The Sentence Is Death

And here she was again, expensively dressed in a black trouser suit with a pale grey pashmina draped over her shoulders and twisted round one arm. Cara Grunshaw was sitting opposite her and the man I knew only as Darren was standing to one side, either chewing gum or pretending to, still holding his totemic notebook.

Grunshaw introduced Hawthorne but said nothing about me, which was probably just as well. I wasn’t sure what Akira would have thought of my being there and I very much doubted that she would enjoy ending up in one of my books. This was an informal interview. There was no solicitor, no caution.

‘I want to thank you for coming in,’ Grunshaw began, addressing Akira. ‘As you know, Richard Pryce was found dead at his home yesterday morning and we’re hoping you can help us with our enquiries.’

Akira shrugged. ‘I don’t see why I should be able to help you. I hardly knew Mr Pryce. He represented my ex-husband but we never spoke. I had nothing to say to him. He made his living from the death of love and from the unmaking of people’s dreams. What else is there to say?’

She had a strange accent, largely American but with a slight Japanese inflexion. Her voice was soft and completely emotionless. She sounded bored.

‘You threatened him.’

‘No. I did not.’

‘With respect, Ms Anno, we have several witnesses who were present at The Delaunay restaurant on the twenty-first of October. You had been having dinner there. As you left the restaurant, you saw Mr Pryce, who was sitting with his husband. You threw a glass of wine at him.’

‘I poured it over his head. He deserved it.’

‘You called him a pig and you threatened to hit him with a bottle.’

‘It was a joke!’ There was an extraordinary malevolence in the four words, as if Grunshaw was deliberately overlooking something that was painfully obvious to everyone else. ‘I poured maybe two, three inches of wine and I said he was lucky he hadn’t ordered a bottle or I’d have used that. My meaning was quite clear. It was that I would have poured more of the wine over him. Not that I would have used the bottle to injure him.’

‘Given the way he died, it was still an unfortunate choice of words.’

She considered. I could see her replaying and analysing the scene at the restaurant as if she was going to turn it into a short story. Or a haiku. It was all there in those deep black eyes. She arrived at a conclusion. ‘I don’t regret anything that I said. I told you. It was a joke.’

‘Not a very funny one.’

‘I don’t think a joke has to be funny, Detective Inspector. In my books, I use humour only to subvert the status quo. If you’ve ever read the French philosopher Alain Badiou, you’ll know that he defines jokes as a type of rupture that opens up truths. I actually met him at the Sorbonne, by the way. He was a remarkable man. By ridiculing my enemy, I defeat him. That was the insight that Alain gave me and although I see no need to justify myself, that was precisely the mechanism I was using at The Delaunay.’

I could imagine Akira Anno and Alain Badiou together, talking into the small hours. I’m sure it would have been a barrel of laughs.

‘Who had you been having dinner with, Ms Anno?’

‘A friend of mine.’

‘It might be helpful if you gave us his name.’

‘It might be preferable not to. Anyway, it wasn’t a man. It was a woman.’

DI Grunshaw took a breath. Next to her, Darren was scribbling away, his pen scratching at the paper. They weren’t used to being spoken to in this way. ‘If your dinner companion overheard the comments you made and if they were intended as a joke, then we might ask her for a statement and that might actually be helpful to you.’

‘All right.’ Akira shrugged. ‘It was a publisher. Dawn Adams.’

‘Is she your publisher?’

‘No. She’s just a friend.’

Darren added the name to his notebook and underlined it. I wondered why Akira had been so reluctant to provide such an irrelevant piece of information.

‘Where were you last weekend, Ms Anno?’

‘I was in a cottage near Lyndhurst. It belongs to another friend of mine. My yoga teacher.’

‘And he will confirm this?’

‘If someone hasn’t murdered him with a wine bottle, I expect so.’

There she was, subverting the status quo again.

‘Was anyone with you in Lyndhurst?’ Hawthorne cut in.

‘Near Lyndhurst.’ Akira underlined the word with her voice. ‘The cottage is actually very remote and I was alone.’

‘What time did you leave?’ Hawthorne again. I could tell that he didn’t believe her story.

‘I left on Monday morning at about half past seven. I stopped for a coffee near Fleet but after that I went straight home. I showered and changed and then I went out again. I was giving a lecture at Oxford University and I stayed there overnight. I came back to London this morning and was told that the police had been looking for me and wanted to see me.’ She levelled her eyes at Grunshaw. ‘In all truth, I don’t think I was so difficult to find. I hope you have more success with whoever committed the crime.’

‘Where did you have the coffee?’ Darren asked.