The Sentence Is Death

‘That’s right. And it was the pedal that made that hole in the soil. Then Colin rang the door. Richard opened it and of course he was surprised to see him. “It’s a bit late.” Yes, it was. Eight o’clock at night in a quiet part of Hampstead. That is late for a kid to be out on his own.

‘Richard invited him in. He could probably see that Colin was upset, although he had no idea what had brought him to the house. He got them both a drink. You remember what we saw on the table in his study?’

‘Two cans of Coke.’

‘Exactly. There was alcohol in the house but Richard didn’t drink it – and nor did his visitor. That’s one of the reasons I figured it wasn’t Davina. She drinks like a fish. Again, who drinks Coca-Cola at eight o’clock in the evening?’

‘A child.’

‘To be honest with you, Tony, there were a lot of things about this murder that struck me as childish. I mean, that number on the wall for a start! What sort of person bludgeons someone to death and then wastes time painting cryptic messages for the police to find?’

‘But what did it mean? Had he read the haiku?’

‘No, no, no, one eight two had nothing to do with the haiku. That was just Davina making things up. You’ve got to get inside Colin’s head. When I first walked into that room, before we’d even heard of Akira Anno and her stupid poetry, I told you what it might mean.’

‘You said it could be a bus route, the name of a restaurant . . .’

‘. . . or an abbreviation used in texting. That’s something a teenager would know all about, isn’t it ?’

‘What does one eight two mean? In texting.’

‘I hate you.’ Hawthorne smiled. ‘He couldn’t really have put it more clearly, could he?’

‘But why did he do that? You say you understand the way he was thinking. But I can’t imagine why any kid would do a thing like that.’

‘Who was Colin’s favourite author – after he stopped reading your books?’ Hawthorne asked. ‘His mum told you. And the funny thing is, the same writer seems to have been tiptoeing along three paces behind us ever since we started this investigation.’

‘Conan Doyle!’

‘Sherlock bloody Holmes. That’s right! Didn’t the parallels jump out at you when we were reading A Study in Scarlet at the book group? I quite liked the book, by the way. I think the others were a bit hard on it and for what it’s worth, A Multitude of Gods is fucking unreadable. I’m not sure I’ll get to the end . . .’

‘What parallels, Hawthorne?’

‘The writing on the wall! Enoch Drebber is poisoned in Lauriston Gardens and the killer writes “RACHE” on the wall . . . not in paint but in blood. And then at the end of the book, in Utah, numbers keep appearing all over John Ferrier’s house. It’s a warning from the Mormon elders.’

‘What? He copied it?’

‘Or he could have been thinking of The Sign of Four.’

Hawthorne sighed, then began again.

‘Look, maybe Colin didn’t mean to kill Richard Pryce. Maybe he went over there just to shout at him. He probably wanted to get a bit of teenaged angst off his chest and tell his loving godfather to fuck off out of his life. But you can imagine it. Things get out of hand. Colin starts by accusing him of leaving his dad on his own in the bottom of a flooded cave. To start with, Richard denies it, but he’s smart enough to know that the game is up. So he tries to explain himself – but that just makes things worse. Colin is shouting at him. Richard tries to calm him down. Maybe he even puts a hand on him and that makes Colin think he’s gay and that he’s trying it on. Anything’s possible. But the point is, he completely loses it and then he sees the bottle of wine that Richard’s got on his desk or somewhere in the room. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He picks it up and he smashes it into his godfather’s face and then he stabs him and he stabs him and the next thing he knows, he’s standing over a dead body with blood and wine everywhere.

‘What next? Now he’s scared. He’s committed murder. He’s got to cover his tracks and because he’s a kid, and not even a very bright kid, he thinks of Sherlock Holmes. He remembers the paint pots he saw in the hallway and he gets a brush and paints a number on the wall, just like in a Sherlock Holmes story. And the first number that comes into his head is one that he knows well and exactly expresses what he’s feeling. I hate you.’

He stopped. I couldn’t have written it any better than the way it had just been described.

‘It didn’t end there,’ Hawthorne went on. ‘When we went to see Davina Richardson, he came into the kitchen and he couldn’t resist joining in. By now the cocky little sod probably thought he’d got away with it, so he decided to spin us a story, again straight out of Sherlock Holmes. Richard Pryce is being followed. And it can’t be anyone normal. There’s something wrong with his face. That was what he told us.’

‘I thought he was talking about Lofty.’