The Twist of a Knife

25 Final Act

‘You know what I never understood?’ Hawthorne asked. ‘As I’ve said, every single person on this stage had a good reason to kill Harriet Throsby. But why frame Tony? I mean, that’s just stupid. Not only is he completely harmless, but it’s obvious he wouldn’t commit a murder. At least, it’s obvious to everyone apart from DI Grunshaw and DC Mills. If anyone was going to be framed, it should have been Jordan Williams. He was the one most upset by the review and he announced it in front of everyone. “I’ll kill her, I swear to you … Someone should put a knife in her!”

‘And here’s another thing. Why use Tony’s knife? If Harriet Throsby had been stabbed with a kitchen knife, there could have been a million and one suspects. Anyone in London could have killed her. But by using one of the Macbeth daggers, the killer narrowed the number of suspects down to the people who are here today.’ Hawthorne swept his hand across the whole group of us. ‘Only one of you sitting in this theatre could have got your hands on the Macbeth dagger.’

‘I couldn’t have got it,’ Olivia said.

‘That’s true,’ Hawthorne agreed. ‘But someone could have got it for you.’

‘And who might that have been?’

‘Your friend, Sky Palmer.’

‘We hardly know each other.’

‘Really?’ Hawthorne went over to her. ‘When we were at your home, you told your dad he didn’t need to pretend any more.’

‘So what?’

‘So why are you still pretending now? What are you afraid of? Your mum isn’t here to call you out any more.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Arthur Throsby demanded.

It was Sky Palmer who answered. ‘He’s talking about me.’ She stood up and went over to Olivia, resting her hands on her shoulders. ‘You might as well tell him. He knows.’

Olivia glanced briefly at her father, then placed one of her own hands on Sky’s. ‘We’re together,’ she said, simply.

Sky glared at Hawthorne. ‘Who told you?’

‘Nobody needed to tell me. It might have just been a coincidence that Olivia was wearing a T-shirt printed with a well-known gay icon at the first-night party. But obviously the two of you were close. She’d been round to your place loads of times.’

‘I never said that,’ Sky protested.

‘No. But when we met at the theatre you mentioned all the CCTV cameras along the canal, which meant you knew the flat was near one. And you must have been there because you’d seen them.’ Sky said nothing, so he went on. ‘Why else would Olivia have bust into her mum’s computer and sent you the review? I did wonder why you were hiding your relationship – I mean, these days, two girls like you should be out having a nice time – but it all made sense when I talked to Harriet’s old editor in Bristol. He said that Harriet slated the first play she ever reviewed because she hated gay relationships. I could imagine that would have made life awkward for you.’

These last words had been addressed to Olivia, who nodded. ‘I couldn’t tell her. It would have been more trouble than it was worth.’

‘I hate to say this, but it does give you both a real reason to want to do away with her.’

Sky looked Hawthorne straight in the eye. ‘I can’t disagree with that.’ She dragged another chair from the side and sat down next to Olivia.

Hawthorne walked back to the centre of the stage.

‘It’s a funny thing about you theatre people,’ he went on, ‘but nothing is ever straightforward, is it! These two aren’t the only ones lying about their relationships. What about Jordan and Maureen? Now there’s an odd couple if ever I saw one.’

‘What are you insinuating?’ Maureen was outraged.

‘Don’t worry, darling. I know you two haven’t been to bed together. But are you going to tell me you’re not just a little bit in love with him?’ Maureen made no reply, so he went on. ‘When we were in your office, you leapt in to defend him – what he’d said about Harriet in the green room at the theatre. He was joking. He didn’t mean it. You wouldn’t even consider that he might have killed her, even though secretly you believed that he’d made good on his threat and done exactly that.’

‘How can you possibly know that?’

‘Because he’d asked you to cover up for him the night before the murder and you’d agreed. He never actually left the theatre. You know that. You lied to the police … and to me.’

‘Leave her alone!’ This was Jordan Williams, getting angrily to his feet.

