The Sentence Is Death

‘Lofty won’t win any beauty prizes but there’s nothing particularly wrong with his appearance. And also he wasn’t following Richard Pryce. He was working for him! No. There’s a story – ‘The Yellow Face’. It starts with a client, Grant Munro, who says he’s seen a ghastly face watching him from an upstairs window. You look in your notes. I think you’ll find Colin used almost exactly those words.’

I was embarrassed. I should have been the one to know all this, not Hawthorne. I was the one who had written about Sherlock Holmes. His shadow had been there the whole time. I’d even spent a whole evening talking about the books. But maybe because they were written more than a century ago, I hadn’t seen their relevance to the case we were pursuing.

‘When did his mother know?’ I asked. ‘Was she protecting him all along?’

Hawthorne hesitated and I realised he wished I hadn’t asked that. And suddenly I was wishing it too. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘she only found out when you told her.’

My wound was throbbing. I could taste the sugar in the hot chocolate sticking to my lips. ‘Go on,’ I said.

‘I did warn you about chipping in when I’m interviewing someone,’ Hawthorne said. ‘And the thing is, the first time we were with Davina Richardson, without meaning to you changed everything.’

‘What did I say?’

‘You told her about the number written on the wall. And you said it was written in green paint.’

‘What was so bad about that?’

‘Do you remember what was happening in the kitchen when we were there?’

I cast my mind back. ‘She was smoking. There were plates in the sink.’

‘And the washing machine was on. She was washing Colin’s clothes. She’d already told us that he couldn’t look after himself, that he was always in a mess. My guess is that he’d come home on Sunday night with green paint on his jacket or shirt and probably quite a lot of blood and wine too. He’d have washed those out himself in the sink or covered them with mud or whatever – but the green paint he couldn’t get rid of. Mum found the clothes, still stained, and put them in the wash. It explains why, the moment you mentioned green paint, she got up and stood against the washing machine and she never moved, as if she didn’t want us to see what was on the other side of the round window. She also got Colin out of the room as fast as she possibly could. She’d been pleased enough to see him when he came down, but suddenly it was bath night and homework and all the rest of it. She was terrified he would give himself away.

‘That was when she started changing her story – or adapting it. All of a sudden, Colin – who’s tall for his age and can certainly look after himself – is being bullied at school. It was darling uncle Richard who sorted it out. Richard and Colin were inseparable. He was just a sweet kid in need of a dad. No way the little chap would go round and batter him to death with a bottle.

‘It didn’t stop there. The next time we went round to Priory Gardens – and this time she made sure Colin wasn’t there – she had it all set up. She had to divert our attention. If we weren’t going to suspect her son, there had to be someone else in the frame. The person she picked was Adrian Lockwood. He might have been her lover but she would sacrifice him in the blink of an eye to save her kid. Maybe she knew the significance of one eight two. Maybe Colin had told her what it meant. Well, she’d got an answer for that too. First of all she fed you that haiku. Did you really think that book, brand new by the way, just happened to be lying there – and just one page away from the poem she wanted you to see?’

‘I was the one who turned the page.’

‘If you hadn’t, she’d have done it for you. But you were looking at haiku 181. It was in front of your eyes. Even an idiot would have thought of seeing what came next.’

‘Thank you.’

‘She knew the poem connected with Adrian Lockwood because the eighteenth of February was the date of his wedding. And then she gave you that spiel about how hard it was to live alone, how she always forgot to put the clocks back. And if that wasn’t enough, just in case you hadn’t picked up on it the first time, she said it again while I was there. “I went out at half past four. No! I mean half past three. I keep getting confused!” Laying it on with a trowel! What she was doing, of course, was deliberately destroying Adrian Lockwood’s alibi. She wanted us to believe that he had left an hour earlier, which would have given him plenty of time to pop in and murder Richard Pryce. She even mentioned he was angry with Richard, although she didn’t say why. She was just feeding him to us, bit by bit.’

‘And she put green paint on his sleeve.’

‘I wondered if you’d noticed it. Yes. That was her – what do you call it? French word . . .’

‘Her pièce de résistance.’

‘That’s the one.’ Hawthorne smiled.

‘You saw it too. You might have mentioned it.’