The Twist of a Knife

24 Back to the Vaudeville

Hawthorne didn’t speak to me as we crossed Blackfriars Bridge, the river glittering beneath us in the sunshine.

He hadn’t mentioned Roland and I was sensible enough not to ask him any more questions about his adoptive brother – or whatever Roland wanted to call himself. From the way he walked – his shoulders hunched, his eyes fixed on the road ahead – he seemed to be in a hurry to reach our destination and put this whole business behind us. He obviously regretted ever having let me into his flat and knew that I had managed to get through some of his defences.

And what exactly had I learned? That he had been born in Reeth. His parents had died, presumably at the same time and so, I would imagine, in traumatic circumstances. A car crash? As a result, he had been adopted by a serving police officer. He was the classic private detective, working part-time for an agency possibly run by a man called Morton. The nature of the agency was still a mystery. It clearly had some sort of connection with River Court. It appeared that Hawthorne was not caretaking the flat as he had told me. He was there for another reason.

I would make sense of it all later. Right now I had other thoughts on my mind. Hawthorne had worked out the identity of Harriet’s killer! We were on our way to meet him (or her) at the Vaudeville Theatre. I tried to imagine who might be waiting for us in the foyer and pictured them, one at a time. Ahmet with one of his American cigarettes. Maureen in her fur wrap. Martin Longhurst, tall and twitchy. Then I remembered something Hawthorne had said to Roland just before we left. My play might have come off by the following week. Did that mean one of the cast members was about to be arrested? Or Ewan Lloyd, the director?

We reached the other side of the bridge and turned into the Strand. ‘Where were you this morning?’ I asked.

Hawthorne took a few more steps before answering. ‘I went over to Petty France,’ he said.

That was in Westminster. It was where a number of government offices were located. I remembered that the Passport Office had been in the same street, although even assuming they were still there, they would surely be closed on a Saturday. ‘Is that where you found the answer?’ I asked.

‘It was where I found what I expected to find.’

‘Well, I’m glad that’s sorted, then.’ I hated it when he was so cryptic.

The theatre was ahead of us. As far as I could see, the play was still running. In fact, there would be a matinée performance at three o’clock that afternoon. Hawthorne opened the front door for me. I went into the foyer …

… and stood there with my heart pounding, my stomach shrinking and a sense of complete despair as DI Cara Grunshaw and DC Mills lurched towards me. Grunshaw was grinning victoriously. Her assistant was contenting himself with an unpleasant smirk. They had both been expecting me.

‘So you kept your word,’ Grunshaw said. She was talking to Hawthorne.

‘Hawthorne—!’ I couldn’t believe he had done this to me.

‘I’m sorry, mate. Detective Grunshaw called me this morning. Somehow, she’d worked out where you were – which is surprising as working things out has never been her strong suit – and she made it clear to me. I can’t be seen to be obstructing the course of justice.’

‘But I thought we were friends!’

‘I’ll come and visit you in jail.’

‘I’m not going to jail. I didn’t kill anyone.’ I was close to tears. It wasn’t just the notion of being charged with a crime I hadn’t committed. It was Hawthorne lying to me, leading me into a trap.

‘I saw your play last night,’ Cara said. ‘I took Mills. What did you think of it, Derek?’

‘Not a lot,’ Mills said.

‘I quite enjoyed it myself. I think Harriet Throsby was very unfair. In fact, I might have been tempted to murder her myself if I’d been the writer. Anyway, shall we get the formalities over and done with?’

‘You do not have to say anything—’ Mills began. It was the second time he had given me an official police caution.

‘Hold on a minute,’ Hawthorne cut in. ‘I think you’re forgetting our deal, Cara.’

‘What deal?’ I grasped at the straw. Maybe they were going to let me run away.

‘Thirty minutes. I explain how it all happened. Then you make the arrest.’

‘We know how it happened,’ Cara growled.

‘That was still the deal we made.’

She sighed. Her ample chest rose and fell. ‘All right then, Hawthorne. But I haven’t got all day.’

‘Not here,’ Hawthorne said. ‘Inside.’

‘In the theatre? I didn’t have you pegged as a drama queen, but I don’t mind sitting down. I’ve been on my feet since breakfast and they’re killing me. Let’s get on with it.’

We went down the stairs, back into the auditorium and down the red carpet to the condemned cell … that was how it felt. But when we entered the stalls, I stopped in surprise. I looked past the long stretch of empty seats to the stage. The curtain was up and there were nine people waiting for us on the set of Mindgame, some of them sitting on the furniture used in the play, others perched on plastic seats that had been brought from backstage. Absurdly, the human skeleton that was part of the action stood in the corner.

