The Word Is Murder

Nineteen Mr Tibbs

I wasn’t expecting to see Hawthorne the next day, so I was surprised to get a telephone call from him shortly after breakfast.

‘Are you doing anything this evening?’

‘I’m working,’ I said.

‘I need to come round.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

Hawthorne had never been to my London flat before and I was happy to keep it that way. I was the one trying to insinuate myself into his life, not the other way round. And so far, he hadn’t even told me his address. In fact, he had deliberately misled me. He had said his home was in Gants Hill when he actually had a flat in River Court, Blackfriars, on the other side of the river. I didn’t like the idea of him casting his detective’s eye over my home, my possessions, and perhaps coming to conclusions that he might later use against me.

He must have sensed the hesitation at the other end of the line. ‘I need to set up a meeting,’ he explained. ‘I want it to be somewhere neutral.’

‘What’s wrong with your place?’

‘That wouldn’t be appropriate.’ He paused. ‘I’ve worked out what really happened in Deal,’ he said. ‘I think you’ll agree that it’s relevant to our investigation.’

‘Who are you meeting?’

‘You’ll know who they both are when they get here.’ He tried one last plea. ‘It’s important.’

As it happened, I was on my own that evening. And it occurred to me that if I allowed Hawthorne to see where I lived, perhaps I might be able to persuade him to do the same. I was still keen to find out how he could possibly afford a flat overlooking the river and although Meadows had said he didn’t own it I was curious to see inside.

‘What time?’ I asked.

‘Five o’clock.’

‘All right,’ I said, already regretting it. ‘You can come here for an hour – but that’s it.’

‘That’s great.’ He rang off.

I spent the rest of the morning typing up my notes from the investigation so far: Britannia Road, Cornwallis and Sons, the South Acton Estate. I had made several hours’ worth of recordings on my iPhone and I connected it to my computer, listening to Hawthorne’s flat, wheedling voice through a set of headphones. I’d also taken dozens of photographs and I flicked through them, reminding myself of what I’d seen. I already had far more material than I needed and I was sure that ninety per cent of it was irrelevant. For example, Andrea Kluvánek had talked at length about her childhood in the Banská Štiavnica district of Slovakia and how happy she had been until the death of her father in an agricultural accident. But even as she had gone on, I’d been doubtful that any of it would make the first draft.

I had never worked this way before. Normally, when I’m planning a novel or a TV script, I know exactly what I need and don’t waste time with extraneous details. But without knowing what was going on inside Hawthorne’s head, how could I tell what was relevant and what wasn’t? It was exactly what he had warned me about when he’d read my first chapter. A spring bell mechanism on a door or its absence could make all the difference to the conclusion and leaving something out could be just as damaging as making it up. As a result, I was having to write down everything I saw in every room I visited – whether it was the Stieg Larsson in Diana Cowper’s bedroom, the fish-shaped key hook in her kitchen or the Post-it notes in Judith Godwin’s kitchen – and the rapidly growing pile of information was driving me mad.

I was still convinced that Alan Godwin was the killer. If it wasn’t him, who else could it have been? That was the question I asked myself as I sat at my desk, surrounded by what felt like a devastation of white A4.

Well, there was Judith Godwin, for one. She had exactly the same motivation. I thought back to what Hawthorne had said about the killer when we were at the scene of the crime, then rifled through the pages until I found it. He was almost certainly a man. I’ve heard of women strangling women but – take it from me – it’s unusual. Those were his exact words, recorded and written down. As a result, I hadn’t considered any of the women I had met. But almost certainly was not one hundred per cent definite and unusual was not impossible. It could have been Judith. It could have been Mary O’Brien – so devoted to the family that she had stayed working with them for the whole ten years. And what about Jeremy Godwin? It was always possible that he wasn’t quite as helpless as everyone supposed.

And then there was Grace Lovell – the actress who had moved in with Damian Cowper. Although she hadn’t said so in as many words, there was clearly no love lost between her and Damian’s mother, whose interest had extended no further than her first grandchild, Ashleigh. The baby had been the end of Grace’s acting career and if the newspaper stories were true, Damian had proved to be a far from ideal partner. Drugs, parties, showgirls … it easily added up to a motive for murder. On the other hand, she had been in America when Diana was killed.

Or had she?

Once again, I scoured through my notes and found exactly what I was looking for, a line spoken by Damian Cowper that hadn’t registered at the time but which, I now saw, was hugely significant. Grace had complained that she didn’t want to go back to Los Angeles. She wanted to spend more time with her parents. And Damian had said to her: You’ve already had a week with them, babe. I felt a glow of satisfaction. I really had missed nothing! It might even be that I was ahead of Hawthorne on this one. A week might be an approximation. Grace could have arrived nine or ten days ahead of Damian. In which case she could easily have been in the country on the day that Diana was killed. That said, we had left her behind at the pub in the Fulham Road after the funeral and remembering how heavy the traffic was, I would have thought it impossible for her to have reached Brick Lane before us.

