The Word Is Murder

Twenty-two Behind the Mask

From Gower Street, I took the tube back out to west London and walked down to a square, red-brick building on the Fulham Palace Road just five minutes from Hammersmith roundabout. It’s no longer there, by the way. It was knocked down when they constructed a brand-new office block – Elsinore House. By a weird coincidence, HarperCollins are based there. They publish the American editions of my books.

The building that I visited that day was deliberately discreet, with frosted-glass windows and no signage at all. When I rang the front doorbell, I was greeted by an angry buzz and a click as the lock was electronically released from somewhere inside. A CCTV camera watched as I entered an empty reception area with bare walls and a tiled floor. It reminded me of a clinic or some obscure department of a hospital, though perhaps one that had recently closed down. At first I thought I was alone but then a voice called out to me and I went into an office just round the corner where the funeral director, Robert Cornwallis, was making two cups of coffee. The office was as unremarkable as the rest of the building, with a desk and a collection of very utilitarian chairs – padded without being remotely comfortable. A coffee machine stood on a trestle table to one side. There was a calendar on the wall.

This was the facility that Cornwallis had mentioned when we first met. His clients came to South Kensington for consultations but the actual bodies were brought here. Somewhere close by there was a chapel, ‘a place of bereavement’ Irene Laws had called it. Certainly, this wasn’t it – for the room I had entered offered no solace at all. I listened out for other people. It had never occurred to me that we might be alone but it was late afternoon by now and perhaps everyone had gone home. I had actually telephoned Cornwallis in his office but he had insisted on meeting me here.

He greeted me by name and as I came in and sat down he seemed warmer and more relaxed than the last two occasions I had seen him. He was wearing a suit but had taken off the tie and undone the top two buttons of his shirt.

‘I had no idea who you were,’ he said, passing me one of the cups of coffee. I’d given him my name over the phone. ‘You’re a writer! I have to say, I’m quite surprised. When you came to my office – and my house – I had assumed you were working with the police.’

‘I am, in a way,’ I replied.

‘No. I mean, I thought you were a detective. Where is Mr Hawthorne?’

I drank some of the coffee. He had added sugar without asking me. ‘He’s out of London at the moment.’

‘And he sent you?’

‘No. To be honest, he doesn’t know I’m seeing you.’

Cornwallis considered this. He looked puzzled. ‘On the telephone, you said you were working on a book.’

‘Yes.’

‘Isn’t that a little unorthodox? I thought a police inquiry, a murder inquiry, would be conducted in private. Will I be appearing in this book of yours?’

‘I think you might,’ I said.

‘I’m not sure that I want to. This whole business with Diana Cowper and her son has been extremely upsetting and I really don’t want the company dragged into it. As a matter of fact, I’m sure you’ll find quite a few of the parties involved may have objections.’

‘I suppose I’ll have to get their permission. And if anyone really does object, I can always change their name.’ I might have added that there was nothing to stop me writing about real people if they were in the public domain, but I didn’t want to antagonise him. ‘Would you prefer it if I changed yours?’ I asked.

‘I’m afraid I’d insist on it.’

‘I could call you Dan Roberts.’

He looked at me curiously. A smile spread across his face. ‘That’s a name I haven’t used for years.’

‘I know.’

He took out a packet of cigarettes. I didn’t know that he smoked although now I thought about it there had been an ashtray of some sort in his office. He lit a cigarette and shook out the match with an angry wave of the hand. ‘You mentioned on the telephone that you were calling from RADA.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I was there this afternoon. I was seeing …’ I told him the name of the associate director. He didn’t seem to recognise it. ‘You never told me that you went to RADA,’ I added. I’d drunk half of the coffee. I set the mug down.

‘I’m sure I did.’

‘No. I was there on both occasions when Hawthorne spoke to you. Not only were you at RADA but you were there at the same time as Damian Cowper. You acted with him.’

I was sure he would deny it but he didn’t blink. ‘I never talk about RADA any more. It’s not a part of my life that I remember with any great fondness and from what you yourself told me, I didn’t think it was relevant. When you came to see me in my South Kensington office you made it quite clear that your investigation – or, I should say, Mr Hawthorne’s investigation – was directed towards the car accident that had taken place in Deal.’

