She married the English cinematographer Marcus Brandt, who had worked on her film, and this was what had brought her to London where she now lived. It was an abusive relationship – described over nine pages in the Sunday Times Magazine and later in a BBC Imagine documentary – and it had come to an end in 2008. There were no children. Two years later, in 2010, much to the surprise of many newspaper pundits, she had married the property developer Adrian Lockwood.
At some stage in her life she had embraced Shinto, the traditional religion of Japan, and this was reflected in much of her work, particularly her belief in animism, the idea that inanimate objects contain some sort of spirituality, although as far as I could tell she wasn’t known to visit shrines or, for that matter, to indulge in ritual dance. She also explored the nature of otherness, her own dual ethnicity and the disconnection that came from living in a culture separated from that in which she had been born. I’m quoting here from the flap of one of her books.
I had been introduced to her in the yurt, the Mongolian-style writers’ tent they put up every year at the Edinburgh Book Festival. It’s not huge but it’s a quiet place to hang out and they serve coffee and snacks all day, with malt whisky in the evening – if they haven’t already packed you off home. I was in Edinburgh to talk about my children’s books. She was doing a poetry recital. I was sitting on my own when she arrived as part of a melee that included her publisher, her agent, her publicist, two journalists, a photographer and the director of the festival. For some reason she was wearing a man’s three-piece suit, complete with bowler hat. Apart from a silver brooch – possibly a letter from the Japanese alphabet – pinned to her shoulder, she could have stepped out of a painting by Magritte.
There was hardly anyone else in the tent and after Akira had accepted a cup of green tea and refused a rather tired egg and cress sandwich, somebody noticed I was there and introduced me as the author of the Alex Rider series.
‘Oh yes?’
Those were her first two words to me and I will never forget them – nor the handshake that followed. It was utterly indifferent, over in an instant.
I muttered something about admiring her work, which wasn’t true but was something I felt I ought to say.
‘Thank you. It’s very nice to meet you.’ If each word was a tapestry, it had been spun out of razor wire.
She was already doing that awful thing of looking over my shoulder to see if there was anyone more interesting in the yurt. When she established that there wasn’t, she turned her back on me to check something with her publicist and a moment later the entire group ebbed away.
I wasn’t exactly put out although I did think it was strange. The atmosphere at book festivals is nearly always friendly and non-competitive and it’s rare to meet an author who grandstands. I gave Akira the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she was nervous about her session. I’m the same. No matter how often I speak in public, I’m uneasy before I go onstage and find it hard to make conversation. I’m sure there are plenty of people who think I’m just rude.
But when I met her a few months later at the book launch, she snubbed me again and this time I was sure it was quite deliberate. She seemed to have no memory of having met me before and the moment she was told (again) that I was a children’s author, she switched off. It really was as if a light had gone out in her eyes. By now she had started affecting those Yoko Ono-style tinted glasses. I thought she was rather ridiculous.
And here she was again, expensively dressed in a black trouser suit with a pale grey pashmina draped over her shoulders and twisted round one arm. Cara Grunshaw was sitting opposite her and the man I knew only as Darren was standing to one side, either chewing gum or pretending to, still holding his totemic notebook.
Grunshaw introduced Hawthorne but said nothing about me, which was probably just as well. I wasn’t sure what Akira would have thought of my being there and I very much doubted that she would enjoy ending up in one of my books. This was an informal interview. There was no solicitor, no caution.
‘I want to thank you for coming in,’ Grunshaw began, addressing Akira. ‘As you know, Richard Pryce was found dead at his home yesterday morning and we’re hoping you can help us with our enquiries.’
Akira shrugged. ‘I don’t see why I should be able to help you. I hardly knew Mr Pryce. He represented my ex-husband but we never spoke. I had nothing to say to him. He made his living from the death of love and from the unmaking of people’s dreams. What else is there to say?’
She had a strange accent, largely American but with a slight Japanese inflexion. Her voice was soft and completely emotionless. She sounded bored.
‘You threatened him.’
‘No. I did not.’
‘With respect, Ms Anno, we have several witnesses who were present at The Delaunay restaurant on the twenty-first of October. You had been having dinner there. As you left the restaurant, you saw Mr Pryce, who was sitting with his husband. You threw a glass of wine at him.’
‘I poured it over his head. He deserved it.’
‘You called him a pig and you threatened to hit him with a bottle.’
‘It was a joke!’ There was an extraordinary malevolence in the four words, as if Grunshaw was deliberately overlooking something that was painfully obvious to everyone else. ‘I poured maybe two, three inches of wine and I said he was lucky he hadn’t ordered a bottle or I’d have used that. My meaning was quite clear. It was that I would have poured more of the wine over him. Not that I would have used the bottle to injure him.’
‘Given the way he died, it was still an unfortunate choice of words.’
She considered. I could see her replaying and analysing the scene at the restaurant as if she was going to turn it into a short story. Or a haiku. It was all there in those deep black eyes. She arrived at a conclusion. ‘I don’t regret anything that I said. I told you. It was a joke.’
‘Not a very funny one.’
‘I don’t think a joke has to be funny, Detective Inspector. In my books, I use humour only to subvert the status quo. If you’ve ever read the French philosopher Alain Badiou, you’ll know that he defines jokes as a type of rupture that opens up truths. I actually met him at the Sorbonne, by the way. He was a remarkable man. By ridiculing my enemy, I defeat him. That was the insight that Alain gave me and although I see no need to justify myself, that was precisely the mechanism I was using at The Delaunay.’
I could imagine Akira Anno and Alain Badiou together, talking into the small hours. I’m sure it would have been a barrel of laughs.
‘Who had you been having dinner with, Ms Anno?’