The Word Is Murder(25)

Hawthorne was undoubtedly clever. I’d been impressed by the way his mind worked when we were together at the house in Britannia Road, and he’d quickly been proved right about the cleaner and the stolen money. And, for that matter, the disappearing cat. Detective Inspector Meadows might not have been pleased to see him but I had got the sense that there was a grudging respect and someone high up in the Metropolitan Police clearly had a high opinion of him too. You got a new puppy! I remembered how quickly he had pinned me down – where I’d been, what I was doing. He was clever all right. He might even be brilliant.

The trouble was, I didn’t like him very much and that made the book almost impossible to write. The relationship between an author and his main protagonist is a very peculiar one. Take Alex Rider, for example. I’d been writing about him for over ten years and although I sometimes envied him (he never aged, everyone liked him, he had saved the world a dozen times) I was always fond of him and eager to get back to my desk to follow his adventures. Of course, he was my creation. I controlled him and made sure that I pressed all the right buttons for a young audience. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t swear. He didn’t have a gun. And he certainly wasn’t homophobic.

That was what was preying on my mind: Hawthorne’s reaction to Raymond Clunes. I really had been shocked by what he had said outside the house. I didn’t even understand why he’d opened up to me in that way when he was so secretive about everything else.

There are some people who argue that we are too sensitive these days, that because we’re so afraid of causing offence, we no longer engage in any serious sort of argument at all. But that’s how it is. It’s why political chat-shows on television have become so very boring. There are narrow lines between which all public conversations have to take place and even a single poorly chosen word can bring all sorts of trouble down on your head.

I remember once that I was asked about gay marriage on a radio programme. This was at a time when a Christian husband and wife with a hotel in Cornwall had refused to give a room to a gay couple. I was careful. To begin with, I made it clear that I was one hundred per cent in favour of gay marriage and that I didn’t agree with the hotel owners at all. However, having established that, I went on to say that we should try to understand their point of view, which was at least based on some sort of religious conviction (even if I didn’t share it), and that perhaps they didn’t deserve the hate mail and the death threats they had received. We need to tolerate intolerance. I thought that was a neat encapsulation of what I believed.

It didn’t prevent a torrent of abuse hitting my Twitter feed. A couple of teachers wrote to me to say that my books would never appear in their schools again. Someone else thought all my books should be burned. These days, the world sees things in black and white, so although it may be all right for a twenty-first-century novelist to create a character who is homophobic, it will be much more sensible if that character is palpably vile, the villain of the piece.

Sitting in my office, gazing out of the window at the red lights twinkling on the cranes that had sprung up all over Farringdon during the construction of Crossrail, I asked myself if I could continue working with Hawthorne. What had drawn me into this in the first place and what possible benefit could I get from pursuing it any further? It would be much better to drop him now, before I was fully committed, and get on with other things. It was past midnight now and I was getting tired. The Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West, the book I was supposed to be reading, lay face down next to my computer. I reached out and dragged it towards me. That was where I should be spending my time. The 1940s were so much safer.

And that was when my phone pinged. I looked down at the screen. It was a text from Hawthorne.

Unico Cafe

Harrow on the Hill

9.30am. Breakfast.



Harrow-on-the-Hill was where the Godwins lived. He was telling me that that was where he was going next.

I really wanted to know who had killed Diana Cowper. That was the truth of it. Like it or not, I was involved. I had stood in her living room and I had got a sense of how she had lived … and died. I had seen the stain on the carpet. I wanted to know who had sent her that letter and if it was the same person who had taken her cat. Hawthorne had told me that she knew she was going to die. How was that possible and if it was the case, why hadn’t she gone to the police? Most of all, I wanted to meet the Godwin family and Jeremy Godwin in particular – ‘the boy who was lacerated’. One day I might come upon the solution to the mystery in a newspaper article. Hawthorne might even get someone else to write the book for him. But that wasn’t good enough.

I wanted to be there myself.

It occurred to me that I could make up my own rules. Who had said that I had to write down everything exactly as it happened? There was absolutely no need to mention what Hawthorne had said about Raymond Clunes. For that matter, I could remove any reference to the black and white photograph and the other artwork that had sparked the whole thing off. In fact, I could describe him in any way I wanted. There was nothing to stop me making him younger, wittier, softer, more charming. It was my book! He wouldn’t read it until it was published and by then it would be too late. He wouldn’t care anyway, so long as it sold.

At the same time, I knew I couldn’t do it. Hawthorne had approached me and he was what he was. If I changed him, it would be the first ripple in the pond, the start of a process that would shift everything back into the world of fiction. I could see myself reinventing all the people he spoke to and all the different places he went. That bloody Robert Mapplethorpe would be the first to go. What, then, would be the point? I might just as well go back to what I always did and make up the whole thing.