He paused and I flinched, wondering if he was going to pick up another scalpel. The first two were burning into me. But he was too absorbed in his own story to hurt me any more.
‘I was actually very good at the job. I suppose you could say it was in my blood. I hated every single minute of it but then is there such a thing as a cheerful undertaker? The fact that I was miserable probably made me more suited to the role. In the words of the song, I lived the life I was given. I met Barbara at her uncle’s funeral – isn’t that romantic? – and we got married! I never really loved her. It was just something I had to do. We had three sons and I’ve tried to be a good father but the truth is they’re foreign objects to me. I never wanted them. I never wanted any of it.’ He half smiled. ‘It amused me when Andrew said he wanted to be an actor. Where do you think he got that from? I’ll never let it happen, of course. I’d do anything to protect him from that particular circle of hell.
‘Hell pretty much describes my life for the last twelve years. I managed to catch up with Amanda in the end. One day, when I couldn’t bear it any more, I tracked her down and invited her out to dinner. She was the first one I killed and doing that gave me a real sense of gratification, I’ll admit it. You probably think I’m crazy but you don’t understand what she did to me, she and Damian. He was the one I really wanted to deal with: Damian Cowper, who was winning awards and getting more and more famous and making films in America. But I knew it was just a dream, that he was out of my reach. How could I get anywhere near him?
‘So you can imagine how I felt when, one day, his mother walked into the funeral parlour. Come into the parlour, said the spider to the fly! I recognised her at once. She had come to RADA quite a few times and she’d been there for Hamlet. She’d even complimented me on my performance. And here she was, sitting in front of me, arranging her own funeral! She didn’t recognise me but then why should she have? I’ve changed a lot in the time since I left drama school. I’ve lost my hair and then there is the beard and the glasses. And at the end of the day who looks at an undertaker anyway? We’re a type. People who deal with the dead live in the shadows and nobody really wants to acknowledge that we’re there. So she chatted to me and chose her willow coffin and her music and her prayers and she didn’t notice that I was sitting there quite stunned.
‘You see, I’d been struck by the most remarkable thought: if I killed her, Damian would come to her funeral and then I would be able to kill him! That was what came to me in the space of about one minute. And that’s exactly what I did. She had given me her address and I went round to her house and I strangled her. And then, a couple of weeks later, I stabbed Damian to death in his fancy flat. I enjoyed doing that more than you can possibly imagine. I’d been careful to avoid him at the funeral. I let Irene have all the personal contact. But you should have seen his face when I told him who I was! He knew I was going to kill him even before I took out the knife. And he knew why. I just wish I could have made it last longer. I’d have liked him to suffer more.’
I waited for him to continue. There was so much he hadn’t explained and while he was talking he wasn’t attacking me. But he’d stumbled to a halt and I think we both knew at the same moment that he had nothing more to say. There was still no movement in my legs and arms. I wondered what drug I had been given. But if I was paralysed, I wasn’t numb. The pain in my chest and arm was radiating outwards and there was a lot of blood on my shirt.
‘What are you going to do with me?’ I just about managed to articulate the words.
He looked at me, dully.
‘I’ve got nothing to do with this,’ I said. ‘I’m just a writer. I only got involved because Hawthorne asked me to write about him. If you kill me, he’ll know it was you. I think he knows already.’ I was having to work to make myself understood but it seemed to me that the more I spoke to him, the greater my chances of surviving. ‘I have a wife and two sons,’ I said. ‘I understand why you killed Damian Cowper. He was a shit – I thought so too. But killing me is different. I’m nothing to do with this.’
‘Of course I’m going to kill you!’
My heart sank deep into my bowels as Cornwallis snatched a third scalpel off the table. This one was going to be the murder weapon. He was a little wild now, his face livid, his eyes unfocused.
‘You really think I’m going to tell you all this and leave you alive? It’s your fault!’ He sliced the air with the scalpel, emphasising the point. ‘Nobody else knows about RADA …’
‘I told lots of people!’
‘I don’t believe you. And it doesn’t matter anyway. You should have stuck with your stupid children’s books. You shouldn’t have interfered.’
He advanced towards me, measuring his steps.
‘I’m really sorry …’ he said. ‘But you brought this on yourself.’
In that last moment, he had the soulful look of the professional undertaker greeting a new customer. The scalpel was in his hand, slanting upwards. He ran his eyes over me, wondering where to strike.
And then a door which I hadn’t even noticed burst open and a figure moved into the room, on the very edge of my field of vision. I managed to turn my head. It was Hawthorne. He was holding his raincoat in front of him, almost like a shield. I didn’t have a clue how he had got there but I couldn’t have been happier to see him.
‘Put that down,’ I heard him say. ‘It’s over.’
Cornwallis was standing in front of me, no more than a couple of metres away. He looked from Hawthorne back to me and I wondered what he was going to do. I also saw the moment when he made up his mind. He didn’t put the scalpel down. Instead, he lifted it to his own throat, then drew it across in a single, decisive, horizontal slash.
The blood exploded out of him. It gushed over his hand, curtained down his chest, pooled around his feet. He remained standing with a look on his face that still gives me nightmares to this day. I would say he was gleeful, triumphant. Then he collapsed, his entire body twitching spastically as more blood spread around him.
I didn’t see any more. Hawthorne had grabbed hold of the wheelchair and spun me away. At the same time, I heard the comforting wail of sirens as police cars approached, somewhere high above.
‘What are you doing here? Jesus Christ!’
Hawthorne crouched beside me, staring wide-eyed at the two scalpels, wondering why I wasn’t getting to my feet. And I can honestly say that Watson had never looked up to Sherlock Holmes nor Hastings admired Poirot more than I loved Hawthorne right then and my last thought before I passed out was how lucky I was to have him on my side.
Twenty-three
Visiting Hours
In retrospect, it’s a pity that I decided to write all this in the first person as it will have been obvious all along that I wasn’t going to die. It’s a literary convention that the first-person narrator can’t be killed although it’s true that one of my favourite films, Sunset Boulevard, breaks all the rules with its opening shot and there are one or two novels, The Lovely Bones for example, that do the same. I wish there had been some way to disguise the fact that I would make it through to this chapter and wake up in the A&E Unit of Charing Cross Hospital, just a short way down the Fulham Palace Road, but I’m afraid I couldn’t think of one. So much for suspense!
I’m a little embarrassed that I had managed to pass out a second time during the course of a single investigation but the doctor assured me it was more to do with the drug I had been given than my own faint-heartedness. This turned out to be Rohypnol, the date-rape drug no less. We would never discover where Cornwallis had managed to get it from – although his wife, Barbara, was a pharmacist so perhaps he had got it through her. I never found out what happened to her and her children, by the way. It can’t have been much fun discovering that she had been married to a psychopath.