The Word Is Murder

Twenty-three Visiting Hours

In retrospect, it’s a pity that I decided to write all this in the first person as it will have been obvious all along that I wasn’t going to die. It’s a literary convention that the first-person narrator can’t be killed although it’s true that one of my favourite films, Sunset Boulevard, breaks all the rules with its opening shot and there are one or two novels, The Lovely Bones for example, that do the same. I wish there had been some way to disguise the fact that I would make it through to this chapter and wake up in the A&E Unit of Charing Cross Hospital, just a short way down the Fulham Palace Road, but I’m afraid I couldn’t think of one. So much for suspense!

I’m a little embarrassed that I had managed to pass out a second time during the course of a single investigation but the doctor assured me it was more to do with the drug I had been given than my own faint-heartedness. This turned out to be Rohypnol, the date-rape drug no less. We would never discover where Cornwallis had managed to get it from – although his wife, Barbara, was a pharmacist so perhaps he had got it through her. I never found out what happened to her and her children, by the way. It can’t have been much fun discovering that she had been married to a psychopath.

I was kept in overnight for observation but generally I wasn’t in such bad shape. My two scalpel wounds hurt a lot but needed just two stitches each. I’d been badly scared. It would take between eight and twelve hours for the effects of the drug to wear off.

I had visitors. My wife came first, interrupting a busy production schedule to make her way up to the second floor where I had now been transferred. She wasn’t too pleased to see me. ‘What on earth have you been doing?’ she demanded. ‘You could have been killed.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘And you’re not really going to write about it, are you? You’ll look ridiculous! Why did you even go into the building? If you knew he was a killer …’

‘I didn’t know it was empty. And I didn’t think he was the killer. I just thought he might know more than he was saying.’

It was true. I had recognised Robert Cornwallis in the photograph that Liz had shown me but the trouble was, in the back of my mind, I’d already decided that if it wasn’t Alan Godwin, then Grace’s father, Martin Lovell, must have been responsible for the murders. He’d been in the photograph too, the man with the flowers on the edge of the frame. He had a good reason to want Damian Cowper dead. He would have done anything to protect his daughter and help her restart her career. I’d been so sure I was right that I hadn’t thought it through and had almost got myself killed.

‘Why did you never tell me you were writing this book?’ my wife asked. ‘You don’t normally keep things from me.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’ I felt wretched. ‘I knew you’d think it was a bad idea.’

‘I don’t like the idea of you putting yourself in danger. And look where it’s got you: intensive care!’

‘It was only four stitches.’

‘You were very lucky.’ Just then her mobile phone rang. She glanced at the screen and got up. ‘I brought you this,’ she said.

She’d brought a book and laid it on the bed. It was The Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West, the book I was reading for Foyle’s War. ‘ITV are waiting to hear about the new series,’ she reminded me.

‘I’ll write it next,’ I promised.

‘Not if you’re dead, you won’t.’

My two sons sent nice texts but they didn’t come to the hospital. It was the same when I’d had my motorbike accident in Greece the year before. They were quite squeamish about seeing me horizontal.

Hilda Starke looked in though. I hadn’t seen or heard from my agent since our lunch and she was in a hurry, on her way to a BAFTA screening. She came bustling into my room, perched on a chair and examined me briefly. ‘How are you?’ she asked.

‘I’m all right. They’re really only keeping me in for examination.’

She looked doubtful.

‘I was drugged,’ I explained.

‘This man, Robert Cornwallis, attacked you?’

‘Yes. And then he committed suicide.’

She nodded. ‘Well, I have to admit that will make a terrific end for the book. I’ve got news on that front, by the way. Good news and bad news. Orion don’t want it. I told them the idea and they just weren’t interested. At the same time, they want you to stick to the three-book contract so it may be a while before you can write it.’

‘What’s the good news?’ I asked.

‘HarperCollins have already confirmed American rights. And I’ve spoken to a terrific editor, Selina Walker, and she likes your work enough that she’s prepared to wait too. She’s coming back to me with a deal.’

I could see the books piling up in front of me. Sometimes, when I’m sitting at my desk I feel as if there’s a dump truck behind me. I hear the whirr of its engine and it suddenly off-loads its contents … millions and millions of words. They keep cascading down and I wonder how many more words there can possibly be. But I’m powerless to stop them. Words, I suppose, are my life.

