lived. It was an abusive relationship – described over nine pages in the Sunday Times Magazine and later in a BBC Imagine documentary – and it had come to an end in 2008. There were no children. Two years later, in 2010, much to the surprise of many newspaper pundits, she had married the property developer Adrian Lockwood.

At some stage in her life she had embraced Shinto, the traditional religion of Japan, and this was reflected in much of her work, particularly her belief in animism, the idea that inanimate objects contain some sort of spirituality, although as far as I could tell she wasn’t known to visit shrines or, for that matter, to indulge in ritual dance. She also explored the nature of otherness, her own dual ethnicity and the disconnection that came from living in a culture separated from that in which she had been born. I’m quoting here from the flap of one of her books.

I had been introduced to her in the yurt, the Mongolian-style writers’ tent they put up every year at the Edinburgh Book Festival. It’s not huge but it’s a quiet place to hang out and they serve coffee and snacks all day, with malt whisky in the evening – if they haven’t already packed you off home. I was in Edinburgh to talk about my children’s books. She was doing a poetry recital. I was sitting on my own when she arrived as part of a melee that included her publisher, her agent, her publicist, two journalists, a photographer and the director of the festival. For some reason she was wearing a man’s three-piece suit, complete with bowler hat. Apart from a silver brooch – possibly a letter from the Japanese alphabet – pinned to her shoulder, she could have stepped out of a painting by Magritte.

There was hardly anyone else in the tent and after Akira had accepted a cup of green tea and refused a rather tired egg and cress sandwich, somebody noticed I was there and introduced me as the author of the Alex Rider series.

‘Oh yes?’

Those were her first two words to me and I will never forget them – nor the handshake that followed. It was utterly indifferent, over in an instant.

I muttered something about admiring her work, which wasn’t true but was something I felt I ought to say.

‘Thank you. It’s very nice to meet you.’ If each word was a tapestry, it had been spun out of razor wire.

She was already doing that awful thing of looking over my shoulder to see if there was anyone more interesting in the yurt. When she established that there wasn’t, she turned her back on me to check something with her publicist and a moment later the entire group ebbed away.

I wasn’t exactly put out although I did think it was strange. The atmosphere at book festivals is nearly always friendly and non-competitive and it’s rare to meet an author who grandstands. I gave Akira the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she was nervous about her session. I’m the same. No matter how often I speak in public, I’m uneasy before I go onstage and find it hard to make conversation. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think I’m just rude.

But when I met her a few months later at the book launch, she snubbed me again and this time I was sure it was quite deliberate. She seemed to have no memory of having met me before and the moment she was told (again) that I was a children’s author, she switched off. It really was as if a light had gone out in her eyes. By now she had started affecting those Yoko Ono-style tinted glasses. I thought she was rather ridiculous.

And here she was again, expensively dressed in a black trouser suit with a pale grey pashmina draped over her shoulders and twisted round one arm. Cara Grunshaw was sitting opposite her and the man I knew only as Darren was standing to one side, either chewing gum or pretending to, still holding his totemic notebook.

Grunshaw introduced Hawthorne but said nothing about me, which was probably just as well. I wasn’t sure what Akira would have thought of my being there and I very much doubted that she would enjoy ending up in one of my books. This was an informal interview. There was no solicitor, no caution.

‘I want to thank you for coming in,’ Grunshaw began, addressing Akira. ‘As you know, Richard Pryce was found dead at his home yesterday morning and we’re hoping you can help us with our enquiries.’

Akira shrugged. ‘I don’t see why I should be able to help you. I hardly knew Mr Pryce. He represented my ex-husband but we never spoke. I had nothing to say to him. He made his living from the death of love and from the unmaking of people’s dreams. What else is there to say?’

She had a strange accent, largely American but with a slight Japanese inflexion. Her voice was soft and completely emotionless. She sounded bored.

‘You threatened him.’

‘No. I did not.’

‘With respect, Ms Anno, we have several witnesses who were present at The Delaunay restaurant on the twenty-first of October. You had been having dinner there. As you left the restaurant, you saw Mr Pryce, who was sitting with his husband. You threw a glass of wine at him.’

‘I poured it over his head. He deserved it.’

‘You called him a pig and you threatened to hit him with a bottle.’

‘It was a joke!’ There was an extraordinary malevolence in the four words, as if Grunshaw was deliberately overlooking something that was painfully obvious to everyone else. ‘I poured maybe two, three inches of wine and I said he was lucky he hadn’t ordered a bottle or I’d have used that. My meaning was quite clear. It was that I would have poured more of the wine over him. Not that I would have used the bottle to injure him.’

