The Word Is Murder

Eighteen Deal

I didn’t speak to Hawthorne on the train to Deal. We sat across from each other, on opposite sides of the aisle, and there was more distance between us than there had ever been. Hawthorne read his book, resolutely turning the dog-eared pages. I stared morosely out of the window, thinking about what he had said. Perhaps I was wrong to be offended and I did wonder which other writers he’d approached, but by the time we arrived I’d managed to put the whole thing out of my head. It didn’t matter how it had come to me. This was my book and it just made me all the more determined to make sure that I was the one in control.

I’d never visited Deal before but had always wanted to. I read all the Hornblower books when I was at school and this is where they began. It’s the setting of the third James Bond novel, Moonraker: Hugo Drax plans to destroy London with a newfangled V2 rocket fired from his headquarters, nearby. And it’s one of the settings in my very favourite novel, Bleak House. The hero, Richard Carstone, is garrisoned there.

In fact, I’ve always had a fondness for seaside towns, particularly out of season when the streets are empty and the sky is grey and drizzling. At the time when I was reading Hornblower, my parents would often go to the South of France but they would send me, my sister and my nanny to Instow in Devonshire and the whole language of the British seaside has stayed with me. I love the sand dunes, the slot machines, the piers, the seagulls, the peppermint rock with the name printed, impossibly, all the way through. I have a hankering for the cafés and the tea shops, old ladies pouring muddy tea out of pots, slabs of millionaire shortbread, shops that sell fishing nets, windbreaks and novelty hats. I suppose it’s the age I am. These days, everyone leaps on a plane when they want a cheap holiday. But that’s also part of the charm of all those little towns along the coast, the fact that they’ve been left behind.

Deal seemed to be surprisingly charmless as we came out of the station and walked down the main street with the seagulls screaming at us from the rooftops. It was May but the season had yet to kick off and the weather was utterly miserable. I wondered what it must be like to live here, trapped in the triangle formed by the massive Sainsbury’s and the inevitable Poundland and Iceland supermarkets. A drink at the Sir Norman Wisdom pub, dinner at the Loon Hin Chinese restaurant and then on to the Ocean Rooms night club and bar (‘Entrance next to the Co-op’).

We came to the sea, as cold and uninviting as only the English Channel can be. Deal has a pier but it is one of the most depressing in the world, an empty stretch of concrete, brutalist in style, lacking any entertainments whatsoever: no penny arcades, no trampolines, no carousels. I wondered why the Godwins had sent their children here. Surely there must have been somewhere more fun?

But gradually the little town won me over. It had that peculiar defiance of all coastal resorts, that sense of being quite literally outside the mainstream, on the edge. Many of the houses and villas fronting the sea were brightly painted and had overflowing window boxes. The pebble beach, sloping down to the water, stretched into the distance, with a wide promenade and dozens of benches. There were flower beds, lawns and parkland, old fishing boats leaning on their side, dogs running, seagulls hovering. We came to a miniature castle and I began to see that in the sunshine Deal might provide a host of adventures. I was being too cynical. I needed to look at it with a child’s eye.

We did not visit the accident site to begin with.

Hawthorne wanted to see where Diana Cowper had been living and so when we reached the sea, we turned right – towards the neighbouring village of Walmer. We still weren’t talking to each other but as we continued along the seafront we passed an old antiques shop and Hawthorne suddenly stopped and looked in the window. There wasn’t much there: a ship’s compass, a globe, a sewing machine, some mouldering books and pictures. But as if to break the silence he pointed and said, ‘That’s a Focke-Wulf Fw 190.’

He was looking at a German fighter plane with three black crosses and the figure 1 on the fuselage, suspended on a thread. There was a tiny pilot just visible in the cockpit. It was from one of those plastic kits – Revell, Matchbox or Airfix – that children used to assemble although to be fair it had been so well made that I doubted that a child had been involved.

‘It’s a single-seat, single-engine fighter, developed in the thirties,’ he went on. ‘The Luftwaffe used it throughout the war. It was their favourite aircraft.’

