The Word Is Murder

Fifteen Lunch with Hilda

‘You’ve bought new shoes,’ my wife said as I left home the following Monday.

‘No, I haven’t,’ I replied. I looked down and saw that I was wearing the shoes that Hawthorne had given me, the ones that had belonged to Damian Cowper. They were comfortable, Italian – but I had put them on without thinking. ‘Oh, these!’ I muttered.

My wife is a television producer. She has such an extraordinary eye for detail that she could easily be a detective or a spy. I stood there, awkwardly. I hadn’t told her anything about Hawthorne.

‘I’ve had them for some time,’ I said. ‘I just don’t often wear them.’ We don’t lie to each other. Both statements were, broadly, true.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘Lunch with Hilda,’ I said.

Hilda Starke was my literary agent. I hadn’t told her about Hawthorne either. I left as quickly as I could.

The relationship between writers and their agents is a peculiar one and I’m not even sure I fully understand it myself. Starting with the basics, writers need agents. Most writers are hopeless when it comes to contracts, deals, invoicing – in fact anything to do with business or common sense. Agents handle all of this in return for ten per cent of what you earn, a figure which is actually very reasonable until you start selling a lot of books – but when that happens, you no longer care. They don’t do very much else. They won’t really get you work. If they manage to raise your advance, it will be by quite a lot less than the amount they’re taking for themselves.

An agent is not exactly your friend – or if they are, they’re a particularly flirtatious one with dozens of other clients whom they’re equally pleased to see. They may tentatively ask about your wife or children but actually it’s the progress of your new book that most interests them. It could be said that they have a one-track mind and that it’s perfectly in sync with Nielsen, the company that scans and tracks UK book sales. One week after I have a book published, Hilda will ring to tell me where it is in the charts even though she knows I hate it. ‘Book sales aren’t everything,’ I will tell her. And that, in a nutshell, is the difference between us.

I remember meeting her at City Airport, shortly after she had taken me on. We were on our way to Edinburgh for a talk I was giving and I was already surprised that she had agreed to come. Didn’t she have a home to go to, a family? I would never find out. She didn’t invite me to her home and I’ve never met her family. When I saw her, on the other side of security, she was yelling at someone on her mobile and she signalled me not to interrupt. It took me about ten seconds to work out that it was a publisher at the other end and another ten seconds to realise that it was my publisher. She had put on her shoes, belt, jacket and marched into the airport branch of W. H. Smith where she had discovered that my new book wasn’t stocked. She wanted to know why.

That was Hilda. Before I signed with her, I met her at book fairs in Dubai, Hong Kong, Cape Town, Edinburgh and Sydney. She knew everything about me: how well my latest book was doing, why my editor had just resigned, who was going to replace her. She really was the genie to my Aladdin, although as far as I could recall, I had never rubbed the magic lamp. It was inevitable that I would sign with her and in the end I did. I was far from her biggest author, by the way. Her talent was in making me believe that, actually, I was.

I always had to remind myself that, theoretically, she worked for me and not the other way round. Even so, I was always nervous when I was meeting her. She was a short, sharply dressed woman with tightly curled hair and very intense, searching eyes. Everything about her was tough: the way she jabbed her finger at you, the staccato phrases, the lack of emotion, the dress sense. She swore almost as much as Hawthorne. I liked her and feared her in equal measure.

I knew that I was going to have to tell her about the book I was writing. She would sell it. She would do the deal. I also knew that she would be annoyed that I had gone ahead without asking her first, which is why I held back for as long as I could, talking about anything else that mattered: marketing for The House of Silk, the possibility of a new Alex Rider (I had an idea for a book about Yassen Gregorovich, the assassin who had appeared in several of the adventures), ITV and the scheduling of Injustice, the next season of Foyle’s War if there was actually going to be one. Hilda was unusually twitchy, even by her standards, and as the waiter cleared the plates, I asked her what was wrong.

‘I wasn’t going to mention it,’ she said. ‘But you’ll probably read about it in the newspapers anyway. One of my clients has been arrested.’

‘Who?’

‘Raymond Clunes.’

‘The theatre producer?’

She nodded. ‘He raised money for a musical last year. Moroccan Nights. It didn’t do as well as expected.’ Hilda would never call anything a total flop, even if it had lost every penny. If a book was savaged by the critics, she would still find the single word that would allow her to claim it had had mixed reviews. ‘Now some of the backers are alleging that he misled them. He’s being investigated for fraud.’

