The Word Is Murder(69)

‘You think he had something to do with her murder?’

‘Everyone we meet had something to do with her murder. That’s how murder works. You can die in bed. You can die of cancer. You can die of old age. But when someone slashes you to pieces or strangles you, there’s a pattern, a network – and that’s what we’re trying to work out.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know! Maybe you’re not right for this, Tony. It’s a shame I couldn’t go with one of the other writers.’

‘What?’ I was horrified. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You heard me.’

‘You spoke to other writers?’

‘Of course, mate. They turned me down.’





Eighteen


Deal




I didn’t speak to Hawthorne on the train to Deal. We sat across from each other, on opposite sides of the aisle, and there was more distance between us than there had ever been. Hawthorne read his book, resolutely turning the dog-eared pages. I stared morosely out of the window, thinking about what he had said. Perhaps I was wrong to be offended and I did wonder which other writers he’d approached, but by the time we arrived I’d managed to put the whole thing out of my head. It didn’t matter how it had come to me. This was my book and it just made me all the more determined to make sure that I was the one in control.

I’d never visited Deal before but had always wanted to. I read all the Hornblower books when I was at school and this is where they began. It’s the setting of the third James Bond novel, Moonraker: Hugo Drax plans to destroy London with a newfangled V2 rocket fired from his headquarters, nearby. And it’s one of the settings in my very favourite novel, Bleak House. The hero, Richard Carstone, is garrisoned there.

In fact, I’ve always had a fondness for seaside towns, particularly out of season when the streets are empty and the sky is grey and drizzling. At the time when I was reading Hornblower, my parents would often go to the South of France but they would send me, my sister and my nanny to Instow in Devonshire and the whole language of the British seaside has stayed with me. I love the sand dunes, the slot machines, the piers, the seagulls, the peppermint rock with the name printed, impossibly, all the way through. I have a hankering for the cafés and the tea shops, old ladies pouring muddy tea out of pots, slabs of millionaire shortbread, shops that sell fishing nets, windbreaks and novelty hats. I suppose it’s the age I am. These days, everyone leaps on a plane when they want a cheap holiday. But that’s also part of the charm of all those little towns along the coast, the fact that they’ve been left behind.

Deal seemed to be surprisingly charmless as we came out of the station and walked down the main street with the seagulls screaming at us from the rooftops. It was May but the season had yet to kick off and the weather was utterly miserable. I wondered what it must be like to live here, trapped in the triangle formed by the massive Sainsbury’s and the inevitable Poundland and Iceland supermarkets. A drink at the Sir Norman Wisdom pub, dinner at the Loon Hin Chinese restaurant and then on to the Ocean Rooms night club and bar (‘Entrance next to the Co-op’).

We came to the sea, as cold and uninviting as only the English Channel can be. Deal has a pier but it is one of the most depressing in the world, an empty stretch of concrete, brutalist in style, lacking any entertainments whatsoever: no penny arcades, no trampolines, no carousels. I wondered why the Godwins had sent their children here. Surely there must have been somewhere more fun?

But gradually the little town won me over. It had that peculiar defiance of all coastal resorts, that sense of being quite literally outside the mainstream, on the edge. Many of the houses and villas fronting the sea were brightly painted and had overflowing window boxes. The pebble beach, sloping down to the water, stretched into the distance, with a wide promenade and dozens of benches. There were flower beds, lawns and parkland, old fishing boats leaning on their side, dogs running, seagulls hovering. We came to a miniature castle and I began to see that in the sunshine Deal might provide a host of adventures. I was being too cynical. I needed to look at it with a child’s eye.

We did not visit the accident site to begin with.

Hawthorne wanted to see where Diana Cowper had been living and so when we reached the sea, we turned right – towards the neighbouring village of Walmer. We still weren’t talking to each other but as we continued along the seafront we passed an old antiques shop and Hawthorne suddenly stopped and looked in the window. There wasn’t much there: a ship’s compass, a globe, a sewing machine, some mouldering books and pictures. But as if to break the silence he pointed and said, ‘That’s a Focke-Wulf Fw 190.’

He was looking at a German fighter plane with three black crosses and the figure 1 on the fuselage, suspended on a thread. There was a tiny pilot just visible in the cockpit. It was from one of those plastic kits – Revell, Matchbox or Airfix – that children used to assemble although to be fair it had been so well made that I doubted that a child had been involved.

‘It’s a single-seat, single-engine fighter, developed in the thirties,’ he went on. ‘The Luftwaffe used it throughout the war. It was their favourite aircraft.’

It was quite a different Hawthorne who was speaking and I understood that he had given me this scrap of information as a peace offering, to make up for what he had told me on the train. It wasn’t the history of the Focke-Wulf that interested me. It was the fact that Hawthorne had shown it to be one of his enthusiasms. He had actually revealed two things about himself in the space of one day. There was the reading group and there was this. It didn’t add up to a character I particularly understood but it was a start and I was grateful.