‘Doyle really doesn’t like Mormons, does he! I would say his depiction is actually quite racist.’
‘The book was very short. At least it had that going for it.’
‘I didn’t understand the end at all. Why are the last two lines written in Latin?’
‘I didn’t believe a single word of it …’
A Study in Scarlet is a book I’ve always loved and I only half listened to the group as, one after another, they weighed in with their opinions. Curiously, having invited me to join the group, no one seemed to notice I was in the room – but that suited me fine. My mind was elsewhere.
Kevin and Hawthorne. The snatch of conversation I’d heard on the twelfth floor: I couldn’t do it without you. What couldn’t he do? Why had Kevin even been in Hawthorne’s flat? I had to know.
About forty minutes into the conversation, and still without having contributed anything, I leaned over to Hawthorne and whispered, ‘Where’s the toilet?’
Lisa Chakraborty had overheard me. ‘It’s down the corridor, second on the left,’ she announced loudly, so that everyone in the room could hear. Silence fell as I got up and left the room. I felt the entire group watching me.
‘That clue on the wall,’ I heard someone say. ‘The word “RACHE” painted in blood. That’s silly really. That would never happen in real life …’
I continued down the corridor and the voices faded away, swallowed up by the thick walls and carpets and the excess of furniture. I wasn’t going to the toilet. I was a little ashamed of myself, intruding this way – but I’d made up my mind. I almost certainly wouldn’t be invited back to Lisa’s flat so I would never get another chance like this. I continued past the toilet to the room I had seen Kevin entering from the kitchen. I stood there for a moment, with my ear pressed against the wood. There was no sound coming from inside. Gently, I turned the handle. Somewhere in my head a voice was telling me that this was a terrible thing to be doing. But another voice was already practising my excuse. So sorry. I got the wrong door.
I looked inside.
It might have been a typical teenager’s bedroom apart from the hospital-style bed with the hoist standing next to it, the extra-wide doorway into the bathroom and the strange smell of medicine and disinfectant. It was messy. The lights were low. I might have noticed posters from Star Wars and The Matrix on the walls, piles of books and magazines. But instead my eyes were drawn, first to Kevin, who was sitting at a table with his back to me and who hadn’t heard me come in, and then to the screen of the industrial-sized computer that was in front of him. The computer wasn’t an Apple or any make I recognised. It was about five or six metres away from me and if it had been displaying written data, I would have been unable to read it. Even an image would have been hard to identify. But what was on the screen was obvious to me and it was so unexpected, so bewildering, that for a moment I forgot everything else.
I was looking at a photograph of myself.
Actually, it was me and my younger son, Cassian. At the time, he was twenty-two years old and was just finishing a journalism course at City University. I remembered the picture being taken a couple of days before; it showed the two of us having a drink at the Jerusalem Tavern, a pub close to where I live. But what was so shocking was that it had never been published. I hadn’t sent it to anyone. So how could it possibly be on Kevin’s screen?
‘Kevin … ?’ I couldn’t stop myself. I hadn’t gone into the room. I spoke to him from the door.
He looked over his shoulder and realised who it was. I saw the panic in his eyes. At the same time, his hand scrabbled for the mouse and a moment later the screen went black. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. Kevin liked a joke but he was utterly serious now.
‘Where did you get that photograph?’ I asked.
‘What are you doing here? This is my room!’
‘I was looking for the toilet.’
‘Do you mind leaving?’
‘I’m not leaving until you tell me how you got that picture.’ I was already aware that I was behaving badly, that I shouldn’t be speaking to him in this way. Is it ever acceptable to lose your temper with someone who is in a wheelchair? But I was truly shocked by what I had just seen. Kevin had been spying not just on me but on my son. ‘You’ve hacked into my computer!’ I exclaimed. It was the only way it could have got there.
‘No!’ He squirmed in his seat.