So the story that Bruno Wang had told me after the funeral was true. I was surprised. I didn’t even know that Hilda represented theatrical producers, and wondered if she had lost money herself. I didn’t dare ask. But this was the opening I’d been looking for. I began by saying that I had recently met Clunes, that he’d been at Diana Cowper’s funeral. This got me talking about Hawthorne and finally I described the book I had agreed to write.

She wasn’t angry. Hilda never shouted at her clients. Incredulous would be a more accurate description. ‘I really don’t understand you,’ she said. ‘We’ve talked about moving you out of children’s books and establishing you as an adult author …’

‘This is an adult book.’

‘It’s true crime! You’re not a true crime writer. And anyway, true crime doesn’t sell.’ She reached for her wine glass. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea. You’ve got The House of Silk coming out in a few months and you know how much I like that book. I thought the idea we agreed was that you were going to write a sequel.’

‘I will!’

‘You should be working on that now. That’s what people are going to want to read. Why should anyone be interested in this … what’s he called?’

‘Hawthorne. Daniel Hawthorne but he doesn’t use his first name.’

‘They never do. He’s a detective.’

‘He used to be a detective.’

‘So he’s an unemployed detective! “The Unemployed Detective”. Is that what you’re going to call the book? Do you have a title yet?’

‘No.’

She threw back the wine. ‘I really don’t understand what’s attracted you to this. Do you like him?’

‘Not terribly,’ I admitted.

‘Then why will anyone else?’

‘He’s very clever.’ I knew how feeble that sounded.

‘He hasn’t solved the case.’

‘Well, he’s still working on it.’

The waiter arrived with the main courses and I told her about some of the interviews where I’d been present. The trouble was, apart from the notes I’d taken, I hadn’t written anything down yet and, in the telling, it all sounded very vague and anecdotal … boring even. Imagine trying to describe, in detail, the plot of an Agatha Christie. That was how it was for me.

In the end she interrupted. ‘Who is this man, Hawthorne?’ she asked. ‘What makes him fun? Does he drink single malt whisky? Does he drive a classic car? Does he like jazz or opera? Does he have a dog?’

‘I don’t know anything about him,’ I said, miserably. ‘He used to be married and he has an eleven-year-old son. He may have pushed someone down a flight of stairs at Scotland Yard. He doesn’t like gay people … I don’t know why.’

‘Is he gay?’

‘No. He hates talking about himself. He won’t let me come close.’

‘Then how can you write about him?’

‘If he solves the case …’

‘Some cases can take years to solve. Are you going to follow him around London for the rest of your life?’ She had ordered veal escalope. She sliced into it as if it had caused her offence. ‘You’re going to have to change names,’ she added. ‘You can’t just barge into people’s houses and put them in a book.’ She glared at me. ‘You’d better change my name! I don’t want to be in it.’

‘Look, at the end of the day, this is an interesting case,’ I insisted. ‘And I think Hawthorne is an interesting man. I’m going to try and find out more about him.’

‘How?’

‘There’s a detective I met. I’ll start with him.’ I was thinking about Charlie Meadows. Maybe he’d talk to me if I bought him a drink.

‘Have you talked to Mr Hawthorne about money?’ Hilda asked, chewing on her veal.

It was the question I had been dreading. ‘I suggested fifty-fifty.’

‘What?’ She almost threw down her knife and fork. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said. ‘You’ve written forty novels. You’re an established writer. He’s an out-of-work detective. If anything, he should be paying you to write about him and certainly he shouldn’t be getting more than twenty per cent.’

‘It’s his story!’

‘But you’re the one writing it.’ She sighed. ‘Do you really mean to go ahead with this?’

‘It’s a bit late to back out now,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I’m not sure I want to. I was there in the room, Hilda. I actually saw the dead body, cut to ribbons, covered in blood.’ I glanced at my steak, then put down my knife and fork. ‘I want to know who did it.’

‘All right.’ She gave me the sort of look that said that no good would come of this but it wasn’t her fault. ‘Give me his number. I’ll talk to him. But I should warn you now, you’re still under contract for two more books and at least one of them is meant to be set in the nineteenth century. I’m not sure your publishers are going to be interested in this.’