‘I’ve also been in contact with the police,’ Hilda went on. ‘Obviously, some of this is going to get into the newspapers but we’re trying to keep you out of it. First of all they’re embarrassed that you were involved in the first place but, more importantly, we don’t want people to know the story before you write it.’ She stood up, ready to leave. ‘And by the way,’ she went on, almost as an afterthought, ‘I’ve spoken to Mr Hawthorne. The title is “Hawthorne Investigates” and we’re splitting the profits fifty-fifty.’

‘Wait a minute!’ I was stunned. ‘That’s not the title and I thought you said you were never going to agree to that deal.’

She looked at me curiously. ‘That was what you agreed,’ she reminded me. ‘And it was the only deal he was prepared to accept.’ She was nervous about something and I found myself wondering if there was something Hawthorne knew about her and if he had used it in the negotiations. ‘Anyway let’s talk about this when we hear back from Selina.’ She paused. ‘Is there anything you need?’

‘No. I’ll be home tomorrow.’

‘I’ll call you then.’ She was gone before I could say another word.

My last guest arrived later that evening, long after visiting hours were over. I heard a nurse trying to stop him and the snap of his reply: ‘It’s all right. I’m a police officer.’ Then Hawthorne appeared at the foot of my bed. He was holding a crumpled brown paper bag.

‘Hello, Tony,’ he said.

‘Hello, Hawthorne.’ It was odd, but I was very glad to see him. More than that I felt a warmth towards him that had no basis in logic or reason. Right then, there was nobody I wanted to see more.

He sat down on the chair that Hilda had vacated. ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

‘I’m much better.’

‘I brought you these.’ He handed me the bag. I opened it. It contained a large bunch of grapes.

‘Thank you very much.’

‘It was either that or Lucozade. I thought you’d prefer grapes.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’ I set them aside. I’d been given a private room, perhaps because I was involved in a police inquiry. The lights were low. There were just the two of us, the chair, the bed. ‘About Hammersmith,’ I said. ‘I was very glad you turned up. Robert Cornwallis was going to kill me.’

‘He was a total loony. You shouldn’t have gone in there on your own, mate. You should have called me first.’

‘Did you know he was the killer?’

Hawthorne nodded. ‘I was about to arrest him. But I had to sort out that business with Nigel Weston first.’

‘How is he?’

‘A bit pissed off that his house burned down. Otherwise he’s fine.’

I sighed. ‘I don’t really understand any of it,’ I said. ‘When did you first know it was Cornwallis?’

‘You up for this now?’

‘I’m not going to get any sleep unless you tell me. Wait a minute!’ I reached for my iPhone. The movement tweaked the wounds in my chest and my shoulder, making me wince. But I had to record him. I turned it on. ‘Start from the beginning,’ I said. ‘Don’t leave anything out.’

Hawthorne nodded. ‘All right.’

And this was what he said.

‘Right from the start, I told you we had a sticker. What Meadows and the rest of them couldn’t get their head round was this. A woman walks into an undertaker’s to arrange her funeral and six hours later she’s dead. That was the bottom line. If she hadn’t gone to the undertaker’s, there’d have been nothing very strange about her murder. It might have been that burglar Meadows was going on about. But we had two unusual events and the trouble was, we couldn’t work out the connection.

‘But actually, it became pretty clear to me why Diana Cowper had gone to Cornwallis and Sons. It’s what I told you on the train. You’ve got to think of her state of mind. This is a woman who spends her whole life on her own. She misses her husband so much that she still visits the memorial garden where they used to live. She can’t trust anyone. Raymond Clunes has just ripped her off. Her beloved son has pissed off and gone to America. She’s got so few friends that after she was killed it took two whole days for anyone to notice she was dead and even then it was only the cleaner. It struck me from the start that she must have been pretty bloody miserable. And that’s why she was thinking of doing herself in …’

I took a sharp breath. ‘Committing suicide?’

‘Exactly. You saw what was in her bathroom. Three packets of temazepam. More than enough to kill her.’

‘We saw her doctor!’ I said. ‘She couldn’t sleep.’

‘That’s what she told him. But she wasn’t taking the pills, she was stockpiling them. She’d more or less decided that she’d had enough and then her cat went missing. My guess is that it was Mr Tibbs that pushed her over the edge. She’d already been visited by Alan Godwin and he’d threatened her and, reading the letter he’d sent her, she must have decided that he’d killed the cat. I know the things that are dear to you. Mr Tibbs disappearing was the final straw: that was when she decided to do it. But being the sort of woman she was, all neat and methodical, she wanted everything to be arranged, including her own funeral. So, on the same day, she resigns from the board of the Globe Theatre and goes to Cornwallis and Sons.’

