The Twist of a Knife

13 A Run of Bad Luck

I’ve never much liked Euston.

I got to know the area well during the sixteen years I worked on Foyle’s War. I did a lot of the research at the British Library, just about the only modern building in the entire square mile with any sense of architectural style. I still don’t understand how you can have a road that’s only a twenty-minute walk from the centre of town, yet remains so inherently cheap and tacky. Or why there’s been a traffic jam from one end to the other for the past twenty years. The shops are useless and you’d be mad to eat in any of the restaurants. Half the people you meet are tourists with backpacks. I should have known better when I heard that this was where Ahmet had his office. Theatreland it most certainly was not.

I brought Hawthorne to the front entrance, taking him down a flight of stairs concealed behind a row of dustbins to the basement of a tired grey house that had been sliced into flats. Light was streaming out of the windows below pavement level, but the glass was so dusty we couldn’t see in. I rang the bell. It was ten to eight in the evening, but so dark that it could have been midnight. The April weather was showing no signs of improvement. It wasn’t raining, but there was a thick fog that was doing the same job. Nobody came, so I rang the bell a second time. The door swung open to reveal Maureen Bates, dressed in a tweed skirt and mauve jersey with her glasses resting on her chest. She looked far from happy as she stood there, purposefully blocking the way in.

‘I think Mr Yurdakul is expecting us,’ Hawthorne said.

‘I’m aware of that. Yes. But I have to tell you that this really isn’t a good time.’ Did she think we’d just turn round and leave?

‘It’s never a good time when someone has been killed,’ Hawthorne assured her.

‘I don’t see how Mr Yurdakul can help you.’

‘You’ll find out when you let us in.’

With a pout of resignation, she turned and led us through the tiny hallway and into the office, where Ahmet was just finishing a conversation with a dark-haired man who looked uncomfortable in the armchair into which he had folded himself. As we arrived, he stood up and I saw that he was about six foot five, towering over the producer, twitchy and apologetic. I recognised him as the same person Ahmet had been talking to at the cast party. He had looked nervous then too. Cigarette smoke hung thick in the air, which was both unpleasant and, in modern times, rare. Ahmet was smoking. There was a packet of his L&M cigarettes in front of him, along with the onyx ashtray filled with at least half a packet’s worth of butts.

The tall man was in a hurry to get away. He muttered a quick ‘Good evening’ to us and gathered up his laptop and papers, shoving them awkwardly into a leather briefcase. Maureen showed him out and I heard a brief snatch of their conversation at the door.

‘I’ll call you in a couple of days.’

‘Thank you, Martin.’

‘I’m so sorry. You know …’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll deal with it.’

Not good news, then.

Meanwhile, I had introduced Hawthorne to Ahmet and he had taken the empty seat. Ahmet had stayed at his desk, half concealed behind a laptop and a great pile of letters and bills. As usual, he was wearing a suit, but had taken off his jacket to reveal an old-fashioned shirt and braces. His fingers were stained yellow with nicotine. It had even crept into his eyes.

‘So, how are things?’ Hawthorne asked cheerfully.

‘Not so good.’ The three words were like a death knell. I had never heard him sound so defeated. He looked at me like a dog abandoned by its owner. ‘Martin, the man who was here just now – he is my accountant. A very reliable man. And what he tells me …’

‘Are we going to have to close?’ I asked. It was the inevitable conclusion. I just wanted him to get to the point.

He drew out another cigarette and lit it. ‘I am fighting, Anthony. All my life I have been fighting.’ He blew out grey-blue smoke. ‘I will tell you. It was my ambition to produce for the theatre from the day that I joined the Really Useful Theatre Company. I was there for many years.’

‘You worked with Andrew Lloyd Webber?’ I asked. I was impressed. The Really Useful Group had been set up to look after Lloyd Webber’s multibillion-pound musicals, but had since diversified into theatre ownership, film production and records. It was a fantastically successful conglomeration, but Ahmet had never mentioned he had been part of it.

‘I worked for him in IT,’ he explained. ‘I helped to develop the box-office ticketing software they still use to this day!’ For a moment, a smile flitted across his face and his eyes were far away. ‘Database compatible files, easily imported into spreadsheets. Mail merge files and account reports. Online credit card verification. Publicity. Revenues. One of the first user-friendly onscreen seating charts! Do you know what I called it? Computer-assisted Ticketing System. CATS! They told me that Sir Andrew smiled when he heard that. He was not a lord then. I don’t know why they didn’t use it. The name, I mean. The system is still very much alive.’