‘Are you going to deny it, Jordan?’ Hawthorne smiled. ‘We know you’d been arguing with your wife. We know she didn’t come to the first night. And there were a whole load of clothes in your dressing room … You’d even brought along your wedding photograph – the two of you outside Islington Registry Office. You’d had a fight, hadn’t you? You had nowhere else to go, so you were camping out at the theatre.’

‘This has nothing to do with the death of Harriet Throsby!’

‘No? You threaten to kill her – and the night before it happens, you ask Maureen to lie on your behalf—’

‘I didn’t!’

‘—and she agrees because she must have met you when you were playing Mr Mistoffelees in Cats. Maybe it was you who met her backstage that night when she saw it for the hundredth time.’

Jordan took a breath. ‘It was,’ he admitted.

‘He was brilliant!’ Even now, Maureen couldn’t resist a whisper of excitement.

‘Which is why you could be sure she’d agree to sign you out of the theatre that night.’ Before anyone could interrupt, Hawthorne went on. ‘Keith didn’t really know who was entering and leaving. He didn’t see Tony leave either.’

‘I can’t see everything!’ Keith complained, still half concealed in the wings.

Hawthorne ignored him. ‘It was easy enough for Maureen to register that you had left five minutes before her, at ten to one. She made just one mistake. Everyone else had used the twelve-hour clock. You yourself had written that you’d arrived at ten thirty p.m. But she used the twenty-four-hour clock. She arrived at twenty-three twenty-five and left an hour and a half later at zero fifty-five. And she wrote down zero fifty for you.’

‘I was there all night,’ Jordan admitted in a hoarse voice. ‘Jayne and I had had a stupid row – maybe that was why I was so emotional about the review. After the party, I went back to my dressing room and fell asleep almost at once. It had been a long day and I was exhausted. The next morning, I slipped out, using the fire exit downstairs. I went straight home and – Jayne will tell you – I was there by half past ten …’

‘Still enough time to make a detour via Little Venice.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about Harriet Throsby! I wanted to see my wife … to apologise for the things I’d said.’

‘All of you were thinking about Harriet Throsby! We already know about Martin Longhurst and her book. Her review was the first nail in the coffin for Ahmet and his production company, and Maureen wouldn’t have been too happy about that either. Tirian would have had his career screwed if she’d repeated the comments she’d heard him making about Christopher Nolan …’

I thought Hawthorne had dismissed this when I had suggested it to him. But maybe he was just trying to needle Tirian. It worked. ‘That’s ridiculous!’ Tirian snapped. ‘She couldn’t have heard a word I was saying, and why would I care if she did? It was a private conversation. She wouldn’t have been allowed to write about it.’

‘And then there’s Ewan,’ Hawthorne went on. ‘He had a particular loathing for Harriet because of what she’d written about his production of Saint Joan.’

‘That was a long time ago,’ Ewan said.

‘Yes. But as you told us, she chose her words very carefully and she deliberately baited you when you met at the party. It was as if she was mocking you. “Those big hotels don’t exactly light my fire.” Given that you’re now in a relationship with the actress who suffered those injuries, it would hardly be surprising if you were goaded into taking revenge.’

‘Sonja and I have learned to live with what happened. Harriet meant nothing to me.’

‘So you say.’ Hawthorne sounded doubtful.

‘You’ve been talking for a long time, Hawthorne. Is this actually going anywhere?’ The interruption came from the stalls, of course, from Cara Grunshaw.

Hawthorne beamed down at her. ‘Don’t worry if you’re finding it hard to follow, Cara. I’ll go through it all again later.’ He turned back. ‘We all know where we are now,’ he concluded. ‘But before I can tell you who killed Harriet, we need to look at the other two deaths: Frank Heywood and Major Philip Alden. Both of those men were connected to Harriet, so you have to ask – did they in some way inform her murder all these years later?