It was quite a different Hawthorne who was speaking and I understood that he had given me this scrap of information as a peace offering, to make up for what he had told me on the train. It wasn’t the history of the Focke-Wulf that interested me. It was the fact that Hawthorne had shown it to be one of his enthusiasms. He had actually revealed two things about himself in the space of one day. There was the reading group and there was this. It didn’t add up to a character I particularly understood but it was a start and I was grateful.

We walked for another fifteen minutes and at some stage Deal turned into Walmer and we arrived at Stonor House, which was where Diana Cowper had lived until the accident that had forced her to move. It was sandwiched between two roads, Liverpool Road at the back and The Beach at the front, a private drive connecting them, with ornate metal gates at each end. From the little that I knew about Diana Cowper, I would have said the house had suited her very well. Certainly, I could imagine her living here. It was pale blue, solid, well maintained, with two floors, several chimneys and a garage. A pair of stone lions stood guard in front of the door. It was surrounded by topiary that had been precisely clipped and semi-tropical plants, equally disciplined, in narrow beds. The whole place was walled off so that it was both prominent and private. Of course, some of these particulars could have been installed by the new owners but I got the feeling that it was more likely they had inherited it the way it was.

‘Are we going to ring the bell?’ I asked. We were standing on the Liverpool Road side. As far as I could see, there was nobody at home.

‘No. There’s no need.’ He took a key out of his pocket and I saw the name of the house on the tag dangling underneath it. For a moment, I was puzzled. Then I realised. He must have taken it from Diana Cowper’s kitchen, although I wasn’t sure when. I didn’t think the police would have allowed him to remove evidence, so they were probably unaware it even existed.

The key was solid and chunky. Not a Yale. I saw now that it couldn’t have fitted the front door. It was much more likely to open the gate. Hawthorne tried it a couple of times, then shook his head. ‘Not this one.’

We walked around to the other side of the house and tried the gate that opened onto The Beach but the key didn’t fit that one either. ‘That’s a pity,’ Hawthorne muttered.

‘Why did she hold on to the key?’ I asked.

‘That’s what I wanted to find out.’

He looked around him and I thought we were going to walk back to Deal – but then he noticed a second gate on the other side of the road. Stonor House had a quite separate, private garden right next to the beach. Smiling to himself, he crossed the road and tried the key a third time. This time, it turned.

We entered a small square area, with bushes on all four sides. It wasn’t exactly a garden; more a courtyard with miniature yew trees and rose beds surrounding a pretty marble fountain and two wooden benches that faced each other. The ground was paved with York stone. The effect was theatrical – like a scene from a children’s story. Even as we walked up to the fountain, which was dry and hadn’t been used for some time, I felt a sense of sadness and had a good idea what we were going to find.

And there it was, carved onto the stone shelf of the fountain: Lawrence Cowper. 3 April 1946 – 22 October 1999. ‘To sleep, perchance to dream.’

‘Her husband,’ I said.

‘Yes. He died of cancer and she built this place as a memorial to him. She couldn’t stay in the house but she always knew she’d want to come back. So she kept a key.’

‘She must have loved him very much,’ I said.

He nodded. Just for once, we were equally uncomfortable, standing there. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

The accident that had changed Diana Cowper’s life had taken place close to the Royal Hotel in the centre of Deal. The Royal was the handsome Georgian building where Mary O’Brien had been staying with Jeremy and Timothy Godwin. The three of them had only been minutes from tea and bed when the car ran them down.

I remembered what Mary had told us. The children had come off the beach, which was behind us, with the pebbles sloping down. The pier was nearby. The road was wider here than at any other point in Deal and subsequently the cars travelled faster, sweeping down from King Street which formed a junction over to the right. There was a shop selling Deal rock and an entertainment arcade on the corner. This was the way Diana Cowper had come. In front of me, there were more shops in a short parade: a pub, a hotel, a chemist – it advertised itself as Pier Pharmacy. Finally, next to it, stood the ice-cream shop with a front made up entirely of plate-glass windows and a bright, striped canopy.

