The Twist of a Knife

14 Premonitions

Ewan Lloyd’s home was a mews house in every respect but one. It wasn’t actually in a mews. It was compact and elegant, painted pale blue, with a flat roof and a front room that had been converted from a garage. It was wedged in between two very similar houses in a cobbled street with old-fashioned street lamps. But the street itself led somewhere. I could imagine it being used as a rat run by north London mothers taking their children to school. Finsbury Park tube station, one of the most depressing stations on the London Underground system, was just round the corner. It had been my nearest station when I was living in Crouch End and I might have rubbed shoulders with Ewan any number of times. It’s amazing, really, the invisible process that can turn complete strangers into friends.

As Hawthorne rang the front bell, yellow light spilling out of the front windows and the sound of a Chopin nocturne being played on a speaker system, it struck me that this was exactly the sort of home I would have expected Ewan to live in. It reflected his single-mindedness, the way he presented himself, as if the light and the music had been arranged specially for our arrival. It was also the house of a divorced man. Ahmet had told me that he’d been married with four children and it was impossible to imagine them all living here. I wondered if he was still on his own.

The nocturne stopped mid-trill and a few moments later, Ewan opened the door and stood there, blinking through his round-framed spectacles. Hawthorne had told him we were on our way and he had dressed for the occasion in a velvet jacket with another long scarf dangling from his shoulders. At the same time, he wasn’t happy to see us. He filled the entire door frame … but then again, it was a small door.

‘Mr Hawthorne?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m afraid I can only give you a few minutes. My wife will be home soon and I’m just cooking dinner.’

Well, that answered the question I’d just been asking myself.

‘A few minutes is all I need.’ Hawthorne replied. Of course, he would say that. Once he was inside, he would stay as long as he wanted.

The front door opened directly into the main living area, effectively a single space with an open-plan kitchen, modern furniture, a spiral staircase leading up to the next floor, and more than a thousand books. Like Harriet’s office, these focused almost entirely on the theatre. I ran my eye across biographies of Trevor Nunn, Laurence Olivier, Peter O’Toole, Harold Pinter – and was surprised to see that he arranged his shelves alphabetically. There were framed posters from landmark productions that he might have seen when he was much younger: Look Back in Anger, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. No musicals or comedies. The awards he had won peeked out of various corners, but none of them were recognisable in the way of a Tony or a BAFTA. Over in the kitchen, a large copper pan sat on the flame, the lid gently rising and falling and something bubbling away at the edges. The smell of onions and spices permeated the room and I was reminded that Ewan was a vegetarian. I’d found this out when we’d had dinner together in Colchester.

‘Can I get you a glass of wine?’ he asked.

‘No, thank you.’ Somehow, Hawthorne had answered for both of us.

Ewan already had a glass of red wine. He gestured at a sofa shaped like an L, arranged around a crowded coffee table with a widescreen TV beyond. I took the short end, leaving Hawthorne with the full width. Ewan sat down in an armchair, setting his wine beside him. He took off his glasses and wiped the lenses with a handkerchief.

‘This is such a horrible thing to have happened,’ he began. ‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard.’

‘And why was that?’ Hawthorne asked, innocently. ‘A woman like Harriet Throsby would have had a lot of enemies.’

‘That’s true. But even so …’

‘And a death threat was made against her right in front of you.’

‘You’re talking about Jordan.’ Ewan waved the idea aside. ‘He was just letting off steam.’

‘Really? He specifically announced his intention to put a knife in her … the same knife that was used, as things turned out.’

‘I understood that it was a different knife.’ Ewan had not taken to Hawthorne. I could see that already. And no matter how he felt about Harriet, he had an almost proprietorial interest in protecting his cast. ‘Jordan is a good actor and a good man, the father of two children. If he has a fault, it’s that he sometimes doesn’t think through what he’s saying. He can get angry. We all do. Theatre can be a very demanding business. But whatever he may have said that night, I can assure you he didn’t mean it. If you think about it, Mr Hawthorne, if you were planning to kill someone, would you announce it to the whole world first?’

‘Maybe someone else in the room got the idea from him.’

‘I think it’s very unlikely.’ Ewan finished his wine. His little eyes blinked at us. ‘I know the people in that room better than anyone, and I think I’m the best judge of what they might and might not be capable of doing. I remember working on an improvisation with Jordan – the scene when he attacks Nurse Plimpton – and I can assure you that he found it incredibly difficult to find the trigger … the well of anger inside him.’

‘Was that before or after he nearly put her in hospital?’

‘I think you’re exaggerating. It was just a few bruises.’ He paused. ‘I’m not saying Jordan isn’t emotional. Quite the opposite. It’s not helped by the fact that he’s having marriage difficulties at the moment …’

‘I had no idea,’ Hawthorne lied.

‘Then I’m sorry I mentioned it. I just want you to understand that he would never hurt anyone.’ He looked at me across the top of his wine glass. ‘If you’re going to start throwing accusations around, you might as well know that Jordan wasn’t the only one. Anthony, for one, agreed with him.’