Who else was there? I had spent a lot of time with Robert Cornwallis – and, for that matter with his cousin, Irene Laws. Either of them could have slipped the music player into the coffin but why would they have? They only met Diana Cowper on the day she died. Neither of them had anything to gain from her death, or that of her son.

I spent the rest of the day working on my notes and hardly noticed the time when, at a quarter to five, the doorbell rang. I work on the fifth floor of the building, with an intercom that connects me to the street, although there are times when I don’t feel connected at all, stuck in my ivory tower. I buzzed the door open, then went downstairs to meet my guest.

‘Nice place,’ Hawthorne said as he walked in. ‘But I don’t think we’ll need the drinks.’

I’d laid out glasses with a choice of mineral water and orange juice as it seemed a polite thing to do. I noticed him examining the living room as I returned them to the fridge. The main floor of my flat is essentially one large space. It has bookshelves – I have about five hundred books in the house but I keep my favourite ones here – a kitchen area, a dining-room table and my mother’s old piano which I try to play every day. There’s a TV area and a couple of sofas around a coffee table. Hawthorne sat down here. He looked completely relaxed.

‘So you know what really happened in Deal,’ I said. ‘Am I about to find out who killed Diana Cowper?’

Hawthorne shook his head. ‘Not right now. But I think you’ll find it interesting. I’ve got some good news, by the way,’ he added.

‘What’s that?’

‘Mr Tibbs has turned up.’

‘Mr Tibbs?’ It took me a few seconds to remember who he was. ‘The cat?’

‘Diana Cowper’s Persian grey.’

‘Where was he?’

‘He’d got into the neighbour’s house – through a skylight. Then he couldn’t get out again. He was found by the owners when they got back from the South of France and they called me.’

‘I suppose that is good news,’ I said, wondering what Diana Cowper’s cat had to do with anything. Then another thought struck me. ‘Wait a minute. There was a lawyer living in the house next door.’

‘Mr Grossman.’

‘Why did he contact you? How did he even know who you were?’

‘I put a note through his door. Actually, I put a note in all the houses in Britannia Road. I wanted to know if the cat had made an appearance.’

‘Why?’

‘Mr Tibbs is the reason everything happened, Tony. If it hadn’t been for him, Mrs Cowper might never have been killed. And nor would her son.’

I was sure he was joking. But he was sitting there with that strange energy of his, that mix of malice and single-mindedness that made him so hard to read, and before I could challenge him the doorbell rang for a second time.

‘Shall I answer it?’ I asked.

Hawthorne waved a hand. ‘It’s your place.’

I went over to the intercom and picked up the telephone. ‘Yes?’

‘This is Alan Godwin.’

I felt a surge of excitement. So that was my first visitor. I told him to come up the three flights of stairs and buzzed him in.

He appeared a short while later, wearing a raincoat that looked a size too large for him, the same coat he had worn at the funeral. He came into the room like a man approaching the scaffold and I was quite certain that, despite what he had said to me on the way to Canterbury, Hawthorne had summoned him here to accuse him of the murders and that everything was about to be revealed to me. Then I remembered that there were two people coming. Could Godwin have had an accomplice?

‘What is it you want?’ he asked, heading straight for Hawthorne. ‘You said there was something you had to tell me. Why couldn’t you just do it over the phone?’ He looked around him, noticing his surroundings for the first time. ‘Do you live here?’

‘No’ Hawthorne pointed in my direction. ‘He does.’

Godwin realised that although we had met, he knew nothing about me. ‘Who are you?’ he demanded. ‘You never told me your name.’

Fortunately, the doorbell rang again and I hurried over to answer it. This time there was silence from the street. ‘Are you here to see Hawthorne?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’ It was a woman’s voice.

‘I’ll open the door. Just follow the stairs up to the flat.’

‘Who is that?’ Godwin demanded but from the fear in his voice I think he knew.

‘Why don’t you sit down, Mr Godwin,’ Hawthorne said. ‘Although you won’t believe me, I’m actually trying to help you. Is there anything you want?’

‘I’ve got juice,’ I said.

‘I’ll have some water.’ Godwin sat down on the other side of the table, facing Hawthorne but carefully avoiding his eye.

I went and got the water that Hawthorne had told me to put away. I’d just brought it over when I heard more footsteps and Mary O’Brien walked into the room. She was the last person I had expected to see but at the same time it suddenly seemed obvious that it should have been her. She took two steps towards us, then stopped dead. If she had been nervous and uncertain a moment before, she was now simply thunderstruck. She had noticed Alan Godwin and she was staring at him. He, equally shocked, stared back.

Hawthorne sprang to his feet. There was something almost devilish about him, a glee I had never seen before. ‘I think you two know each other,’ he said.

