The Sentence Is Death

I had stopped at Waterstones Piccadilly on the way to meet Hawthorne and had picked up a copy of Prisoners of Blood, the third book in the Doomworld series. Mark Belladonna had been given pride of place on one of the tables in the circular entrance hall and, standing there, I read a few pages. I wanted to remind myself just how terrible it was: the awful language, the use of clichés, its near-pornographic relish. The books must have made Dawn Adams a ton of money, and as I’d learned from my time with Hawthorne, money and murder have a way of going hand in hand. I was certain that he would want to interrogate the publisher soon. She was, after all, Akira’s only alibi – and also lingering in my mind was the question of what the two women might have in common. After all, their literary tastes could hardly have been further apart. I had dipped back into Prisoners of Blood in the hope that it might answer, at least in part, some of that question. It hadn’t.

I put the book down, then walked the short distance to Green Park station, thinking about the theory I had outlined to Cara Grunshaw. It was becoming ever more likely that Adrian Lockwood could be the killer. What I had told her was true. He had a motive and according to Akira, he had known haiku 182. I had actually seen a copy of the book in his house. Could he have painted the number on the wall at Heron’s Wake as some bizarre statement of revenge?

Hawthorne was waiting at the station and seeing him I was tempted to ask about his relationship with Kevin, how the two of them had met and what exactly was the arrangement they had made between them. Was he paying the teenager for his work or was it just something Kevin did for fun? And there were wider implications. He always seemed to know where I was and what I was doing. Was this down to brilliant detective work or was he simply hacking into my emails?

I wanted to confront him but decided against it. I could use Kevin to find out about Hawthorne. It would be much easier than the other way round.

We set off together, walking up towards Hyde Park Corner. It wasn’t quite raining but there was a fine mist hanging in the air. This was that dead time of the year, after the summer holidays and before the excitement of Guy Fawkes Night, with the Christmas decorations waiting just round the corner to go up. Every year, they seemed to come sooner.

‘I read what you gave me,’ he said, affably.

It took me a moment to realise that he was talking about the pages I had given him describing my meeting with Davina Richardson and my discovery of the haiku.

‘Oh,’ I said, carefully. ‘Were they helpful?’

‘You seem a bit nervous of me, mate, if you don’t mind my saying so.’ He thought for a moment, then quoted an extract almost word for word: ‘He wouldn’t be too happy, me being here without him. He hated me asking questions even when he was in the room . . .’

‘It’s absolutely true!’ I replied. ‘Every time I open my mouth you stare at me as if I’m a badly behaved schoolboy.’

‘It’s not that.’ He was offended. ‘I just don’t like you interrupting my train of thought. And you have to be careful what you say in front of suspects. You don’t want to give stuff away.’

‘I haven’t done that.’

Hawthorne grimaced.

‘Have I?’ I was alarmed.

‘I hope not. But actually, what you wrote was pretty helpful. The thing about you, Tony, is you write stuff down without even realising its significance. You’re a bit like a travel writer who doesn’t know quite where he is.’

‘That’s not true!’

‘Yeah. It’s like you’re in Paris and you write how you’ve seen this big, tall building made of metal but you forget to mention that it might be worth a visit.’

This was completely unfair. I wrote what I saw and almost everything that Hawthorne said. Of course, I had to choose which details I chose to describe – otherwise the book would run into thousands of pages. Take Adrian Lockwood’s house, for example. I had mentioned the bilberries he was eating not because they necessarily had anything to do with the crime – they almost certainly didn’t – but because they were there and seemed vaguely noteworthy. At the same time, I hadn’t mentioned that he had cut himself shaving that morning. There had been a nick on the side of his chin. Of course, if it turned out to be significant, if his hand had been trembling after he murdered Richard Pryce, then I would go back and put it in the second draft. This is how it all works.

‘So how did I help you?’ I asked. ‘Maybe you can let me know which Eiffel Tower I managed to describe without actually knowing it was there?’

‘Well, Davina went on at you about all the things she couldn’t do without a man in her life. I thought that was interesting.’

‘She’s a single mother with a teenaged son.’

‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’