‘Who told you I’d overslept?’ I asked, falling into the obvious trap.
‘And you still haven’t found your phone.’
‘Hawthorne . . . !’
‘You didn’t lose it in the street,’ he went on. ‘I think you’ll find it’s somewhere in your flat. And I’ll give you a word of advice. If Michael Kitchen doesn’t like your script, maybe you should think about hiring another actor. Don’t take it out on me!’
I stared at him, playing back what he had just said and wondering what evidence he could possibly have for any of it. Michael Kitchen was the star of Foyle’s War and although it was true we’d had a lot of discussion about the new episode, I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone apart from Jill, who knew anyway. And I certainly hadn’t brought up my sleeping patterns or the fact that I had been unable to find my phone when I got up that morning.
‘What are you doing here, Hawthorne?’ I demanded. I had never once called him by his first name, not from the day I had met him. I’m not sure anybody did. ‘What do you want?’
‘There’s been another murder,’ he said. He stretched out the last word in that odd accent of his. Another murrrr-der. It was almost as if he was relishing it.
‘And?’
He blinked at me. Wasn’t it obvious? ‘I thought you’d want to write about it.’
If you’ve read The Word Is Murder, you’ll know that Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne was first introduced to me as a consultant on a television series I was writing: Injustice. He had once worked for Scotland Yard but that had come to an end following an incident in which a suspect, a man dealing in child pornography, had taken a tumble down a flight of concrete stairs. Hawthorne had been standing right behind him at the time. As a result, he had been fired and since then had been forced to earn a living on his own. He could have gone into security like many ex-detectives but instead he’d turned his talents to helping film and television companies producing dramas about crime and that was how we met. But, as I soon discovered, it turned out that the force hadn’t quite finished with him after all.
He was called in when the police got what they called a ‘sticker’ – that is, a case which presented obvious difficulties from the start. Most murderers are brutal and unthinking. A husband and wife have an argument. Perhaps they’ve been drinking too much. One of them picks up a hammer and – bang – that’s it. With fingerprints, blood splatter and all the other forensic evidence, the whole thing will be solved within twenty-four hours. And these days, with so much CCTV, it’s hard even to escape a crime scene without leaving a cheerful snapshot of yourself behind.
Much rarer are the premeditated murders, where the perpetrators actually put a bit of thought into their crimes, and curiously, perhaps because they rely so heavily on technology, modern detectives find these much harder to solve. I remember a clue I put into an episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot when I was writing it for ITV. A woman’s glove embroidered with the letter H is left at the crime scene. Modern detectives would be able to tell you where and when it was made, what fabric was used, what size it was and everything it had touched in the last few weeks. But they might not recognise that the H was actually the Russian letter for N and that it had been deliberately dropped to frame somebody else. For these esoteric insights, they needed someone like Hawthorne.
The trouble was, they didn’t pay him a great deal and after we had finished Injustice he got in touch with me, asking me if I would be interested in writing a book about him. It was a straightforward commercial proposition. My name would go on the cover but we would share the proceeds fifty-fifty. I knew from the start that it was a bad idea. I make up stories; I prefer not to follow them around town. More to the point, I like to be in control of my books. I had no wish to turn myself into a character, and a secondary one at that: the perennial sidekick.
But somehow he persuaded me and even though, quite literally, it had almost killed me, the first book was now finished, although it had yet to be published. There was a further issue. My new publisher – Selina Walker at Random House – had insisted on a three-book contract and, urged on by my agent, I had agreed. I think it’s the same for every writer, no matter how many books they have sold. A three-book contract represents stability. It means that you can plan your time, knowing exactly what you’re going to be doing. But it also means you’re committed to writing them. No rest for the insecure.
Hawthorne knew this, of course, so all through the summer I had been waiting for the telephone to ring, at the same time hoping that it wouldn’t. Hawthorne was undoubtedly brilliant. He had solved the first mystery in a way that made it seem like child’s play though I had missed every one of the clues that had been presented to me. But on a personal level I found him extremely trying. He was dark and solitary, refusing to tell me anything about himself even though I was supposed to be his biographer. I found some of his attitudes disconcerting to say the least. He swore all the time, he smoked and he called me ‘Tony’. If I had chosen to pluck a hero from real life, it certainly wouldn’t have been him.
And here he was, stalking me again just weeks after I had finished writing The Word Is Murder. I hadn’t shown it to him yet and he didn’t know what I’d written about him. I had decided to keep it that way for as long as possible.
‘So who’s been murdered?’ I asked.
‘His name is Richard Pryce.’ Hawthorne stopped as if he expected me to know who he was talking about. I didn’t. ‘He’s a lawyer,’ he went on. ‘A divorce lawyer. He’s been in the papers quite a bit. A lot of his clients have been well known. Celebrities . . . that sort of thing.’
As he spoke, I realised that I did know the name after all. There had been something about him on the radio as I was being driven to the set but, half asleep, I hadn’t really listened. Richard Pryce lived in Hampstead, which is somewhere I often go when I’m walking the dog. According to the report, he’d been attacked in his own home, hit with a wine bottle. And there was something else. He’d had a nickname. Was it ‘Steel Magnolia’? No. That was Fiona Shackleton, who had famously represented Sir Paul McCartney in his acrimonious split from Heather Mills. Pryce was known as ‘the Blunt Razor’. I had no idea why.
‘Who killed him?’ I asked.
Hawthorne looked at me sadly. ‘If I knew that, mate, I wouldn’t be here.’
He was right about one thing. I was overtired. ‘The police want you to look into it?’ I asked.
‘That’s right. I got the call this morning. And immediately I thought of you.’
‘That’s very kind of you. But what makes it so special?’
To answer my question, Hawthorne pulled a stack of photographs out of his inside jacket pocket. I steeled myself. I’ve often seen crime-scene images as part of my research and I can never quite get over how shockingly violent they are. It’s the artlessness of them, the fact that everything is presented without any sensitivity. There’s something about the lack of colour too. Blood looks even more horrible when it’s dark black. The dead bodies you see on a television screen are just actors lying on their sides. They have almost nothing in common with real corpses.
The first picture was all right, though. It was a posed, portrait shot of Richard Pryce taken while he was still alive and showed a handsome, rather debonair man with an aquiline nose and long, grey hair sweeping back over a high forehead. He was wearing a jersey and half smiling as if he was pleased with himself, and certainly had no inkling that he was about to find himself the subject of a murder investigation. His left hand was folded over his right arm and I noticed a gold band on his fourth finger. So, he was married.