The Twist of a Knife

‘Forget it, Dad!’ Olivia interrupted her father. ‘Of course we’re both suspects. We both hated her.’

‘But I wasn’t at home when it happened. I was at school.’

‘I’ve talked to your school,’ Hawthorne remarked. ‘You had no lesson from nine thirty to ten fifteen. You told us you had witnesses at the school, but in fact it would have been easy for you to leave. You had your bicycle. Ten minutes each way and two minutes to get rid of her …’

Arthur Throsby fell silent. ‘I didn’t touch her!’ he muttered.

Hawthorne was unmoved. ‘Any one of you could have done it,’ he continued. ‘And as it happens, none of you can fully account for your movements at the time she died. Easy enough to slip out of Starbucks without being noticed.’ That was Olivia. ‘You could have gone on a cigarette break.’

‘I don’t smoke,’ Olivia said.

Hawthorne ignored this. ‘Martin Longhurst has ninety minutes unaccounted for between leaving this theatre and arriving at his office. We don’t know where Jordan Williams was at that time.’

‘You didn’t ask me,’ Jordan protested.

‘You want me to ask you now?’

‘I was at home, in bed.’

‘I wish people wouldn’t tell so many lies. It does make my job very difficult.’ Hawthorne shook his head sadly. ‘But we’ll get to all that in a minute. The point is, the crime itself was very straightforward and, more than that, the killer was obvious from the start. He’d threatened Harriet on the night of the party and he’d made it clear that he thought she should be dead. He knew where she lived. He was seen on CCTV near her flat. He used a murder weapon that could only have belonged to him and he stupidly left his fingerprints on the hilt. He dropped a hair at the scene of the crime and he managed to get some cherry blossom, identical to the sort that grows in Palgrove Gardens, on his coat. Worse still, it turns out that Harriet may not have been the only theatre critic he’s killed.’

‘Who are you talking about?’ Sky Palmer asked.

‘I think you all know who I mean.’

‘He’s talking about Anthony,’ Cara Grunshaw called out, her voice expanding into the great emptiness around her. ‘So if you’ve said your piece, Hawthorne, maybe we can arrest him and everyone can go home.’

There was a brief silence. I could feel everyone looking at me.

‘I always knew it was him,’ Maureen said. She turned to Ahmet. ‘The first time he walked into the office, I warned you against him. All the violence in that play! You can’t write things like that without being disturbed.’

‘That’s not true,’ Ewan remarked, unexpectedly taking my side. ‘Shakespeare wrote some extremely violent tragedies. Look at the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear or the multiple killings in Titus Andronicus, some of them utterly disgusting, and yet—’

‘I think we can manage without a lecture in English drama, thanks all the same,’ Hawthorne cut in. ‘The point is, if it was Tony, why are there still so many unanswered questions?’

‘What unanswered questions?’ Cara demanded.

‘I can think of half a dozen straight off.’ Hawthorne counted them out on his fingers.

‘Why were there three broken cigarettes in the dustbin in the green room? Why did Ewan Lloyd have a premonition that something bad was going to happen as he left the theatre that night? Why was a light bulb deliberately broken on the ground floor? How did Sky Palmer manage to read Harriet’s review when it hadn’t been posted on the internet? Why did Jordan Williams lie about the time he left the theatre and why did Maureen Bates agree to help him?’

‘I did nothing of the sort!’ Maureen sniffed.

‘But let’s imagine for a minute that, as improbable as it sounds, DI Grunshaw got it wrong and Tony didn’t commit the murder. Now we’ve got another, bigger question to consider. Why did someone deliberately set out to frame him? A lot of the evidence is circumstantial. The CCTV camera only shows someone wearing a jacket that’s similar to Tony’s. There are actually quite a few Yoshino cherry trees in different parts of London including, as it happens, one in St John’s Gardens, which is where he walks his dog. Did he know Harriet’s address? Perhaps not. But the knife with his fingerprints and a strand of his hair found on the body. There’s no arguing with that. Either he was incredibly clumsy or they were deliberately planted. So what had he done to upset anyone so much that they wanted to see him in jail?’

‘He wrote the play,’ Tirian said.

‘That seems a bit harsh,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘Like killing Harriet because she wrote a bad review. Maybe I’m biased, but I don’t believe Tony did it and I certainly don’t think he did it because he was pissed off by a review.

‘And here’s the last thing. How many murders are we investigating here? Harriet Throsby was the start. But she also wrote a book about a teacher who was killed in Wiltshire and it turns out that one of the killers was Martin Longhurst’s kid brother, Stephen.’