‘Fifty-fifty,’ I said.

‘Over my dead body.’

After lunch, I headed off to Victoria, feeling like a schoolboy playing truant. Why was I suddenly hiding everything from everyone? I hadn’t told my wife anything about Hawthorne and here I was, slipping off to meet him again without having mentioned it to Hilda. Hawthorne was worming his way into my life in a way that was definitely unhealthy. The worst of it was that I was actually looking forward to seeing him, to finding out what happened next. What I’d just said to Hilda was true. I was hooked.

I don’t like Victoria and hardly ever go there. Why would I? It’s a weird part of London on the wrong side of Buckingham Palace. As far as I know, it has no decent restaurants, no shops selling anything anyone could possibly want, no cinemas and just a couple of theatres that feel cut off and separated from their natural home in Shaftesbury Avenue. Victoria station is so old-fashioned you almost expect a steam train to pull in and the moment you step outside, you find yourself lost in a haphazard junction of shabby, seedy streets that all look the same. In recent years, they’ve introduced cheerful guides who stand on the forecourt of the station in bowler hats, giving tourists advice. The only advice I’d give them is to go somewhere else.

This was where Alan Godwin worked, running a company that organised conferences and social events for businesses. His office was on the second floor of a 1960s building that had weathered badly, at the end of a narrow street crowded with unappetising cafés, close to the coach station. It was raining when I arrived – it had been cloudy all day – and with the puddles on the pavements and the coaches spraying water as they rumbled past, I could hardly imagine anywhere I would less like to be. The sign on the door read Dearboy Events and it took me a moment to work out where it had come from. It was a quotation from Harold Macmillan, who had once been asked what politicians should fear. His answer was: ‘Events, dear boy, events.’

I was shown into a small, unevenly shaped reception room and I didn’t need to be a detective to see the way this business was going. The furniture was expensive but it was getting tired and the trade magazines spread out on the table were out of date. The potted plants were wilting. The receptionist was bored and didn’t make any attempt to disguise it. Her telephone wasn’t ringing. There were a few awards on display on a shelf, handed out by organisations I’d never heard of.

Hawthorne was already there, sitting on a sofa with that sense of impatience I was beginning to know so well. It was as if he was addicted to crime and couldn’t wait to begin his next interrogation. ‘You’re late,’ he said.

I looked at my watch. It was five past three. ‘How are you?’ I asked. ‘How was your weekend?’

‘It was all right.’

‘Did you do anything? Did you see a film?’

He looked at me curiously. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing.’ I was thinking about my lunch with Hilda. I sat down opposite him. ‘Did you know that Raymond Clunes has been arrested?’

He nodded. ‘I saw it in the papers. When he took that fifty grand off Diana Cowper, it looks like he was ripping her off.’

‘Maybe she knew something about him. It could have given him a reason to kill her.’

Hawthorne considered my suggestion in a way that told me he had already dismissed it. ‘Is that what you think?’

‘It’s possible.’

A young girl came into the reception area and told us, in a hopeless tone of voice, that Mr Godwin would see us. She led us down a short corridor past two offices – both of them empty, I noticed. There was a door at the end. She opened it. ‘Here are your visitors, Mr Godwin.’

We went in.

I knew Alan Godwin at once. I had seen him at the funeral. He had been the tall man with the straggly hair and the white handkerchief. Now, he was sitting behind a desk with a window behind him and a view of the coach station over his shoulder. He was wearing a sports jacket and a round-necked jersey. He recognised us too as we came in. He knew that we had seen him at the cemetery. His face fell.

There were two seats opposite the desk. We sat down.

‘You’re a police officer?’ He examined Hawthorne nervously.

‘I’m working with the police, that’s right.’

‘I wonder if I could see some sort of identification.’

‘I wonder if you could tell me what you were doing at Brompton Cemetery and for that matter what you did when you left.’ Godwin didn’t say anything, so Hawthorne went on. ‘The police don’t know you were there but I do and, if I tell them, I’m sure they’ll be very interested to talk to you. Frankly, I think you’d find it a lot easier, talking to me.’

Godwin seemed to sink into his chair. Looked at more closely, he was a man weighed down by failure. It was hardly surprising. The accident that had taken one of his sons and cruelly injured the other had been the start of a general unravelling which had seen him lose his home, his marriage and his business. I knew he was going to answer Hawthorne’s questions. He had almost no fight left in him.