‘Yes!’ Looking past him, I saw that the entire surface of his desk was littered with complicated electrical equipment, strange black boxes with antennae and keyboards connected to a labyrinth of wires. I pointed at the screen. ‘That was my son. That was me!’
He searched for an explanation, couldn’t find one and miserably folded in on himself.
‘It wasn’t your computer. It was your phone.’
I didn’t even try to counter that. ‘How did you do that?’ I demanded. ‘Why did you do that?’ And then the next thought hit me. ‘Does Hawthorne know about this?’
Of course he did. That was how Kevin helped him. Suddenly I saw it all, perfectly clearly. The automatic number-plate recognition that proved Akira Anno had never driven through Hampshire. The CCTV footage that had been taken from the Welcome Break service station at Fleet. I had wondered why Cara Grunshaw had shown them to Hawthorne but she never had! He had simply stolen them, hacking into the police computer systems with assistance from his brilliant young friend on the third floor.
Kevin was staring at me, aghast. His whole body seemed to have become more twisted and out of control. ‘You can’t tell Mr Hawthorne you know,’ he said.
‘Why were you looking at my personal data?’ I insisted.
‘Because I like you.’
‘That’s a funny way to show it.’
‘I’m interested in you. I read your books.’
Well, that was very flattering. But it didn’t mean I liked the idea of Kevin gazing out at me through the camera in my computer or perhaps listening to me, via my iPhone, when I was in the bath. I would have been furious but, given his condition, I was forcing myself to stay calm.
‘What exactly do you do for Hawthorne?’ I asked.
‘I don’t do anything. If he knew about this, he’d kill me!’
‘Don’t lie to me, Kevin …’
‘I can’t tell you. I can’t talk about him. Please …’
I don’t know if he was acting but suddenly there were tears in his eyes and that simply made me feel like the worst bully in the world. Also, I had been away from the book group for quite some time and I didn’t like the idea of Kevin’s mother or even Hawthorne himself coming out and finding me here. I didn’t know which would have been worse.
I drew a breath and tried to sound reasonable. ‘I won’t say anything to Hawthorne,’ I said. ‘But this isn’t the end of it, Kevin. I’m going to have to talk to you again.’
‘You can’t.’
‘Yes, I can. And don’t try to avoid me.’
‘I’m not running anywhere.’ Despite everything, his morbid sense of humour was still in play.
‘And I want you to stay out of my phone! In fact, I’m going to buy a new phone.’
‘Actually, that won’t help.’
‘For heaven’s sake!’ I thought I heard someone coming. I waved a finger in Kevin’s direction. ‘Just stay out of my iPhone, my computer, my iPad … even the phone on my front door. Promise me!’
‘I promise.’ He was looking ill. I couldn’t push him any further.
‘We’re going to talk more about this another time. Do you understand? This isn’t over!’
I backed out, closing the door behind me.
‘I don’t believe Sherlock Holmes for a single minute. I mean, on page thirty-two, he says he’s made a study of cigar ashes and he can tell the brand of a cigar just from one glance at the ash.’
I heard Hawthorne’s voice as I entered the room and sure enough the entire book group was focused on what he was saying. I took my place and pretended to l
isten as he continued.
‘I can tell you, they’ve recently tried that in America. They dissolve the ash with a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids and then they analyse the results using plasma mass spectrometry.’ He shook his head. ‘Even then they only get about sixty per cent accuracy so I don’t know what Holmes is going on about.’
Hawthorne paused for a moment, then began to talk about the correlation between a suspect’s height and the length of his stride – dismissing another of the fictitious detective’s theories. But I didn’t listen to him. His words simply floated somewhere in the air. I was thinking about Kevin, who had somehow hacked into my phone without even touching it, and I was wondering how Hawthorne could operate as a private detective working for Scotland Yard when he was actually using methods that were quite probably criminal. Certainly, it put him in a very different light.
The rest of the evening went by in a sort of daze. Someone brought up The House of Silk and although it turned out that only a couple of people – the identical twins – had actually read it, I was asked to talk about writing in the style of Conan Doyle. I managed to ramble on for a few minutes before Lisa Chakraborty cut me short.