The cast was on one side: Jordan Williams next to Sky Palmer, then Tirian Kirke. Ewan Lloyd was nearby but on his own. Ahmet Yurdakul and Maureen Bates came next, sitting side by side, uncomfortably close, on a sofa. Martin Longhurst, their accountant, was behind them. Arthur Throsby and his daughter, Olivia, had also been summoned to the theatre and were over by the window that during the play turned into a wall. They must have been waiting for us for some time and weren’t looking too pleased as the four of us made our way down the aisle. That was when I noticed that Keith, the deputy stage-door manager, had been summoned too. He was sitting, half-hidden, in the wings.

We reached the front of the stage.

‘You stay here,’ Hawthorne said. He was addressing Grunshaw and Mills. He turned to me. ‘You come with me, Tony.’

A flight of steps had been placed against the apron. While the two detectives settled themselves into the first row of the stalls, we climbed up. I noticed an empty chair had been placed centre stage, presumably for me. I sat in it. I was aware of everyone examining me and kept my gaze fixed on the empty auditorium, the invisible audience somehow more unnerving than a real one, all those imagined eyes watching me. Meanwhile, Hawthorne had taken off his coat. He was completely at ease, even enjoying himself. But then in his own way he always had been a performer. He was in his element.

‘Thank you all for coming,’ he began. ‘I know it was a bit short notice, but Detective Inspector Grunshaw here only works until lunchtime on Saturdays.’

‘What is this all about?’ Jordan asked. Typically, he was more annoyed than anyone else.

‘Well, obviously, it’s about the murder of Harriet Throsby. We haven’t come here to rehearse. All of you were involved, one way or another, and I thought you might like to know how it happened.’

‘Do you know who killed my wife?’ Arthur Throsby asked.

He was considerably less mournful than he had been just two days ago when we had first met. He was wearing brand-new clothes, for a start: a colourful blazer and tie. He’d had a haircut. It seemed to me that he’d not only got used to his wife’s death, he had adapted to it and perhaps even found that it suited him. Next to him, Olivia was quiet, clearly nervous.

‘I wouldn’t have called you all here if I didn’t,’ Hawthorne replied.

He hadn’t even started and Grunshaw and Mills were already looking bored.

‘If you’ll forgive me, Mr Hawthorne, why do we all have to be here?’ It was Tirian who was speaking. ‘It’s the weekend. We have two performances today. There are other places I’d rather be.’

‘I’m sorry to have spoiled your morning,’ Hawthorne said, not sounding sorry at all. ‘There are still a few questions that have to be answered by all of you. The funny thing about this murder is that it’s much more complicated than it needs to be. Someone knocked on the door at Palgrove Gardens and killed Mrs Throsby. I think it’s fair to say that every single one of you on this stage had a good reason to wish her dead.’

‘How dare you say that!’ Arthur Throsby remarked, although he didn’t sound particularly outraged. ‘Do you really think that Olivia or myself—’

‘Forget it, Dad!’ Olivia interrupted her father. ‘Of course we’re both suspects. We both hated her.’

‘But I wasn’t at home when it happened. I was at school.’

‘I’ve talked to your school,’ Hawthorne remarked. ‘You had no lesson from nine thirty to ten fifteen. You told us you had witnesses at the school, but in fact it would have been easy for you to leave. You had your bicycle. Ten minutes each way and two minutes to get rid of her …’

Arthur Throsby fell silent. ‘I didn’t touch her!’ he muttered.

Hawthorne was unmoved. ‘Any one of you could have done it,’ he continued. ‘And as it happens, none of you can fully account for your movements at the time she died. Easy enough to slip out of Starbucks without being noticed.’ That was Olivia. ‘You could have gone on a cigarette break.’

‘I don’t smoke,’ Olivia said.

Hawthorne ignored this. ‘Martin Longhurst has ninety minutes unaccounted for between leaving this theatre and arriving at his office. We don’t know where Jordan Williams was at that time.’

‘You didn’t ask me,’ Jordan protested.

‘You want me to ask you now?’

‘I was at home, in bed.’

‘I wish people wouldn’t tell so many lies. It does make my job very difficult.’ Hawthorne shook his head sadly. ‘But we’ll get to all that in a minute. The point is, the crime itself was very straightforward and, more than that, the killer was obvious from the start. He’d threatened Harriet on the night of the party and he’d made it clear that he thought she should be dead. He knew where she lived. He was seen on CCTV near her flat. He used a murder weapon that could only have belonged to him and he stupidly left his fingerprints on the hilt. He dropped a hair at the scene of the crime and he managed to get some cherry blossom, identical to the sort that grows in Palgrove Gardens, on his coat. Worse still, it turns out that Harriet may not have been the only theatre critic he’s killed.’

