The Word Is Murder(16)
‘What shit? What fan?’
‘When I left.’
That was all he was going to say, so I made a mental note to follow it up later. Obviously, now wasn’t the right time. I opened the notebook which I had brought with me and took out a pen. ‘All right. While we’re sitting here, I want to ask you a few questions about yourself. I don’t even know where you live.’
He hesitated. This really was going to be blood out of a stone. ‘I’ve got a place in Gants Hill,’ he said at length. I’d often driven through Gants Hill, a suburb in north-east London, on the way to Suffolk.
‘Are you married?’
‘Yes.’ I could see that there was more to come but it took a while to arrive. ‘We’re not together any more. Don’t ask me about that.’
‘Do you support a football team?’
‘Arsenal.’ He said it without much enthusiasm and I suspected that if he was a football fan, he was a fairly casual one.
‘Do you go to the cinema?’
‘Sometimes.’ He was getting impatient.
‘What about music?’
‘What about it?’
‘Classical? Jazz?’
‘I don’t listen to music much.’
I’d been thinking of Morse and his love of opera but that had just gone out of the window too. ‘Do you have children?’
He swiped the cigarette out of his lips, holding it like a poison dart, and I saw that I’d pushed too hard, too soon. ‘This isn’t going to work,’ he snapped and at that moment I could easily imagine him in a police station, in an interrogation room. He was looking at me with something close to contempt. ‘You can write what you like about me. You can make it all up if you want to. What difference does it make? But I’m not going to play fucking University Challenge with you now or at any time. I’ve got a dead woman and somebody strangled her in her own front room and that’s all that matters to me right at this moment.’ He snatched up one of the pages. ‘Do you want to look at this or not?’
I could have gone home right then. I could have forgotten the whole thing – and, given what happened later on, it might have been better if I had. But I had just left the murder scene. It was almost as if I knew Diana Cowper and for some reason – maybe it was the photographs I had seen, the violence of her death – I felt I owed her something.
I wanted to know more.
‘All right,’ I said. I put down my pen. ‘Show me.’
The page contained a screenshot of the text that Diana Cowper had sent to her son just before she died.
I have seen the boy who
was lacerated and I’m afraid
‘What do you make of that?’ he asked.
‘She was interrupted before she finished,’ I said. ‘There’s no full stop. She didn’t have time to say what she was afraid of.’
‘Or maybe she was just afraid. Maybe she was too afraid to worry about the full stop at the end of the sentence.’
‘Meadows was right. It doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Then maybe this will help.’ Hawthorne pulled out three more pages, copies of newspaper articles written ten years before.
DAILY MAIL – FRIDAY, 8 JUNE 2001
TWIN BOY KILLED IN HIT-AND-RUN HORROR
His brother is in critical condition but doctors say he will recover.
An eight-year-old boy was fighting for his life and his twin brother was killed by a short-sighted motorist who ploughed into both children before driving off.
Jeremy Godwin was left with injuries which include a fractured skull and a severe laceration of the brain. His brother, Timothy, died instantly.
The accident took place at half past four on Thursday afternoon on The Marine in the coastal resort of Deal, Kent.
The two boys, who have been described as ‘inseparable’, were returning to their hotel with their nanny, 25-year-old Mary O’Brien. She told the police: ‘The car came round the corner. The driver didn’t even try to slow down. She hit the children and drove straight off. I’ve been with the family for three years and I’m devastated. I couldn’t believe she didn’t stop.’
Police have arrested a 52-year-old woman.
THE TELEGRAPH – SATURDAY, 9 JUNE 2001
POLICE ARREST SHORT-SIGHTED DRIVER WHO KILLED TWIN
The woman who killed eight-year-old twin, Timothy Godwin, and inflicted life-threatening injuries on his brother has been named as Diana Cowper. Mrs Cowper, 52, is a long-term resident of Walmer, Kent, and was returning from the Royal Cinq Ports Golf Club when the accident took place.
Mrs Cowper, who had been drinking at the club-house with friends, was not over the limit and witnesses have confirmed that she was not speeding. However, she was driving without her spectacles and in a test conducted by the police she was unable to read a registration plate 25 feet away.
Her lawyers have made the following statement. ‘Our client had spent the afternoon playing golf and was on her way home when the incident took place. She had unfortunately mislaid her glasses but thought she would be able to drive the relatively short distance without them. She admits that she panicked following the accident and drove straight home. However, she was fully aware of the seriousness of what she had done and contacted the police within two hours that same evening.’