The Sentence Is Death

‘So if she was, Richard wouldn’t have hesitated. He’d have upturned the entire judgement even though it would have harmed his own client. Adrian Lockwood wasn’t going to allow that to happen. He hated Akira and he didn’t want anything more to do with her. He may not have gone to the house meaning to kill Richard Pryce. The two of them could have had an argument. Akira told us he was violent. He could have picked up the bottle and—’

‘Wait a minute,’ Grunshaw cut in. ‘Lockwood had an alibi. He was with Davina Richardson in Highgate.’

‘He was only a few minutes away in a fast car.’

There was a brief silence at the end. Then: ‘Adrian Lockwood didn’t kill Richard Pryce,’ Cara said, flatly.

‘Do you know who did?’

‘I’m close. I could be making an arrest any time.’

Hawthorne had told me that he had narrowed the identity of the killer down to two possible suspects but I didn’t tell her that. Nor did I mention that I had myself narrowed it down to a possible five. DI Grunshaw had set this up as a race to the truth and she had decided to cheat every step of the way.

‘Keep in touch,’ she said and rang off.

I slunk out of bed and got into the shower. The conversation with Cara Grunshaw had unnerved me. As I stood there with the water hammering down, it all seemed so unfair. I had managed to spend fifty years without ever encountering people like her and now, suddenly, I was being threatened and roughed up in my own home. I was also seriously worried about Daunt’s. I had told Hawthorne that the story could destroy my career and it was true. For twenty years, the press had ignored me. Then, when Alex Rider began to sell in large numbers, and particularly after the film, they had been broadly supportive. But more recently it was as if someone had decided I had got too big for my boots and I had noticed my name turning up in diary pieces that were half true and resolutely hostile. A children’s author caught stealing from a much-loved bookshop would be more than a diary piece. This was 2013 and we were already moving towards the atmosphere of the bear pit where anyone who was even slightly in the public spotlight could find themselves torn down on the strength of a single accusation long before the allegations could actually be disproved.

Perhaps Grunshaw had been lying. It might be that the whole thing would go away, but in the end I decided I couldn’t take that chance. I got out of the shower, dried myself and got dressed. Then I went to see Hilda Starke.

Hilda had been my literary agent for about two years. It was she who had sold my novel The House of Silk to Orion Books as part of a three-book deal. A small, grey-haired woman with beady eyes and a fondness for quite masculine clothes, she ran her own agency with offices in Greek Street, Soho. I had only been there a couple of times – we usually met at restaurants or at my publishers – and I hadn’t been too impressed. Hilda occupied the third and fourth floors of a building above an Italian café, reached by a narrow and uneven flight of stairs. Today, there were no more than half a dozen people in the office, including two junior agents, a receptionist and a couple of assistants – but with small rooms and little light it still felt crowded.

I had rung ahead, of course, but she seemed surprised to see me. ‘What are you doing here? How’s the next book?’

For someone so petite, she had an extraordinary presence. I found her wearing a double-breasted jacket and wide-collared shirt, hunched over her desk, gazing into a laptop computer like a fortune-teller with a crystal ball – and I wouldn’t have put it past her to divine the future with her exhaustive knowledge of past deals, Nielsen charts and international trends. Ask her how many copies the last Harlan Coben has sold or what titles are trending on Amazon and she would have the answer without so much as touching the keypad. If Hilda was married – and she had never told me – her husband wouldn’t have got a word in edgeways. This was a woman who didn’t just go to bed with a book. She went to bed with a library.

I sat down opposite her. ‘I may have a problem.’

‘Have you started the next Sherlock Holmes?’

‘No.’

‘That is a problem. You know that Orion wants it by March. The House of Silk is doing well. You’ve slipped off the bestseller list but it’s a very crowded week.’ There was always a reason for a fall in sales: the weather, the time of year, other writers. I was still disappointed.

‘I’m writing another book about Hawthorne,’ I said.

She glared at me. She hadn’t actually been too pleased when I had told her the idea in the first place and she had only come round when she had managed to get a contract with Penguin Random House. ‘Why are you doing that?’ she asked. ‘They haven’t even published the first one yet.’

‘I didn’t really have any choice,’ I said. ‘Someone got killed.’

‘Who?’

‘His name was Richard Pryce. He was a divorce lawyer.’