‘Is that why you became a producer?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘Yes, sir. I looked at the enormous amounts of money these musicals were making. It was incredible! Do you know that a hundred and fifty million people have seen Phantom of the Opera and that it has made more than six billion dollars worldwide?’ He pointed at me. ‘And not all the reviews were favourable, let me tell you! There were critics who said that it was old-fashioned hokum. What did they know?’

‘So we might be all right,’ I said.

‘No, no, no. They still liked the sets, the sumptuous costumes, the music, the performances. With Mindgame … not so much.’ He gazed at me, tears welling in his eyes. ‘I blame myself, Anthony. It is a wonderful play. It is original. Apart from the excessive violence – and we did discuss this – it is highly entertaining. I believed in it and it may be that in the end I did not do it justice. This is my fault. I have let you down.’

I should have argued with him but I was feeling too dispirited.

‘You don’t blame Harriet Throsby?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘Why?’ Ahmet seemed genuinely surprised.

‘I’d have said she had the loudest voice. Certainly, she was the rudest.’ Hawthorne paused. ‘And the first. That may be why she was the one who was stabbed to death.’

‘You believe she was killed because of what she wrote?’ Ahmet shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hawthorne. That is impossible. Sometimes critics upset us. Sometimes they make us angry. But we are never violent!’

‘Jordan Williams was violent. He made threats against her.’

It was Maureen who answered. ‘He did no such thing!’

‘Tony was there. He heard him.’

‘Jordan had been drinking and he was emotional. But it was obvious to everyone in the room that he didn’t mean what he said. He was joking.’

‘A strange sense of humour.’ Hawthorne considered. ‘How well do you know him?’

It was an innocent enough question, but Maureen turned away, leaving it to Ahmet to step in. ‘This was the first time we had worked together. But we got to know each other during rehearsals. Of course he was angry. But I can assure you that he meant nothing by what he said. He was acting!’

‘You were angry too,’ Hawthorne pointed out. ‘You said Harriet Throsby was a liar and that what she wrote was shit.’

Maureen visibly winced when she heard that. She didn’t like bad language. Ahmet glanced at me sadly. ‘Did you tell him that?’ It was clear to me that he felt I had betrayed him. Jordan Williams had said the same. ‘I was upset, of course. It was the first review. But I had no ill feelings towards her personally. She is a woman. She is doing her job. And sometimes, you know, there is nothing you can do. My company has had a run of bad luck. I can blame the critics. I can blame the audiences. But in the end, what good will that do? I made the choices. I blame myself.’

‘You’re going out of business,’ Hawthorne said.

Ahmet didn’t even try to deny it. He nodded. ‘I was meeting with my accountant when you came in. Martin has told me there is no other option. It is not just Mindgame. We lost a great deal of money on Macbeth.’

‘We should have taken out weather insurance,’ Maureen muttered.

‘We discussed this at the time,’ Ahmet snapped back. ‘It was either weather insurance or costumes.’ He collected himself. ‘That was just one in a sea of misfortunes. There are other plays, also, which I have developed and which have never reached the stage and these have also cost money. I have overheads … the rent on this office, the photocopier. Martin has persuaded me that we have come to the end of the road.’

‘It’s a crying shame,’ Maureen exclaimed. She sounded more outraged than upset. Two circles of pink had appeared on her cheeks. ‘Nobody has worked harder than Ahmet. I’ve known him twenty years and he deserves better than this.’

‘Were you also at the Really Useful Company?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘No. We met at the New London Theatre. Ahmet organised a very special evening for me.’ Hawthorne looked at her enquiringly and she realised she was going to have to continue. ‘It was an anniversary.’

‘My software told me that Maureen had seen Cats one hundred times,’ Ahmet explained.

‘I loved that show. I can’t explain why.’ Maureen looked into the far distance. ‘It was the music, of course. “Memory”! “The Rum Tum Tugger”. That always used to make me laugh, every time. There wasn’t a song in that show I didn’t know off by heart.’ She stopped herself, aware that she might look foolish. ‘It filled a hole in my life after my husband died,’ she explained. ‘I went once. Then I thought I’d see it again. And after a while I found that I was only happy when I was in the theatre. It was like a barrier against the world.

‘I couldn’t afford the best seats, but that night I got a surprise. I found myself in the front row. Ahmet had arranged that for me. I had a free glass of champagne in the interval and afterwards I went backstage and met some of the cast. It was a wonderful evening and after that we sort of became friends.’

‘Maureen came to work for me when I set up on my own.’

‘What were you doing before that?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘I was a secretary at Hewlett-Packard in Reading.’