‘I didn’t commit any crime going to the funeral,’ he said.

‘That may or may not be the case. You heard that music. “The wheels on the bus …” If memory serves, that one comes under the Burial Laws Amendment Act: riotous, violent or indecent behaviour at a funeral. But I suppose you could equally well put it down to breaking and entering. Someone broke into the coffin and inserted a music box. Do you know anything about that?’

‘No.’

‘But you saw what happened.’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘Did that song mean anything to you?’

Godwin paused and for a moment I saw two deep pits of despair opening in his eyes. ‘We played it when we buried Timothy,’ he rasped. ‘It was his favourite song.’

Even Hawthorne faltered at that, but only briefly. Straight away he was back on the attack. ‘So why were you there?’ he demanded. ‘Why go to the funeral of a woman you had every reason to hate?’

‘It was because I hated her!’ Godwin’s cheeks had reddened. He had heavy black eyebrows, which accentuated his anger. ‘That woman with her stupidity and her carelessness killed my son, an eight-year-old boy, and turned his brother who was a livewire and who could make anybody laugh – turned him into pretty much a vegetable. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and she destroyed my life. I went to the funeral because I was delighted she was dead and I wanted to see her put in the ground. I thought it would give me closure.’

‘And did it?’

‘No.’

‘How about the death of Damian Cowper?’ Hawthorne could have been a tennis player, slamming the ball back across the net. He had the same coiled-up energy, the same focus.

Godwin sneered. ‘Do you think I killed him, Mr Hawthorne? Is that why you asked me what I did after the funeral? I went for a long walk, down the King’s Road and then beside the River Thames. Yes, I know. That’s very convenient, isn’t it? No witnesses. Nobody to tell you where I was. But why would I have wished him any harm? He wasn’t driving the car. He was at home.’

‘His mother drove away, maybe to protect him.’

‘That was her decision. It was cowardly and selfish but he had nothing to do with it.’

That chimed in with what I had been thinking. Alan Godwin might have a good reason to kill Diana Cowper but I couldn’t see how it could be extended to her son.

Both men had stopped as if they were in a boxing ring and had come to the end of a round. Then Hawthorne weighed in again. ‘You went to see Mrs Cowper.’

Godwin hesitated. ‘No.’

‘Don’t lie to me, Mr Godwin. I know you were there.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Mrs Cowper told her son. She was scared of you. According to him, you threatened her.’

‘I did no such thing.’ He stopped himself and took a breath. ‘All right. I went to see her. I don’t see why I should deny it. It was about three or four weeks ago.’

‘Two weeks before she died.’

‘I’ll tell you when it was. It was two weeks after Judith asked me to leave the house, when we finally realised our marriage couldn’t be saved. That’s when I went to see her, because it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, she might be able to help. I thought she might even want to.’

‘Help you? In what way?’

‘With money! What do you think?’ He drew a breath. ‘I might as well tell you what you want to know because – you know what? I don’t really give a damn any more. There’s nothing left. My company’s down the pan. Businesses don’t want to spend any more … not on corporate events. Gordon Brown ran this bloody country into the ground and the new lot don’t have a clue. So everyone’s tightening their belts and people like me are the first out the door.

‘Judith and me – we’re finished too. Twenty-four years of marriage and you suddenly wake up and realise that you can’t bear to be in the same room. That’s what she said, anyway.’ He pointed at the ceiling. ‘There’s a one-bedroom flat upstairs and that’s where I’m living now. I’m fifty-five years old and I’m boiling eggs on a single gas ring or bringing in Big Macs in brown paper bags. That’s what my life has come to.

‘I can put up with all that. I don’t care. But do you know what really hurts … why I went to see that bloody woman? We’re losing my house, the house in Harrow-on-the-Hill. We can’t keep up with the mortgage repayments. And even that wouldn’t matter to me except it’s Jeremy’s house. It’s his home. It’s the one place he feels safe.’ Anger sparked in his eyes. ‘If I could find any way to protect him from that, I would do it. So that is why I swallowed my dignity and went to see Mrs Cowper. I thought she could help. She had a nice address in Chelsea and, from what I read in the newspapers, that son of hers was making a fortune out in Hollywood. I thought, maybe, if she had a shred of decency in her, she might like to make amends for what she’d done and actually help my family by reaching into her pocket.’