‘Let’s start with Heywood, the drama critic who supposedly died of a heart attack after eating a dodgy lamb curry at a restaurant called the Jai Mahal. He was a close friend of Harriet’s and it may even be that they were having an affair. That’s what Adrian Wells, her editor, believed. He also told us, by the way, that she always got what she wanted, which I think we already knew, but it does make me ask – if she wanted to take over as drama critic, did she also want him dead?

‘I can’t be certain. This all happened years ago and there are no witnesses. The police never suspected foul play, but then why would they even have looked? Both Harriet and Frank were poisoned. The restaurant was well known for its dodgy cuisine. Anyway, Frank died of a heart attack.

‘But one thing we do know. Harriet chose the restaurant. Wells told us that when we met him. She knew it had a bad reputation, so why did she want to go there? And here’s something else to consider. When she was writing her first book, No Regrets, she managed to get close to the main suspect, a man called Dr Robert Thirkell who was eventually arrested for poisoning a series of old ladies using rat poison – active ingredient, arsenic. Is it too far-fetched to suppose that she might have got a couple of doses from him just in case she might need it one day?’

‘Are you saying that my wife might have killed Frank Heywood?’ Arthur Throsby demanded.

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘A big dose for him. A smaller one for her. The curry will disguise the taste. And the restaurant will get the blame. Do you really think it so unlikely?’

Arthur Throsby thought for a moment, then he gave a sniff of laughter. ‘I wouldn’t put it past her!’ he exclaimed. ‘She was capable of anything, my Harriet. If she slept with him, it was only because she wanted something from him.’ He thought back. ‘You know, it’s very strange, but now that I think about it, I remember walking into her bedroom the next day, after she’d been released from hospital. She was sitting up in bed, writing Frank’s obituary for the Argus.’

‘What was so strange about that?’ Olivia asked.

‘He hadn’t died yet.’

There was a shocked silence.

‘So much for Frank Heywood,’ Hawthorne continued. ‘But what about Philip Alden? There’s no mystery about who was responsible for his death, even if the whole truth has never really come out. It was Stephen Longhurst who thought up the trick that killed him because it was Stephen Longhurst who really hated him.’ Hawthorne approached Martin Longhurst. ‘Did you know the truth about your brother, Mr Longhurst? That he was the one in charge, not the other boy?’

‘I only knew what my parents told me.’

‘Your parents, or their lawyers, bribed one of the witnesses. They perverted the course of justice. A poor little kid got the bigger sentence – ten years in jail – when it should have been Stephen who took the rap.’

‘I had no idea.’

‘Why did you go back to the school? Why did you pretend you were going to send your own children there?’

‘I can’t answer that, Mr Hawthorne.’ Longhurst bowed his head. ‘All my life, I’ve been haunted by what happened at Moxham Heath Primary School. It tore my family apart. Even if Harriet hadn’t written her book, it would have destroyed us. I just wanted to see where it happened, to try to understand. I couldn’t explain myself to the head teacher, so I made up a story about my own children. I suppose you could say I was trying to lay a ghost to rest.’

‘I’d like you to know, incidentally, that I did write to you,’ I said. I couldn’t resist chipping in, even if no one on the stage had a clue what I was talking about.

Nor did Martin Longhurst. He looked at me blankly. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The head teacher said you used to read my books. You wrote to me and you didn’t get a reply.’

‘No.’ He scowled. ‘She’s got that wrong. It wasn’t you. It was Michael Morpurgo.’

‘Oh.’ I felt my cheeks burning and twisted in my seat.

Fortunately, Hawthorne had already moved to the front of the stage, working his way towards the final act. ‘Are you still awake, Cara?’ he called out.

‘This had better be good, Hawthorne.’

He turned his back on her.

‘The reason Harriet Throsby was killed had nothing to do with the play and nothing to do with Tony,’ he said. ‘The big mistake I made at the start was to believe that somebody had tried to frame him. His hair. His dagger. That made no sense at all. Worse than that, it twisted the whole crime out of shape. I should have listened to my instincts, which told me he was irrelevant. But it was only after I’d talked to all of you that I got the complete picture and realised what had happened.