It was all too easy to see how it had happened: the car coming round the corner, moving quickly to avoid the cross traffic. The two children, choosing exactly that moment to slip away from their nanny, running across the pavement and then into the road in their hurry to reach the ice-cream shop in front of them. Nigel Weston might have been right. Even with glasses, Diana Cowper would have been hard-pressed to stop in time. The accident had taken place at exactly this time of the year, almost to the day. The promenade would have been just as empty, the late afternoon light just beginning to dim.

‘Where do we start?’ I asked.

Hawthorne nodded. ‘The ice-cream shop.’

We could see it was open. We crossed the road and went in.

It was called Gail’s Ice-Cream and it was a cheerful place with plastic chairs and a Formica floor. The ice-cream it sold was home-made, stored in a dozen different tubs in a freezer that had seen better days. The cones were stacked up against the window and looked as if they might have been there a while. Gail’s also sold fizzy drinks, chocolate, crisps, and ready-mixed bags of sweets, another seaside staple. A menu on the wall advertised eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms and chips: The Big Deal Fry-Up. I’d wondered how long it would be before I saw the obvious pun based on the town’s name.

Just two of the tables were occupied. An elderly couple sat at one. Two young mothers with pushchairs and babies were at the other. We went up to the counter where a large, smiling woman in her fifties, wearing a dress and an apron that matched the canopy, was waiting to serve.

‘What can I get you?’ she asked.

‘I’m hoping you can help me,’ Hawthorne said. ‘I’m with the police.’

‘Oh?’

‘I’m making enquiries about the accident that happened here a while ago. The two children who were hit by the car.’

‘But that was ten years ago!’

‘Diana Cowper, the woman who was driving … she died. You didn’t read about that?’

‘I may have read something. But I don’t see—’

‘Fresh evidence may have come to light.’ Hawthorne was keen to shut down the conversation.

‘Oh!’ She looked at us nervously, in a way that made me wonder if she had something to hide. ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you very much about it,’ she said.

‘Were you here?’

‘I’m Gail Harcourt. This is my shop. And I was here the day it happened. It makes me feel sick when I remember those poor little children. All they wanted was an ice-cream and that was why they ran across the road. But they were wasting their time. We weren’t open.’

‘At the beginning of June? Why was that?’

She pointed at the ceiling. ‘We had a burst pipe. It completely flooded the place, ruined the stock and put out the electrics. We weren’t insured either, of course. Well, you should have seen the premium. It nearly ruined us.’ She sighed. ‘If only they’d stopped to look! They just ran across the road at the worst possible moment. I heard the accident. I didn’t see it. I went out into the street and saw them both lying there. The nanny didn’t know what to do. She was in shock – but then she was young herself. Only in her twenties. I turned my head and then I saw the car. It had stopped just the other side of the pier. It stayed there a minute and then it drove off.’

‘Did you see the driver?’ I asked. I got a dark look from Hawthorne but I didn’t care.

‘Only the back of her head.’

‘So it could have been anyone?’

‘It was that woman! They put her on trial!’ She turned back to Hawthorne. ‘I don’t know how anyone could do that, drive away from the scene of the accident. And those two little children, lying there! What a bitch! She wasn’t wearing her glasses, you know. But who gets behind the wheel of a car when they can’t see? She should have been locked up for life and that judge, the one who let her walk free, he should have been sacked. It’s disgusting. There’s no justice any more.’

I was quite taken aback by her vehemence. For a moment, she seemed almost monstrous.

‘I’ve never felt the same here since,’ she continued. ‘It’s taken all the pleasure out of running this business but there’s nothing else I can do.’ Two more customers came in and she hitched up her apron strings, preparing for business. ‘You should talk to Mr Traverton next door. He was there. He saw much more than me.’ She brushed us aside and suddenly the plump, smiling lady was back, everyone’s favourite aunt. ‘Yes, dear. What would you like?’