He made it sound so obvious. ‘That’s why she knew she was going to die,’ I said. ‘Because she was about to commit suicide!’

‘Exactly.’

‘She didn’t leave a note.’

‘In a way, she did. You saw her funeral choices. First of all there’s “Eleanor Rigby”. All the lonely people, where do they all come from? That’s a cry for help if ever I heard one. And then there’s that poet, Sylvia Plath, and the composer, Jeremiah Clarke. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they both topped themselves, do you?’

‘And the psalm?’

‘Psalm 34. Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all. It’s a psalm for suicides. You should have talked to a vicar.’

‘I suppose you did.’

‘Of course.’

‘And what was the first thing Diana Cowper saw when she went to the undertaker’s?’ I asked. ‘You said it was important.’

‘That’s right. It was the marble book in the window. And that had a quote too.’

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. I knew it off by heart.

‘It comes from Hamlet. I don’t know a lot about Shakespeare – I would have thought that was more up your street – but the funny thing is, he’s been everywhere in this case. Diana Cowper had Shakespeare quotes on her fridge and there were all those theatre programmes on her stairs. There was another quote on that fountain we saw in Deal.’

‘To sleep, perchance to dream. That was Hamlet too.’

‘Exactly. It’s Hamlet that’s on her mind when she goes into the funeral parlour – because of what she’d seen in the window – and that was going to play a part later. But what happened first was that Robert Cornwallis recognised her. Obviously she’s got a famous name but my guess is that she boasts about Damian. And Cornwallis goes mental. Actually, he’s been mental all along.

‘You know already that Cornwallis was at RADA with Damian Cowper.’ Hawthorne had settled back in the chair, enjoying this. ‘You remember that ashtray we saw in his office? It was awarded to Robert Daniel Cornwallis, Undertaker of the Year. He took his second name and his first name and he put them backwards and he became Dan Roberts.’

‘He told me. He didn’t want anyone to know his family were all undertakers.’

‘The funny thing is that Grace Lovell thought that Amanda Leigh was the one with the false name. It seems these drama types didn’t care too much what the kids called themselves. Cut forward a few years and it was suddenly quite useful for Cornwallis. He didn’t want us to know that he’d tried and failed to become an actor. He didn’t want us to make the link with RADA.’

But I had, I thought. I had made the connection even if I’d missed its full significance. How different everything would have been if I’d simply picked up the phone and called Hawthorne!

‘When we were at his house, he was careful not to tell us what he’d done in his twenties,’ Hawthorne continued. ‘He said he sowed a few wild oats but you only have to do the maths! He’s in his mid-thirties. He said that he’d been in the funeral business for about ten years. So there were at least five years before he started when he was doing something else. And while we were there, his son, Andrew, announced that he wanted to be an actor. That was what Barbara Cornwallis told us: Acting runs in his blood. She meant that he took after his dad. But when Andrew came downstairs and started talking about himself, his father jumped right in: Let’s not talk about that right now. Andrew knew that his dad had once been to drama school and Cornwallis was scared he’d give it away.’

‘That’s what this was all about,’ I said. It was all falling into place. ‘A production of Hamlet! It was meant to be Robert Cornwallis’s – I mean, Dan Roberts’s – moment in the sun. He’d got the lead part in the end-of-year show and all the main agents were coming. But then Damian stole it from him.’

‘Did he tell you how?’

‘No.’ I thought back. ‘Damian Cowper was going out with Amanda Leigh. But Grace told us that they split up and that just before rehearsals began she saw Amanda in a clinch with Dan.’ Suddenly it all made sense. ‘It wasn’t true!’ I exclaimed. ‘Damian put her up to it!’ I remembered something else. ‘My friend, Liz, said there was a bad case of glandular fever doing the rounds …’

‘Glandular fever is also known as the kissing disease,’ Hawthorne added. ‘Amanda deliberately passed the virus on to Dan. Dan was forced out of the play. Damian got the main part and the rest is history. Except that Robert Cornwallis never forgave them. Four years later, he caught up with Amanda Leigh and killed her.’

