The Sentence Is Death

It was drizzling again – this horrible autumn weather. There seemed no point hanging around in the street so I followed her through the cluttered hallway and back into the kitchen. The smell of cigarette smoke was everywhere. I gave up cigarettes thirty years ago but even when I smoked it was never inside the house and I wondered how she lived with it. I sat down at the kitchen table, at the same time noticing that she had been reading Two Hundred Haikus by Akira Anno. There was a brand-new copy that had been left face down, with the pages fanning out.

‘Will you have some tea?’

‘Not for me, thank you.’

‘The kettle’s just boiled.’ She brought a plate of chocolate digestives to the table. ‘I shouldn’t really be eating these but Colin loves them and you know how it is once you’ve opened the packet . . .’

‘Where is Colin?’ I asked.

‘He’s doing his homework with a friend.’ She bit into a biscuit. By the time I left, she would have eaten four or five. She was wearing a baggy mohair jersey but I didn’t think she had chosen it to hide her shape. For all her apologies, she didn’t strike me as a woman who was particularly self-conscious. She was completely comfortable with who and what she was. I still didn’t know for certain that she had been having an affair with Adrian Lockwood, but if she had, I was sure she would have been better suited to him than Akira Anno. She would have looked after him like she looked after Colin – nagging him, cajoling him, but at the end of the day doing everything she could to make him happy.

‘How well do you know Adrian Lockwood?’ I asked.

She stopped mid-bite. ‘I thought I told you that the last time you were here. He was introduced to me as a client but he’s become a sort of friend. Why do you ask?’

‘No particular reason.’

‘I miss having a man in the house.’ She looked genuinely wistful. ‘I know I shouldn’t say it in this day and age but I’m absolutely useless without a man. There isn’t a moment I don’t miss Charlie. I never get anything right. I can’t work out the buttons on the TV remote control. Parking the car is a nightmare even though it’s only a Toyota Prius and it isn’t that big. I forget to put the clocks back and I wake up an hour early or an hour late or whatever it is. I hate taking the rubbish out, and you try putting on a duvet cover by yourself!’ She sighed. ‘Adrian was never happy with Akira. He never said as much to me, not in so many words, but I could tell. Women can, you know. We always know when something’s not right.’

While she was talking, I was nervously listening out for Hawthorne. He probably wouldn’t be too happy, me being here without him. He hated me asking questions even when he was in the room and I certainly didn’t want to say anything that might undermine his investigation, not after what had happened before. So I glanced at the book on the table and asked conversationally, ‘Have you been reading these?’

‘Oh yes. Someone gave them to me because they knew I was friends with Adrian.’ She gestured at it vaguely. ‘I don’t really understand them, to be honest with you. She’s far too clever for me.’

I picked it up. Like many books of poetry, Two Hundred Haikus was a fairly slim volume – only about forty pages long – and at £15 it wasn’t cheap either. But I suppose that’s fair enough. Poetry has limited sales and it’s rare that you’re going to find any poet’s work with a half-price sticker on the front table at Waterstones. It was a hardback with a tiny detail taken from a woodblock, I think by Hokusai, on the front cover. The haikus were arranged in groups of four or five on high-quality paper. There was a black and white photograph of Akira Anno on the back. She wasn’t smiling.

I was introduced to haikus when I was at school. I wasn’t a particularly bright child and I remember liking them because they were so short. It was Matsuo Bashō in the seventeenth century who made them famous. An ancient pond / A frog jumps in / The splash of water. It’s one of the few poems I can still quote in its entirety, although in the original Japanese it has five syllables in the first line, seven in the second and then another five in the third. That’s the whole point.

I cast my eye over Akira’s efforts, which were in English, though printed in curving black letters that imitated Japanese calligraphy. The book had been left open on haikus 174–181 (each one was numbered, with no title). On an impulse, I turned the page and my eye was immediately drawn to haiku 182 at the top of the page.

You breathe in my ear

Your every word a trial

The sentence is death

182.

The number painted on the wall next to the dead body of Richard Pryce.