The Word Is Murder(51)

‘Oh.’ I profoundly wished that I wasn’t here. Not for the first time, I wished that I’d never agreed to write this bloody book.

Hawthorne lit a cigarette.

‘Did you find anything upstairs?’ I asked.

‘There’s no-one else here,’ he said.

‘You knew he was going to be killed.’

‘I knew it was a possibility.’

‘How?’

He cupped his hand and tapped ash into his palm. I could see that he was reluctant to tell me. ‘I was stupid,’ he said, at last. ‘But when the two of us were here the first time, you distracted me.’

‘So it was my fault?’

‘I told you, when I’m talking to someone, I need to focus and when you interrupt, it sort of breaks what I’m thinking, my train of thought.’ He softened. ‘It was my fault. I’ll hold my hands up. I was the one who missed it.’

‘Missed what?’

‘Damian said that his mum came in and watered the plants on the terrace. He said she forwarded his mail. I should have remembered. When we were at Diana Cowper’s place, there were five hooks in the kitchen. Do you remember?’

‘They were on a wooden fish.’

‘That’s right. And there were four sets of keys. If Diana Cowper was coming in here while he was in LA, it followed that she had his keys but I didn’t see one with that label.’

‘There was an empty hook.’

‘That’s right. Someone kills her. They search the place. They notice the keys. And they take the opportunity to snatch them.’ He stopped and I saw him playing back what he had just said. ‘That’s one possibility anyway.’

I heard the stamp of feet on the stairs leading up to the front door and a moment later, two uniformed police constables arrived. They looked from the body to the two of us, trying to work out what was going on.

‘Stay right where you are,’ the first one said. ‘Who made the call?’

‘I did,’ Hawthorne said. ‘And you took your time getting here.’

‘Who are you, sir?’

‘Ex-Detective Inspector Hawthorne, formerly with MIT. I’ve already contacted DI Meadows. I’ve reason to believe that this murder may be connected to a current investigation. You’d better get in the local DI and the murder squad.’

The British police have a particular way of addressing each other, a formal and slightly tortuous turn-of-phrase, as in ‘I have reason to believe’ and ‘contacted’ instead of ‘called’. It’s one reason why I’ve always found them so difficult to dramatise on television. It’s hard to care about a character who talks in clichés. They also look so much less interesting than their American counterparts, with their white shirts, stab vests and those hopeless blue helmets. No guns. No sunglasses. These two policemen were young and earnest. One was Asian, the other white. They hardly spoke to us again.

One of them took out his radio and called in the situation while Hawthorne set about examining the room for himself. I watched him as he went over to the door that led out to the terrace. He was careful not to touch the handle, using a handkerchief which he pulled out of his pocket. The door was unlocked. He disappeared outside and although I was still feeling dreadful, I hauled myself out of the chair and followed. The policemen had made their calls. They didn’t seem to have anything else to do. They glanced uncertainly in my direction as I left. They hadn’t even asked who I was.

I felt better immediately, being out in the afternoon air. Like the interior of the flat, the terrace – with its deckchairs, potted plants and gas barbecue – reminded me of a studio set. It resembled the balcony where Joey and Chandler and the rest of them used to hang out in Friends, looking out towards the back of the building with a metal fire escape leading to an alleyway. Hawthorne was standing at the edge, gazing down. I noticed he had taken off his shoes, presumably to avoid leaving footprints. He was smoking again. He consumed a suicidal number of cigarettes a day; at least twenty, maybe more. He turned round as I approached.

‘He was waiting out here,’ he said. ‘By the time Damian Cowper got back from the funeral, he’d already let himself into the flat, using the keys he’d taken from Britannia Road. Then he came out here and he waited. He also left this way when it was over.’

‘Wait a minute. How do you know all that? How do you even know it was a he?’

‘Diana Cowper was strangled with a curtain cord. Her son was chopped to pieces. The killer was either a man or a really, really angry woman.’

‘What about the rest of it? How can you be sure that’s how the murder happened?’

Hawthorne just shrugged.

‘If you want me to write about it, you’re going to have to tell me. Otherwise, I’ll have to make it up.’ It was a threat I’d made before.

‘All right.’ He flicked the cigarette over the side of the building. I watched it spin in the air before it disappeared. ‘Start by putting yourself in the killer’s place. Think about what’s going on in his mind.

‘You know Damian’s going to be coming back here from the funeral. That crap with the MP3 player and “The wheels on the bus” was done deliberately to drive him here. Or it could be that you were in the cemetery – in the crowd or hiding behind one of the gravestones. You heard him tell his girlfriend: I’m going home. That’s when you made your plan.