The Word Is Murder(91)

‘Hello, Tony,’ he said.

‘Hello, Hawthorne.’ It was odd, but I was very glad to see him. More than that I felt a warmth towards him that had no basis in logic or reason. Right then, there was nobody I wanted to see more.

He sat down on the chair that Hilda had vacated. ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

‘I’m much better.’

‘I brought you these.’ He handed me the bag. I opened it. It contained a large bunch of grapes.

‘Thank you very much.’

‘It was either that or Lucozade. I thought you’d prefer grapes.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’ I set them aside. I’d been given a private room, perhaps because I was involved in a police inquiry. The lights were low. There were just the two of us, the chair, the bed. ‘About Hammersmith,’ I said. ‘I was very glad you turned up. Robert Cornwallis was going to kill me.’

‘He was a total loony. You shouldn’t have gone in there on your own, mate. You should have called me first.’

‘Did you know he was the killer?’

Hawthorne nodded. ‘I was about to arrest him. But I had to sort out that business with Nigel Weston first.’

‘How is he?’

‘A bit pissed off that his house burned down. Otherwise he’s fine.’

I sighed. ‘I don’t really understand any of it,’ I said. ‘When did you first know it was Cornwallis?’

‘You up for this now?’

‘I’m not going to get any sleep unless you tell me. Wait a minute!’ I reached for my iPhone. The movement tweaked the wounds in my chest and my shoulder, making me wince. But I had to record him. I turned it on. ‘Start from the beginning,’ I said. ‘Don’t leave anything out.’

Hawthorne nodded. ‘All right.’

And this was what he said.

‘Right from the start, I told you we had a sticker. What Meadows and the rest of them couldn’t get their head round was this. A woman walks into an undertaker’s to arrange her funeral and six hours later she’s dead. That was the bottom line. If she hadn’t gone to the undertaker’s, there’d have been nothing very strange about her murder. It might have been that burglar Meadows was going on about. But we had two unusual events and the trouble was, we couldn’t work out the connection.

‘But actually, it became pretty clear to me why Diana Cowper had gone to Cornwallis and Sons. It’s what I told you on the train. You’ve got to think of her state of mind. This is a woman who spends her whole life on her own. She misses her husband so much that she still visits the memorial garden where they used to live. She can’t trust anyone. Raymond Clunes has just ripped her off. Her beloved son has pissed off and gone to America. She’s got so few friends that after she was killed it took two whole days for anyone to notice she was dead and even then it was only the cleaner. It struck me from the start that she must have been pretty bloody miserable. And that’s why she was thinking of doing herself in …’

I took a sharp breath. ‘Committing suicide?’

‘Exactly. You saw what was in her bathroom. Three packets of temazepam. More than enough to kill her.’

‘We saw her doctor!’ I said. ‘She couldn’t sleep.’

‘That’s what she told him. But she wasn’t taking the pills, she was stockpiling them. She’d more or less decided that she’d had enough and then her cat went missing. My guess is that it was Mr Tibbs that pushed her over the edge. She’d already been visited by Alan Godwin and he’d threatened her and, reading the letter he’d sent her, she must have decided that he’d killed the cat. I know the things that are dear to you. Mr Tibbs disappearing was the final straw: that was when she decided to do it. But being the sort of woman she was, all neat and methodical, she wanted everything to be arranged, including her own funeral. So, on the same day, she resigns from the board of the Globe Theatre and goes to Cornwallis and Sons.’

He made it sound so obvious. ‘That’s why she knew she was going to die,’ I said. ‘Because she was about to commit suicide!’

‘Exactly.’

‘She didn’t leave a note.’

‘In a way, she did. You saw her funeral choices. First of all there’s “Eleanor Rigby”. All the lonely people, where do they all come from? That’s a cry for help if ever I heard one. And then there’s that poet, Sylvia Plath, and the composer, Jeremiah Clarke. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they both topped themselves, do you?’

‘And the psalm?’

‘Psalm 34. Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all. It’s a psalm for suicides. You should have talked to a vicar.’

‘I suppose you did.’

‘Of course.’

‘And what was the first thing Diana Cowper saw when she went to the undertaker’s?’ I asked. ‘You said it was important.’

‘That’s right. It was the marble book in the window. And that had a quote too.’

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. I knew it off by heart.

‘It comes from Hamlet. I don’t know a lot about Shakespeare – I would have thought that was more up your street – but the funny thing is, he’s been everywhere in this case. Diana Cowper had Shakespeare quotes on her fridge and there were all those theatre programmes on her stairs. There was another quote on that fountain we saw in Deal.’