I could have invited him over to my own home in Farringdon, but I wasn’t too keen to do that either. For a start, my wife, Jill Green, had a television production company just around the corner and she could have walked in on us at any time. I didn’t want them to meet. Jill had never really approved of Hawthorne – not since he had first tricked his way into my life. She had read The Word is Murder and The Sentence is Death and said she’d enjoyed them, but she had serious reservations about my appearing in them and certainly didn’t want to do so herself. I was still worrying about what I was going to do when the fourth novel, Murder at the Vaudeville Theatre, came out. I had never told her everything that had happened and I wondered how she’d react when she read that I’d been arrested by the police on suspicion of the murder of Harriet Throsby and had spent twenty-four hours being interrogated under caution.
Also, Hawthorne was the only person I knew who still smoked, although he never seemed to enjoy cigarettes. He smoked mechanically: an idiosyncrasy rather than an addiction. If I have one abiding memory of him, it’s watching him hunched over a black coffee in his trademark suit, white shirt and tie, his shoulders hunched, gazing at me with those softly menacing brown eyes whilst tapping ash into the lid of his polystyrene cup. At those moments, he could have walked out of one of those films shot in the forties: a reborn Cagney or Bogart. Nothing about him was black and white. It was all various shades of grey.
So that was where we found ourselves, sitting outside a Starbucks on the Clerkenwell Road. It was the first week in August and I had just five months to produce a book which, at that moment, had no title, no plot, no characters. In fact, I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was going to be about. Hawthorne had agreed to meet me, but I still didn’t know if he was going to help.
‘How are you?’ I began.
He shrugged non-committally, as unwilling as ever to provide any information about himself. I wondered what would happen if he ever got ill. A doctor would have to tie him to a chair to get so much as a blood sample. ‘I’m OK,’ he said, at length.
‘How was Radio 4?’ I was still a little put out that he’d been invited and not me, but did my best not to show it.
He shook his head. ‘I turned them down. I’m not interested in publicity.’
‘Publicity sells books.’
‘Not my job, mate. I should have kept my name out of the books to start with.’ He pulled out a cigarette. ‘Too late now.’
‘So what have you been working on?’
‘Not a lot.’ He looked at me suspiciously. ‘Why are you asking?’
I explained that Hilda had called me and that we needed to start a new book straight away.
Hawthorne already knew. ‘Yeah. She told me she was going to call you,’ he said.
Of course she had told him. He wouldn’t have met me if it was just for coffee and a general chat. I didn’t feel comfortable that he was now represented by my agent, particularly as she seemed rather more invested in him than in me. I bet she hadn’t ordered lunch while she was talking to him. ‘So what do you think?’ I asked.
‘You want to write about a murder that happened before we met?’
‘Well, you said it would be a good idea. When we were at the Alderney Book Festival, you mentioned a case you’d solved in Richmond. Somewhere called Riverside Close.’
He lit the cigarette and took in his first lungful of smoke. ‘It wasn’t Riverside. It was Riverview.’
‘You told me someone was hammered to death.’
‘They were shot with a crossbow.’
I glared at him. ‘Hawthorne! Do you know how many tweets and emails I get when I make mistakes?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t like people knowing too much about me.’
‘That doesn’t mean you can deliberately lie to them.’
He frowned and tapped ash. ‘Things have changed,’ he explained. ‘I never expected we’d get all this attention. Radio 4 and all the rest of it. There are people I know who would prefer me to keep a low profile. And this business in Richmond – if you want the truth, I’m not too happy about the way it all worked out.’
‘But you solved the case . . .’
He was offended. ‘Of course I did.’
‘Would you be prepared to tell me about it?’
‘I don’t know.’ He seemed genuinely pained. I had seen the same look on his face when I had asked him about Reeth, the village in Yorkshire where he had lived as a child. ‘It all happened five years ago. And how can you even write it if you weren’t there?’
‘I’ve just been writing about Alex Rider in outer space . . .’
‘But that’s not real.’
‘So what happened in Riverside . . . or Riverview Close?’ I waited while he smoked in silence. I was actually getting quite annoyed. ‘Who was murdered?’
‘A man called Giles Kenworthy. He wasn’t very nice . . . some sort of hedge fund manager. Old Etonian. Right-wing, borderline racist. He had a wife and a couple of kids, though, and they weren’t too happy about him dying.’
‘It sounds like a great start,’ I said. ‘Why was he killed?’
‘He didn’t get on with his neighbours.’
I wondered if Hawthorne was being sarcastic. ‘Did you keep your notes from the case?’ I asked. ‘Can you remember all the details?’
‘I had an assistant. He took notes. And he recorded the interviews.’
Hawthorne said this in a way that was completely matter-of-fact and didn’t seem to notice how much it affected me. I’d spent weeks with him, following in his footsteps, and then months writing about him. He’d never once mentioned or even hinted that he’d had a different sidekick before he met me.
‘What was his name?’ I asked.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Because if we go ahead with this, I suppose I might just end up writing about him.’
‘John Dudley,’ Hawthorne said, reluctantly. ‘He helped me with the case. He did the same job as you. Not the writing, though. He was more . . . professional.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ I muttered. ‘Where is he now?’
‘We haven’t seen each other for a while.’
‘Why did he stop working with you?’
Hawthorne shrugged. ‘He had other things to do.’
That was a non-answer if ever I’d heard one.
‘Well, I don’t think we have any choice,’ I went on, repeating what Hilda had told me. ‘We’ve only got five months to deliver because the publishers want the next book out at the end of next year. Of course, we could sit back and wait for another murder, but it sounds as if things have been quiet for you recently, and even if someone does get killed, there’s no saying it’ll be interesting enough for book five.’
‘Can’t you make something up?’
‘And put you in it? I don’t think that would work. Look, what we’ve got here is a case you’ve already investigated – and solved. Why can’t you just tell me what happened?’
Hawthorne thought for a few moments as he finished smoking. ‘I suppose I could describe it for you,’ he said eventually. He ground out the cigarette and dropped it into the plastic lid. ‘But I’d want to see what you were writing.’
‘You mean . . . while I was writing it?’
‘Yes.’
The thought horrified me. I wasn’t sure I could work with Hawthorne peering over my shoulder. I’d have to censor half the things I said about him. Worse than that, he would have the upper hand. He had met all the suspects. He’d been there, whereas, to some extent, I would be groping in the dark. Inevitably, I’d have to make a lot of it up and I could see us arguing about every word, every description. It might take years to complete. ‘Why would you want to do that?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you trust me?’