‘Who are you talking about?’ Sky Palmer asked.

‘I think you all know who I mean.’

‘He’s talking about Anthony,’ Cara Grunshaw called out, her voice expanding into the great emptiness around her. ‘So if you’ve said your piece, Hawthorne, maybe we can arrest him and everyone can go home.’

There was a brief silence. I could feel everyone looking at me.

‘I always knew it was him,’ Maureen said. She turned to Ahmet. ‘The first time he walked into the office, I warned you against him. All the violence in that play! You can’t write things like that without being disturbed.’

‘That’s not true,’ Ewan remarked, unexpectedly taking my side. ‘Shakespeare wrote some extremely violent tragedies. Look at the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear or the multiple killings in Titus Andronicus, some of them utterly disgusting, and yet—’

‘I think we can manage without a lecture in English drama, thanks all the same,’ Hawthorne cut in. ‘The point is, if it was Tony, why are there still so many unanswered questions?’

‘What unanswered questions?’ Cara demanded.

‘I can think of half a dozen straight off.’ Hawthorne counted them out on his fingers.

‘Why were there three broken cigarettes in the dustbin in the green room? Why did Ewan Lloyd have a premonition that something bad was going to happen as he left the theatre that night? Why was a light bulb deliberately broken on the ground floor? How did Sky Palmer manage to read Harriet’s review when it hadn’t been posted on the internet? Why did Jordan Williams lie about the time he left the theatre and why did Maureen Bates agree to help him?’

‘I did nothing of the sort!’ Maureen sniffed.

‘But let’s imagine for a minute that, as improbable as it sounds, DI Grunshaw got it wrong and Tony didn’t commit the murder. Now we’ve got another, bigger question to consider. Why did someone deliberately set out to frame him? A lot of the evidence is circumstantial. The CCTV camera only shows someone wearing a jacket that’s similar to Tony’s. There are actually quite a few Yoshino cherry trees in different parts of London including, as it happens, one in St John’s Gardens, which is where he walks his dog. Did he know Harriet’s address? Perhaps not. But the knife with his fingerprints and a strand of his hair found on the body. There’s no arguing with that. Either he was incredibly clumsy or they were deliberately planted. So what had he done to upset anyone so much that they wanted to see him in jail?’

‘He wrote the play,’ Tirian said.

‘That seems a bit harsh,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘Like killing Harriet because she wrote a bad review. Maybe I’m biased, but I don’t believe Tony did it and I certainly don’t think he did it because he was pissed off by a review.

‘And here’s the last thing. How many murders are we investigating here? Harriet Throsby was the start. But she also wrote a book about a teacher who was killed in Wiltshire and it turns out that one of the killers was Martin Longhurst’s kid brother, Stephen.’

‘You have absolutely no right to bring Stephen into this.’ Longhurst leaned forward in his chair, speaking for the first time. ‘It’s bad enough dragging me into your petty accusations, Mr Hawthorne. But Stephen was the victim in all this and you should leave him out of it. He’s completely irrelevant.’

‘I would have said Philip Alden was the victim,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘He was the one who ended up dead with his skull caved in. And as for relevance, let’s not forget that Harriet Throsby wrote a very nasty book about your parents and what happened in Moxham Heath. You told us that you blame her for the break-up of their marriage and the impact that had on your life. You also blamed Frank Heywood, the drama critic of the Bristol Argus. He knew Harriet and brought her into your lives. He fed her the information she needed. And that brings us to our third death, because he was killed too, apparently by food poisoning in an Indian restaurant. That was a very long time ago and we’ll never be sure, but maybe it wasn’t quite the accident it seemed.’

‘I’ve never heard of Frank Heywood,’ Grunshaw complained.

‘That’s because you haven’t done your job,’ Hawthorne returned. ‘You might have asked yourself why Harriet had her book out on the morning of her death. Bad Boys: Life and Death in an English Village. Maybe she was trying to tell somebody something.

‘You see what I’m getting at? All these complications! Quite frankly, it does my head in.’

Hawthorne fell silent.

When, after a lengthy pause, he still hadn’t continued, it was Derek Mills who called out from the stalls. ‘So if it wasn’t Tony, do you know who did kill Harriet?’

‘Oh yes.’ Hawthorne smiled. ‘That bit is easy.’