‘There may still be a connection,’ I said. ‘Were you there when Damian talked about it? Apparently he used it as the basis of one of his acting classes.’

‘As a matter of fact, I was. It was a long time ago, of course, and I’d forgotten all about it until you brought it up.’ He came round the side of the desk and perched on the edge, hovering over me. There was a harsh neon light in the room and it reflected in his glasses. ‘He brought in a little red bus and he played the music. He talked about what had happened and the impression it had made on him.’ Robert Cornwallis reflected for a moment. ‘Do you know, he was actually quite proud of the fact that immediately after she had run over two children, killing one of them as it turned out, his mother’s thoughts were entirely focused on him and his career. The two of them were really quite remarkable, wouldn’t you agree?’

‘You acted with him,’ I said. ‘You were in Hamlet.’

‘The Noh production. Based on Japanese classical theatre. All masks and fans and shared experience. Ridiculous, really. We were just children with big ideas about ourselves but at the time it mattered more than you can possibly imagine.’

‘Everyone says you were brilliant,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘There was a time when I wanted to be an actor.’

‘But you became an undertaker.’

‘We discussed this when you were at my house. It was the family business. My father, my grandfather … remember?’ He seemed to have an idea. ‘There’s something I’d like to show you. You may find it interesting.’

‘What is it?’

‘Not here. Next door …’

He stood up, expecting me to follow. And that was what I meant to do. But when I tried to get to my feet, I discovered that I couldn’t.

Actually that’s not even the half of it. What I’m describing was without question the single most terrifying moment of my life. I couldn’t move. My brain was sending a signal to my legs – ‘get up’ – but my legs weren’t listening. My arms had become foreign objects, attached to me but not connected. I was aware of my head, perched like a football, on a body that had turned into a useless pile of muscle and bone and somewhere inside my heart was hammering away in panic as if it could somehow break free. I will never fully be able to describe the bowel-emptying fear I felt at that moment. I knew that I had been drugged and that I was in terrible danger.

‘Are you all right?’ Cornwallis asked, his face full of concern.

‘What have you done?’ Even my voice didn’t sound like me. My mouth was having to work twice as hard to form the words.

‘Stand up …’

‘I can’t!’

And then he smiled. It was a horrible smile.

Moving very slowly, he came over to me. I flinched as he took out a handkerchief and forced it into my mouth, effectively gagging me. It hadn’t even occurred to me until then that I really ought to have screamed, not that it would have made any difference. I knew now that he had made sure we were on our own.

‘I’m just going to get something. I won’t be a minute,’ he said.

He walked out of the room, leaving the door open. I sat there, exploring my new sensations – or rather, my lack of them. I couldn’t feel anything – except fear. I tried to slow my breathing. My heart was still pounding. The handkerchief was pressing against the back of my throat, half suffocating me. I was actually too terrified to work out what should have been obvious to me: that I had blithely walked into a place of death – and that my own death was almost certain to be the result.

Cornwallis came back pushing a wheelchair. Perhaps he used it for corpses although it was more likely that he kept it for the elderly relatives who came to pay their last respects to the departed. He was whistling quietly to himself and there was a curious, empty quality to his face. He was no longer wearing his tinted glasses and I looked at his twinkling eyes, his neat little beard, his thinning hair, with the knowledge that they were nothing more than a mask and that they had concealed something quite monstrous which was now showing through. He knew I couldn’t move. He must have put something in my coffee and I, fool that I was, had drunk it. Already I was screaming at myself. This was the man who had strangled Diana Cowper and had sliced up her son. But why? And why hadn’t I worked it out – hadn’t it been obvious? – before I came here?

He leaned down and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss me. I recoiled in disgust but he simply picked me up and dumped me in the wheelchair. I weigh about eighty-five kilograms and the effort made him pause for breath. Then he brushed himself off, straightened my legs and, still whistling, wheeled me out of the office.

