The Sentence Is Death

But then again, the entire scenario, the accident at Long Way Hole, could be completely irrelevant. That was a worrying thought. Was I going to end up writing two or three chapters – the visit to Ribblehead, the Station Inn and all the rest of it – when actually it was a giant red herring and a complete waste of time? Hawthorne had almost suggested as much before we’d got on the train back to London. It doesn’t quite stack up, mate. Suppose I took the entire Yorkshire sequence out of consideration. Where did that leave me?

Richard Pryce, a wealthy divorce lawyer, had been murdered in his own house. Just a few days before, Akira Anno, a woman he had deliberately set out to humiliate, had threatened to smash a bottle over his head and that was exactly how he had died. Then she killed him! Those were my words. I had spoken them to Hawthorne when he had first outlined the case and at the time the conclusion had seemed inescapable. Had she really been in a remote cottage near Lyndhurst on the Sunday evening? Hawthorne seemed to doubt it. And what about the secret income stream that Oliver Masefield had mentioned and which Richard had been investigating?

And then there was her ex-husband, Adrian Lockwood. As far as I could see, he had no motive to kill his lawyer: Pryce had managed to get him exactly the divorce he wanted; indeed, he had rewarded him with that very expensive bottle of wine. It was also impossible for Lockwood to have committed the murder, at least on his own. He had been with Davina until just after eight o’clock in the evening. Pryce’s neighbour, the unpleasant Mr Fairchild, had seen someone approaching the house (holding a torch) around five to eight and there had been the timing of the telephone call too. There was no way he could have got there in time.

Ignoring him, I turned to Stephen Spencer, Richard’s husband. He had almost certainly been lying when he said he was in Frinton with his sick mother and it did make me wonder. Why does nobody ever tell the truth when a murder has been committed? You’d have thought people would have fallen over themselves to co-operate – but no, not a bit of it. It was almost as if they were all queuing up to be suspects. So where was he? With another man . . . or with a woman? Richard Pryce had been talking about his will quite recently. Could Stephen have discovered he was about to be cut out?

I thought about Davina Richardson. She had told us that she had forgiven Richard Pryce for his part in her husband’s death and I believed her. She had taken money from him and allowed him to become a second father to her son. She seemed to get many of her clients from him and she had even been redecorating his house. Was it possible that she was harbouring some secret hatred for him and if so, why? No one had ever suggested that he had been responsible for what happened at Long Way Hole. Quite the contrary. This is my fault. That was what Gregory Taylor had said – repeatedly – when he reached Ing Lane Farm. If she had any argument, it was with him.

Finally, there was the man with the blue glasses and the rash or whatever it was on his face who had broken into Adrian Lockwood’s office. I still had no idea who he was but it seemed probable that he was the same man whom Richard Pryce had mentioned to Colin Richardson, Davina’s son. There was something wrong with his face. According to Colin, Pryce had been worried about the mystery man for some time. Suppose the man worked for Akira Anno? She knew that both Adrian and Richard Pryce were investigating her. She could have hired him to find out what they knew.

When I next looked at my watch, a couple of hours had passed and I was still no nearer the truth. There were notes and scribbles everywhere: it’s funny how the surface of my desk always reflects the state of my mind. Right now, it was a mess. I snatched hold of a page and read: What are you doing here? It’s a bit late.

Richard Pryce’s last words, overheard on the telephone by his husband, Stephen Spencer. But it had only been eight o’clock. So whoever had come to the door had arrived too late in another sense.

I took out a red pen and underlined the words that had been spoken. I knew they were important. I just couldn’t figure out why.

Hawthorne wasn’t there when I reached Davina Richardson’s house but it was only ten to five: I had arrived a few minutes early. I was standing in the street looking out for him when the front door opened and Davina appeared on the doorstep, calling me in.

‘I saw you out of the window,’ she explained. ‘Are you waiting for your friend?’

‘He’s not exactly my friend,’ I said.

‘You said you were writing a book about him. Does that mean I’m going to be one of the characters?’

‘Not if you don’t want to be.’

She smiled. ‘It doesn’t bother me at all. Why don’t you come in?’