The Sentence Is Death

I was lucky that this part of the corridor was in shadow or he would have spotted me for sure but even so I was still there, hiding inside the lift, and I realised that I’d put myself in a difficult position. If I stepped out and revealed myself, Hawthorne would see me and know I had been spying on him. At the same time, Kevin was rolling steadily towards me and would surely wonder what I was doing, lurking there, refusing to come out. I decided to stay where I was. As he manoeuvred himself into the lift, I studied the buttons as if I had just got in ahead of him and had forgotten where I wanted to go. I pressed Ground.

‘Third floor, please.’ Kevin was next to me, facing out. The doors slid shut and suddenly we were alone together in the confined space, he in a sitting position and so some distance below me. There were two leather pads holding his head in place. I pressed the button for him. Painfully slowly, the lift began to descend.

‘I could have done it myself,’ he said. ‘It’s only getting up to the twelfth that I find difficult.’

‘Why is that?’ I asked.

‘The button’s too high.’

It took me a moment to work out that this was a variation on an old joke. ‘Do you live here?’ I asked.

‘I live on the third.’

‘Nice place.’

‘It’s got nice views,’ he agreed.

‘The river,’ I said.

He frowned. ‘What river?’

Briefly, I froze. How could he not have noticed it? Was it something to do with his disability? Then I saw him grinning at me and realised he was joking again. We lapsed into silence until, with a slight jerk, we arrived and the doors opened. Kevin pushed the lever forward and rolled out.

‘Have a nice day,’ I said. It’s an Americanism but one I find myself using more and more these days.

‘You too.’

The lift continued on its journey, taking me down to the ground floor. There were two people, perhaps a husband and wife, waiting to go up, and they too were puzzled when I refused to get out. ‘Wrong floor!’ I muttered, weakly. They stepped in and took the lift up to the ninth floor, which must have been where they lived. The doors closed again and finally, after what seemed like a very long time, I arrived back where I wanted to be.

I went straight to Hawthorne’s flat and rang the bell. The door opened almost at once and there he was, with his raincoat over his arm, ready to go out. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. I had intended to arrive early but with all the fuss going up and down in the lift, I was more or less on time.

‘You should have rung the bell outside,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘It would have saved you coming up.’ He led me back down the corridor and called the lift. ‘How was the Old Vic?’

‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘There’s a board meeting next week.’

‘So long as you’ve got time to write our book . . .’

‘My first thought exactly.’ Sarcasm was wasted on Hawthorne. For someone who used it so often, it was remarkable that he never recognised it.

The lift arrived. I was beginning to get sick of the sight of it. We went back down and my heart sank when we stopped at the ninth floor and the husband and wife that I had just met got in again. They looked at me curiously but said nothing. They didn’t seem to know Hawthorne.

I was glad, finally, to leave the building. ‘Are they expecting us?’ I asked.

‘Masefield Pryce Turnbull? Yes. I spoke to Oliver Masefield. They’re just across the river . . . off Chancery Lane.’

‘Then we can walk.’

Kevin couldn’t walk. A teenager, disabled, from a different culture; what on earth had he been doing in Hawthorne’s flat? The two of them sounded like old friends. I was desperate to ask him but of course I couldn’t.

I thought about nothing else the entire way.

After walking all the way across Blackfriars Bridge to see Hawthorne, I now followed my steps back again. Masefield Pryce Turnbull had offices in Carey Street, behind the Central London County Court and just round the corner from where I live. This part of London is dedicated to the legal profession and wants you to know it. Even the newer, more modern buildings are carefully traditional, utterly discreet.

Masefield Pryce Turnbull occupied the top two floors of a handsome townhouse that they shared with two other boutique firms. It was a twenty-first-century law firm in a nineteenth-century building; sliding glass doors and open-plan offices behind the classical arches and sculpted pediments. A young, smiling secretary took us through to a corner office where Oliver Masefield was waiting for us, sitting behind a massive, highly polished desk. This was a practice that specialised in divorce – matrimonial law, as they called it – and perhaps he needed a solid barrier between himself and the grief and anger of his clients.