‘Given the way he died, it was still an unfortunate choice of words.’

She considered. I could see her replaying and analysing the scene at the restaurant as if she was going to turn it into a short story. Or a haiku. It was all there in those deep black eyes. She arrived at a conclusion. ‘I don’t regret anything that I said. I told you. It was a joke.’

‘Not a very funny one.’

‘I don’t think a joke has to be funny, Detective Inspector. In my books, I use humour only to subvert the status quo. If you’ve ever read the French philosopher Alain Badiou, you’ll know that he defines jokes as a type of rupture that opens up truths. I actually met him at the Sorbonne, by the way. He was a remarkable man. By ridiculing my enemy, I defeat him. That was the insight that Alain gave me and although I see no need to justify myself, that was precisely the mechanism I was using at The Delaunay.’

I could imagine Akira Anno and Alain Badiou together, talking into the small hours. I’m sure it would have been a barrel of laughs.

‘Who had you been having dinner with, Ms Anno?’

‘A friend of mine.’

‘It might be helpful if you gave us his name.’

‘It might be preferable not to. Anyway, it wasn’t a man. It was a woman.’

DI Grunshaw took a breath. Next to her, Darren was scribbling away, his pen scratching at the paper. They weren’t used to being spoken to in this way. ‘If your dinner companion overheard the comments you made and if they were intended as a joke, then we might ask her for a statement and that might actually be helpful to you.’

‘All right.’ Akira shrugged. ‘It was a publisher. Dawn Adams.’

‘Is she your publisher?’

‘No. She’s just a friend.’

Darren added the name to his notebook and underlined it. I wondered why Akira had been so reluctant to provide such an irrelevant piece of information.

‘Where were you last weekend, Ms Anno?’

‘I was in a cottage near Lyndhurst. It belongs to another friend of mine. My yoga teacher.’

‘And he will confirm this?’

‘If someone hasn’t murdered him with a wine bottle, I expect so.’

There she was, subverting the status quo again.

‘Was anyone with you in Lyndhurst?’ Hawthorne cut in.

‘Near Lyndhurst.’ Akira underlined the word with her voice. ‘The cottage is actually very remote and I was alone.’

‘What time did you leave?’ Hawthorne again. I could tell that he didn’t believe her story.

‘I left on Monday morning at about half past seven. I stopped for a coffee near Fleet but after that I went straight home. I showered and changed and then I went out again. I was giving a lecture at Oxford University and I stayed there overnight. I came back to London this morning and was told that the police had been looking for me and wanted to see me.’ She levelled her eyes at Grunshaw. ‘In all truth, I don’t think I was so difficult to find. I hope you have more success with whoever committed the crime.’

‘Where did you have the coffee?’ Darren asked.

She almost yawned. ‘It was a Welcome Break service station and it was busy. I’m sure quite a few people will have seen me. You can ask.’

‘We will.’

‘What did you have against Richard Pryce?’ Hawthorne cut in. Akira threw a contemptuous glance in his direction but before she could answer, he went on. ‘You said just now that you hardly knew him and you never spoke. He represented your husband and from what I hear your husband came away from his divorce with a big smile on his face. Did you blame Pryce for that? He could have done you for assault in that restaurant. Why did you attack him?’

She rearranged the pashmina before she answered, wrapping it more tightly around herself. ‘Richard Pryce was a liar,’ she said. ‘He represented my ex-husband and deliberately lied and intimidated me to protect him.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ Hawthorne looked genuinely sympathetic and sounded so interested that even Akira was taken by surprise. That was another of his tricks. He had a way of getting people to tell him perhaps more than they intended.

‘I will tell you,’ she said. ‘I don’t care if you know because it’s behind me now. I look on my divorce as a cleansing process. The water runs foul only when you step into the shower.’

‘I’m sure.’

She composed herself. ‘I never married Adrian Lockwood. I married the image, the smiling Cheshire cat, that I made of him. That’s the truth even if it took me three years to see it. My first marriage was a degradation. Marcus, my first husband, was a professional narcissist, and I never knew where I was with him, in every sense. Moving with him to London took me not just from my place of birth, Tokyo, but from my home, New York. It was like falling through concentric circles, disappearing down a spiral that increasingly alienated me. In the end, there was only Marcus and he knew it. It was what gave him his power over me. He made my life miserable and when I found the strength to leave him, I had nothing.’

‘You had your books,’ I suggested, surprising myself. I hadn’t intended to speak.

‘The writer is only the shadow on the page. Yes. My books were appreciated all over the world, translated into forty-seven languages. I received many awards. I am sure you are familiar with my work.’