‘Jordan Williams had said he wanted to murder Harriet Throsby. He’d shouted it out in front of everyone. So it made complete sense for the killer to frame him. But that’s what went wrong. Tony was a mistake.

‘Think what happened on the night of the party. Tony arrives, soaking wet, and Jordan hands him a towel.’

‘I dried my hair!’ I said.

‘Yes, mate, and at your age you’re losing some of it too. Later on, someone went into Jordan’s dressing room and picked a hair off his towel, thinking it was Jordan’s. But in fact they took yours. Simple as that.’

‘And they left it on the body!’

‘Yes. As for the knife, that was another mistake. Keith came down and took Jordan’s dagger and carried it over to the sink. Meanwhile, Tony had left his own dagger somewhere in plain sight and, once again, the killer took it, thinking it was Jordan’s. Of course, the killer was careful not to add his own fingerprints to the hilt and since nobody else had handled it from the moment Tony unwrapped it from the tissue paper – wiping it clean at the same time – only his own fingerprints appeared.

‘So the question we have to ask ourselves is not who would want to frame Tony, but who might have had it in for Jordan? And I think everyone here knows the answer to that.’

Suddenly, he was standing in front of Tirian.

‘I like you, Tirian,’ he said. ‘I sort of feel sorry for you. But I’ve got to tell you. I know everything.’

‘No. You can’t.’

‘I wish it could be otherwise, mate. But you can’t hide any more. I know.’

Tirian gazed at him for what felt a very long time. Then, to my astonishment, tears appeared in his eyes and when he spoke again he sounded almost like a child. ‘But I was so clever!’ he wailed. ‘I got it all right!’

‘That’s not quite true. You mucked up with the hair and the weapon, just for a start.’

‘Apart from that!’ The tears were flowing freely down his cheeks.

At once, Cara Grunshaw was on her feet. ‘Tirian Kirke killed Harriet Throsby?’ she exclaimed.

‘Well done, Cara! You got there in the end!’ Hawthorne smiled at her. ‘You just needed a bit of help.’

‘But why? Because she didn’t like the play?’

‘Haven’t you been listening? How many times do I have to tell you? It had nothing to do with Mindgame.’

‘Then … why?’

Tirian was slumped in his chair, silent, crying. He hadn’t even tried to deny what Hawthorne was saying. The other actors, Martin Longhurst, Ahmet and especially Maureen were staring at him in horror.

‘Let’s start with the night of the party,’ Hawthorne suggested, calmly. ‘Tirian had decided to kill Harriet before he even left the theatre. We’ll come to the reason in a minute. When Jordan Williams made his death threat, it provided Tirian with an opportunity he couldn’t ignore. Jordan would be the scapegoat. Easy enough to nip upstairs and nick one of his hairs off a brush or a towel – but he also needed the dagger with Jordan’s fingerprints. That would be the clincher.

‘He was the first to leave the green room – at about twenty minutes past midnight. He signed out at twelve twenty-five. But he knew he’d have to come back when the theatre was locked for the night and there was only one way in: the fire exit, which only opened from the inside. So what he did was, he nicked a packet of Ahmet’s cigarettes, which he was going to use as a wedge. He’d push the bar to open the door into the alleyway and then slide the packet underneath to make sure it never completely shut.

‘But he had a problem. He knew that Keith was sitting in front of the TV screens in the stage-door office and the lights in the basement corridor were too bright. When he opened the door, light would spill outside and there was a good chance that Keith would see it – even on a black-and-white TV, a shaft of light is one thing you can’t miss – and maybe he’d come to investigate. So he nipped upstairs, probably stole the hair from Jordan’s dressing room at that time, and then smashed a light bulb.’ Hawthorne glanced at me. ‘He didn’t do it to darken the corridor. He was just creating a diversion. Immediately afterwards, he ran back down and opened the fire door while Keith was dealing with the broken glass. Now everything was set up. He waited a moment or two, went back upstairs and left through the stage door – making sure he chatted with Keith so that everything would look normal.