Right then I felt a sense of guilt and sadness that might have been unjustified but which nonetheless affected me. Maureen and Ahmet truly were an odd couple. I’d known that from the start, but I’d been so eager to see Mindgame on the stage that I had ignored my misgivings and let them go ahead. But it wasn’t the failure of the play that upset me. It was the sense that it was all my fault. I was the one who’d brought them down, and although I would go on to other things – there were other books in the pipeline – they’d come to the end of the road. Right then, I wanted to go back outside and never see either of them again. I hoped Hawthorne had found out everything he wanted and we could leave.

But he hadn’t finished yet. He reached into his pocket and took out the crumpled packet of American cigarettes he had found at the theatre. ‘Are these yours, Mr Yurdakul?’ he asked.

Ahmet was puzzled. ‘It’s the brand I smoke. Yes.’

‘I found this in the green room at the Vaudeville.’ He opened the packet, showing Ahmet the three broken white tubes spilling out their tobacco. ‘I wondered why you didn’t finish the pack.’

‘I don’t remember. Where were they?’

‘They were in the bin.’

‘Maybe somebody found them and threw them away. I don’t remember leaving them behind.’

‘What have three broken cigarettes got to do with anything?’ Maureen asked, scornful now.

‘Probably nothing.’ Hawthorne smiled and got to his feet. ‘Thank you, Mr Yurdakul. You’ve been very helpful.’

‘I’ll show you out.’

We left the office and went back into the hallway. Maureen closed the door behind us as we came out. ‘Mr Yurdakul is very upset,’ she said in a low voice. She was almost admonishing Hawthorne, as if he had no right to come barging in with his questions. ‘You can’t possibly think he had anything to do with that woman’s death.’

‘He had the most to lose,’ Hawthorne remarked, pragmatically.

‘If he’d wanted to kill someone, he’d have killed Anthony.’ I was shocked to hear her say that, but she had already turned on me with fury in her eyes and there was no stopping her. ‘I warned him against your play. I said that it was too peculiar for a modern audience and that nobody would understand what you were trying to get at. Is it a comedy? Is it a thriller? What is it, exactly? But he had complete faith in you, and now you turn up with your detective friend and cast aspersions on a man who is absolutely blameless and wouldn’t dream of hurting anyone. Mr Yurdakul has been wonderful to work with. I’d do anything for him! And just so you know, I’ve never seen him lose his temper … not once. He’s a gentleman in every sense of the word.’

‘So where was he on Wednesday morning?’ Hawthorne asked, cutting her short.

She looked at him in disbelief. ‘He was nowhere near Palgrove Gardens. He had a meeting at Frost and Longhurst at eleven o’clock.’

‘Who are Frost and Longhurst?’

‘His accountants. That was Martin Longhurst you met just now.’

‘And where are they based?’

‘In Holborn.’

Hawthorne sighed. ‘Holborn is less than thirty minutes from Little Venice on the tube. That would have left him plenty of time to kill Harriet Throsby.’

Maureen stared at him with poison in her eyes. ‘You clearly haven’t listened to a word I’ve said …’ she sniffed.

‘You think she didn’t deserve it?’ He was deliberately provoking her.

‘Just so you know, I agree with every single word she said – about the play, anyway. Maybe I wouldn’t have couched it in quite those terms, but of course she didn’t deserve to die. Nobody does.’

‘Just out of interest, how did you know she lived in Palgrove Gardens.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘You just said that Ahmet was nowhere near that address.’

Maureen took a deep breath. I thought she might be about to scream. ‘The police told me where she lived,’ she explained, simply. ‘Before they came here, I knew almost nothing about Harriet Throsby. As far as I’m concerned, I never want to hear her name again.’ She opened the door, allowing the cold air to rush in. ‘I very much hope you won’t come back,’ she continued. ‘We’ve got nothing more to tell you and as far as I can see, you’re not helping at all.’

We walked past her and climbed back up to street level.

‘Frost and Longhurst,’ Hawthorne said.

‘The accountants …’ I muttered.

‘The name doesn’t mean anything to you?’

‘No. Should it?’

‘It’s lucky you’re not a detective.’ Hawthorne glanced at his watch. ‘Time for one more visit. If you’re up for it.’

‘Don’t you ever eat, Hawthorne?’

‘Ewan Lloyd is expecting us.’

Ewan Lloyd would complete the line-up, and perhaps he would shed some light on what had happened. For myself, I had no idea who had killed Harriet Throsby. It was always possible that her husband had finally got tired of being criticised day in, day out. It would have been easy enough to slip out of school, cycle home and kill his wife. Her daughter had made no secret that she loathed her mother and she didn’t work too far from home either. Jordan Williams, Tirian Kirke, Sky Palmer, Ahmet Yurdakul, Maureen Bates and Ewan Lloyd were the six main suspects, all connected to her by the play. Any one of them could have got hold of my dagger and planted it in her chest.

It had to be one of them.

But which?