The Sentence Is Death

Much rarer are the premeditated murders, where the perpetrators actually put a bit of thought into their crimes, and curiously, perhaps because they rely so heavily on technology, modern detectives find these much harder to solve. I remember a clue I put into an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot when I was writing it for ITV. A woman’s glove embroidered with the letter H is left at the crime scene. Modern detectives would be able to tell you where and when it was made, what fabric was used, what size it was and everything it had touched in the last few weeks. But they might not recognise that the H was actually the Russian letter for N and that it had been deliberately dropped to frame somebody else. For these esoteric insights, they needed someone like Hawthorne.

The trouble was, they didn’t pay him a great deal and after we had finished Injustice he got in touch with me, asking me if I would be interested in writing a book about him. It was a straightforward commercial proposition. My name would go on the cover but we would share the proceeds fifty-fifty. I knew from the start that it was a bad idea. I make up stories; I prefer not to follow them around town. More to the point, I like to be in control of my books. I had no wish to turn myself into a character, and a secondary one at that: the perennial sidekick.

But somehow he persuaded me and even though, quite literally, it had almost killed me, the first book was now finished, although it had yet to be published. There was a further issue. My new publisher – Selina Walker at Random House – had insisted on a three-book contract and, urged on by my agent, I had agreed. I think it’s the same for every writer, no matter how many books they have sold. A three-book contract represents stability. It means that you can plan your time, knowing exactly what you’re going to be doing. But it also means you’re committed to writing them. No rest for the insecure.

Hawthorne knew this, of course, so all through the summer I had been waiting for the telephone to ring, at the same time hoping that it wouldn’t. Hawthorne was undoubtedly brilliant. He had solved the first mystery in a way that made it seem like child’s play though I had missed every one of the clues that had been presented to me. But on a personal level I found him extremely trying. He was dark and solitary, refusing to tell me anything about himself even though I was supposed to be his biographer. I found some of his attitudes disconcerting to say the least. He swore all the time, he smoked and he called me ‘Tony’. If I had chosen to pluck a hero from real life, it certainly wouldn’t have been him.

And here he was, stalking me again just weeks after I had finished writing The Word Is Murder. I hadn’t shown it to him yet and he didn’t know what I’d written about him. I had decided to keep it that way for as long as possible.

‘So who’s been murdered?’ I asked.

‘His name is Richard Pryce.’ Hawthorne stopped as if he expected me to know who he was talking about. I didn’t. ‘He’s a lawyer,’ he went on. ‘A divorce lawyer. He’s been in the papers quite a bit. A lot of his clients have been well known. Celebrities . . . that sort of thing.’

As he spoke, I realised that I did know the name after all. There had been something about him on the radio as I was being driven to the set but, half asleep, I hadn’t really listened. Richard Pryce lived in Hampstead, which is somewhere I often go when I’m walking the dog. According to the report, he’d been attacked in his own home, hit with a wine bottle. And there was something else. He’d had a nickname. Was it ‘Steel Magnolia’? No. That was Fiona Shackleton, who had famously represented Sir Paul McCartney in his acrimonious split from Heather Mills. Pryce was known as ‘the Blunt Razor’. I had no idea why.

‘Who killed him?’ I asked.

Hawthorne looked at me sadly. ‘If I knew that, mate, I wouldn’t be here.’

He was right about one thing. I was overtired. ‘The police want you to look into it?’ I asked.

‘That’s right. I got the call this morning. And immediately I thought of you.’

‘That’s very kind of you. But what makes it so special?’

To answer my question, Hawthorne pulled a stack of photographs out of his inside jacket pocket. I steeled myself. I’ve often seen crime-scene images as part of my research and I can never quite get over how shockingly violent they are. It’s the artlessness of them, the fact that everything is presented without any sensitivity. There’s something about the lack of colour too. Blood looks even more horrible when it’s dark black. The dead bodies you see on a television screen are just actors lying on their sides. They have almost nothing in common with real corpses.