‘I didn’t!’

‘I saw you nod your head.’

‘Ewan – that’s not fair. I thought what he said was awful!’

‘I’m sure that’s true. I’m just pointing out that we’d all been drinking, it was late, the end of an intense evening, and emotions were running high. I wish Sky had never told us she had the review. I don’t know what she was thinking, anyway. She could have at least read it first.’

‘How did it make you feel?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘The review? It made me angry … bloody angry.’ So far Ewan had barely stammered, but he had to fight to get out the ‘b’ of bloody. He noticed the empty glass in his hand and went over to a trolley with its selection of bottles. ‘Are you sure you won’t have something?’ he asked.

‘We’re fine, thank you,’ Hawthorne said.

Ewan refilled his glass and came back to his chair.

‘First of all, it was unfair. Lots of people enjoyed it when we performed it outside London and I think it was sharper and stronger when we came in. But even if there were some failings – in the script, in my direction, whatever – she had no reason to be so filthy.’ He took another swig. ‘Harriet Throsby chose her words carefully,’ he continued. ‘That was what was so appalling about her. It’s one thing to criticise a play, but she did it in a very deliberate way, to cause the greatest upset. She was even at it at the party! I mean, you have to ask yourself, why would she even come to a first-night party? No critic does that. But she couldn’t resist the opportunity because she enjoyed hurting people – she relished it. You heard what she said to me.’

‘She hardly spoke to you,’ I said.

‘She said enough.’ He put the glass down heavily, slopping red wine over his fingers. ‘Perhaps you don’t remember what she said about the Savoy Hotel. “Those big hotels don’t exactly light my fire.” Those were her exact words.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You wouldn’t.’ I had never seen Ewan like this. He might have been unable to find a well of anger in Jordan Williams, but his own was spilling over, perhaps helped by all the wine he had consumed. ‘My life was ruined by a fire.’

‘Your production of Saint Joan!’ Suddenly I remembered.

‘Exactly. And you might as well know, she did the same thing in the review she wrote after the accident. There were plenty of newspaper stories, but none of the other critics actually sat down and reviewed the play. Why would they? It had already closed down. No audience was ever going to see it after the disaster on the opening night. But she couldn’t resist it, gloating about what had happened. Not, of course, that she made it obvious. It was just one little line buried in the rest of it. “Under Ewan Lloyd’s over-fussy direction, the play never caught fire.” You see? The same word!’

‘Do you have a copy of the review?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘No. I wouldn’t have that garbage in my house. You can find it online. Most of it was very sympathetic – or pretending to be. At the time nobody knew how badly Sonja Childs had been injured, so maybe that was why Harriet got away with it. In fact, she praised Sonja. “I’m sure everyone in the audience will be wishing her the speediest recovery and we can’t wait to see this talented actress back on the stage … ” But with every word she wrote, she blamed me. My ambition. My arrogance. My stupidity.

‘I thought about suing her. The theatre fully supported me. But at the time, I was torn to pieces. I had a young, beautiful actress in intensive care with third-degree burns. I’d destroyed her career. How could I have any right to worry about my reputation when I knew that, at the end of the day, it had happened because of me? To this day I don’t know what went wrong. Something short-circuited? A transformer overheated? Somehow a fake fire became a real fire and it was horrible, the worst day of my life – and Harriet Throsby made it worse still. I’ll never forgive her for that.

‘But I didn’t kill her.’ He had seen Hawthorne examining him and returned the stare. ‘I was in this house all morning. I took phone calls. I can give you the names of people who spoke to me.’

‘Did anyone see you?’

‘No. My wife was at the surgery. She’s a sports therapist. There was just me.’

‘So if it wasn’t you, who was it?’

‘I’ve told you. I don’t think it was anyone who was in the green room that night. Not Jordan. Not Sky or Tirian – they had no reason to kill her. She hadn’t said anything bad about either of them.’

‘You haven’t talked very much about Tirian. What do you make of him?’

Ewan took off his glasses and turned them over in his hands, using them almost like worry beads. ‘I can only answer that as a director,’ he said. ‘I don’t really know him – and actually, that’s the worst I can say of him. He’s a loner. It was very hard to make him feel part of the company, but then he only joined the cast at the last minute.’ He sighed. ‘He’s never had any professional training and that doesn’t help. He doesn’t know how to project. He gets bored too easily. It isn’t easy giving him notes. From my experience, I don’t think he’s suited to theatre. He’s one of those actors who need to be famous because then they can get away with murder.’ He stopped himself. ‘That wasn’t appropriate, but you know what I mean. I have a feeling the camera will love Tirian. He’s got real star quality. But that doesn’t necessarily work on the stage.’

‘Sky?’

‘A trouper. We had an extremely difficult time at Middleham Castle, but she never once complained and I was thrilled she joined the cast of Mindgame.’

‘What about Ahmet? And his colleague?’

‘Ahmet’s harmless.’ Ewan smiled for the first time since we came in. ‘As for Maureen, you know she saw Cats over a hundred times?’

‘Is that relevant?’