‘And did she?’

‘What do you think?’ The sneer was back in place. ‘She tried to slam the door in my face and when I forced my way in, she threatened to call the police.’

‘You forced your way in? What exactly do you mean by that?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘I mean I persuaded her to let me speak to her. I didn’t make any threats. I didn’t use violence. I almost got down on my bloody knees asking her for ten minutes of her time.’ He paused. ‘All I wanted was a loan. Was it so much to ask? I had a couple of pitches coming up. I might have been able to turn a corner. I just needed a bit of breathing space. But she wasn’t having any of it. I don’t know how any human being can be so bloody cold, so removed. She told me to leave her house and that’s exactly what I did. I actually felt sick with myself for having gone in the first place. It just shows you how desperate I was.’

‘Which room did this happen in, Mr Godwin?’

‘The front room. The living room. Why?’

‘What time?’

‘It was lunchtime. Around midday.’

‘So the curtains were tied back.’

‘Yes.’ He was puzzled by the question.

‘How did you know she’d be in?’

‘I didn’t know. I went round on the off-chance.’

‘And later on, you sent her a letter.’

Godwin hesitated very briefly. ‘Yes.’

Hawthorne reached into his jacket pocket and took out the letter which he had been given by Andrea Kluvánek. So much had happened in the last few days that I’d almost forgotten about it. He unfolded it. ‘I have been watching you and I know the things that are dear to you,’ he read. ‘You say you didn’t threaten her but that sounds pretty threatening to me.’

‘I was angry. I didn’t mean anything by it.’

‘When did you send it?’

‘I didn’t. I hand-delivered it.’

‘When?’

‘It was about a week after I’d seen her. A Friday. I suppose it must have been the sixth or the seventh.’

‘The weekend before she died!’

‘I didn’t go into the house. I just put it through the door.’

‘Did she reply?’

‘No. I never heard a word from her.’

Hawthorne glanced at the letter again. ‘What do you mean – the things that are dear to you?’

‘I didn’t mean anything!’ Godwin pounded his fist on the desk. ‘It was just words. You put yourself in my position! It was stupid going to see her. It was stupid writing the letter. But when people are pushed into a corner, sometimes they do stupid things.’

‘Mrs Cowper had a cat,’ Hawthorne said. ‘A Persian grey. I don’t suppose you saw it.’

‘No. I didn’t see any fucking cat – and actually I’ve got nothing else to say to you. You haven’t shown me any ID. I don’t know who you are. I want you to leave.’

A telephone rang in the office next door. It was the only sound we’d heard since we’d entered the building. ‘How much longer before you move out of here?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘I’ve got the lease for another three months.’

‘Then we’ll know where to find you.’

We walked through the almost empty office and back out into the rain. Hawthorne immediately lit a cigarette. ‘I’m going to Canterbury tomorrow,’ he suddenly announced. ‘You up for that?’

‘Why Canterbury?’ I asked.

‘I’ve tracked down Nigel Weston.’ I’d forgotten who this was. ‘Nigel Weston QC,’ Hawthorne reminded me. ‘The judge who let Diana Cowper go free. And after that, I thought I’d wander over to Deal. You might like that, Tony. Get a bit of sea air.’

‘All right,’ I said, although I didn’t really want to leave London. I was being dragged into unfamiliar territory in every sense and I didn’t feel comfortable having Hawthorne as my guide.

‘I’ll see you then.’

We went our separate ways and it was only when I got to the end of the street that I remembered the one question I had been meaning to ask. Alan Godwin had said that he was glad she had been killed; in his own words, he was delighted. But when I had seen him at the funeral, he had been crying. His handkerchief had been constantly at his eyes. Why?

And there was something else.

‘She wasn’t wearing her glasses and she destroyed my life.’

That was what he had said just now, his voice half-strangled by anger. But there had been another witness, Raymond Clunes, talking about Diana Cowper, and he had said something quite different.

As soon as I got home, I looked through my notes and found what I was looking for. It was something that Hawthorne had missed – but it had been there all along, in front of our eyes, the reason why both the mother and the son had to die, and it told me precisely who had killed them. In fact it was obvious.

Suddenly I was looking forward to our train journey to Canterbury. For once, I had the upper hand.