The Word Is Murder(96)

So here was part of the mystery of ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne revealed. His flat was very large, at least two thousand square feet. The main rooms had been knocked together into a single space with wide doorways separating a kitchen and a study from the main living area. It did indeed look out over the river but the ceilings were too low and the windows too narrow for a real ‘wow’ factor. Everything was beige, the same colour as the exterior, and modern. The carpets were brand new. The room was almost completely without character. There wasn’t a single picture on the walls. He had almost no furniture: just a sofa, a table with two chairs and a number of shelves. There were not one but two computers on the desk in the study, along with some serious-looking hardware connected by a tangle of wires.

I noticed books, scattered on the table. The Outsider by Albert Camus was on the top. Next to the books was a pile of magazines, at least fifty of them. Airfix Model World. Model Engineer. Marine Modelling International. The titles, in bold letters, grabbed my attention, reminding me of the antiques shop in Deal. So his interest wasn’t historical. He made models. Looking around, I saw there were literally dozens of them, planes, trains, boats, tanks, jeeps, all of them military, sitting on shelves, positioned on the carpet, hanging from wires, half assembled on the table. He had been putting together a battle tank when I’d rung the bell and that was presumably why it had taken him so long to answer.

He saw me examining them. ‘It’s a hobby,’ he said.

‘Model-making.’

‘That’s right.’ Hawthorne’s jacket had been on the back of one of the chairs where he’d been working. He put it on.

I looked at the tank, spread out on the table, some of the pieces so tiny that you would need tweezers to pick them up. I remembered being given Airfix kits when I was a child. I’d always start with the best of intentions but it would go wrong all too quickly. The pieces would stick to me, not to each other. I’d have a spider’s web of glue between my fingers. I never left anything long enough to dry and if I did manage to finish what I was building, which happened all too rarely, it would be lopsided, hopelessly unfit for service. Painting was even worse. I’d line up all those tiny pots of paint but I’d use too much. The paint would run. It would smudge. When I woke up the next morning, I would guiltily bundle the whole thing into the bin.

Hawthorne’s work was a world apart. Every model in the room had been put together immaculately, with extraordinary care and patience. They had been beautifully painted. I had no doubt at all that the various markings – the jungle camouflage, the flags, the stripes on the wings – were completely accurate. He must have spent hundreds of hours making them. He had the computers but there was no television in the room. I suspected it was pretty much all he did.

‘What is this?’ I asked. I was still examining the tank.

‘It’s a Chieftain Mark 10. British built. It went into service with NATO in the sixties.’

‘It looks complicated.’

‘The masking’s a bit tricky. It means you can’t fit the subassemblies until you’ve done the painting and the turret baskets are devils. But the rest of it’s easy enough. It’s nicely engineered. The company knows what it’s doing. It’s beautifully moulded.’

The only time I had ever heard him talk like this was when he was describing the Focke-Wulf plane in Deal.

‘How long have you been doing this?’ I asked.

I saw him hesitate. Even now, he didn’t want to give anything away. Then he relented. ‘I’ve been doing it for a while,’ he said. ‘It was a hobby when I was a kid.’

‘Did you have brothers or sisters?’

‘I had a sort of half-brother.’ A pause. ‘He’s an estate agent.’

So that explained the flat.

‘I was crap at making models,’ I said.

‘It’s just a question of patience, Tony. You’ve got to make sure you take your time.’

There was a brief silence but for the first time I felt it wasn’t an awkward one. I was almost comfortable with him.

‘So this is where you live,’ I said.

‘For the moment. It’s only temporary.’

‘You’re like a caretaker?

‘The owners are in Singapore. They’ve never been in the place. But they like to keep it occupied.’

‘So your half-brother put you in here.’

‘That’s right.’ There was a packet of cigarettes on the table and he snatched it up but I noticed there was no smell of tobacco in the room. He must smoke outside. ‘You said you wanted to talk about the book.’

‘I think I may have a title,’ I said.

‘What’s wrong with “Hawthorne Investigates”?’

‘We’ve already had that discussion.’

‘What then?’

‘I was going through my notes this morning and I came upon something you said to me when we first met in Clerkenwell, when you asked me to write about you. I was saying that people read detective stories because they were interested in the characters and you disagreed. The word is murder. That’s what matters. That’s what you said.’

‘And …?’

‘“The Word is Murder”. I thought that would make a good title. After all, I’m a writer, you’re a detective. That’s what it’s all about.’