The Sentence Is Death

‘But what really did it for me was that moment at Daunt’s. Didn’t you see the look on her face when you were caught nicking Prisoners of Blood? She was horrified. I thought she was going to be sick. But it wasn’t just because you’d stolen a book, it was because you’d chosen that book. She thought you must have rumbled her.’

It was true. She had said nothing. She hadn’t even looked at me. Her eyes had been glued to the book.

‘It still seems quite a leap,’ I said.

‘Not really. She’s a writer and like all writers she’s a bit of an egotist so she couldn’t completely abandon authorship of her crap stories. The last four letters of Belladonna are her own name backwards. And three of the letters in Akira turn up in Mark. I’m surprised you didn’t see that, mate.’

I was surprised too. I do the Times crossword every day. I love anagrams, codes, acronyms . . .

I was still trying to piece it all together. ‘What you said about King’s Cross just now. Was that true? Was Gregory Taylor trying to send a message?’

‘Yes, he was. Just not the message you think.’

What message was that? And had we just eliminated Akira Anno from our enquiries? Both she and Dawn Adams had been insulted by Richard Pryce and they had provided each other with an alibi on the night of the murder. Added to which, Pryce had been investigating Akira’s income. Suppose he had stumbled onto the truth about Mark Belladonna? That would have given them both a powerful incentive to kill him.

I thought I’d narrowed the list of suspects down to one of five. Now it had slipped back up to half a dozen.

20 Green Smoke

‘You do realise that Akira is trying to land me in it. There’s nothing she’d like more than to see me arrested for something I didn’t do. I mean, all that stuff she said about me. I don’t have a violent temper! If I did, I can tell you, I’d have done her in years ago. She was the most annoying person I ever met. She’d have tried the patience of a Shinto saint – and probably did, for all I know.

‘As for that bloody haiku of hers, yes, she showed it to me. She seemed to think it was terribly clever but I’m afraid it went right over my head. The sentence is death? What’s that meant to mean exactly? She took a great deal of pleasure in reading it to me but she might as well have been quoting from a Japanese washing-machine manual for all the sense it made.’

The strange thing about Adrian Lockwood was that even when he was in a bad mood, as he was now, he still seemed quite laid-back and jovial. The sunglasses and ponytail were still in place, along with the white shirt splayed open at the neck. His office was less extravagant than his house, a utilitarian set of suites so lacking in style that it could have belonged to one of those management companies that lease space by the month, and I suspected that he didn’t come here very often. The laptop that Lofty Pinkerman had hacked into was on the desk in front of him. He was in a padded leather chair, bent several ways to follow the contours of his body. He was sitting with his hands folded behind his head.

‘And if either of us was going to paint that number on the wall, it would have been her. What did you say it was? A hundred and eighty-two? Do you really think I’d have been able to remember that? It could just as easily have been the one about the flower blossoming in the car park or the sparrowhawk losing its feathers or any of the other rubbish she saw fit to print.’

‘The haiku was about you,’ Hawthorne said.

‘Was it?’

‘Akira told you so. And anyway, you’d have remembered the number quite easily.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s the date of your marriage! You told us you got married just after your birthday – on the eighteenth of February.’ Hawthorne gave Lockwood one of his dangerous smiles: ‘18/2.’

I should have seen it for myself. I had been in the room when Lockwood told us the date. I had even made a note of it. But once again I had missed the connection.

‘Look!’ Lockwood spread his hands, metaphysically embracing us, man to man. ‘The marriage was a bloody disaster. I’ve already told you that—’

‘It was your second marriage to end in disaster,’ Hawthorne interrupted. ‘Your first wife, Stephanie Brook—’

‘You can leave her out of this!’ Lockwood was red-faced. This was a side of him I hadn’t seen before. ‘That’s completely out of order. The fact is, you’re as bad as some of those scum journalists who reported it. Stephanie was a lovely girl, lovely, and for a time we were happy together. But she was a mess. She drank and she took recreational drugs and in the end she died in Barbados. But I wasn’t even on the boat when it happened. It was a tragic accident. Maybe she killed herself, like they said. I don’t know. I don’t think it makes much difference when you fool around with that stuff. At any event, it’s got nothing to do with what happened to Richard.’

‘Except that in both instances, you were involved.’

‘I wasn’t anywhere near Richard either.’

‘You were in Highgate. Not so far.’