Close to Death

The more I learned about Hawthorne, the less I knew him. He was a brilliant detective. Four times, I’d watched him pluck solutions out of the air, knitting together clues I hadn’t noticed even as I’d described them. But his private life, in so far as he had one, was peculiar, quite possibly dangerous, and I’d be perfectly happy if I never went anywhere near Hawthorne’s flat again.

I could have invited him over to my own home in Farringdon, but I wasn’t too keen to do that either. For a start, my wife, Jill Green, had a television production company just around the corner and she could have walked in on us at any time. I didn’t want them to meet. Jill had never really approved of Hawthorne – not since he had first tricked his way into my life. She had read The Word is Murder and The Sentence is Death and said she’d enjoyed them, but she had serious reservations about my appearing in them and certainly didn’t want to do so herself. I was still worrying about what I was going to do when the fourth novel, Murder at the Vaudeville Theatre, came out. I had never told her everything that had happened and I wondered how she’d react when she read that I’d been arrested by the police on suspicion of the murder of Harriet Throsby and had spent twenty-four hours being interrogated under caution.

Also, Hawthorne was the only person I knew who still smoked, although he never seemed to enjoy cigarettes. He smoked mechanically: an idiosyncrasy rather than an addiction. If I have one abiding memory of him, it’s watching him hunched over a black coffee in his trademark suit, white shirt and tie, his shoulders hunched, gazing at me with those softly menacing brown eyes whilst tapping ash into the lid of his polystyrene cup. At those moments, he could have walked out of one of those films shot in the forties: a reborn Cagney or Bogart. Nothing about him was black and white. It was all various shades of grey.

So that was where we found ourselves, sitting outside a Starbucks on the Clerkenwell Road. It was the first week in August and I had just five months to produce a book which, at that moment, had no title, no plot, no characters. In fact, I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was going to be about. Hawthorne had agreed to meet me, but I still didn’t know if he was going to help.

‘How are you?’ I began.

He shrugged non-committally, as unwilling as ever to provide any information about himself. I wondered what would happen if he ever got ill. A doctor would have to tie him to a chair to get so much as a blood sample. ‘I’m OK,’ he said, at length.

‘How was Radio 4?’ I was still a little put out that he’d been invited and not me, but did my best not to show it.

He shook his head. ‘I turned them down. I’m not interested in publicity.’

‘Publicity sells books.’

‘Not my job, mate. I should have kept my name out of the books to start with.’ He pulled out a cigarette. ‘Too late now.’

‘So what have you been working on?’

‘Not a lot.’ He looked at me suspiciously. ‘Why are you asking?’

I explained that Hilda had called me and that we needed to start a new book straight away.

Hawthorne already knew. ‘Yeah. She told me she was going to call you,’ he said.

Of course she had told him. He wouldn’t have met me if it was just for coffee and a general chat. I didn’t feel comfortable that he was now represented by my agent, particularly as she seemed rather more invested in him than in me. I bet she hadn’t ordered lunch while she was talking to him. ‘So what do you think?’ I asked.

‘You want to write about a murder that happened before we met?’

‘Well, you said it would be a good idea. When we were at the Alderney Book Festival, you mentioned a case you’d solved in Richmond. Somewhere called Riverside Close.’

He lit the cigarette and took in his first lungful of smoke. ‘It wasn’t Riverside. It was Riverview.’

‘You told me someone was hammered to death.’

‘They were shot with a crossbow.’

I glared at him. ‘Hawthorne! Do you know how many tweets and emails I get when I make mistakes?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t like people knowing too much about me.’

‘That doesn’t mean you can deliberately lie to them.’

He frowned and tapped ash. ‘Things have changed,’ he explained. ‘I never expected we’d get all this attention. Radio 4 and all the rest of it. There are people I know who would prefer me to keep a low profile. And this business in Richmond – if you want the truth, I’m not too happy about the way it all worked out.’

‘But you solved the case . . .’

He was offended. ‘Of course I did.’

‘Would you be prepared to tell me about it?’

‘I don’t know.’ He seemed genuinely pained. I had seen the same look on his face when I had asked him about Reeth, the village in Yorkshire where he had lived as a child. ‘It all happened five years ago. And how can you even write it if you weren’t there?’

‘I’ve just been writing about Alex Rider in outer space . . .’

‘But that’s not real.’