‘She’s mine now too.’
‘You’re serious? You’re paying her fifteen per cent?’
‘Actually, I managed to knock her down a bit.’ He moved on hastily. ‘She reckons we could get another three-book deal. And a bigger advance!’
‘I don’t write for the money.’ I didn’t mean to sound so prim but it was true. Writing for me has always been a very personal process. It’s my life. It’s what makes me happy. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t make any difference,’ I went on. ‘I can’t write another book about you. You’re not working on any new cases.’
‘Not at the moment,’ he admitted. ‘But I could tell you about some of my past ones.’
‘When you were with the police?’
‘After I left. There was that business in Riverside Close in Richmond. A man hammered to death in a posh cul-de-sac. You’d like that, Tony! It was my first private investigation.’
I remembered him talking about it when we were both in Alderney. ‘It may be a great story,’ I said. ‘But I can’t write about it. I wasn’t there.’
‘I could tell you what happened.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m not interested.’ I reached out for one of the biscuits, then changed my mind. They were somehow unappetising. A chocolate hashtag. ‘Anyway, it’s not just about the crimes, Hawthorne. How can I write about you when I know almost nothing about you?’
‘I’m a detective. What else do you need to know?’
‘We’ve already been into this. I know you’re a very private person. But you’ve got to see things from my point of view. You can’t have a main character who doesn’t give anything away, and frankly, being with you, I feel I’m up against a brick wall.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Are you being serious?’
‘Ask me!’
‘All right.’ About twenty questions arrived at the same moment, but I asked the first one that came into my head. ‘What happened at Reeth?’
‘I don’t even know where that is.’
‘When we were in that pub in Yorkshire, a man called Mike Carlyle said that he knew you from Reeth, although he called you Billy.’
‘He’d got the wrong person. That wasn’t me.’
‘And there’s something I didn’t tell you.’ I paused. ‘When I got back from Alderney, a postcard came. It was from Derek Abbott.’
Abbott was the convicted child pornographer we’d met in Alderney. He was the man who’d supposedly fallen down the stairs while he was in police custody.
‘He wrote to you from hell?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘He wrote to me before he died. He told me to ask you about Reeth.’
‘I don’t know anything about Reeth. It’s a place. I haven’t been there.’
I knew he was lying, but there was no point in challenging him. ‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘Tell me about your wife. Your son. What about your brother, the estate agent? How old are you really? You said you were thirty-nine in Alderney, but I think you’re older.’
‘That’s not very nice.’
I ignored him. ‘Why do you make all these models? What’s that all about? Why don’t you ever eat?’
Hawthorne looked uncomfortable. His hand edged towards the cigarette packet and I knew that he wanted to light up. ‘You don’t need any of this,’ he complained. ‘That’s not what the books are about. They’re about murder!’ He made it sound attractive, as if violent death was something to be desired. ‘If you really want to put in stuff about me, why don’t you just make it up?’
‘That’s exactly my point!’ I exclaimed. ‘I prefer making things up. I don’t find it easy writing books when I don’t know the ending. I don’t like walking three steps behind you like the murder-mystery equivalent of the Duke of Edinburgh. I’m sorry, Hawthorne. But this hasn’t been much fun for me. I’ve been stabbed twice! I’ve never come anywhere close to getting anything right. And even if I did want to continue, you haven’t got any more cases for us to investigate together – besides which, I made a mistake with the titles.’
‘You should have called the first one Hawthorne Investigates.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’ I snatched one of the KitKats after all. I didn’t want to eat it. I just wanted to spoil the pattern. ‘It’s the concept. It doesn’t work.’
I’d decided that all the titles would have some sort of literary reference. After all, I was a writer; he was a detective. The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line to Kill. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’d already run out of grammatical allusions. Life Comes to a Full Stop? It wouldn’t make sense in America, where they have periods. The Case of the Missing Colon? It would only work if a body part went missing from a morgue. No. Even the titles were telling me that I had agreed to a trilogy and that was as far as it would go.
‘You can find someone else,’ I suggested, weakly.
He shrugged. ‘I like working with you, mate. You and I get along … somehow. We’ve got an understanding.’
‘I’m not sure I understand anything,’ I said. It was strange. I hadn’t expected this meeting to become so gloomy. I’d thought it was just going to be a simple parting of the ways. ‘It’s not the end of our relationship,’ I continued. ‘There are two more books still to come out. We’ll meet at the publishers. And maybe there’ll be more literary festivals – although after the last one, people may be nervous about inviting us.’
‘I thought we did all right.’
‘Three people got killed!’
I had never seen Hawthorne so defeated. At that moment, I realised that whatever I might have said, some sort of bond had grown between us. At the end of the day, it’s not possible to investigate the deaths of seven human beings without becoming close. I admired Hawthorne. I liked him and I’d always tried to make him likeable when I was writing about him. Suddenly I wanted to leave.
I didn’t eat the KitKat. I finished my tea and stood up. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘If something comes up, another investigation, let me know and maybe I’ll think again.’ Even as I spoke the words, I knew I wouldn’t. At the same time, I was quite sure he wouldn’t get in touch with me either.
‘I’ll do that,’ he said.
I walked towards the door but before I reached it, I turned back. I wanted to end on a more cheerful note. ‘My play opens next week,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you come to the first night?’
‘What play is that?’
I was sure I’d mentioned it to him. ‘Mindgame. It’s a sort of thriller. It’s got Jordan Williams and Tirian Kirke in it.’ They were both well-known actors but Hawthorne didn’t appear to have heard of either of them. ‘You’ll enjoy it. It’s on at the Vaudeville Theatre.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘It’s in the Strand … opposite the Savoy. There’ll be a party afterwards and Hilda will be there.’
‘So what night is it on?’
‘Tuesday.’
‘Sorry, mate.’ The answer came straight back without a moment’s pause. ‘I’m busy that night.’
Well, if he was going to be like that, I wasn’t going to persuade him otherwise. ‘That’s too bad,’ I said, and I left.
I was feeling a little dejected as I walked along the River Thames towards the bridge, heading back to my flat in Clerkenwell. I knew I’d made the right decision about the books, but still I had a sense of a task that I hadn’t completed, of an opportunity I’d allowed to slip away. I really had wanted to know more about Hawthorne. I’d even been thinking of making the journey to Reeth. Now it was almost certain that I’d never see him again.