I remembered the way Akira had turned on me. ‘What happened to the cat?’ I asked.
‘Oh. I had it put down.’
‘So you must have been surprised when you were told that the victim was your solicitor, Richard Pryce,’ Hawthorne said.
‘I’ll say!’ He held up a finger, contradicting himself. ‘Well, he was a lawyer. And you know what they say about lawyers! What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘A good start!’
He roared. Hawthorne was blank-faced. ‘So what you’re saying is that you would consider the murder of a lawyer to be justifiable.’
‘I’m not being serious!’ Lockwood stared at Hawthorne, carefully adjusting his features. ‘Look – you’re not really suggesting that I had anything to do with it, are you? Why would I have done something like that? Richard was a bit of a fusspot. He had to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s and he could certainly be a bit long-winded, but then, of course, the more they talk, the more they get paid. But he did a terrific job. The divorce went exactly the way I wanted.’
‘You gave him a gift, is that right?’
‘A bottle of wine, yes.’ Lockwood seemed unaware that this had been the murder weapon. ‘It wasn’t very much,’ he went on. ‘But it was the least I could do. By persuading Akira not to go for a final hearing, he’d saved me thousands of pounds.’ Lockwood glanced briefly at his gold cufflink and adjusted it. ‘Actually, it was a waste of money giving it to him as I learned afterwards that he didn’t drink. But, as they say, it’s the thought that counts!’
‘I’d be interested to know the details of what you agreed . . . the settlement between you and your wife.’
‘I’m sure you would, Mr Hawthorne. But I wouldn’t say it was any of your business.’
Hawthorne shrugged. ‘You know that Richard Pryce had hired a team of forensic accountants to investigate your wife.’
‘My ex-wife. Yes, of course I know. Navigant! Who do you think was paying the bills?’
‘What you may not know is that almost the last thing he did before he was killed was to ring his partner – Oliver Masefield – and tell him that he was concerned about something that related to the settlement. He was even thinking about referring the matter to the Law Society. It could well be that he was murdered to prevent this. So it is very much my business, Mr Lockwood. And the police’s business. You’d be doing yourself a favour if you got your version of events out there first.’
Lockwood was flustered. Two red pinpricks had appeared in his cheeks, fighting against the suntan. ‘Well, I’ve got nothing to hide. Everything is on record and I’m sure you’ll get access to all the papers. It’s just that having put the whole thing behind me, I’m not keen on stirring it all up again.’
‘I can understand that.’ Hawthorne was a little more emollient now. But then he knew he was going to get what he wanted.
‘It was actually very straightforward. Ms Anno, if I may call her that, thought she could get her hooks into half of everything I had but Richard very quickly put her right. Let’s start with the fact that she had brought absolutely nothing to the marriage. Quite the opposite. I had to prop her up with her therapies and her health club and her yoga sessions and all the rest of it. After the honeymoon, she hardly ever let me into her bed and even on the honeymoon I had to chase her round the bloody ecolodge that she’d chosen in the middle of Mexico.’
There was a bowl of fruit – bilberries – on the table beside him. Lockwood reached in and scooped out a handful, which he ate, one after another, as he continued.
‘But it’s simpler than that. All we’re talking about, really, is money. It’s certainly what was on her mind! For someone who calls herself a poet, she certainly has an eye for the hard stuff! Well, Mr Hawthorne, here’s the truth. As you probably know, I’ve made my living out of property. I won’t say I’ve done badly. In fact I’ve had some pretty good years. But it’s an up-and-down business and sad though it is to say it, there have recently been more downs than ups. There was the credit crunch – and we still haven’t shaken off the after-effects. The slowdown in London. Banks not lending. I don’t need to go into the details. But it’s been pretty grisly, I can tell you, and dear old Akira joined the team at exactly the worst time.
‘In the three years I was married to her, I made nothing. Not a bean! Absolute zip. And that was the point. Akira was entitled to fifty per cent of nothing at all and I was more than happy to give it to her.’
‘Did she believe you?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘Of course she didn’t! Listen. I had my accountants work on the papers that we presented to her lawyers. I set out all my finances, down to the last euro, everything fair and square. I had to. That’s the law. But Akira wouldn’t accept it. She questioned every last bloody detail and she had her own forensic accountants looking into all my business dealings over God knows how many years. I have no idea what they hoped to find but they came up with nothing.’
Lockwood was becoming more relaxed, warming to his subject. The smile was back on his face.
‘And while we’re on the subject, maybe we should be talking about her own income. She was always very cagey about how much money she was earning but I can tell you that she had plenty of spare cash stashed away under the mattress. You can’t be married to someone for three years and hide that sort of thing, even if the marriage is as useless as ours. She was loaded but here’s the funny thing. Wherever the money was coming from, it wasn’t from her writing. I happened to catch sight of one of her royalty statements from Virago Books and I can tell you, it wouldn’t have paid for a wet weekend in Torquay! For all her airs and graces, it seems there isn’t much of an audience for clinically depressed call girls surviving Hiroshima or weird Japanese poems that don’t make any sense.’
He plucked out another handful of the bilberries.
‘As a matter of fact, I was the one who suggested to Richard that he should call in Navigant and it’s just as well I did because the moment she knew we were on to her, she caved in. Suddenly she was all for coming to an agreement and forget Justice Cocklecarrot and the rest of it. That was pretty much the end of it. We settled everything outside the court. She got the house in Holland Park and I let her keep the Jag. But the actual settlement was a tenth of what she’d hoped for, and frankly, if it had meant seeing the back of her, I’d have happily paid twice as much.’
Another bark of laughter. Nobody enjoyed their own witticisms more than Adrian Lockwood.
But Hawthorne still wasn’t smiling. ‘Why do you think Richard Pryce made that call on the day he died?’ he asked. ‘There was obviously something that was worrying him.’
‘Are you certain it related to my divorce?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I have no idea. Presumably he’d found out something about Akira, about her income – where it was coming from. If she was breaking the law, I’m sure he’d have wanted to take the matter further. But for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t have cared if she was the top hitwoman for the Mafia. I would have told him to forget it. As far as I was concerned, she was over. We’d come to an agreement. I was a single man. I never wanted to hear her name again.’
Lockwood sank back into the sofa, a smug look on his face.
‘Just out of interest, where were you when your lawyer was killed, Mr Lockwood?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘Why on earth do you want to know?’
‘Why do you think?’ Hawthorne’s voice was bleak, on the edge of rude. ‘We need to know where everyone was on Sunday evening between eight and nine o’clock.’
‘So you can eliminate them from your enquiries? That’s how you put it in police speak, I believe.’