Close to Death

Hawthorne and I spent a couple more hours sitting outside the coffee shop, making us the least profitable customers that particular branch must have ever entertained. The first thing he told me was the location of the private road where the murder had taken place – Riverview Close. He said it was a turning off the Petersham Road, near a pub I vaguely remembered, the Fox and Duck. I was sure I’d gone there for a drink a couple of times when I was living in west London and used to take my dog for walks in Richmond Park. I’d never noticed the close, though.

He described the layout of the buildings, the history of the place, Petersham Road and the immediate surroundings. For the first time, he gave me the names of the people I was going to be living with for the next few months. Tom and Gemma Beresford. Roderick Browne, dentist to the stars, with his invalid wife. Chess mastermind Adam Strauss . . . and so on. He also introduced me to some of the minor characters who would appear later: the lady gardener, the Australian nanny who also looked after an old lady in Hampton Wick, the detective superintendent in charge of the case and a detective constable who worked with him but who just seemed like one officer too many and would barely make it into my second draft.

He was only reticent about one character and that, not surprisingly, was John Dudley. Even a physical description seemed to challenge him. ‘Same age as me. Dark hair. Ordinary-looking.’ That was all he gave me. As we talked, I got the sense that the two of them had parted acrimoniously, or at least that something had come between them, and in a way I found this quite gratifying. Perhaps I hadn’t been such a useless assistant after all.

Hawthorne promised he would dig out more information for me and it arrived the next day by courier: a neatly wrapped parcel that opened to reveal about twenty black-and-white photographs, police reports, typescripts and handwritten notes made by his erstwhile assistant. More surprising was a plastic box full of old-fashioned memory sticks that turned out to contain the recordings of entire conversations. One way and another, I had more than enough material to imagine myself in Riverview Close and even in The Tea Cosy bookshop, which Hawthorne would only visit later.

What’s important is that everything I have written so far (Part One: Riverview Close) is based on fact, with just a few extra flourishes from me. It’s worth remembering, though, that even as I set it all down, I was as much in the dark as I had been when I followed Hawthorne around London after the death of Diana Cowper, or when I travelled to Yorkshire to discover the truth about a potholing accident, or when my visit to the Alderney Literary Festival was rudely interrupted by the main sponsor being tied to a chair and stabbed. This was exactly what Hawthorne wanted. He was still in charge.

And despite my earlier misgivings, I was also quite pleased with what I had written, following the investigation from different perspectives, finishing with the non-appearance of Giles and Lynda Kenworthy at the drinks party and generally making the murder an inevitable consequence. It felt solid to me and entirely accurate. Once I’d got to the end of the section, I sent it off to Hawthorne with a degree of confidence and when it came to our second meeting, I broke my own rules by inviting him over to my flat. Jill was on the set of Safe House, a drama she was making for ITV. I was home alone.

He didn’t like what I’d done.

‘You’ve made half of it up!’ That was the first thing he said. He had printed up the thirty-two pages and spread them in front of me. We were sitting in my office.

‘What do you mean?’

‘That chess game in the first chapter. I never told you about players called Frank or Charmaine. How do you know what May and Phyllis had for breakfast? That business about Roderick Browne’s matron when he was at prep school . . . ? You say she had a gap in her teeth. Where did that come from?’

‘Come on, Hawthorne. I can’t just write the information you gave me. First of all, the whole book would only be thirty pages long and it would be boring! Nobody would read it. I’ve taken what you’ve given me and I’ve added a bit of colour, that’s all.’

‘I get that. But you don’t think people are going to get a bit fed up with it? I mean, there’s even a paragraph about bloody parakeets! You’ve written all these pages and nobody’s been killed.’

‘I have to set the scene! And anyway, you know perfectly well that there’s more to a novel – even a crime novel – than violent death. It’s all about character and atmosphere and language. Why do you think people read Jane Austen? She wrote thousands of pages and she never felt the need to murder anyone.’

‘Actually, that’s not true. Anna Parker murdered both her parents and she was planning to do the same to her sister.’

‘And she’s a character in Jane Austen?’ My head swam. ‘I suppose you came across that in your book club.’