I smiled vaguely, nervous that I would be stopped, but the policeman seemed to be expecting me too. I went in.
Heron’s Wake wasn’t built like an ordinary house. The main rooms weren’t divided by walls and doors. Instead, one area seemed to morph into another with a wide entrance hall opening into a state-of-the-art kitchen on one side and a spacious living room on the other. The back wall was made almost entirely of glass, giving lovely views of the garden. There were no carpets; just expensive rugs of various sizes artfully strewn over American oak floors. The furniture was modern, designer-made, the art on the walls mainly abstract. It was obvious that a great deal of care had been lavished on the interior, even if the overall impression was one of simplicity. All the door handles and light switches, for example, were brushed steel, not plastic, and whispered of Paris or Milan. I could imagine them being carefully chosen from catalogues. Most of the house was white but Pryce had recently decided to add a few splashes of colour. There were paint pots and brushes arranged on dust sheets in the hall. An open doorway led into a cloakroom that had become an eye-catching canary yellow. The windows in the kitchen were now framed in terracotta red. I had assumed that the lawyer was married, but the house had the feel of a very expensive bachelor pad.
I caught up with Hawthorne just as a large, unattractive woman appeared, elbowing her way out of the kitchen, dressed in a bright mauve trouser suit with a black polo-neck sweater. What made her unattractive? It wasn’t her clothes or her size, although she was overweight with round shoulders and a face that was thick and fleshy. No. It was mainly her attitude. She hadn’t spoken a word to us but she was already scowling. Either her spectacles were too big or her eyes were too small, but she had managed to make herself look mean and hostile, peering at the world with a malevolence that she wore like mascara. What struck me most about her, though, was her hair. I’m sure it was real but it resembled one of those cheap wigs worn by department-store mannequins, jet black and as glossy as nylon. It didn’t seem to belong to her head. She had a gold necklace around her neck and below that a lanyard resting horizontally on an ample chest identified her as DI Cara Grunshaw of the Metropolitan Police. She moved quickly, aggressively, like a wrestler entering an arena. If I were a criminal, I’d be afraid of her. I hadn’t done anything wrong but she still made me nervous.
‘Hello, Hawthorne,’ she said. To my surprise and despite her appearance, she was quite jocular. ‘They told me you were on your way.’
‘Hello, Cara.’
They knew each other. They seemed to like each other. Hawthorne turned to me. ‘This is Detective Inspector Cara Grunshaw,’ he said, unnecessarily. He didn’t tell her who I was. Nor did she seem particularly interested.
‘They sent over the details?’ She had come straight to the point, without any small talk. Her voice was heavy and emotionless, with no particular accent. ‘Initial report? Photographs?’
‘Yes.’
‘They didn’t waste any time! He was only found this morning.’
‘Who found him?’
‘The cleaner. Bulgarian. Mariella Petrov. You can talk to her if you want to but you’ll be wasting your time. She doesn’t know anything. She’d only worked for Pryce for six weeks . . . came through a good agency in Knightsbridge. Lives in Bethnal Green with a husband and two kids. Her first job was to come down from Highgate, bringing in fresh bread and milk for his breakfast. She went into the kitchen and got everything ready. Then she walked into the study and that was where she found him. We’ve moved the body but you can take a look if you like.’
‘Sure.’
‘Here . . .’ She had produced plastic shoe covers and handed them to us casually, like serviettes before a meal.
I was a little disappointed. In the back of my mind, I had been hoping that the investigating officer would be DI Meadows. He was the detective I’d met when Diana Cowper was murdered and later on the two of us had even had a drink at my club. I had been interested in his relationship with Hawthorne. The two of them had worked together and there was clearly no love lost between them. I wanted to know more about Hawthorne and although Meadows had been both reticent and expensive (he had charged me for his time), I was sure he had more information he could have given me.
More than that, he would have been a useful character if I really was going to continue writing about Hawthorne. Holmes has Lestrade. Poirot has Japp. Morse often tussled with Chief Superintendent Strange. It’s a simple fact of life that a clever private detective needs a much less clever police officer in much the same way as a photograph needs both light and darkness. Otherwise, there’s no definition. I’m not saying that Meadows was unintelligent, by the way, but he did think Mrs Cowper had been killed by a burglar and in that he was most certainly wrong.
Given a choice, I would have been happy to bump into Meadows at every crime scene I visited, but of course there are more than thirty thousand police officers in London and the chances of his turning up in both Chelsea (the scene of the first murder) and Hampstead were non-existent. As I followed Grunshaw through the living room, I had already decided that she was going to be less useful to me. She was completely businesslike and seemed to know what she was doing. She had shown no interest in me at all.
We went through the living area and down two steps to the study, which, with its wooden floor and minimal decoration, actually had the appearance of a conference room. There was no desk. Instead, four white leather and steel chairs had been arranged around a glass table framed by bookshelves on one side and windows on the other. Another glass panel ran the full length of the ceiling, allowing the light to flood in. There were two cans of Coke on the table, one of them open.
The body had already been removed but there could be no doubt that this was where Richard Pryce had died. A sticky, dark red pool stretched out across the floor; a mixture of red wine and blood. Rather horribly, I could make out the lawyer’s head, his shoulders and one outstretched arm in the shape left behind when the body had been removed. The broken bottle, parts of it still held together by the label, lay in the middle of the mess.
My eyes were drawn to the wall between two of the bookshelves. There was the three-digit number that Hawthorne had shown me, daubed hastily in green paint: 182. The paint had trickled down, as if in a poster for a horror film. The digits were crude and uneven, the eight quite a bit larger than the one and the two. The brush that had been used to write them had been left on the floor, leaving a green smudge on the wood.
‘He was killed between eight o’clock and eight thirty. He was alone in the house but we know he had a visitor just after five to eight. A neighbour, Henry Fairchild, was walking his dog and saw someone coming off the Heath. I’m sure you’ll want to talk to him. He lives at the other end of the street. It’s a pink building . . . Rose Cottage. The houses round here don’t have numbers. They’re too fucking posh for that.’ She smiled very briefly. ‘It’s all just fancy names . . . like Heron’s Wake. What does that even mean? Anyway, Mr Fairchild is retired. He’s a charming man. I’m sure you’ll enjoy talking to him.’
‘Was Pryce alone in the house?’
‘He was last night. He was married but his husband was away. They have a second home in Clacton-on-Sea. He got back about an hour ago and found us all here, which must have been a bit of a shock for him. He’s upstairs now.’ That explained the red MG with an engine that hadn’t had time to cool down. ‘He’s not in a good way,’ she went on. ‘I only spoke to him for a few minutes and he didn’t make much sense. He was crying his eyes out so I got someone to make him a cup of tea.’ She paused and sniffed. ‘He asked for camomile.’