Mrs Cowper’s living room couldn’t have been more different. As I stepped onto the thick-pile carpet with its floral pattern etched out in pink and grey and took in the crystal chandelier, the comfortable, faux-antique furniture, the Country Life and Vanity Fair magazines spread out on the coffee table, the books (modern fiction, hardback, nothing by me) on the built-in shelves, I felt like an intruder. I was on my own, wandering through what might as well have been a museum exhibit as a place where someone had recently lived.
The police investigators had left those yellow numbers on plastic tags that mark out crime scenes but there weren’t very many of them, suggesting that there hadn’t been much to find. A full glass of what looked like water (12) had been left on an antique sideboard and next to it I noticed a credit card (14) with Diana Cowper’s name. Were they clues? It was hard to say, just seeing them there. The room had three windows, each of them with a pair of velvet curtains hanging all the way to the floor. Five of the curtains were tied back with knotted red cords and tassels. The curtain nearest the door (6) was hanging loose and it reminded me that not so long ago, a middle-aged woman had been strangled right where I was standing. It was all too easy to see her in front of me, her eyes staring, her fists pummelling the air. I looked down and noticed a stain on the carpet, marked by two more police numbers. Her bowels had loosened just before she died, the sort of detail I would normally have spared an ITV audience.
Hawthorne came into the room, dressed in the same suit as usual – and that’s one sentence I definitely don’t need to write again. He was eating a sandwich and it took me a moment to realise that he must have made it for himself, in Mrs Cowper’s kitchen, using her food. I stared at him.
‘What is it?’ he asked, with his mouth full.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Have you had breakfast?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
He must have heard the tone in my voice. ‘Shame to waste it,’ he said. ‘And she don’t need it any more.’ He waved the sandwich around the room. ‘So what do you think?’
I wasn’t sure how to respond. The room was very neat. Apart from the flat-screen television – on a stand rather than mounted on the wall – everything in the room belonged to a former age. Diana Cowper had lived an orderly life with the magazines placed just so and the ornaments – glass vases and china figurines – regularly dusted. She had even died tidily. There had been no last-minute struggle, no upturned furniture. The assailant had left just one mark: a muddy half-footprint on the carpet near the door. I could imagine her frowning if she had seen it. She had not been brutally beaten or raped. In many ways this murder had been sedate.
‘She knew the killer,’ Hawthorne said. ‘But he wasn’t a friend. He was a man, at least six feet tall, well built, with poor eyesight. He came here with the specific intention of killing her and he wasn’t here very long. She left him alone for a while and went into the kitchen. She hoped he was going to leave – but that was when he killed her. After he had finished, he searched the house and took a few things but that wasn’t the reason he was here. This was personal.’
‘How can you possibly know all that?’ Even as I spoke the words I was annoyed with myself. I knew it was exactly what he wanted me to ask. I had fallen right into the trap.
‘It was getting dark when he arrived,’ Hawthorne said. ‘There have been quite a few burglaries in the area. A middle-aged woman, living alone in an expensive part of town, wouldn’t open her door to a complete stranger. He was almost certainly a man. I’ve heard of women strangling women but – take it from me – it’s unusual. Diana Cowper was five foot three and it would have been helpful if he’d been taller than her. He fractured her hyoid bone when he killed her, which tells me he was strong, although I admit she was a bit of an old biddy so it might have snapped anyway.
‘How do I know he came here to kill her? Three reasons. He didn’t leave any fingerprints. It was a warm evening but he made sure he was wearing gloves. He didn’t stay here very long. He was only in this room and as you can see there are no coffee cups, no empty glasses of G and T. If he’d been a friend, six o’clock, they’d probably have had a drink together.’
‘He might have been in a hurry,’ I said.
‘Look at the cushions, Tony. He didn’t even sit down.’
I went over to the glass I’d seen and resisted the temptation to pick it up. The police and forensics must have been here and I was more than a little surprised that they’d left it behind. Wouldn’t they have taken it away for immediate analysis? I said as much to Hawthorne.
‘They’ve brought it back,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘For me.’ He smiled that bleak little smile of his, then finished the rest of the sandwich.
‘So someone did have a drink,’ I said.
‘It’s only water.’ He chewed and swallowed. ‘My guess is that he asked her for a glass of water before he left. That got her out of the room long enough for him to unhook the curtain and steal the tie. He couldn’t have done that with her watching.’
‘But he didn’t drink it.’
‘He didn’t want to leave his DNA.’
‘What about the credit card?’ I read the name, printed across it: MRS DIANA J. COWPER. It had been issued by Barclays bank. Its expiry date was November. Six months after hers.
‘That’s an interesting one. Why isn’t it in her purse with all the others? Did she take it out to pay for something and is that why she opened the door? There are no fingerprints on it except her own. So you’ve got a possible scenario. Someone asks her for payment. She takes out the credit card and while she’s fiddling around with it, he slips behind her and strangles her. But then, why isn’t it on the floor?’ He shook his head. ‘On the other hand, it may have nothing to do with what happened. We’ll see.’
‘You said the killer had poor eyesight,’ I said.
‘Yes—’
‘That was because he missed the diamond ring on her finger.’ I’d cut in before Hawthorne could explain everything down to the last detail. ‘It must be worth a fortune.’
‘No, no, mate. You’ve got that all wrong. He obviously wasn’t interested in the ring. Whoever did this nicked a few pieces of jewellery and a laptop to make it look like a burglary but he either forgot the ring or he couldn’t get it off her finger and decided not to bother with a pair of secateurs. There was no way he could have missed it. He was right up close when he was strangling her.’
‘Then how do you know his eyesight was bad?’
‘Because he stepped in the puddle outside the door, which is how he left a mark on the carpet. It looks like a man’s shoe, by the way. In every other respect he was careful. That was the one thing he missed. Aren’t you going to write all this down?’
‘I can remember most of it.’ I took out my iPhone. ‘But I’ll take some pictures if that’s OK.’
‘You go ahead.’ He pointed at a black and white photograph of a man in his forties, also on the sideboard. ‘Make sure you get a shot of him.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Her husband, at a guess. Lawrence Cowper.’
‘Divorced?’
He looked at me sadly. ‘If they were divorced, she wouldn’t keep his picture, would she! He died twelve years ago. Cancer.’
I took the picture.
After that, I followed Hawthorne around the house as he went from room to room, photographing everything that he pointed out to me. We started in the kitchen, which had the look of a showroom: expensively stocked but underused. Diana Cowper had enough equipment to cook a Michelin-starred meal for ten but probably went to bed with a boiled egg and two pieces of toast. The fridge was covered with magnets: classical art and famous Shakespearean quotes. A metal tin, merchandise from the Narnia film Prince Caspian, stood on the fridge. Using a cloth to keep his hands from coming into contact with the metal, Hawthorne opened it and looked inside. It was empty apart from a couple of coins.