We went past an open door with a chapel on the other side. I glimpsed candles, wood panels, an altar that might be equipped with a cross, a menorah or whatever religious icon was appropriate. At the end of the corridor there was an industrial lift, large enough to hold a coffin. He pushed me in and stabbed at a button. As the doors closed, I felt my entire life being shut off behind me. There was a jolt and we began our descent.

The lift opened directly into a large, low-ceilinged workroom with more neon lights, evenly spaced. Everything I saw filled me with fresh horror, intensified by the fact that I was completely helpless. At the far end there were six silver cabinets, refrigerated compartments arranged in two sets of three, each one large enough to hold a human body. A whole side of the room was given over to what looked like a basic surgery with a metal gurney, shelves containing darkly coloured bottles and vials, a table with an array of scalpels, needles and knives. He parked me so that I was facing them, with my back to the lift. The walls were whitewashed brick. The floor was covered in grey sheet vinyl. There was a bucket in one corner, and a mop.

‘I really wish you hadn’t come here,’ Cornwallis said. He still had that very reasonable, mannered way of speaking which he had cultivated over the years and which suited the role he had taken. Because I knew now that it was just a role. With every second that passed, the real Robert Cornwallis was revealing himself to me.

‘I’ve got nothing against you and I don’t want to hurt you but you made the decision to come here and poke your nose into my fucking business.’ His voice had risen as he completed the sentence so that by the time he reached the swear-word it was a high-pitched scream. He recovered himself a little. ‘Why did you have to ask about RADA?’ he went on. ‘Why did you have to go digging around in the past? You come here asking me these stupid questions and I have to tell you and then I have to deal with you – which I really don’t want to do.’

I tried to speak but the handkerchief prevented me. He pulled it out of my mouth. As soon as it came free, I found my voice. ‘I told my wife I was coming here,’ I said. ‘And my assistant. If you do anything to me, they’ll know.’

‘If they ever find you,’ Cornwallis replied. His voice was matter-of-fact. I was about to speak again but he held up a hand. ‘I don’t care. I don’t want to hear anything more from you. It doesn’t really make any difference to me any more. But I do just want to explain.’

He touched his fingertips to the side of his head, staring into the mid-distance as he gathered his thoughts. And I just sat there, silently screaming. I am a writer. This can’t happen to me. I didn’t ask for any of it.

‘Do you have any idea what my life has been like?’ Cornwallis said at last. ‘Do you think I enjoy my job? What do you think it’s like, sitting day after day after day listening to miserable people going on about their miserable dead mothers and fathers and grannies and grandpas, arranging funerals and cremations and coffins and headstones while the sun is shining and everyone else is getting on with their lives? People look at me and they see this boring man in a suit who never smiles and who says all the right things – ‘my condolences, oh I’m so sorry, please let me offer you a tissue’ – when inside I actually want to punch them in the face because that’s not me and it’s not who I ever wanted to be.

‘Cornwallis and Sons. That’s what I was born into. My father was an undertaker. My grandfather was an undertaker. His father was an undertaker. My uncles and aunts were undertakers. When I was a boy, everybody I knew was dressed in black. I was taken out to see the horses pulling the hearse along the street. That was a treat for me. I’d watch my father eating his dinner and I’d think to myself that he’d spent the whole day with dead people and that those hands of his, the same hands that had embraced me, had touched dead flesh. Death had followed him into the room. The whole family was infected by it. Death was our life! And the worst of it was that one day I would be exactly the same because that was what they had planned for me. There was never any question about it. Because we were Cornwallis and Sons – and I was the son.

‘They used to tease me about it at school. Everyone knew the name, Cornwallis. They’d pass the shop on the way to get the bus and it wasn’t as if it was Jones or Smith or something forgettable. They called me “funeral boy” … “dead boy”. They asked me if my dad got off on corpses … if I did. They wanted to know what dead people looked like with no clothes on. Did they get hard-ons? Did their nails still grow? Half the teachers thought I was creepy – not because of who I was but because of what my family did. Other kids talked about university, about careers. They had dreams. They had a future. Not me. My future was, quite literally, dead.