‘I remember it like it was yesterday. Quarter past four. It had been a beautiful day. Not like today. Perfect sunshine and warm enough to go paddling in the sea. I’d just been serving a customer – he was the one everyone was interested in later on. The mystery man. He left the shop about five seconds before it happened and it was thanks to him that I heard it so clearly. You see, he activated the entrance door. I actually heard the car hitting those two children. It was a horrible sound. You wouldn’t have thought it would be so loud. I knew at once it was going to be bad. I grabbed my mobile phone and went straight out. There was nobody else in the shop, by the way, except Miss Presley, who used to work in natural remedies but she’s married now and I don’t think she lives in Deal. I made sure she stayed behind before I left. We have a lot of drugs and medicines here and we’re not allowed to leave the premises unguarded, even in exceptional circumstances such as these.’

Pier Pharmacy was one of those strange, old-fashioned shops that seem very much at home in a British seaside resort. As we’d gone in, the door had folded open automatically to reveal a rack with a dozen varieties of hot water bottle. Nearby, a collection of brightly coloured scarves hung forlornly on a wire display. The shop seemed to sell a little bit of everything. Looking around, I saw stuffed toys, jam, chocolate bars, cereal, toilet paper and dog leads. It was like one of those crazy memory games I used to play with my children. There was a corner with stationery and terrible birthday cards, the sort you might find in a garage. A whole aisle was given over to herbal remedies. By far the biggest area was at the back of the shop, which contained the actual pharmacy. Deal might have more than its fair share of old-age pensioners but no matter what diseases their later years might bring, I was sure they would find a remedy here. The staff wore white coats. They had hundreds of different packets, foils and bottles within reach.

We were talking to one of them – Graham Traverton – the owner and manager, a man in his fifties, bald and ruddy-cheeked, with an off-putting gap between his two front teeth. He was keen to talk to us and I was astonished at his grasp of detail. He seemed to have a perfect memory of everything that had happened that day, to the extent that I wondered if he wasn’t making some of it up. But then again, he had been interviewed before – by the police and by journalists. He’d had plenty of opportunities to rehearse his story. And I suppose, when something terrible happens, you do tend to hang on to the details that surround it.

‘I went out through that door and almost bumped into the customer, who was standing on the pavement,’ Traverton continued. ‘I went straight up to him. “What happened?” I asked. He didn’t tell me. He didn’t say anything.

‘I tell you, I can still see all of it. Every day when I go home, it’s like a photograph engraved on my mind. The two children were in the road, both of them dressed in blue shorts and short-sleeve shirts. I knew that one of them had to be dead just from the way he was lying there with his arms and legs all wrong. His eyes were shut and he wasn’t moving. The nanny – her name was Mary O’Brien – was kneeling beside the other little boy. She was obviously shocked – she was like a ghost. As I stood there, she looked up at me and for a minute she was staring right into my eyes. It was like she was pleading with me to help her but what could I do? I called the police. I think a lot of people must have done the same.

‘There was a car, a blue Volkswagen, parked just a short way up the road. I noticed someone sitting in it and then, seconds later, it pulled out from the kerb and accelerated away. I swear it had smoke coming out of the exhaust and I heard the sound of the rubber tyres screaming against the tarmac. Of course, at the time I didn’t know it belonged to the woman who was responsible for the accident but I took down her number and reported it to the police. That was when I noticed the man that I’d been serving. He suddenly turned round and walked away. He went round the corner into King Street and then he disappeared.’

‘Did that strike you as strange?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘It most certainly did. He was behaving in a very peculiar way. I mean, what do you do when you see an accident like that? You either stay and you watch – that’s human nature. Or you decide it’s got nothing to do with you and you leave. But he hurried away like he didn’t want to be seen. And here’s the point. He’d seen it. He must have. It had happened right in front of him. But when the police asked for witness statements, he never came forward.’

‘What else can you tell us about him?’