‘He didn’t take the train to Blackheath. At least, not then. He came back to the theatre in the middle of the night, by which time he assumed everyone had left – although he didn’t realise that Jordan was sound asleep in his dressing room. That didn’t matter. He snuck back in through the fire exit, chucked the crumpled packet into the bin and stole the first dagger he saw, which happened to be the wrong one. Incidentally, one person noticed that the fire exit was open when they left the green room. That was Ewan Lloyd. He told me that he had a chill at the back of his neck – he thought it was some sort of premonition. He didn’t realise … It was a cold night and all he’d felt was the draft from the slightly open door.

‘The next morning, Tirian went round to Harriet’s home. He’d got the address from an article in a magazine. She wasn’t surprised to see him. She’d been expecting him.’

‘How do you know?’ Arthur asked.

‘Because of the three books on her table. She was killed in the hall, so she must have taken them off the shelf before he arrived. They were her credentials, if you like. All three of them were a reminder of her days as a crime reporter, but the one that was actually relevant was Bad Boys. That was what she would have shown him if she’d lived a few minutes more.’

Hawthorne took a breath. Tirian was still crying. I had watched Hawthorne expose several killers in my time with him, but I had never witnessed such a complete collapse. Part of me felt sorry for him, but at the same time there was something quite horrible about it. Harriet Throsby had described him as childish in her review. She’d obviously seen something that I hadn’t.

‘So that was how it was done. But I’m sure all of you – especially Cara – want to know why.’

‘Don’t push your luck, Hawthorne,’ Cara growled.

‘To understand that, we have to go back to the party itself. Tony described it all very precisely for me. It was almost like I was there.

‘Harriet Throsby, of course, was there. She made a habit of crashing first-night parties because she liked screwing with people’s heads. I think we all know by now that she had a malicious streak as wide as the Gulf of Mexico. There are two more things we have to remember about her. Ewan has already explained how she used words like weapons. She expressed herself in a way that was deliberately hurtful. That thing about lighting her “fire”, for example. And there was something else. Tony told me that she was avoiding his eye when she was talking to him. She was “looking over my shoulder as if hoping someone more interesting had come into the room.” That’s what he said. And he was half-right.

‘She wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to Tirian. And once you understand that, everything falls into place.

‘What did she say? “I never forget a face.” She was pretending to be talking about an actor in some thriller she’d seen on the stage. But I bet you she was looking right into Tirian’s eyes then. And a moment later, Olivia mentioned Tony’s Alex Rider books, and how did she describe them? “They were stories about a young assassin.” That’s not quite true. They’re about a young spy. So why that description?’

‘She recognised me!’ Tirian sobbed out the words.

‘That’s right. And just to make sure you knew that she knew, she even had to rub it in when she wrote her review. Not once but three times. “Most disappointing for me is Tirian Kirke, whom I recognised from the first time I saw him … ” There you are. She’s telling him she knows who he is. “His performance is quite childish.” Odd choice of word, don’t you think? Childish. But then, she’d known him when he was a child. And that last line: “ … surprisingly, he is completely unconvincing when things turn violent.” Why surprisingly? Unless Harriet knew that he had committed an act of violence in which a man had died …’

‘So who is he?’ Derek Mills had also got to his feet and was leaning against the front of the stage.

‘Do you want me to tell them, Tirian?’ Hawthorne asked.

Tirian nodded, unable to speak.

‘His real name is Wayne Howard.’

Martin Longhurst stood up, his own seat falling backwards and crashing to the floor. ‘He and Stephen—’

‘That’s right.’ Hawthorne was merciless. ‘He’s the boy your parents stitched up for the death of Philip Alden. Wayne and Stephen were best friends in Moxham Heath and it was your brother who inspired him to choose the name he uses now. When Stephen was on trial, he had a Narnia book with him. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. According to the gardener, the two boys used to meet by a statue outside Moxham Hall. That’s another lion – and in the book, lots of animals are turned into stone. Stephen called his horse Bree. He appears in the fifth Narnia book – The Horse and His Boy. And while we’re on the subject of horses, take a look at Tirian. He’s got a crooked nose, which he must have broken at some time in his life. I think he got that when he fell off a horse at Moxham Hall after Stephen persuaded him to take a ride.’