‘Well, actually—’

‘But I was nothing.’ She brought her fist crashing down on the table but it was so small, her fingers so slender, that it made almost no sound. ‘I had no inner life in myself, no confidence.

‘And then, at a party, I met Adrian. A property developer! It would be hard to imagine any occupation more alien to my sensibilities. I did not find him attractive and yet I will admit that I was attracted to him. He was so loud and cheerful. And rich. Yes. He had houses all over the world, beautiful cars, a yacht in the Camargue. He never read, of course. He had no interest in literature. He went to the theatre and to the opera when he was taken there by his corporate friends, but he didn’t care what he was seeing. It meant nothing to him.

‘He provided me with a safe space in which I was able to rebuild my confidence, to discover something of my inner self. I found his very ignorance a solace. He looked up to me, of course. He admired me. Perhaps, in his own way, he loved me. But his love was never more than skin-deep.’ She swept a hand through her hair. ‘I could live with that.’

‘So what went wrong?’ Hawthorne asked.

She shrugged. ‘I got bored. I found it increasingly difficult to reconcile my life as a serious writer, critic and performance poet with my role as his wife. Also, he was having affairs. He had nothing interesting to say. All he ever talked about was his business! He was a brute.’ She shuddered. ‘He had a foul temper and he could be violent. He made demands of my body that made me feel sick.’

‘But it wasn’t your husband you attacked in a restaurant, Ms Anno,’ Grunshaw reminded her. ‘It was his solicitor.’

‘I already told you. Richard Pryce lied.’ She closed her eyes. Her hair was hanging loose, her hands palms up on the table. For that brief moment, she could have been in one of her yoga classes. ‘First, there was the question of the settlement. I was not acquisitive. I was not unreasonable. I can live without money. My currency is invested in the words that I write. I asked only for enough to support my lifestyle, my two houses, my travel and other expenses. I was fully prepared to go to court to fight for what was rightfully mine.

‘Mr Pryce characterised me in a way that made that impossible. He belittled me. He made it seem that I had brought nothing to the marriage but had used Adrian as some sort of emotional crutch. I was not the one who was disabled! Yes, I will admit that he had filled a need, but I brought much into his life that had not been there before and he drank deep from the fountainhead that I provided. I was not a parasite!’ These last words were spoken with a blaze of anger. ‘My lawyers were concerned that I was unlikely to be viewed sympathetically if I insisted on a hearing and I needed little persuasion. The law has always been fundamental in the suppression of women. Why should I think it would treat me any differently?’

She fell silent, but DI Grunshaw hadn’t finished yet. ‘Were you aware that Richard Pryce had investigated you?’ she asked. I was surprised she knew that. She must have spoken to Oliver Masefield.

‘No.’

‘Are you quite sure?’

‘I was advised that he might be interested in my royalties and other earnings, but I didn’t care. I had nothing to hide.’

Grunshaw glanced at Hawthorne, who briefly shook his head. There was nothing more he wanted to ask. ‘We may need to speak to you again, Ms Anno,’ she said. ‘Do you have any plans to leave London?’

‘I’m at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival next week.’

‘But you’re not leaving the country?’

‘No.’

‘Then we’ll be in touch with you soon.’

It might have ended there but suddenly I noticed that Akira Anno was staring at me. I turned away, trying to make myself invisible, but it was already too late. I actually saw the moment when she remembered who I was.

‘I know you!’ she exclaimed. ‘We’ve met before.’

I said nothing. I was extremely uncomfortable but neither Hawthorne nor Grunshaw chose to help me out.

‘You’re a writer!’ She was not using the word as a compliment. She stood up, her hands resting on the table, balled into fists. ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded. Her accent, which had been Japanese American, now veered further towards Japanese.

‘Well . . .’ I began, still hoping Hawthorne would step in.

‘Why is he here?’ She turned vengefully on DI Grunshaw.

Grunshaw shrugged. ‘I didn’t invite him. He’s writing a book.’

‘A book about me? He’s putting me in his book? I don’t want to be in his fucking book! I want my lawyer in this room. If he puts me in his book, I’ll fucking sue him.’

‘I think you’d better go,’ Grunshaw said to me.

‘This is a fucking outrage! I don’t give him permission. Do you hear me? If he writes about me, I’ll kill him!’

She was screaming, her voice not exactly loud but high-pitched, her entire body shaking as Hawthorne and I excused ourselves and hurried out as quickly as we could. I had never seen anyone so angry and at that moment it was easy to imagine her picking up the bottle of wine, smashing it over Richard Pryce’s head and then using the jagged end to make mincemeat of his neck.

If there had been another bottle handy, I had no doubt at all she would have done the same to me.