The Sentence Is Death

Hawthorne waited. ‘And what were they?’

Once again, Masefield was hesitant. He had taken against Hawthorne but at the same time he was smart enough to know that in the end he would have no choice. ‘The bulk of his estate is left to his husband,’ he said. ‘That includes the property in north London and the house in Clacton-on-Sea. He named a number of charities. But the only other large bequest, and I’m referring to a sum of about £100,000, goes to a Mrs Davina Richardson. If you wish to speak to her, my secretary can give you her address.’

‘I do wish to speak to her,’ Hawthorne said. There was a gleam in his eyes that I knew well, the awareness of another door opening, another line of enquiry for him to pursue. ‘But maybe you can tell me why he should have been so generous to her.’

‘I really don’t see that it’s any of my business.’ Oliver Masefield was much less jovial than he had been when we came in. I’m afraid Hawthorne did have this effect on people. You could say that he was the needle and every witness, every suspect, the balloon. ‘Mrs Richardson is an interior decorator. She and Richard were close friends. He was also godfather to her son. I’ll give you her telephone number.’ He brought it up on his computer screen, then scribbled it down on a sheet of paper and handed it across. ‘Anything more than that, you’ll have to get from her.’

As we left the office, Hawthorne’s mobile rang. It was Detective Inspector Grunshaw. She was ringing to let him know that Akira Anno had turned up and was ready to talk.

6 Her Story

Akira Anno lived somewhere in Holland Park but we didn’t meet her at her home. Presumably because she didn’t want her privacy invaded, she had chosen to be interviewed at Notting Hill Gate police station, a rather handsome and imposing building that stood at the corner of Ladbroke Grove. It’s been shut down now, part of a brilliant scheme to close half of London’s police stations and reduce uniformed officers on the street that has seen a surge in knife crime and made it impossible to use a mobile phone without the risk of it being snatched by thieves on motorbikes.

I was puzzled why Detective Inspector Grunshaw had invited us over, given that she had made it clear she viewed the investigation as a competition which she was determined to win.

‘She thinks the Anno woman did it,’ Hawthorne explained.

‘How does that work?’

‘She makes the arrest. She makes me look bad. I was there – but she was one step ahead of me.’

‘You don’t like her.’

‘Nobody does.’

We showed our IDs and were eventually allowed into the police station. Grunshaw had booked a grim, magnolia-painted interview room on the ground floor. The windows were frosted glass, blanking out any view. There was a table bolted into the floor. No Farrow & Ball here. A collection of health and safety posters on the walls were the only decoration.

Akira Anno was sitting uncomfortably, poised on the edge of a particularly brutal wooden chair. She was a small woman, quite boyish, not exactly short but somehow unreal, as if she were a scaled-down model of herself. Her eyes were very dark and intense and only partially concealed by her round, mauve-tinted glasses. These were perched on porcelain cheeks and a sharply contoured nose that might have seen the edge of a plastic surgeon’s knife. Her hair was black and too straight, hanging down to her shoulders and framing a face that was old and young at the same time. She gave the impression that she was extremely wise and knowledgeable, partly because she never smiled. She was sulking now. It turned out that she had just driven back from Oxford. She showed no sign of remorse that her ex-husband’s lawyer had been brutally murdered, but she was indignant that anyone should think she had anything to do with it.

I had already met Akira Anno twice before.

As I write this, I don’t want to give the impression that I had any animosity towards her or her work. In fact, at the time of Richard Pryce’s death I’d never actually read anything she’d written apart from a couple of poems that had been published in the New Statesman and they hadn’t made a word of sense. The first time I had come across her had been at the Edinburgh Book Festival and then, six months later, I had seen her at a launch party in London. Afterwards, I looked her up on the Virago website. That was the impression she made on me.