‘But he had a problem. He knew that Keith was sitting in front of the TV screens in the stage-door office and the lights in the basement corridor were too bright. When he opened the door, light would spill outside and there was a good chance that Keith would see it – even on a black-and-white TV, a shaft of light is one thing you can’t miss – and maybe he’d come to investigate. So he nipped upstairs, probably stole the hair from Jordan’s dressing room at that time, and then smashed a light bulb.’ Hawthorne glanced at me. ‘He didn’t do it to darken the corridor. He was just creating a diversion. Immediately afterwards, he ran back down and opened the fire door while Keith was dealing with the broken glass. Now everything was set up. He waited a moment or two, went back upstairs and left through the stage door – making sure he chatted with Keith so that everything would look normal.
‘He didn’t take the train to Blackheath. At least, not then. He came back to the theatre in the middle of the night, by which time he assumed everyone had left – although he didn’t realise that Jordan was sound asleep in his dressing room. That didn’t matter. He snuck back in through the fire exit, chucked the crumpled packet into the bin and stole the first dagger he saw, which happened to be the wrong one. Incidentally, one person noticed that the fire exit was open when they left the green room. That was Ewan Lloyd. He told me that he had a chill at the back of his neck – he thought it was some sort of premonition. He didn’t realise … It was a cold night and all he’d felt was the draft from the slightly open door.
‘The next morning, Tirian went round to Harriet’s home. He’d got the address from an article in a magazine. She wasn’t surprised to see him. She’d been expecting him.’
‘How do you know?’ Arthur asked.
‘Because of the three books on her table. She was killed in the hall, so she must have taken them off the shelf before he arrived. They were her credentials, if you like. All three of them were a reminder of her days as a crime reporter, but the one that was actually relevant was Bad Boys. That was what she would have shown him if she’d lived a few minutes more.’
Hawthorne took a breath. Tirian was still crying. I had watched Hawthorne expose several killers in my time with him, but I had never witnessed such a complete collapse. Part of me felt sorry for him, but at the same time there was something quite horrible about it. Harriet Throsby had described him as childish in her review. She’d obviously seen something that I hadn’t.
‘So that was how it was done. But I’m sure all of you – especially Cara – want to know why.’
‘Don’t push your luck, Hawthorne,’ Cara growled.
‘To understand that, we have to go back to the party itself. Tony described it all very precisely for me. It was almost like I was there.
‘Harriet Throsby, of course, was there. She made a habit of crashing first-night parties because she liked screwing with people’s heads. I think we all know by now that she had a malicious streak as wide as the Gulf of Mexico. There are two more things we have to remember about her. Ewan has already explained how she used words like weapons. She expressed herself in a way that was deliberately hurtful. That thing about lighting her “fire”, for example. And there was something else. Tony told me that she was avoiding his eye when she was talking to him. She was “looking over my shoulder as if hoping someone more interesting had come into the room.” That’s what he said. And he was half-right.
‘She wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to Tirian. And once you understand that, everything falls into place.
‘What did she say? “I never forget a face.” She was pretending to be talking about an actor in some thriller she’d seen on the stage. But I bet you she was looking right into Tirian’s eyes then. And a moment later, Olivia mentioned Tony’s Alex Rider books, and how did she describe them? “They were stories about a young assassin.” That’s not quite true. They’re about a young spy. So why that description?’
‘She recognised me!’ Tirian sobbed out the words.
‘That’s right. And just to make sure you knew that she knew, she even had to rub it in when she wrote her review. Not once but three times. “Most disappointing for me is Tirian Kirke, whom I recognised from the first time I saw him … ” There you are. She’s telling him she knows who he is. “His performance is quite childish.” Odd choice of word, don’t you think? Childish. But then, she’d known him when he was a child. And that last line: “ … surprisingly, he is completely unconvincing when things turn violent.” Why surprisingly? Unless Harriet knew that he had committed an act of violence in which a man had died …’
‘So who is he?’ Derek Mills had also got to his feet and was leaning against the front of the stage.
‘Do you want me to tell them, Tirian?’ Hawthorne asked.
Tirian nodded, unable to speak.
‘His real name is Wayne Howard.’
Martin Longhurst stood up, his own seat falling backwards and crashing to the floor. ‘He and Stephen—’
‘That’s right.’ Hawthorne was merciless. ‘He’s the boy your parents stitched up for the death of Philip Alden. Wayne and Stephen were best friends in Moxham Heath and it was your brother who inspired him to choose the name he uses now. When Stephen was on trial, he had a Narnia book with him. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. According to the gardener, the two boys used to meet by a statue outside Moxham Hall. That’s another lion – and in the book, lots of animals are turned into stone. Stephen called his horse Bree. He appears in the fifth Narnia book – The Horse and His Boy. And while we’re on the subject of horses, take a look at Tirian. He’s got a crooked nose, which he must have broken at some time in his life. I think he got that when he fell off a horse at Moxham Hall after Stephen persuaded him to take a ride.’
‘Tirian Kirke …?’ I was trying to remember where I’d come across that name.
‘King Tirian is a character in The Last Battle. I know all the Narnia books because I’ve read them with my son. And Digory Kirke turns up in three of them! When I first heard the name, I thought there was something dodgy about it. That’s why I asked him where it came from, but it was only when we went to Moxham Heath that I got the full significance.’
‘Wait a minute!’ I hated breaking in again, but there was one thing I had to know. ‘You’re saying that Tirian Kirke is really Wayne Howard. But you told me that you’d checked him out and everything he’d told us about himself was true.’
‘No, mate. I said I’d done a search on him and that everything he’d told us checked out. That’s not the same. His whole life story was fake. And for what it’s worth, that puzzled me too. When Tirian was telling us about himself, why did he have to throw in so many facts? The car accident that killed his parents involved a delivery truck. His aunt lived in Harrogate in a converted vicarage on the Otley Road, five minutes from the town centre. His drama teacher was called Miss Havergill … and so on. It was like he was blinding us with science. I told you when you were at my place – there were too many facts and they couldn’t all be right.’
‘He made it all up!’
‘No! Wayne Howard had been in the newspapers. He was the subject of a book. When he was finally released, he had to be protected and that was the job of MAPP: Multi-Agency Public Protection. They would have been the ones who set him up with a completely new identity, starting with his choice of a new name. There was no way he could go back to Moxham Heath – but he did have a relative in Harrogate, which is why he went there. He didn’t live with her, though. He was in an approved hostel. Just so you know, I have a mate in the Prison and Probation Service in Petty France and I talked to him this morning. He managed to dig out the truth.