‘Not a lot – because that’s the other thing. He was wearing sunglasses. Now why would he do that? It was half past four in the afternoon and the sun was low in the sky. In fact, it was getting a little cloudy. He didn’t need them – unless he was someone famous and didn’t want to be recognised. I can’t remember much else about him, to be honest. He was also wearing a cap. But I can tell you what he bought.’

‘And what was that?’

‘A jar of honey and a packet of ginger tea. It was local honey from a place in Finglesham. I recommended it.’

‘So what happened next?’

Traverton sighed. ‘There’s not very much more to tell you. The nanny was kneeling there. At least one of the children was alive. I saw him open his eyes. He called out for his father. “Daddy!” It was pitiful, really it was. Then the police and the ambulance arrived. It hadn’t taken them very long to get there. I went back into the shop. Actually, I went upstairs and had a cup of tea. I wasn’t feeling at all well and I don’t feel that good now, remembering it all. I understand the woman in the car has been killed. Is that why you’re here? That’s a terrible thing, but I won’t say she deserved it. But driving away like that? All the harm she caused! I think the judge let her off far too lightly and I’m not at all surprised that someone else agreed.’

From the pharmacy, we walked the short distance to the Royal Hotel. Hawthorne said nothing. He had a son himself, of course, an eleven-year-old. He was just three years older than Timothy Godwin had been when he died, and it was possible that the story we had just heard had made an impression on Hawthorne. But I have to say that he didn’t look particularly sad. If anything, he seemed to be in a hurry to be on his way.

We entered the sort of lounge you can only get in an English seaside hotel: low ceilings, wooden floors with scattered rugs and cosy leather furniture. It was surprisingly crowded, mainly with elderly couples tucking into sandwiches and beer. The room was almost unbearably warm, with radiators on full blast and a gas-effect fire to one side. We made our way through to the reception area. The friendly local girl who was working there said that she couldn’t help us but telephoned the manager, who came up from the downstairs bar.

Her name was Mrs Rendell (‘like the crime writer,’ she said). She had been at the Royal Hotel for twelve years but hadn’t been working on the day of the accident. She had, however, met Mary O’Brien and the two children.

‘They were dear little things, very well behaved. They had the family room on the second floor. It has a king-sized bed and bunks. Would you like to see it?’

‘Not really,’ Hawthorne said.

‘Oh.’ He had offended her but she continued anyway. ‘They came down on a Wednesday and the accident happened the next day. As a matter of fact, Miss O’Brien wasn’t happy with the room. It doesn’t have sea views. She’d requested a twin and a double with an adjoining door but we don’t have such a thing in this hotel and we couldn’t allow two small children to sleep on their own.’ Mrs Rendell was a small, thin woman. She had the sort of face that finds it easy to express indignation. ‘I can’t say I terribly liked her,’ she remarked. ‘I didn’t trust her and although I hate to have to say it, I was right. She should have been holding on to the two boys. Instead, she allowed them to run across the road and that was what killed them. I really don’t think Mrs Cowper was to blame for the accident.’

‘Did you know her?’

‘Of course I knew her. She often came into the hotel for lunch or for dinner. She was charming – and she had a famous son. Deal is quite well known for its celebrities. Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton are the best known but Norman Wisdom also came here. And Charles Hawtrey used to like sitting at the bar. He moved to Deal after he retired.’

Charles Hawtrey. I still remembered him: the skinny actor with dark wavy hair and round glasses. He was the gay, friendless, drunken star of the Carry On films, British humour at its most dysfunctional. I had watched him in black and white films when I was nine years old, at boarding school. They used to screen them in the gymnasium: Carry on Nurse, Carry on Teacher, Carry on Constable. It was the one big treat of the week, a break from the beatings, bad food and bullying that made up the rest of my time there. For some children, growing up begins the moment they discover that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. For me, it was realising Charles Hawtrey wasn’t and never had been funny. And he had sat here, in this hotel, sipping his gin and watching the boys go by.

Suddenly I didn’t want to be here either. And I was glad when Hawthorne thanked the woman and said he had no more questions and the two of us left.