The Word Is Murder(65)

‘Did he?’ I’d been drinking gin and tonic. I took a sip.

‘Yes. He’s a big fan of Alex Rider.’

‘I’m delighted to hear it.’

‘As a matter of fact …’ Suddenly Meadows was sheepish. He’d been carrying a leather briefcase and he reached into it. I knew what was going to happen next. Over the years, I’ve come to know the body language so well. Meadows pulled out a copy of Skeleton Key, the third Alex Rider novel. It was brand new. He must have stopped at a bookshop on the way to the club. ‘Would you mind signing it?’ he asked.

‘It’s a pleasure.’ I took out a pen. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Brian.’

I opened the book and wrote on the first page: To Brian. I met your dad and he almost arrested me. All good wishes.

I signed it and handed it back. ‘It’s been a pleasure meeting you,’ I said. ‘Thank you for your help.’

‘I think you said you were going to pay me for my time.’

‘Oh yes.’ I reached for my wallet. ‘Fifty pounds,’ I said.

He looked at his watch. ‘Actually, we’ve been here an hour and ten minutes.’

‘As long as that?’

‘And it took me thirty minutes to get here.’

He left with ￡100. I’d also paid for three cocktails and signed his book. And what had I got in return? I wasn’t sure it had been much of a deal.





Seventeen


Canterbury




For once, I was looking forward to meeting Hawthorne and I saw that he was in a good mood when I joined him the next day at King’s Cross St Pancras. He had already bought the tickets and he asked me to fork out only for mine.

We sat facing each other across a table as the train pulled out but before I could begin a conversation he suddenly produced a pad of paper, a pen and a paperback book. I looked at the cover upside-down. The book was The Outsider, by Albert Camus, translated from the French. It was a second-hand edition, a Penguin classic, with loose pages, falling apart at the spine. I was very surprised. It had never occurred to me that Hawthorne would read anything – except maybe a tabloid newspaper. He really didn’t strike me as someone who had any interest in fiction and certainly not in the study of a young nobody plumbing the depths of existentialism in 1940s Algiers. If anyone had asked me, I would have imagined him settling back with a Dan Brown novel perhaps, or maybe something more violent: Harlan Coben or James Patterson. Even that was a stretch. Hawthorne was clever and he was well educated but he didn’t strike me as having any interior imaginative life at all.

I didn’t want to interrupt but at the same time I was itching to tell him my theory, the solution to the murders of Diana Cowper and her son, and after fifteen minutes, sitting in silence with London slipping behind me, I couldn’t resist it any more. He had read three pages in this time, by the way, turning them over with a decisiveness that suggested each one of them had been an effort and he was glad that he would never have to return to them again.

‘Are you enjoying it?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘L’étranger.’ He looked blank, so I translated. ‘The Outsider.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘So you like modern literature, then.’

He knew I was digging and he was briefly irritated. But for once he actually volunteered some information. ‘I didn’t choose it.’

‘No?’

‘It’s my book group.’

Hawthorne in a book group! If he’d told me he was part of a knitting circle, it would be equally incongruous.

‘I read it when I was eighteen,’ I said. ‘It had quite an effect on me. I identified with Meursault.’

Meursault is the title character. He drifts through the novel – ‘Today my mother died. Or maybe yesterday …’ – kills an Arab, goes to prison, dies. It was the bleakness of his outlook, his lack of connectivity, that appealed to me. As a teenager, there was a part of me that wished I could be more like him.

‘Trust me, mate. You’re nothing like Meursault,’ Hawthorne replied. He closed the book. ‘I meet people like him all the time. They’re dead inside. They go out and they do stupid things and they think the world owes them a living. I wouldn’t write about them. I wouldn’t read about them either except it wasn’t my choice.’

‘So who’s in the book group?’ I asked.

‘Just people.’

I waited for him to tell me more.

‘They’re from the library.’

‘When do you meet?’

He said nothing. I looked out of the window at the rows of terraced houses backing onto the railway line, tiny gardens separating them from the endless rattle of the trains. There was litter everywhere. Everything was covered in grey dust.

‘What other books have you read?’ I asked.

‘What are you on about?’

‘I’d like to know.’

He thought back. I could see he was getting annoyed. ‘Lionel Shriver. A book about a boy who kills his school mates. That was the last one.’

‘We Need to Talk About Kevin. Did you like it?’

‘She’s clever. She makes you think.’ He stopped himself. There was a danger that this was going to turn into a conversation. ‘You should be thinking about the case,’ he said.