The Word Is Murder(27)

We finished the breakfast in a moody silence. The waitress brought the bill. Hawthorne didn’t look at it. He was expecting me to pay.

‘That’s another thing,’ I said. ‘So far, I notice that I’ve paid for every coffee and every taxi fare. If we’re in this fifty-fifty, maybe we should split the expenses the same way.’

‘All right!’ He sounded genuinely surprised.

I was already regretting what I’d said. It was more a reaction to what had happened the day before than a genuine desire to share costs. I watched as he took out his wallet and produced a ten-pound note so limp and crumpled that but for the colour I would have been unsure of its denomination. He laid it on the table like an autumn leaf that’s been fished out of the gutter. There were no other notes in his wallet and even if my point had been justified, all I’d managed to do was to make myself seem petty and mean. That was just about the last time Hawthorne ever paid for anything, by the way. I never complained again.

We walked together from the café. I actually know Harrow-on-the-Hill quite well. We filmed quite a few scenes of Foyle’s War there, with the old-fashioned high street doubling as Hastings’. It’s amazing what a few seagulls added to the soundtrack can achieve. My first boarding school was nearby and it struck me how little the area had changed in fifty years. It was still a slightly improbable enclave, very green and unworldly, rising above the other north London suburbs that sprawled around.

‘So what did you get up to last night?’ I asked Hawthorne, as we continued on our way.

‘What?’

‘I just wondered what you did. Did you go out for dinner? Did you work on the case?’ He didn’t answer, so I added, ‘It’s for the book.’

‘I had dinner. I made some notes. I went to bed.’

But what did he eat? Who did he go to bed with? Did he watch TV? Did he even own a TV?

He wasn’t going to tell me and there wasn’t time to ask.

We had arrived at a Victorian house on Roxborough Avenue, three storeys high, built out of those dark red bricks that always make me think of Charles Dickens. It was set back from the main road with a gravel path and a double garage and from the very first sight it struck me that I had never seen a building that exuded a greater sense of misery – from the scrawny, half-wild garden to the peeling paintwork, the window boxes with dead flowers, the blank, unlit windows.

This was the home of the Godwins … or, at least, the three members of the family who had survived.





Eight


Damaged Goods




One of my favourite screenwriters is Nigel Kneale, the inventor of the eccentric Professor Quatermass. He wrote a chilling television play, The Stone Tape, which suggested that the very fabric of a house, the bricks and mortar, might be able to absorb and ‘play back’ the various emotions, including the horrors, that it had witnessed. I was reminded of it as I entered the Godwins’ home on Roxborough Avenue. It was an expensive house. Any property of this size in Harrow-on-the-Hill would have been worth a couple of million pounds. And yet the hall was cold – colder perhaps than it was outside – and poorly lit. It was crying out for redecoration. The carpets were a little threadbare with too many stains. There was a sense of something in the air that might have been damp or dry rot but was actually just misery, recorded and re-recorded until the memory bank was full.

The door had been opened by a woman in her fifties. She would have been about ten or fifteen years younger than Diana Cowper at the time of her death. She looked at us suspiciously, as if we had come to sell her something; in fact her entire body language was defensive. This was Judith Godwin. I could easily imagine her working for a charity. She had a brittle quality, as if she needed charity herself, but knew that she would never get it. The tragedy that had changed her life was still with her. When she asked you for help or for money it would always be personal.

‘You’re Hawthorne?’ she asked.

‘It’s very good to meet you.’ Hawthorne actually sounded as if he meant it and I saw that he had undergone another of his transformations. He had been hard with Andrea Kluvánek, coldly matter-of-fact with Raymond Clunes but now it was a polite and accommodating Hawthorne who presented himself to Judith Godwin. ‘Thank you for seeing us.’

‘Would you like to come into the kitchen? I’ll make us some coffee.’

Hawthorne hadn’t explained who I was and nor did she seem interested. We followed her into a room on the other side of the stairs. The kitchen was warmer but it was also drab and dated. It’s funny how much white goods tell you about a house and its owners. The fridge would have been expensive when it was installed but that was too long ago. The panels had a yellowy sheen, pockmarked with magnets and old Post-it notes containing recipes, telephone numbers, emergency addresses. The oven was greasy and the dishwasher worn out with overuse. There was a washing machine, grinding slowly round, murky water lapping at the window. The room was clean and tidy but it needed money spent on it. A Weimaraner with mangy fur and a grey muzzle lay half-asleep in the corner but thumped its tail as we came in.

Hawthorne and I sat down at an uncomfortably large pine table while Judith Godwin plucked a percolator out of the sink, washed it under the tap and set about making coffee. She talked to us as she worked. I could see she was the sort of woman who never did just one thing at a time. ‘You wanted to talk to me about Diana Cowper.’