Close to Death

There was something else I remembered. When Hawthorne and I visited Alderney for the literary festival that had led to the first murder on that island for a thousand years, he had mentioned something that had taken place in a close or a crescent of houses in Richmond, on the edge of London. It was one of the first cases he had solved as a private detective after he had been thrown out of the police force following an ‘accident’ that had led to the hospitalisation of a suspect he’d been questioning. Those inverted commas are well deserved. The man in question was a vile human being dealing in child pornography and Hawthorne had been right behind him on a steep flight of stairs when the man had somehow tripped and fallen.

I hadn’t seen Hawthorne for some time and it occurred to me that in a strange way I was missing him. I wouldn’t have described him as a friend, but after four outings together we were becoming something that vaguely resembled a team. It was also true that but for him, I would have been writing this from inside a prison cell. Even while I’d been talking to Hilda, I’d been thinking how good it would be to see him again.

I picked up the phone and called.

2

We met, as usual, in one of those coffee bars that have managed to get a stranglehold on the streets of London, each one of them not just identical to each other but, perversely, to the coffee bars owned by their competitors. Hawthorne’s flat was only a fifteen-minute walk from where I lived, but it was equally uninviting: perhaps one of the reasons why he seldom invited me there. We ended up at a Starbucks – or was it a Costa? – nearby, sitting outside in the not very fresh air so that he could smoke.

I’ve described Hawthorne’s London home often enough: the emptiness and lack of any personal touches apart from his extensive model collection – the planes, tanks, battleships and transport vehicles from two world wars that he had painstakingly assembled there. Hawthorne was so reluctant to tell me anything about himself that I had taken an almost unhealthy interest in where – and how – he lived, hoping it might provide me with a few clues. Take his hobby, for example. Was it a throwback to a childhood that had been damaged in some way or just an enjoyable way to pass the time?

And what about his book club, the weird group of people who met every month in a flat one floor below? I had been introduced to a vet, a retired concert pianist and a psychiatrist who had taken an almost perverse pleasure in dismantling the work of my literary hero, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. After just a short while in their company, I wondered if any of them were quite what they seemed. It was as if they were united by some ghastly secret, like the cast of Rosemary’s Baby. Not one of the people I met there had been straightforward.

Take Kevin Chakraborty, Lisa’s son. He was Hawthorne’s teenaged friend, confined to a wheelchair with Duchenne muscular dystrophy and quite possibly one of the most dangerous young men in the world. He regularly helped Hawthorne by hacking into computer systems and, when necessary, causing them to crash. He had access to the entire UK CCTV camera network and could find anyone, anywhere, with a single twitch of his mouse. I had no doubt that he could bring the whole country to a standstill or cause planes to drop out of the sky if he was so minded, and it was fortunate that the two of them were, at least to an extent, on the side of the angels. Hawthorne solved murders. He believed in justice. The only trouble was that he didn’t care how he achieved it.

When I was a fugitive from the police, I had spent a night at his flat, tucked into William Hawthorne’s bed. Or as much of me as would fit. William was Hawthorne’s fourteen-year-old son and his bed was about a metre too short for me. That was something else I didn’t understand. Hawthorne was still married. He clearly saw a lot of his son. But he was on his own. How did that work?

And how did he come to be living in that architecturally incongruous, vaguely brutalist apartment block on the edge of the River Thames, close to Blackfriars Bridge? His flat didn’t belong to him. He had told me that he was living there as a caretaker, working for his half-brother who was an estate agent, but neither of these statements was true. It was all quite complicated, but as far as I could see, the facts were as follows:

Roland Hawthorne was not an estate agent.

Roland worked for some sort of shadowy security organisation that owned flats throughout the building.

The organisation was run by a man called Morton who also employed Hawthorne as an investigator whenever he wasn’t working for the police.

Roland was not Hawthorne’s half-brother. His father, a police officer, had adopted Hawthorne after his parents died in mysterious circumstances.