‘Except – and this is the funny thing – I did have a dream. It’s strange how things happen, isn’t it? One year, they gave me a part in the school play. It wasn’t a big part. I was Hortensio in The Taming of the Shrew. But the thing is, I loved it. I loved Shakespeare. The richness of the language, the way he created a whole world. I felt so excited standing there in costume, with the lights on me. Maybe it was just that I had discovered the joy of being someone else. I was fifteen years old when I realised that I wanted to be an actor and from that moment the thought consumed me. I wouldn’t just be an actor. I would be a famous actor. I wouldn’t be Robert Cornwallis. I’d be someone else. It was what I had been born for.

‘My parents weren’t happy when I told them I wanted to audition for RADA – but do you know what? They let me go ahead because they didn’t think I had a hope in hell of getting in. Secretly, they were laughing at me but they decided that if they let me get it out of my system I’d forget about it and slip back into the family tradition. I applied for RADA and without telling them I applied for Webber Douglas and the Central School of Drama and the Bristol Old Vic too and I’d have applied for a dozen more until I got in. But I didn’t need to. Because the fact of the matter was that I was good. I was really good. I came alive when I was acting. I breezed into RADA. I knew, the moment I auditioned, they were never going to turn me down.’

I said something. It came out as an inarticulate noise because by now the drug had gone to work on my vocal cords and it was difficult to speak. I think I was going to plead with him to let me go but it was a waste of time anyway. Cornwallis frowned, went over to the table and picked up one of the scalpels. As I stared at him, he walked over to me. I saw the light of the neon shimmering in the silver blade. Then, without hesitating, he plunged it into me.

I stared in complete amazement at the handle jutting out of my chest. The strange thing is that it didn’t hurt very much. Nor was there a lot of blood. I just couldn’t believe he’d done it.

‘I told you I didn’t want to hear from you!’ Cornwallis explained, his voice once again rising into a whine. ‘There’s nothing you can say to me that I want to hear. So shut up! Do you understand? Shut up!’

He composed himself, then continued as if nothing had happened.

‘From the first day I entered RADA, I was accepted for what I was and what I had to offer. I didn’t use the name Robert Cornwallis and I never talked about my family. I called myself Dan Roberts … no-one cared about things like that. It was going to be my stage name anyway. And I wasn’t “funeral boy” any more. I was Anthony Hopkins. I was Kenneth Branagh. I was Derek Jacobi. I was Ian Holm. All those names were up there on the boards and I was going to be one of them, just like them. Every time I went into the building I had this sense that I had found myself. I’m telling you now, those were the happiest three years of my life. They were the only happy three years of my life!

‘Damian Cowper was there too. You were right about that – and don’t get me wrong. I liked him. To begin with, I admired him. But that was because I didn’t know him. I thought he was my friend – my best friend – and I didn’t see him for the cold, ambitious, manipulative swine that he was.’

I glanced down at the scalpel, still jutting obscenely out of me. There was a pool of red spreading around it, no bigger than the palm of my hand. The wound was throbbing now. I felt sick.

‘It all came to a head in the third year. Everything was more competitive by then. We all pretended to be each other’s friends. We all pretended to support each other. But let me tell you, when it came to the showcases and the final play, that’s when the gloves came off. There wasn’t a single person in that building who wouldn’t have pushed their best friend off the fire escape if they thought it would help them get an agent. And of course, everyone was sucking up to the staff. Damian was good at that. He’d smile and he’d say the right things and all the time he had his eye on the main prize and in the end, guess what he did?’

Cornwallis paused but I was too afraid to speak. He stared at me, then snatched up a second scalpel and, even as I cried out, stabbed it into me, this time into my shoulder, leaving it there. ‘Guess what he did!’ he screamed.

‘He cheated you!’ I somehow managed to force out the words. I didn’t know what I was saying. I just had to say something.

‘He did more than that. When I was cast as Hamlet, he was furious. He thought he was entitled to the part. He’d already performed it as part of his Tree. He wanted everyone to see how good he was. But it was my turn. The part was mine. That last production was my opportunity to show the world what I could do and he and that bitch girlfriend of his tricked me. They did it together. They deliberately made me sick so that I couldn’t come to rehearsals and they had to recast.’