‘Well, thank you so much for that, Anthony,’ she said. ‘That was a very interesting contribution and a lovely way to round off this evening’s discussion. And now all that’s left for me to do is to hand over to Christine, who has chosen our next book for the New Year. I’ll let her introduce it.’
Christine – spectacles, grey hair, loose-fitting cardigan – got to her feet. ‘I’ve chosen a modern work,’ she said. ‘And I believe something of a masterpiece. It’s A Multitude of Gods, the first published novel by Akira Anno.’
Well, it would be, wouldn’t it! I could actually feel the warmth and enthusiasm in the room.
‘Wonderful!’
‘She’s such a tremendously powerful writer.’
‘I read The Temizu Basin three times. It made me cry.’
‘What a lovely choice, Christine!’
There was a patter of applause.
I couldn’t wait to get out. Hawthorne came with me but I was just as keen to get away from him. We barely spoke as we walked back down the corridor and as I watched him disappear into the lift, I wondered if I should admire or despise him for using a seriously handicapped young man to help him break the law.
One thing was becoming clear. The more I learned about him, the less I actually knew.
17
The Chase
I slept badly that night. I had a bad dream that turned the book group into something out of Rosemary’s Baby – which actually wasn’t too much of a transformation. Hawthorne and Kevin were at the centre of it, crouched over a computer screen that was running a compilation of all the worst moments of my life. Even while I was asleep, I was surprised how many of them there were.
I was woken by the sound of my mobile phone ringing and was grateful to find myself in bed, in my own room. Jill had already gone. I reached out and answered it, thinking it would be Hawthorne, and I half groaned when I heard Cara Grunshaw’s voice at the other end.
‘Did I wake you up?’ she asked, with mock concern. It was a little after seven o’clock, the sun struggling to make itself known.
‘No,’ I said.
‘I thought you’d like to know. I’ve spoken to Daunt’s. They don’t want to press charges.’
‘That’s good news.’
‘I’m trying to persuade them otherwise.’ She paused. ‘Nothing personal. I just don’t think we should be encouraging petty crime.’
I closed my eyes, my head sinking back into the pillows. ‘What do you want?’ I asked.
‘You know what I want.’
I took a breath. ‘Hawthorne is going back to see Adrian Lockwood today,’ I said. I knew that because he’d texted me before I got home. There had been a name, an address in Curzon Street and a time. Nothing more. No question that I wouldn’t be there. As much as I disliked sharing the information with Grunshaw, I couldn’t see any harm in it. After all, Hawthorne had given me permission.
‘We’ve already spoken to him twice,’ Grunshaw said. ‘He didn’t have any reason to kill his lawyer.’
‘Yes, he did, as a matter of fact.’
‘What?’
Maybe it was because I had just woken up or maybe it was just my deep fear of annoying Grunshaw, but suddenly the answer came to me. Was this the ‘shape’ that Hawthorne had been talking about? Even as I blurted out the words, I knew they made sense.
‘Richard Pryce was known as the Blunt Razor because he was completely honest,’ I began. ‘He was worried about Akira Anno because he thought she was concealing part of her income.’
‘I know that.’ Grunshaw sounded bored again.
‘Wait a minute. It’s possible that Pryce had got fresh information about Akira. He was going to ring the Law Society. According to Stephen Spencer, she might even have been involved in something illegal.’
‘So what?’
‘So if she was, Richard wouldn’t have hesitated. He’d have upturned the entire judgement even though it would have harmed his own client. Adrian Lockwood wasn’t going to allow that to happen. He hated Akira and he didn’t want anything more to do with her. He may not have gone to the house meaning to kill Richard Pryce. The two of them could have had an argument. Akira told us he was violent. He could have picked up the bottle and—’
‘Wait a minute,’ Grunshaw cut in. ‘Lockwood had an alibi. He was with Davina Richardson in Highgate.’