‘He chopped her up and put a piece of her in each one of his next seven funerals.’ I remembered what Cornwallis had told me.

Hawthorne nodded. ‘If you want to get rid of a body, I suppose being an undertaker is certainly a help.’

‘I’m surprised his wife never noticed that anything was wrong.’

‘Barbara Cornwallis had the wrong end of the stick,’ Hawthorne said. ‘She told us that he’d seen everything Damian had done. He’d watched the DVDs over and over again. She thought he was a fan. She didn’t realise that he was actually obsessing about him. All he ever thought about was his failed acting career. He’d only ever had one success and he even named his kids after it.’

‘Toby, Sebastian and Andrew. They’re all characters in Twelfth Night.’ Why hadn’t I seen it before?

‘It was the one play he performed in after he left drama school. The poor sod probably dreamed of killing Damian Cowper every day of his life. He blamed him for everything that had gone wrong.’

‘And then Diana Cowper walked into his office.’

‘Exactly. Cornwallis couldn’t reach Damian. He was in America. He was famous. He’d always have an entourage. But at a funeral – that would be the perfect opportunity to do what he wanted, what he’d been dreaming of for years. That’s why he killed the mother. Simply to get Damian in his reach.’

‘He told me that.’

Hawthorne grinned unexpectedly. ‘It had to be somebody on the inside, putting that music player into the coffin. Think about it. They had to know what type of coffin it was, that it was the sort that could be opened in a couple of seconds. They had to know exactly the moment they could reach it and Cornwallis was the one giving the instructions. He could have been alone with it at any time. He knew how much the nursery rhyme would mean to Damian; he’d heard all about it in acting class. He must have been skulking in the cemetery, watching the whole thing. The idea was to get Damian back to the flat and murder him there – and it worked perfectly. You know, when I called Cornwallis after the funeral, he was probably waiting on the terrace. And when Damian arrived on his own, that was it. Psycho time!’ Hawthorne slashed at the air with an invisible knife.

‘How did he get there so quickly?’ I asked. He couldn’t have left the funeral that long before Damian.

‘He had a motorbike. Didn’t you see it parked in his garage? And of course he was wearing leathers, which would have protected him from the blood splatter. After he killed Damian, he took off the leathers and either dumped them or took them home. He was clever, that one. When we saw him that afternoon, his wife asked him why he was still wearing his suit. It was because he knew we were coming and he wanted to show us that it was clean, that it wasn’t covered in blood. He went to the school play. He went home. He had tea. And all that on the same day he’d chopped up his best mate.’

I lay there, thinking about what Hawthorne had said. It all made sense and yet at the same time there was something missing. ‘And Deal had nothing to do with it?’ I asked.

‘Not really.’

‘So who attacked Nigel Weston? Why did you say that was my fault?’

‘Because it was.’ Hawthorne took out a packet of cigarettes, remembered he was in a hospital and put them away again. ‘When we interviewed Robert Cornwallis that first time, you asked him if Diana Cowper had said anything about Timothy Godwin.’

‘You were angry with me.’

‘It was a rookie error, mate. What you did was, you told him that we were interested in the accident that had happened in Deal. And so he decided to use it to misdirect us. It was also what gave him the idea of “The wheels on the bus go round and round”. He knew it would upset Damian but at the same time it would send us in the wrong direction. And setting fire to Weston’s place was genius. Weston was the judge who’d let Diana walk free, so he became a target too. But it was like I told you all along: it wasn’t the tenth anniversary of the accident. It was nine years and eleven months. If Alan Godwin or his wife had really wanted to pay Diana Cowper back for what she’d done, you’d have thought they’d choose the right day.’

‘But what about the text that Diana Cowper sent?’

Hawthorne nodded slowly. ‘Let’s go back to the first murder,’ he said. ‘It’s unplanned … a bit spur of the moment. Cornwallis has Mrs Cowper in his office. He knows where she lives. It’s possible that she’s mentioned she’s alone – I’m sure he got as much information out of her as he could. But he needs an excuse to see her, at her house, later. You remember I asked if she was ever left on her own? I was trying to find out her exact movements at the undertaker’s and it turns out that she used the loo. My guess is that she left her handbag behind in Cornwallis’s office and that was when he nicked it.’

‘What?’