I didn’t understand quite what he was talking about but right then nor did I care. I was sitting there like a bull in the ring with two scalpels sticking out of me, both hurting more and more. I was certain I was going to be killed. He seemed to be waiting for me to speak. Fearful that my silence would only enrage him more, I muttered: ‘Amanda Leigh …’

‘Amanda Leigh. That’s the one. He used her to get at me but I caught up with her in the end and made her pay.’ He giggled to himself. It was the most convincing portrayal of a lunatic I’d ever seen. ‘I made her suffer and then she disappeared. Do you know where she is? I can tell you if you like – but if you want to find her, you’ll need to dig up seven graves.’

‘You killed Damian,’ I rasped. It took every effort to form the words. My heart felt as if it was going to explode.

‘Yes.’ He brought his hands together and bowed his head as if he was praying and even then I got the sense that there was something mannered about what he was doing. This was a performance for an audience of one. ‘People said I was great in the run-up to Hamlet,’ he continued. ‘I should have been Hamlet. But I couldn’t do that because I was ill, so I ended up as Laertes and I was great as Laertes too. But the problem is, Laertes only has half a dozen scenes. He spends most of the play off-stage. I had about sixty lines. That’s all. And at the end of it I didn’t get the agent I wanted and when I left RADA I didn’t get the career I wanted either. I tried. I kept myself in shape. I went to acting classes. I went to auditions. But it never clicked.

‘There was a season playing Feste in Twelfth Night at the Bristol Old Vic and I thought that was going to be the beginning of everything. But after that, nothing happened for me. I came so close! I had three call-backs for The Pirates of the Caribbean before they gave the part to someone else. There were TV shows, new plays … and I was always thinking it was going to happen for me but for some reason it never did and all the time I was getting older and the money was running out and as the months became years I had to accept that there was something broken inside me and that something had been broken by Amanda and by Damian. When you’re an actor, unemployment is like cancer. The longer you have it, the less chance there is of finding a cure. And all the time my fucking family was watching from the sidelines, waiting for me to fail, to come back into the fold. They were almost willing it to happen.

‘Well, one thing after another: my agent decides to drop me. I’m drinking too much. I wake up in a filthy room with no money in my pocket and I realise I’m not having any sort of life. And finally the penny drops. I’m not Dan Roberts any more. I’m Robert Cornwallis. I put on a dark suit and I join my cousin Irene in South Kensington – and that’s it. Game over.’

He paused and I flinched, wondering if he was going to pick up another scalpel. The first two were burning into me. But he was too absorbed in his own story to hurt me any more.

‘I was actually very good at the job. I suppose you could say it was in my blood. I hated every single minute of it but then is there such a thing as a cheerful undertaker? The fact that I was miserable probably made me more suited to the role. In the words of the song, I lived the life I was given. I met Barbara at her uncle’s funeral – isn’t that romantic? – and we got married! I never really loved her. It was just something I had to do. We had three sons and I’ve tried to be a good father but the truth is they’re foreign objects to me. I never wanted them. I never wanted any of it.’ He half smiled. ‘It amused me when Andrew said he wanted to be an actor. Where do you think he got that from? I’ll never let it happen, of course. I’d do anything to protect him from that particular circle of hell.

‘Hell pretty much describes my life for the last twelve years. I managed to catch up with Amanda in the end. One day, when I couldn’t bear it any more, I tracked her down and invited her out to dinner. She was the first one I killed and doing that gave me a real sense of gratification, I’ll admit it. You probably think I’m crazy but you don’t understand what she did to me, she and Damian. He was the one I really wanted to deal with: Damian Cowper, who was winning awards and getting more and more famous and making films in America. But I knew it was just a dream, that he was out of my reach. How could I get anywhere near him?

‘So you can imagine how I felt when, one day, his mother walked into the funeral parlour. Come into the parlour, said the spider to the fly! I recognised her at once. She had come to RADA quite a few times and she’d been there for Hamlet. She’d even complimented me on my performance. And here she was, sitting in front of me, arranging her own funeral! She didn’t recognise me but then why should she have? I’ve changed a lot in the time since I left drama school. I’ve lost my hair and then there is the beard and the glasses. And at the end of the day who looks at an undertaker anyway? We’re a type. People who deal with the dead live in the shadows and nobody really wants to acknowledge that we’re there. So she chatted to me and chose her willow coffin and her music and her prayers and she didn’t notice that I was sitting there quite stunned.

