The Word Is Murder(82)

‘Why?’

Hawthorne looked at me in a way that made me feel uneasy. ‘Someone set fire to Nigel Weston’s house last night,’ he said. ‘They poured petrol through the letter box and set it alight.’

‘My God! Is he dead?’

‘No. He and his boyfriend got out all right. Weston is in hospital. He has smoke inhalation injuries but nothing serious. He’s going to be fine.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m going to get the train.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘No. I don’t think you should. I’ll go there alone.’

‘Why?’ Another silence. I challenged him. ‘You know who was responsible for the fire, don’t you?’ I said.

And there it was again, the bleakness in his eyes that I knew so well and which somehow told me that he saw the world in a completely different way from me and that we would never actually be close.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You were.’





Twenty-one


RADA




I had no idea what Hawthorne meant, but the more I thought about it, the gloomier I became. How could I possibly have been responsible for an arson attack on Nigel Weston’s home? I hadn’t even known where he lived until I went there and I hadn’t spoken a word while Hawthorne, with his customary lack of tact, had laid into the older man. Nor had I told anyone we were planning to see him – apart from my wife, my assistant and perhaps one of my sons. Was Hawthorne deliberately taking his anger out on me? It wouldn’t have surprised me. Something had happened that he hadn’t anticipated so he had lashed out at whoever happened to be closest.

I wondered where this left our inquiry. When he was at my flat, Hawthorne had more or less eliminated Alan Godwin from his investigation and I thought I’d heard the last of the former judge too. It was true that Weston’s connection with Diana Cowper and the fact that he had allowed her to walk free were troubling but there was no proof that he had committed any crime. And yet now he had been attacked! Just when I was beginning to think that there was no connection between the murders and the car accident after all, the exact opposite had proved to be true.

Diana Cowper had been driving the car that had killed Timothy Godwin and injured his brother. She had fled from the scene to protect her son, Damian Cowper. Judge Weston had let her off with the very lightest slap on the wrist. All three of them had been attacked … two of them fatally. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

But that raised another question. How did Amanda Leigh, the girl who had acted with Damian Cowper at RADA and who had mysteriously disappeared, fit into all this? It might be, of course, that she didn’t. I had been the one who had looked her up on my iPhone after we left Grace Lovell’s house and although Hawthorne had read the newspaper article he hadn’t made any comment on it. So I couldn’t be sure that it had any relevance at all.

I was suddenly disgusted with myself.

It was the middle of the afternoon and I was sitting on my own, in the cheap, garish café next to Hounslow East tube station which I had entered after I had parted company with Hawthorne. He had taken the tube. I was surrounded by mirrors, illuminated menus and a wide-screen TV showing some daytime antiques show. I had ordered two pieces of toast and a cup of tea which I didn’t actually want. What had happened to me? When I had first met Hawthorne, I had been a successful writer. I was the creator of a television show that was seen in fifty countries and I also happened to be married to the producer. Hawthorne had worked for us. He had been paid ten or twenty pounds an hour to provide information which I had used in my scripts.

But in just a couple of weeks, everything had changed. I had allowed myself to become a silent partner, a minor character in my own book! Worse than that, I had somehow persuaded myself that I couldn’t work out a single clue without asking him what was going on. Surely I was cleverer than that. For too long I had been following in his footsteps. Now, with Hawthorne away, there was an opportunity for me to take the lead.

There was an oily sheen on the surface of my tea. The toast had been covered in a spread that had melted into something that might have come out of a car. I pushed the plate away and took out my phone. Hawthorne was going to be away for the rest of the day, which gave me plenty of time to investigate this new suspect: Amanda Leigh. Oddly, there had been no photograph of her accompanying the article in the South London Press. I wondered what she looked like. There were no pictures that I could find on the net and only a couple of other references to her. She had disappeared and she had never been found. That was it. Her parents might still be grieving but public interest had evaporated.

I wanted to know more about her. If I really had been looking in the wrong direction all this time – which is to say, in the direction of Deal – then it was time to find out what I had been missing. What could possibly have happened at RADA that might link Amanda, Damian and Diana Cowper and how could it conceivably have led to murder?

Even as I considered the question, it occurred to me that I had a way in. Occasionally, RADA invites actors, directors and screenwriters to come in and meet the students and the year before I’d talked to a whole bunch of them about that curious love triangle: actor, writer, script. Over the course of an hour, I’d tried to explain to them how a good actor will always find things in a script that the writer doesn’t know are there while a bad one will insert things that the writer would prefer they didn’t. I’d talked to them about the way a character is created. Christopher Foyle, for example, existed on the page a long time before Michael Kitchen was cast but only when that decision had been made did the real work begin. There was always a tension between the two of us. For example, Michael insisted almost from the start that Foyle would never ask questions, which made life difficult for me and seemed, to say the least, unusual for a detective. And yet it wasn’t such a stupid idea. We found other, more original ways to get to the information that the plot demanded. Foyle had a way of insinuating himself, getting suspects to say more than they intended. In this way, year after year, the character developed.