‘Tirian Kirke …?’ I was trying to remember where I’d come across that name.

‘King Tirian is a character in The Last Battle. I know all the Narnia books because I’ve read them with my son. And Digory Kirke turns up in three of them! When I first heard the name, I thought there was something dodgy about it. That’s why I asked him where it came from, but it was only when we went to Moxham Heath that I got the full significance.’

‘Wait a minute!’ I hated breaking in again, but there was one thing I had to know. ‘You’re saying that Tirian Kirke is really Wayne Howard. But you told me that you’d checked him out and everything he’d told us about himself was true.’

‘No, mate. I said I’d done a search on him and that everything he’d told us checked out. That’s not the same. His whole life story was fake. And for what it’s worth, that puzzled me too. When Tirian was telling us about himself, why did he have to throw in so many facts? The car accident that killed his parents involved a delivery truck. His aunt lived in Harrogate in a converted vicarage on the Otley Road, five minutes from the town centre. His drama teacher was called Miss Havergill … and so on. It was like he was blinding us with science. I told you when you were at my place – there were too many facts and they couldn’t all be right.’

‘He made it all up!’

‘No! Wayne Howard had been in the newspapers. He was the subject of a book. When he was finally released, he had to be protected and that was the job of MAPP: Multi-Agency Public Protection. They would have been the ones who set him up with a completely new identity, starting with his choice of a new name. There was no way he could go back to Moxham Heath – but he did have a relative in Harrogate, which is why he went there. He didn’t live with her, though. He was in an approved hostel. Just so you know, I have a mate in the Prison and Probation Service in Petty France and I talked to him this morning. He managed to dig out the truth.

‘Wayne was on special licence after his release. He’d have been made aware that he was always at risk of recall. He wouldn’t be allowed to contact anyone connected with Philip Alden or the Longhursts. The south-west would be permanently out of bounds. And he’d have regular meetings with his probation officer, who’d be conducting risk assessments every step of the way. That still continued even when he became an actor.’ Once again, Hawthorne caught my eye. ‘That’s why he had to turn down the part in your TV show, Tony. He wouldn’t have been allowed to play a young offender; there was too much of a chance he’d be recognised. It also explains why he’s never been to France. You might have been a bit surprised when he told you that. But then he’d never had a passport and wouldn’t have been allowed to go abroad until he got cast in that big film. A lot of this was for his own protection. He had to get special permission to perform in Tenet, but at the same time the probation service wouldn’t have wanted to hold him back. Rehabilitation is what it’s all about.

‘Unfortunately, Tenet was what caused all this trouble. You can imagine how terrified he must have been after his encounter with Harriet Throsby.’

‘She was going to tell!’ Tirian could barely get out the words.

‘That’s what she was threatening. Actually, I think she was just playing games with you. She was nasty. But you could see your big opportunity disappearing and your entire career falling apart. Killing her was the only way out.’

Hawthorne had nearly finished. Mills and Grunshaw had taken the steps up to the stage and were waiting to take hold of Tirian.

‘I had a feeling there was something wrong about Tirian the moment I saw his dressing room,’ Hawthorne said. ‘He had so few cards, no photographs, no sense of family or friends. And the way everything was so neat! The cushions exactly ten centimetres apart and the towels folded into perfect squares. That was a pretty good sign of someone who’s been institutionalised. It’s hardly surprising the rest of the cast never got close to him. Jordan called him a cold fish. Ewan said he was a loner … and that’s what he was. He was completely alone.’

Hawthorne went over to Tirian. He had stopped crying at last and was slumped in his chair, exhausted. He laid a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. ‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ he said. ‘There was no need.’

‘I was just so scared!’

‘I know. But you don’t need to be scared any more. It’s over now.’

Hawthorne stepped away.

The two police officers moved in.