‘You see, I’d been struck by the most remarkable thought: if I killed her, Damian would come to her funeral and then I would be able to kill him! That was what came to me in the space of about one minute. And that’s exactly what I did. She had given me her address and I went round to her house and I strangled her. And then, a couple of weeks later, I stabbed Damian to death in his fancy flat. I enjoyed doing that more than you can possibly imagine. I’d been careful to avoid him at the funeral. I let Irene have all the personal contact. But you should have seen his face when I told him who I was! He knew I was going to kill him even before I took out the knife. And he knew why. I just wish I could have made it last longer. I’d have liked him to suffer more.’

I waited for him to continue. There was so much he hadn’t explained and while he was talking he wasn’t attacking me. But he’d stumbled to a halt and I think we both knew at the same moment that he had nothing more to say. There was still no movement in my legs and arms. I wondered what drug I had been given. But if I was paralysed, I wasn’t numb. The pain in my chest and arm was radiating outwards and there was a lot of blood on my shirt.

‘What are you going to do with me?’ I just about managed to articulate the words.

He looked at me, dully.

‘I’ve got nothing to do with this,’ I said. ‘I’m just a writer. I only got involved because Hawthorne asked me to write about him. If you kill me, he’ll know it was you. I think he knows already.’ I was having to work to make myself understood but it seemed to me that the more I spoke to him, the greater my chances of surviving. ‘I have a wife and two sons,’ I said. ‘I understand why you killed Damian Cowper. He was a shit – I thought so too. But killing me is different. I’m nothing to do with this.’

‘Of course I’m going to kill you!’

My heart sank deep into my bowels as Cornwallis snatched a third scalpel off the table. This one was going to be the murder weapon. He was a little wild now, his face livid, his eyes unfocused.

‘You really think I’m going to tell you all this and leave you alive? It’s your fault!’ He sliced the air with the scalpel, emphasising the point. ‘Nobody else knows about RADA …’

‘I told lots of people!’

‘I don’t believe you. And it doesn’t matter anyway. You should have stuck with your stupid children’s books. You shouldn’t have interfered.’

He advanced towards me, measuring his steps.

‘I’m really sorry …’ he said. ‘But you brought this on yourself.’

In that last moment, he had the soulful look of the professional undertaker greeting a new customer. The scalpel was in his hand, slanting upwards. He ran his eyes over me, wondering where to strike.

And then a door which I hadn’t even noticed burst open and a figure moved into the room, on the very edge of my field of vision. I managed to turn my head. It was Hawthorne. He was holding his raincoat in front of him, almost like a shield. I didn’t have a clue how he had got there but I couldn’t have been happier to see him.

‘Put that down,’ I heard him say. ‘It’s over.’

Cornwallis was standing in front of me, no more than a couple of metres away. He looked from Hawthorne back to me and I wondered what he was going to do. I also saw the moment when he made up his mind. He didn’t put the scalpel down. Instead, he lifted it to his own throat, then drew it across in a single, decisive, horizontal slash.

The blood exploded out of him. It gushed over his hand, curtained down his chest, pooled around his feet. He remained standing with a look on his face that still gives me nightmares to this day. I would say he was gleeful, triumphant. Then he collapsed, his entire body twitching spastically as more blood spread around him.

I didn’t see any more. Hawthorne had grabbed hold of the wheelchair and spun me away. At the same time, I heard the comforting wail of sirens as police cars approached, somewhere high above.

‘What are you doing here? Jesus Christ!’

Hawthorne crouched beside me, staring wide-eyed at the two scalpels, wondering why I wasn’t getting to my feet. And I can honestly say that Watson had never looked up to Sherlock Holmes nor Hastings admired Poirot more than I loved Hawthorne right then and my last thought before I passed out was how lucky I was to have him on my side.