Alan Godwin was the first to recover. ‘Of course we know each other. What do you mean by this?’

‘I think you know exactly what’s going on, Alan. Why don’t you sit down, Mary? I think I can call you that. We’re all friends here.’

‘I don’t understand!’ Mary O’Brien was trying to keep her emotions in check but she was on the edge of tears. She looked at Godwin. ‘Why are you here?’

‘He told me to come.’

The two of them looked guilty, angry, afraid. Godwin stood up. ‘I’m not staying here,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what game you’re playing, Mr Hawthorne. I’m not having any of it.’

‘That’s fine, Alan. But you walk out this room, the police are going to know everything. And so is your wife.’

Godwin froze. Mary also wasn’t moving. Hawthorne was completely in charge.

‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘You two have been colluding together and lying for ten years. But it’s over. That’s why you’re here.’

Godwin sat down again. Mary joined him on the sofa, keeping a distance between them. As she took her place, I saw him mouth the words ‘I’m sorry’ – and right then I knew that the two of them were lovers and that Judith Godwin had suspected it too. That was the reason why there had been tension between the two women.

I sat down on the piano stool. Hawthorne was the only one in the room who was still on his feet.

‘We need to get to the bottom of what happened in Deal,’ he began. ‘Because I’ve heard this story half a dozen times and I’ve even been to the bloody place and it’s never made any sense. That’s not surprising. Everything you two have said has been a complete pack of lies. God knows what it must have been like for you but the trouble is, you had no choice. You were locked into this and there was no way out. I’d almost feel sorry for you. Except I don’t.’

He took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. I went into the kitchen, found an ashtray and put it on the table for him to use.

‘When did you start your affair?’ Hawthorne asked.

There was a long silence. Mary had begun to cry. Alan Godwin reached out to take her hand but she pulled it away.

Godwin must have known there was no point trying to pretend. ‘It was very soon after Mary started with us,’ he replied. ‘I was the one who started it. I take full responsibility.’

‘It’s over now,’ Mary said, quietly. ‘It’s been over for a long time.’

‘To be honest with you, I don’t care about your relationship,’ Hawthorne said. ‘I just want the facts, and the fact is that you were responsible for what happened in Deal – both of you. Diana Cowper may have forgotten her specs – but those two little kids got run over because of you and you know it. You’ve been living with it ever since.’

Mary nodded. The tears ran down her cheeks.

Hawthorne turned to me. ‘I’ll be honest with you, Tony. When you and I were in Deal, there was lots of stuff I didn’t understand. Where do I even start? The kids run across the street to an ice-cream shop. Only it’s closed. Not only that, it’s flooded and all the electrics are bust. It’s dark. I know they were only eight but they must have seen there was no chance they were going to get a Mr Whippy there. And then they get hit by the car and one of them is dead and the other’s lying there and, according to Mr Traverton in the chemist shop, he’s calling out for his daddy. But no child does that. When a child gets hurt, what he wants is his mummy. So what’s going on there?’

He paused for a moment. Nobody spoke and it struck me that he was completely in control of the situation, that this might as well have been his flat as mine. Hawthorne certainly had a magnetic personality. Although, of course, magnets can repel as well as attract.

‘Let’s go back to the beginning,’ he went on. ‘Mary here takes the boys to Deal. Mum has a conference. Dad’s on a business trip to Manchester. She books into the Royal Hotel but she doesn’t want a family room. She wants a twin room for the kids and a double room next door. Why do you think that is?’

‘The hotel said that the family room didn’t have a sea view,’ I said.

‘It didn’t have anything to do with the view. Why don’t you tell him, Mary?’

Mary didn’t look at me. When she spoke, her voice was almost robotic. ‘We were meeting in Deal. We were going to be together.’

‘That’s right. The nanny and her boss. Having it off together. But you can’t do it in Harrow-on-the-Hill, not in the family home. So you steal a weekend on the coast. The boys go to bed at six o’clock, which leaves the whole night for you to be together.’

‘You’re disgusting,’ Godwin said. ‘You make it sound so … sordid.’

‘And it wasn’t?’ Hawthorne blew out smoke. ‘You were the mysterious man in the chemist’s shop. And what were you doing in there? It wasn’t to get a pack of six. The reason you were in there was the same reason you were crying your eyes out at Diana Cowper’s funeral.’

I had wondered why he had been so upset.

‘It was hay fever!’ Hawthorne explained. Once again, he addressed himself to me. ‘When we were in Brompton Cemetery, did you notice the plane trees?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I made a note. They were right next to the grave.’

‘Plane trees are the worst if you get hay fever. They’ve got a pollen grain that gets right up your nose. And shall I tell you two well-known cures for hay fever?’

‘Honey,’ I said. ‘And ginger tea.’

