‘But that’s impossible. They’re full of pornography.’ I searched for the worst thing I could say about them. ‘They objectify women!’
‘They sell millions of copies.’ Despite everything, Dawn had leapt to the defence of her friend. Now she got to her feet and walked over to her desk, taking her place on the other side. That put her closer to Akira, back in control. ‘It was my idea. I met Akira at Dubai, just like I told you. She’s a wonderful writer. Her books have won a great many prizes and there was even a film. But you know the market for literary fiction, Anthony. It’s tiny, almost non-existent.’
There was a bottle of water on the desk. She poured herself a glass. ‘This wasn’t Akira’s idea. It was mine. I had to persuade her, but I knew there was a huge market in sword and sorcery.’
‘And sex,’ I added.
‘Whatever you want to call it. Game of Thrones was already huge . . . before the TV series. The two of us were having a cocktail by the pool and I suggested it to Akira almost as a joke, really. If someone like George R. R. Martin could make a fortune out of fantasy fiction then it would be easy for a writer as talented as her.’
‘But it’s everything she despises!’ I insisted. It was almost as if Akira wasn’t in the room. She had been banished, replaced by Mark Belladonna who had come down from Northumberland, somehow overcoming his phobia.
‘There isn’t a writer in the world who doesn’t want to sell!’ Dawn countered.
‘Of course that’s true!’ I agreed. ‘But she . . . !’ I pointed at Akira. ‘She’s a complete hypocrite!’
Akira looked up. ‘Nobody must know,’ she whispered and even behind the tinted glasses I could see the panic in her eyes. ‘You can’t tell them! It will finish me!’
Dawn nodded. ‘If people found out that Akira was the author, it could do enormous damage to her reputation. And it certainly wouldn’t help my business either!’ She was more reasonable than Akira, more pragmatic. But then she was a publisher, not a writer. ‘You don’t know how hard we’ve had to work to keep Mark Belladonna out of the public eye,’ she went on. ‘It’s true that Akira, in her other work, has a completely different profile but lots of writers have used an alias.’ She sighed. ‘When I suggested the idea, it was just a joke. Neither of us had any idea how huge the series would become.’
So this was the income stream that Stephen Spencer had mentioned, the earnings that Akira had kept from Richard Pryce. Dawn was right, of course. Once the public found out how they had been tricked, Akira, Mark and Kingston Books might well be finished.
But Hawthorne was in an unforgiving mood. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think it’s going to be very difficult to keep this from Detective Inspector Grunshaw.’
Akira said nothing.
‘Anthony, I’m sure you understand the situation here.’ Dawn had decided to bypass Hawthorne and appeal directly to me. ‘I’ve put my life into this business and Doomworld is what holds it all together. And Akira hasn’t done anything wrong.’ She leaned forward. ‘Her series is loved. It’s being filmed for TV. Why ruin her life?’
‘That’s a haiku!’ I exclaimed.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What you just said.’ I glanced at Akira, who had folded herself up, in the depths of misery. Despite everything, I felt sorry for her. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
Next to me, Hawthorne stirred. ‘That’s not usually very much,’ he said.
He was actually laughing when we went back out into the street. I’d seen Hawthorne’s sense of humour, which was subtle and a little devious. But I don’t think I’d ever heard him laugh.
‘How did you know?’ I asked. ‘About Akira Anno and Mark Belladonna?’
‘It’s pretty straightforward.’ He took out a cigarette and we set off, walking back towards Holborn station. ‘To start with, we knew Akira was hiding money. Stephen Spencer had told us. How else could she have been earning it apart from writing? And then there was the way she lied about meeting Dawn Adams. Why make up all that crap about a cottage in the middle of nowhere? Having dinner with a publisher is about the most natural thing in the world for a writer – unless they’re up to something pretty unusual together.
‘But what really did it for me was that moment at Daunt’s. Didn’t you see the look on her face when you were caught nicking Prisoners of Blood? She was horrified. I thought she was going to be sick. But it wasn’t just because you’d stolen a book, it was because you’d chosen that book. She thought you must have rumbled her.’
It was true. She had said nothing. She hadn’t even looked at me. Her eyes had been glued to the book.
‘It still seems quite a leap,’ I said.
‘Not really. She’s a writer and like all writers she’s a bit of an egotist so she couldn’t completely abandon authorship of her crap stories. The last four letters of Belladonna are her own name backwards. And three of the letters in Akira turn up in Mark. I’m surprised you didn’t see that, mate.’
I was surprised too. I do the Times crossword every day. I love anagrams, codes, acronyms . . .
I was still trying to piece it all together. ‘What you said about King’s Cross just now. Was that true? Was Gregory Taylor trying to send a message?’
‘Yes, he was. Just not the message you think.’
What message was that? And had we just eliminated Akira Anno from our enquiries? Both she and Dawn Adams had been insulted by Richard Pryce and they had provided each other with an alibi on the night of the murder. Added to which, Pryce had been investigating Akira’s income. Suppose he had stumbled onto the truth about Mark Belladonna? That would have given them both a powerful incentive to kill him.
I thought I’d narrowed the list of suspects down to one of five. Now it had slipped back up to half a dozen.
20 Green Smoke
‘You do realise that Akira is trying to land me in it. There’s nothing she’d like more than to see me arrested for something I didn’t do. I mean, all that stuff she said about me. I don’t have a violent temper! If I did, I can tell you, I’d have done her in years ago. She was the most annoying person I ever met. She’d have tried the patience of a Shinto saint – and probably did, for all I know.
‘As for that bloody haiku of hers, yes, she showed it to me. She seemed to think it was terribly clever but I’m afraid it went right over my head. The sentence is death? What’s that meant to mean exactly? She took a great deal of pleasure in reading it to me but she might as well have been quoting from a Japanese washing-machine manual for all the sense it made.’
The strange thing about Adrian Lockwood was that even when he was in a bad mood, as he was now, he still seemed quite laid-back and jovial. The sunglasses and ponytail were still in place, along with the white shirt splayed open at the neck. His office was less extravagant than his house, a utilitarian set of suites so lacking in style that it could have belonged to one of those management companies that lease space by the month, and I suspected that he didn’t come here very often. The laptop that Lofty Pinkerman had hacked into was on the desk in front of him. He was in a padded leather chair, bent several ways to follow the contours of his body. He was sitting with his hands folded behind his head.
‘And if either of us was going to paint that number on the wall, it would have been her. What did you say it was? A hundred and eighty-two? Do you really think I’d have been able to remember that? It could just as easily have been the one about the flower blossoming in the car park or the sparrowhawk losing its feathers or any of the other rubbish she saw fit to print.’