The Sentence Is Death

‘All right.’ He frowned. ‘If you really must know, she was wearing him out . . . all her demands. He set up her business. He put her son through private education. He was always round there, listening to her problems. But it was never enough. She was bleeding him dry to get more clients who wanted interior decorating and for what it’s worth, he didn’t even much like her taste. It was all reds and yellows and that horrible shade of green. “Gangreen”, he called it! He was desperate to get her out of his life but he couldn’t do it because of what had happened in Yorkshire. I never understood it, personally. It wasn’t as if it had been his fault. I told him to tell her to fuck off – and maybe he did. Maybe he finally got her out of his system.’

‘Do you think she killed him?’ Hawthorne asked, a little more gently.

Spencer shook his head. ‘No. I’ve already told you. It was Akira. I was there in the restaurant when she threatened him and I heard it with my own ears. And there was something else . . .’

He paused for effect and for the first time I glanced around the gallery, at the oil paintings and watercolours displayed on the walls, each one carefully isolated in its private pool of light. It would have made a perfect setting if anyone had chosen to film this.

‘Richard was on to her,’ Spencer continued. ‘He told me that he’d had her investigated. You need to talk to Graham Hain at Navigant business management. He’s a forensic accountant who worked with Richard and he’d discovered that Akira had a limited company and an income stream that she didn’t want anyone to know about. Richard thought she was doing something illegal.’

‘Like what?’ In fact we already knew this. Oliver Masefield had told us as much, although he had put it less baldly.

‘He didn’t say. But she’d done everything she could to keep it hidden and it might have had an impact on the divorce. Both sides have to say how much they’re worth and he knew she was lying.’

Hawthorne made a mental note of it. He never wrote down anything. He had a prodigious memory – and of course he had me. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ he asked.

‘I was upset when you saw me in Hampstead and I wasn’t thinking straight. That’s also why I lied to you about Faraz. I didn’t want to drag him into this, but the truth is that I really don’t have anything to hide. Now, if you don’t mind, I have work to do.’

Spencer padded off towards the office. Hawthorne didn’t try to stop him.

Back out in the street, I turned on him.

‘You can’t behave that way!’ I exclaimed. ‘What happened in there . . . that Ali Baba joke, your whole attitude. You can’t talk like that!’

‘I did what I had to.’ For once, I’d taken Hawthorne by surprise. ‘I had to get under his skin, Tony. Don’t you see it? He’s standing in his smart gallery, surrounded by a million quid’s worth of art. And he’s lying to us! He thinks he can get away with it. I had to break him down and that’s what I did.’

‘But I can’t put that sort of stuff in the book,’ I said.

‘Why not?’

‘People won’t like it.’ I paused. ‘They won’t like you.’

That jolted him. Just for a second I saw the vulnerability, the child he had once been, spark in his eyes and before he could stop himself he asked: ‘Do you like me?’

I wasn’t sure how to answer. ‘I don’t know,’ I stammered eventually.

He looked at me.

‘I don’t need you to fucking like me. I just need you to write the fucking book.’

We stood there, staring at each other. There was nothing more to say.

14 Daunt’s Bookshop

Daunt’s is one of my favourite bookshops in London. It’s halfway down Marylebone High Street, which itself has a pleasant, old-fashioned feel; more a neighbourhood than a shopping precinct. Every time I go in – and it’s not that far from where I live – I get a sense that I’m stepping back into a more civilised city. (Charing Cross Road used to be the same until high rents drove most of the second-hand bookshops away.) It actually occupies two shops, 83 and 84, knocked together with two doorways and two corridors, one on either side of a sales desk that forms a sort of island in between. The interior has the feel of a Methodist chapel, complete with the reticulated window at the end. The books are stacked on old wooden shelves and as an added quirk they are listed not by author or by subject but by country. Everything feels very narrow. About halfway in, a staircase disappears down to a basement, leaving a rectangular space on the other side where authors are invited to give talks. I have given one or two there myself.