‘Her credit card. It was on the sideboard in her living room and I wondered at the time what it was doing there. We also know that Cornwallis telephoned her just after two, when she was at the Globe Theatre. I asked him about that and he gave us some bullshit about needing to know the plot number of where her husband was buried. Why would he think for a minute that she would have that information? Why didn’t he just ring the Chapel Office and get it from them? I knew he was lying to us. What he did was to ring her, all sweetness and light, and tell her that he’d found her credit card and that he would drop it in later that evening: “Don’t worry, Mrs Cowper. No trouble at all.”

‘So later on, he turns up at her house and although it’s getting dark and she’s on her own, of course she lets him in. “Here’s the credit card!” He puts it down but stays for a chat. And that’s when the penny drops. Diana Cowper remembers the quote from Hamlet that she saw in the window. There are the programmes on the stairs and the fridge magnets and maybe they help. Suddenly she recognises Robert Cornwallis and remembers where she has seen him before. It was a long time ago and they probably only exchanged a few words. He’s changed a lot. He’s an undertaker in a dark suit. But she knows that he’s Dan Roberts and maybe there’s something about his manner that’s a little bit creepy and she’s afraid. She knows that he’s come to do her harm.

‘What does she do? If she raises the alarm, he’ll attack her. Perhaps she can see that he’s a complete nutcase. So she smiles at him and offers him a drink. “Yes, please. I’d like a glass of water.” She goes into the kitchen – and that’s when Cornwallis unties the cord from the curtain that he’s going to use to strangle her. At the same time, as quickly as she can, Diana sends her son a text.’

At last, one second before he said it, I realised. ‘The phone auto-corrected!’ I said.

‘That’s right, mate. I have seen the boy who was Laertes and I’m afraid. She couldn’t remember his real name but she wanted her son to know who it was in her living room. She was texting quickly – she was nervous. She didn’t even have time to add the final full stop.

‘And she didn’t see that the text had auto-corrected and it came out: I have seen the boy who was lacerated. I thought it was a bit odd. Surely Mrs Cowper wouldn’t have referred to Jeremy Godwin as the boy who was lacerated, even if she was in a hurry. The boy who was injured, maybe. The boy who was hurt – that’s only four letters. It was just bad luck that we saw brain lacerations in the newspaper report and leapt to the wrong conclusion.’

I wondered if that was true. Hawthorne was paid by the day. The wider the investigation, the more places he visited, the more he earned. It may be stretching it but it was in his interest to examine every possibility.

He went on. ‘After she’d sent the text, she went back into the living room, taking the water with her. She was probably going to ask Cornwallis to get out of her house. I can imagine she was a bit braver, now that Damian knew what was going on. But Cornwallis was too quick. The moment she put the water down, he slipped the cord over her neck and strangled her. Then he went round the house, taking a few things, making it look like a burglary. Then he left.’

Hospitals are strange places. When I had first arrived at Charing Cross, the entire place had been bright, busy, chaotic. But quite suddenly, after visiting hours, everything seemed to have stopped as if someone had thrown a switch. The lighting had dimmed. The corridors were silent. There was a stillness that was almost uncomfortable. I was tired. My stitches were hurting and although I could at least move my limbs, I didn’t want to. It was possible I was still in shock.

Hawthorne could see it was time to leave.

‘How long are they keeping you here?’ he asked.

‘I’ll go home tomorrow.’

He nodded. ‘You’re lucky I got there in time.’

‘How did you know to get to the mortuary?’

‘I rang your assistant to check in with you. She told me where you’d gone. I couldn’t believe it when I heard that. I was worried about you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Well, who’s going to write the book if it isn’t you?’ He suddenly looked sheepish. It was something I’d not seen before and it gave me a glimpse of the child he had been, the one that was still lurking inside the man he had become. ‘Look, mate, I’ve been meaning to say … I lied to you.’

‘When?’

‘In Canterbury. You were having a go at me and I was pissed off with you – but I didn’t speak to any other writers about this book. You were the only one I approached.’

There was a long silence. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Thank you,’ I muttered, in the end.

He stood up. ‘I heard from that agent of yours,’ he continued, briskly. ‘I liked her. It looks like we’re going to have to wait a bit to get published but she says she can get us a good advance.’ He smiled. ‘At least, the way it worked out, you’ve got something to write about. I think it’s going to be good.’

He left and I lay there thinking about what he had just said. ‘It’s going to be good.’ He was right. For perhaps the very first time, there was a chance it might be.