The Sentence Is Death

Nothing. But then Davina’s fifteen-year-old son appeared, this time dressed in jeans and an oversized T-shirt with BREAKING BAD on the front. It was only the second time I had seen him. He was heavier and more adult than I remembered. Perhaps it was down to the way he was scowling, his eyes dark under his tangle of curly hair. The acne spot on his chin had got worse. I wondered how much of the conversation he had overheard.

‘Colin! What were you doing there?’ Davina asked. She would have gone over to him but Hawthorne was in the way.

‘Looks like he was listening through the doorway again,’ Hawthorne said. ‘He seems to make a habit of it.’

I felt I should intercede. Obviously this was no place for a teenaged boy to be. ‘I’ll take him upstairs,’ I said. I moved towards him.

‘Stay where you are, Tony!’ Hawthorne called out. ‘Haven’t you got it? She didn’t kill Richard Pryce. He did!’

It was too late. I had already reached him.

Then everything happened at once. Colin snatched something up from the kitchen surface. Davina cried out. Hawthorne started forward. Colin punched me hard in the chest. I fell back and Hawthorne grabbed hold of me. Colin turned and ran. I heard the front door open and close. And then I was looking in dismay at a kitchen knife with a six-inch blade, half of which was sticking out of my chest.

23 Partners in Crime?

It’s not easy to describe what happened in the next few minutes. It may well be that I was in shock and I was certainly in no mood to take notes. I remember Davina, sitting slumped and helpless at the table, hitting the vodka while Hawthorne took out his mobile phone. He called for an ambulance but not, at this stage, the police. I kept on staring at the knife, which looked like some alien object, and I couldn’t quite get my head around the fact that it was, at least for the moment, part of me. I wanted to pull it out but Hawthorne warned me not to touch it. He helped me into a chair and grabbed hold of the vodka bottle, pouring me a large shot. I needed it. I was feeling completely sick and with every minute that passed, the pain was getting worse. This wasn’t, of course, the first time I had been stabbed. I suppose that, looked at another way, the scene might have had a certain comic edge – but I certainly didn’t see it that way.

The ambulance arrived in less than ten minutes, although it felt a lot longer. I heard its siren as it raced towards us along Priory Gardens. I kept looking at my shirt, depressed that I had put on a new Paul Smith and it was ruined. At least there didn’t seem to be a great deal of blood and there was some relief in that. I don’t like the sight of blood at the best of times, particularly if it’s my own. Hawthorne was sitting close to me. Am I misremembering or did he actually hold on to my arm for a time? He really did seem to be concerned.

Meanwhile, Davina was completely out of it. ‘We need to find Colin!’ Her words drifted across the kitchen.

‘Not now,’ Hawthorne said.

She stood up. ‘I’m going to find him.’

Hawthorne pointed a finger at her. He didn’t shout, but there was such controlled fury in his voice that there could be no argument. ‘You stay right there!’

She sat down again.

And then the door opened and a team of paramedics came bursting in and hurried over to examine me. I have a feeling they took the knife out there and then, but again, I can’t be sure. They injected me with something and a few minutes later I was lying on my back with an oxygen mask on my face, being loaded into the ambulance for the short journey to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead.

As it turned out, the wound was nowhere near as bad as it looked. It was on the other side of my chest, away from my heart and it had missed all my other vital organs too. In fact it was only two inches deep. By the time Jill came to visit me later that evening, I was already sitting up in bed with a couple of stitches and a thick wodge of bandages, watching the news on TV.

She wasn’t amused. ‘You can’t keep ending your books with somebody trying to kill you,’ she said.

‘It’s only the second time it’s happened and anyway, he wasn’t trying to kill me,’ I told her. ‘He was just a kid. He thought I was going to grab hold of him and he panicked.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘I don’t know. I imagine the police will be looking for him.’

‘What about his mother?’

What about her? I supposed there was every chance she would be charged as an accessory to murder. I wouldn’t know until I’d spoken to Hawthorne. ‘She’s being questioned.’

Jill sat down on the end of the bed.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘When are they going to let you come home?’

‘Tomorrow morning.’

‘Is there anything you need?’

‘No. I’m fine.’

She looked at me with a mixture of worry and exasperation. ‘If you want my advice, you’ll leave this out of the book. People aren’t going to believe it and you’re going to look ridiculous.’

‘I’m not even thinking about the book at the moment.’

‘I wish you’d never met Hawthorne.’

‘Me too.’