‘And that’s exactly what Alan was buying in Pier Pharmacy.’ He turned back to Godwin. ‘It’s also the reason why you were wearing sunglasses, even though it wasn’t sunny. You’d gone down to Deal to meet your girlfriend. But then you got an attack of hay fever so you went into the chemist to get something to help. Traverton gave you some herbal stuff and you left the place seconds before the accident took place.

‘And it was you who caused the accident. The two kids were on the promenade next to the beach. They’d been told never to run across the road and anyway they could see perfectly well that the ice-cream shop was closed. But suddenly, in front of their eyes, their dad walked out of the chemist’s shop next door and even with the cap and the sunglasses they recognised you, and because they were excited they ran towards you. That was the moment when Diana Cowper turned the corner and it happened right in front of your eyes. Both your children were hit.’

Godwin groaned and put his head in his hands. Beside him, Mary sobbed quietly.

‘Timothy was killed. Jeremy was lying there and of course he called out for his dad because he’d seen him just a moment ago. I can’t imagine what you must have been feeling right then, Alan. You’d just seen your two children knocked over by a car but you couldn’t go to them because you were supposed to be in Manchester. How were you going to explain to your wife that you were actually in Deal?’

‘I didn’t realise they were so badly hurt,’ Godwin rasped. ‘There was nothing I could have done to help …’

‘You know what? I think that’s bollocks. I think you could have run into the road and cared for your children and to hell with your little subterfuge.’ Hawthorne stubbed out his cigarette, the ash sparking red. ‘But at the very moment, you and Mary came to some sort of an agreement. Traverton told us that Mary was staring into his eyes but he was wrong about that. You were staring at Alan, who was standing right next to him. You were telling him to get the hell out. Is that right?’

‘There was nothing he could do.’ Mary echoed the words that Alan had just spoken. She had a face like death, with tears glistening on both cheeks. She was staring into the mid-distance. Later on, I would be sickened that all this had happened in my home. I would wish that they had never come here.

‘I sort of understand why you’ve stayed with the family all these years, Mary,’ Hawthorne concluded. ‘It’s because you know you were responsible for what happened. Is that right? Or is it because you’re still shagging Alan?’

‘For God’s sake!’ Godwin was furious. ‘We ended that years ago. Mary is there for Jeremy. Only for Jeremy!’

‘Yeah. And Jeremy is there because of Mary. The two of you really are made for each other.’

‘What do you want from us?’ Godwin asked. ‘Do you think we haven’t been punished enough for what happened that day?’ He closed his eyes for a moment, then continued. ‘It was just bad luck. If I hadn’t come out of the shop at that moment, if the boys hadn’t seen me …’ He was speaking very slowly, his tone almost matter-of-fact. ‘All I’ve ever cared about is that Judith should never find out,’ he said. ‘It was bad enough losing Timothy. And Jeremy. But if she knew about Mary and me …’ He stopped. ‘Are you going to tell her?’

‘I’m not going to tell her anything. It’s none of my business.’

‘Then why did you bring us here?’

‘Because I needed to know I was right about the two of you. You want my advice? I’d tell your wife about what happened. She’s already thrown you out. Your marriage is over. But this thing, this secret you’ve had between you, it’s cancer. It’s eating you up. I’d cut it out.’

Alan Godwin nodded slowly, then got to his feet. Mary O’Brien did the same. They moved towards the door but at the last moment Godwin turned back.

‘You’re a clever man, Mr Hawthorne,’ he said. ‘But you have no understanding at all about what we’ve been through. You have no feelings. We made a horrible mistake and we’ve had to live with it every day. But we’re not monsters. We’re not criminals. We were in love.’

But Hawthorne wasn’t having any of it. It seemed to me that his face was paler and his eyes more vengeful than ever. ‘You wanted sex. You were cheating on your wife. And because of that, a child died.’

Alan Godwin stared at him with something close to disgust. Mary had already passed through the door. He spun on his heel and followed her. We were left alone.

‘Did you have to be so hard on them?’ I asked, at length.

Hawthorne shrugged. ‘You feel sorry for them?’

‘I don’t know. Yes. Maybe.’ I tried to gather my thoughts. ‘Alan Godwin didn’t kill Diana Cowper.’

‘That’s right. He doesn’t blame her for the accident in Deal. He blames himself. So he had no reason to kill her. She was just the instrument of what happened, not the cause.’

‘And the driver of the car …’

‘It doesn’t matter who was driving the car. Damian, his mother, the lady next door. It’s got nothing to do with it.’

Cigarette smoke hung in the air. I would have to explain that to my wife later. I was still sitting on the piano stool. My number one theory about the murder had just crashed to the ground.

‘So if the killer wasn’t Alan Godwin, who was it?’ I asked. ‘Where do we go next?’

‘Grace Lovell,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘We’ll see her tomorrow.’