‘You tell me. I think it’s rather delightful. And she dotes on Ahmet. She’d do anything for him.’

Hawthorne was about to ask something, but just then his mobile phone buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and glanced at the long message on the screen. It was something he had never done before – allow the outside world to interrupt his train of thought. He slipped it away. ‘Thank you, Ewan. You’ve been very helpful.’

We both got to our feet.

Ewan did the same. ‘You know, I was quite certain that something bad was going to happen on the first night of Mindgame,’ he said, ruminatively.

‘Oh, yes? And why was that?’

‘I have premonitions. It’s been the same all my life. I had a motorbike crash when I was at drama school and I knew it was going to happen even before I got on. The opening of Saint Joan, I was sick as a dog. It wasn’t nerves. I had a horrible, twisted feeling in my stomach. And it was the same at the theatre, when I left the green room. I wasn’t feeling great. I’d drunk too much. We all had. But I also had this chill in the back of my neck, like there was something following me.’

‘Maybe it was the reviews,’ Hawthorne suggested.

‘I don’t care about the reviews. It was worse than that. When the police told me that Harriet had been stabbed, I wasn’t surprised at all—’

He stopped. Unexpectedly, the front door had opened.

‘You’re early!’ Ewan was looking past us at a woman who had come in. For a moment, she was silhouetted against the street lamps and I couldn’t see her properly.

‘My last client cancelled,’ the woman said. She sounded puzzled. Obviously, Ewan hadn’t told her he was expecting visitors.

‘This is Detective Inspector Hawthorne. He’s asking questions about Harriet Throsby. And this is Anthony. He wrote Mindgame.’

The woman stepped into the room and I saw her clearly. My first impression was that she was very beautiful, with black hair sweeping down past her shoulders. Slim, wearing a thin, grey mac belted at the waist. Brown eyes. She could have been Italian or Eastern European. She had spoken with a slight accent.

Then she turned her head towards Hawthorne and I saw the terrible scars on the side of her face, a red trelliswork that climbed from her neck to her forehead, darkening around one eye. It wasn’t a cold evening, but she was wearing gloves. I wondered what injuries they covered. I knew at once who she was and I was shocked.

‘This is Sonja,’ Ewan said.

Sonja Childs. Saint Joan.

‘You’re together …’ I muttered.

‘Yes.’

He had been responsible for her injuries and, subsequently, he had left his wife for her. I didn’t know what to say.

Hawthorne stepped in for me. ‘We won’t take up any more of your time,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘You’ve been very helpful. Thank you.’

As far as I was concerned, we couldn’t get out quickly enough.

There were all sorts of questions buzzing in my head as we sat in the taxi on the way back to the City – Farringdon for me, Blackfriars for Hawthorne. Had Ewan Lloyd begun an affair while he was still married? Had he moved in with Sonja because he was in love with her or because he felt responsible for what had happened? I very much doubted that I would ever learn the answers. That was the awful thing about the world in which I found myself. Who had murdered Harriet Throsby? That was what we needed to know. It was all that mattered. It suddenly occurred to me that I’d hate to be a detective, seeing life between such narrow lines.

Neither of us spoke. Hawthorne was deep in thought. I was exhausted after a series of interviews that I was quite certain had taken us nowhere. Of course, I was quite wrong. Between them, the various suspects must have provided us with plenty of clues. The trouble was, I hadn’t seen any of them. I was hungry. I was wondering if there would be any food in the house or whether I would have to pop into the Nando’s chicken restaurant that had just opened round the corner from my flat. That was the full extent of my thoughts.

It was only as we headed south down York Way, coming in behind King’s Cross, that I remembered the text message that Hawthorne had received. I asked him about it.

‘It wasn’t good news,’ he said, trying to dismiss the subject.

‘What was it?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘That’s why I’m asking.’

He took the phone out again. ‘It looks like there’s been a breakthrough. Cara Grunshaw may be on to something.’

‘She knows who did it?’

‘Well, there’s new evidence.’

I was astonished. ‘For heaven’s sake, Hawthorne. What is it? Why didn’t you tell me?’

He stared at the screen. ‘There was a CCTV picture of you taken close to the Maida Hill Tunnel, just a few minutes away from Harriet Throsby’s house. You were wearing a grey puffer jacket, but they can’t be sure it was you because the hood was up. That said, they took a similar jacket from your flat.’

‘What about it?’ I was becoming uneasy.

‘They found some blossom from a Japanese cherry tree … a couple of petals. They were lodged inside the hood.’

‘Of my jacket …’

‘Yes. You know, there are over three hundred different species of Japanese cherry … different varieties and hybrids. The police have been able to identify this one as Prunus yedoensis, the Yoshino cherry. Apparently, they’re quite rare in the streets of London. They have pink flowers which fade to white around now.’

‘And?’ I was feeling the same twisted feeling in my stomach and chilled spine that Ewan had described.

‘There’s a line of them growing in Palgrove Gardens. There’s one right outside Harriet’s house.’

The taxi rattled through a set of traffic lights and continued past the station. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry any more.