I was particularly busy when I got back from Alderney. It was always the same. If I took a few days off, I would need a whole week to catch up, and to make matters worse, I now knew that I would have to write a third book about Hawthorne, which only added to the pressure to finish the second. I had decided to call it The Sentence is Death, although I was already beginning to worry that quite soon I would run out of titles with grammatical allusions.
I was working in my office one morning when my wife popped in with the mail – the usual bills, bank statements and circulars. (I used to look forward to the mail when I was young, but nowadays it’s nearly all dreary.)
Rifling through them, I noticed a postcard with a picture of Fort Clonque on the western tip of Alderney. I thought at first it might be fan mail and reached for it straight away. I turned it over and even before I read the brief message, I recognised Derek Abbott’s handwriting. He had sent the card to my publishers at Penguin Random House and someone had forwarded it to me. There were just four words. It read:
Ask Hawthorne about Reeth.
Sitting at my desk, I felt a chill in the pit of my stomach. I remembered the postcards that had been sitting on the desk in Derek Abbott’s living room. He had written his suicide note on the back of one of them, but then he must have decided to write a second card to me. He knew I was planning several books about Hawthorne. Even as he had left this world, he had wanted to leave some small measure of pain behind.
Reeth.
I have already mentioned the evening at the Station Inn in the Yorkshire village of Ribblehead, when Hawthorne and I were investigating the murder of Richard Pryce. We had travelled there to find out more about a potholing accident that had taken place a few years before and we were having dinner together when a man had come up to us and introduced himself as Mike Carlyle. He had addressed Hawthorne as ‘Billy’ – which wasn’t his name, but was, now I thought about it, the name of his son. And what had the man said? I opened the notebook that I always kept on my desk and found the page.
‘You weren’t in Reeth?’
‘No,’ Hawthorne had replied. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just up from London. I’ve never been to anywhere called Reeth.’
At the time, I’d assumed that Mike Carlyle had mistaken Hawthorne for someone else and had put the whole thing out of my mind.
But now this.
Ask Hawthorne about Reeth.
It was clear to me that Hawthorne hadn’t pushed Derek Abbott down a flight of stairs because he disliked what he represented. The two men had known each other before. I remembered what had happened in Abbott’s house just before we left. Abbott had recognised him. I had seen it for myself, the moment when he had realised that he and Hawthorne had a shared history that went all the way back to Reeth. How extraordinary that in the last moments of his life, just before he left to throw himself off Gannet Rock, he should have decided to take this one, final shot at revenge.
I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know any more, but I couldn’t stop myself. I clicked on my laptop and went to yorkshirevillages.org.
Tucked away in the corner of Arkengarthdale and Swaledale, the village of Reeth is an attractive tourist centre with a popular market every Friday. It has been described as a heaven for cyclists … The description went on like that for about half a page, with a couple of pictures: a handsome church, a high street, the surrounding Dales. Other websites talked about hiking trails, campsites, the Black Bull pub. I widened my search on Google but nothing of any interest seemed to have happened there. It was not mentioned in any newspaper stories. Nobody famous had lived or died there. It seemed to be a village completely at peace with itself.
What could I do? I had no way of finding Mike Carlyle and I obviously wasn’t going to ask Hawthorne. I thought for a moment, turning the postcard over in my hands.
Then I slid it into my notebook, closed it and went back to work.
Credits
Writers often feel isolated and alone but the truth is that producing a book is a huge team effort.
It’s my pleasure to acknowledge the fantastic support I’ve been given in the long journey from idea to manuscript to finished publication.
PUBLISHER
Selina Walker
EDITORIAL
Joanna Taylor
Caroline Johnson
DESIGN
Glenn O’Neill
PRODUCTION
Linda Hodgson
Helen Wynn-Smith
UK SALES
Mat Watterson
Claire Simmonds
Olivia Allen
Rachel Campbell
INTERNATIONAL SALES
Cara Conquest
Barbora Sabolova
Laura Ricchetti
PUBLICITY
Charlotte Bush
Anna Gibson
MARKETING
Rebecca Ikin
Sam Rees-Williams
AUDIO
James Keyte
Roy Macmillan