The Sentence Is Death

He waggled a finger. ‘Don’t think for a minute that it was Richard’s fault. There was a full inquiry and it turned out that nobody was to blame. From what Davina told me, he behaved magnificently when it was all over. He supported her and Colin – that’s her son – even paying all the fees to put him through private education. He had no children of his own, of course. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that! He helped her set up her business – interior design – and he always told her she’d be looked after in his will.’

‘Did she know that?’ I asked.

Lockwood frowned. He seemed to notice me for the first time. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Who are you again?’

‘I’m helping him,’ I said. Better to be vague.

‘Well if you think that Davina killed Richard for his money, you’re barking up the wrong tree. She had his money anyway! Anything she wanted, he gave her. He did everything for her and he would probably have slept with her too except that he was gay.’

‘Do you think your ex-wife killed him?’ Hawthorne asked, abruptly.

‘I have no idea.’

‘But you did know that she had threatened him?’

‘Yes. I heard about that business in the restaurant. That was typical Akira! She liked to grandstand. And I can absolutely see her beating someone to death because she was annoyed with them. Mind you, she’d probably torture them first by reading them one of her poems.’

He stood up. He had decided it was time for us to leave.

‘If you really want to know who killed Richard Pryce, then maybe you should start with the man who broke into my office,’ he added, almost as an afterthought.

‘Really?’ Hawthorne had also got to his feet.

‘I actually reported it to the police . . . not that they took a blind bit of notice.’ He paused as if he expected us to agree that, yes, the police were completely useless and should have spent more time and resources investigating his complaint. ‘It happened last Thursday. I have a small suite of offices in Mayfair which I use mainly for meetings. There’s not much there – just a girl on reception, a secretary, a young man who helps with accounts.

‘Anyway, Thursday lunchtime I was out with a client when this chap turns up. Tells the girl on reception that he’s from our IT company and he’s come to fix a glitch on my Mac. She’s stupid enough to let him in – and the next half-hour he’s on his own in my office. She should have known that there was absolutely nothing wrong with my Mac and we don’t even have an IT company! Fortunately, I keep all my private documents in a safe and there’s nothing of particular interest on my hard drive, so whatever he was after, I doubt if he got it. Nothing seemed to be taken. I did call the police, but, as I say, they took no interest. You’d have thought they’d have changed their minds when, just three days later, Richard Pryce was killed. But nobody seems to think there’s any connection.’

‘Was your receptionist able to provide a description of the man?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘She said he was about forty, medium height, white.’

‘That’s not much of a description.’

‘He was wearing glasses. She remembered that. They were heavy, plastic things and they were blue. He may have had some kind of skin problem on the side of his face. Thinning hair. He was dressed in a suit and he had a briefcase. He showed her a business card but she didn’t even read the name of the so-called IT company he worked for. Stupid girl. I fired her, of course.’

‘It goes without saying,’ Hawthorne muttered. ‘There were no CCTV cameras in your office? It might help if we had an image of this man.’

Lockwood shook his head. ‘There’s one on the main stairs but it’s not working. I’m glad you agree there’s something in it.’

‘I’m not sure I said that,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘But if he turns up again, let me know.’

Adrian Lockwood showed us out of the house and as we went, I noticed a collection of pills and medicines on the kitchen counter. They seemed to be mainly homeopathic. Prominent among them was a large bottle of vitamin A. It was odd. Lockwood hadn’t struck me as the sort of person who would be into alternative medicine and I wondered what condition he might be suffering from.

It was too late to ask him. He showed us down the stairs, handed Hawthorne back his coat and opened the front door. He said nothing to me. The door closed behind us and once again we were outside, back in the street.

8 Mother and Son

I spent the afternoon at my flat in Farringdon.

It was hard to believe that only the day before I’d been on the set of Foyle’s War and that the unit was still out there, shooting somewhere in London. All of that felt like a world away. I had to remind myself that I still had a lot of work to do, starting with the rewrite of the next episode, ‘Sunflower’. I’d had notes from ITV, notes from the director, notes from Michael Kitchen, notes from Jill. That’s the difference between writing books and writing television. When you write TV, everyone has an opinion.