‘He was only a few minutes away in a fast car.’
There was a brief silence at the end. Then: ‘Adrian Lockwood didn’t kill Richard Pryce,’ Cara said, flatly.
‘Do you know who did?’
‘I’m close. I could be making an arrest any time.’
Hawthorne had told me that he had narrowed the identity of the killer down to two possible suspects but I didn’t tell her that. Nor did I mention that I had myself narrowed it down to a possible five. DI Grunshaw had set this up as a race to the truth and she had decided to cheat every step of the way.
‘Keep in touch,’ she said and rang off.
I slunk out of bed and got into the shower. The conversation with Cara Grunshaw had unnerved me. As I stood there with the water hammering down, it all seemed so unfair. I had managed to spend fifty years without ever encountering people like her and now, suddenly, I was being threatened and roughed up in my own home. I was also seriously worried about Daunt’s. I had told Hawthorne that the story could destroy my career and it was true. For twenty years, the press had ignored me. Then, when Alex Rider began to sell in large numbers, and particularly after the film, they had been broadly supportive. But more recently it was as if someone had decided I had got too big for my boots and I had noticed my name turning up in diary pieces that were half true and resolutely hostile. A children’s author caught stealing from a much-loved bookshop would be more than a diary piece. This was 2013 and we were already moving towards the atmosphere of the bear pit where anyone who was even slightly in the public spotlight could find themselves torn down on the strength of a single accusation long before the allegations could actually be disproved.
Perhaps Grunshaw had been lying. It might be that the whole thing would go away, but in the end I decided I couldn’t take that chance. I got out of the shower, dried myself and got dressed. Then I went to see Hilda Starke.
Hilda had been my literary agent for about two years. It was she who had sold my novel The House of Silk to Orion Books as part of a three-book deal. A small, grey-haired woman with beady eyes and a fondness for quite masculine clothes, she ran her own agency with offices in Greek Street, Soho. I had only been there a couple of times – we usually met at restaurants or at my publishers – and I hadn’t been too impressed. Hilda occupied the third and fourth floors of a building above an Italian café, reached by a narrow and uneven flight of stairs. Today, there were no more than half a dozen people in the office, inclu
ding two junior agents, a receptionist and a couple of assistants – but with small rooms and little light it still felt crowded.
I had rung ahead, of course, but she seemed surprised to see me. ‘What are you doing here? How’s the next book?’
For someone so petite, she had an extraordinary presence. I found her wearing a double-breasted jacket and wide-collared shirt, hunched over her desk, gazing into a laptop computer like a fortune-teller with a crystal ball – and I wouldn’t have put it past her to divine the future with her exhaustive knowledge of past deals, Nielsen charts and international trends. Ask her how many copies the last Harlan Coben has sold or what titles are trending on Amazon and she would have the answer without so much as touching the keypad. If Hilda was married – and she had never told me – her husband wouldn’t have got a word in edgeways. This was a woman who didn’t just go to bed with a book. She went to bed with a library.
I sat down opposite her. ‘I may have a problem.’
‘Have you started the next Sherlock Holmes?’
‘No.’
‘That is a problem. You know that Orion want it by March. The House of Silk is doing well. You’ve slipped off the bestseller list but it’s a very crowded week.’ There was always a reason for a fall in sales: the weather, the time of year, other writers. I was still disappointed.
‘I’m writing another book about Hawthorne,’ I said.
She glared at me. She hadn’t actually been too pleased when I had told her the idea in the first place and she had only come round when she had managed to get a contract with Penguin Random House. ‘Why are you doing that?’ she asked. ‘They haven’t even published the first one yet.’
‘I didn’t really have any choice,’ I said. ‘Someone got killed.’
‘Who?’
‘His name was Richard Pryce. He was a divorce lawyer.’
She didn’t like the sound of that. ‘I don’t think readers will give a damn about a divorce lawyer,’ she said. ‘Can’t you make him something more interesting … like an actor or a musician?’
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