The Word Is Murder(63)

He smiled a second time. ‘There aren’t many people like Hawthorne around, thank God.’

‘Why exactly do you dislike him?’

‘What makes you think I dislike him? I don’t give a toss about him, to be perfectly honest. I just don’t think it’s right to employ people like him to do police work when he’s not a policeman.’

‘I’d like to know what happened. Why was he fired?’

‘Did you tell him you were seeing me?’

‘No, but he knows I’m writing about him. It’s what he asked me to do. And I told him I’d find out everything I could about him.’

‘Bit of a detective yourself, then.’

‘That had occurred to me.’

I wondered what anyone would make of us if they glanced in our direction. Built like a rugby player, with his broken nose, lank hair and cheap suit, Meadows didn’t look anything like the usual sort of person who drank at the Groucho. Like Hawthorne, there was something indefinably threatening about him. The waiter brought over a bowl of Twiglets and he plunged his hand into it. When he pulled it out again, the bowl was half empty.

‘What did he tell you about the murder squad?’ Crunch, crunch, crunch. The rest of our interview would be punctuated by those damned snacks being mechanically ground between his teeth.

‘He didn’t tell me anything. I know almost nothing about him. I’m not even sure where he lives.’

‘River Court, Blackfriars.’ That was only a mile or so from my own flat in Clerkenwell. ‘It’s quite a fancy place. Views out onto the Thames. I don’t know what the arrangement is. He doesn’t own it.’

‘Do you know the number?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘He told me he had a place in Gants Hill.’

‘He lost that when he split up from his wife.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ I paused. ‘Did you ever meet her?’

‘Once. She came to the office. About five foot eleven. Caucasian.’ He was describing her as if she were a suspect in an investigation. ‘She was quite pretty, fair hair, a few years younger than him. A bit nervous. She asked to see him and I took her to his desk.’

‘What did they talk about?’

‘I haven’t got the faintest idea. No-one ever hung around with Hawthorne. I made myself scarce.’

‘So what was he like to work with?’

‘You couldn’t work with him. That was his problem.’ Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. He wasn’t enjoying the Twiglets. He was just eating them. ‘Can I have another of these?’

He raised his glass. I signalled at the waiter.

‘Hawthorne came to us in 2005,’ he said. ‘He’d been in other sub-commands – in Sutton and Hendon – and they weren’t having him and we soon found out why. They say there’s a lot of competition working in murder. It’s true that the teams can be at each other’s throats. But at the same time, we rub along. We’ll drink together after work. We try to help each other out.

‘But he wasn’t like that. He was a loner and if you want the truth, nobody likes a loner. I’m not saying people didn’t respect him. He was bloody good at the job and he got results. We have something called the murder manual. You ever heard of that?’

‘I can’t say I have.’

‘Well, there’s no secret about it. You can download the whole thing on the internet if you want to look at it. It came out about twenty years ago and it’s the definitive guide to homicide investigation. It says that on page one. Basically, it’s the manual to everything from first response to crime scene strategy to house-to-house and post-mortem procedure and there are some investigating officers who carry it around with them like born-again Christians with their Bible. That’s the thing about our job. Process is king. The trouble is, you can take it too far. There was one man I knew, he was investigating a skeleton that had been dug up in the crypt of a church, victim of a murder that had taken place back in the fifties. He was trying to work out a CCTV strategy because that’s what it tells you to do in the manual – even though it was twenty-five years before CCTV was invented.

‘Now the thing about Hawthorne was, he did things his own way. He’d just disappear without so much as a by-your-leave, because he had a hunch or maybe it was just a lucky guess or Christ knows really how he knew. But almost every single time he was right. That was what pissed people off. He had an arrest record that was second to none.’

‘So what didn’t they like?’

‘Everything. On a day-to-day basis he was a pain in the arse. He was rude to the boss. He never clicked with anyone. And he didn’t drink. I’m not holding that against him but it didn’t help. Seven o’clock in the evening, he’d disappear. Maybe he went home to his wife although I heard whispers he was playing the field. It’s no matter. If he’d made a few more friends, maybe there’d have been someone to stand by him when the shit hit the fan.’

‘You told me not to go near any stairs.’

‘I shouldn’t have said that really. I couldn’t resist having a dig at Hawthorne.’ The third vodka martini arrived. He threw it back. ‘There was a man called Derek Abbott, a 62-year-old retired teacher, living in Brentford, who’d been arrested as part of Operation Spade. It was an international operation involving fifty countries, looking into the trafficking of child pornography by mail and internet. It had started in Canada and eventually there’d be more than three hundred arrests. Abbott was suspected of being the main distributor in the UK and so he’d been brought in for questioning. I’m not even sure what he was doing in Putney, but there he was.