The Sentence Is Death

Except, of course, for the models. I had discovered Hawthorne’s liking for Airfix kits on my first visit and although he had been sheepish at first, he had allowed his enthusiasm to take over and this had led to one of our very few conversations that wasn’t about crime. The surfaces were crowded with tanks, jeeps, ambulances, anti-aircraft guns, battleships, aircraft carriers and so on, while dozens of different aircraft dangled from the ceiling on wires. I noticed the Chieftain Mark 10 that he had been working on the last time I came. It had been perfectly assembled, with not a smear of glue nor a paint stroke out of place. The collection must have taken up thousands of hours of his time. I could imagine Hawthorne, hunched over the table, working into the night. They would also be hours when he could completely cut himself off from the world outside.

I had asked him when he had started model-making. It was a hobby when I was a kid. The more time I spent with Hawthorne, the more I suspected that something traumatic must have happened to him when he was young and it had created the adult he had become. I don’t just mean the casual homophobia, the moodiness, his attitude to me. Becoming a detective, marrying, separating, living alone in an empty flat, making models . . . all of it seemed to be driven by the same catastrophe, which might have happened in Yorkshire and which might have led him to change his name.

‘You’ve started a new model,’ I said.

It was spread out on the table, a helicopter with RAF RESCUE printed on the side.

‘Westland Sea King,’ he said. ‘WS-61. Used in the Falklands, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan . . . Search and Rescue. You want that drink?’

‘Do you have any wine?’

‘No. I’ve got some rum.’

‘That’s fine.’

Hawthorne didn’t drink. He had never told me that but nor had I ever seen him with anything alcoholic. Even at the Station Inn in Ribblehead he’d stuck to water. I followed him into the kitchen, which connected to the living area through a wide doorway. You can learn a lot about someone from their kitchen – but this one was useless. Everything was high-end, brand new and looked as clean as the day it had been fitted. It doesn’t matter how many times I clean my own flat, I’m always embarrassed by the oven, which greets visitors with the carbonised memories of a hundred meals. Hawthorne’s oven had pristine glass doors and silver gas rings that I doubted had ever been switched on.

And there, standing on a marble counter, was the bottle of rum he had offered me. Had he gone out and bought it? I thought it was more likely that he had been given it by someone as a gift, like Richard Pryce and his £2,000 bottle of wine. Either way, the plastic around the cap was unbroken. Along with the single glass that had been placed next to it, it was somehow totemic. I knew at once that this was the only alcohol in the house and that it had been placed there deliberately for me.

Hawthorne went to the fridge and opened the door. Casually, trying not to look too nosy, I turned my head to examine the contents. I wasn’t surprised to see that the interior was as clinical as the rest of the kitchen. In my house, we either have too much food or none at all and there are times when I find myself furiously ransacking the fridge to find the single ingredient I need. Hawthorne’s fridge was monastic by comparison. He mainly seemed to eat ready meals. There were about half a dozen of them in plastic trays, stacked so neatly and with so much space around them that they had become quite unappetising, like an artwork by Damien Hirst. The vegetable trays were half empty, although I could see what looked like a bunch of carrots through the frosted plastic. It was the fridge of a man who had no particular interest in food. He would take out a packet and microwave it and he might not even examine the lid to see what he was going to eat. Now, he plucked a can of Coke out of the door, took some ice from the freezer and brought them over to the table.

‘You’re not going to join me,’ I said.

‘I’ve got some coffee.’ There was a single white mug beside the sink. I hadn’t noticed it before.

Two lumps of ice, about an inch of rum, half the can, a slice of lemon that he produced from somewhere . . . he made the drink mechanically, but slid it towards me with a certain pride. Again, as so often with Hawthorne, I got a sense of a child playing at being an adult.

He took his coffee, then sat down at the table. I produced four folded sheets of paper out of my pocket and slid them across. ‘These are the pages you wanted,’ I said, still keeping my distance.

‘What pages?’

‘From the book. When I met Davina Richardson without you. You said you wanted to see them.’

‘Oh. Right.’ He placed them to one side. He didn’t even open them.

‘You could at least say thank you.’