Akira Anno was staring at the book with a look of queasy horror on her face. It took her a moment to find the words. ‘He’s a thief!’ she exclaimed.
‘I’m not a thief . . .’ I began. ‘This is a set-up!’ I pointed at Mills. ‘He put it in my case. He barged into me when I came upstairs.’
Mills raised his hands in a show of surrender. ‘Why would I do a thing like that?’ he demanded.
Grunshaw looked at me thunderously. ‘Are you accusing a police officer of planting evidence?’
‘Yes! I am!’
‘You realise I could arrest you?’ She turned to LeFevre. ‘Do you want me to arrest him?’
‘Wait a minute.’ LeFevre was looking at me in dismay. If she had reminded me of a teacher before, she was now more like a headmistress with a child who had once been her favourite. ‘You’ve let the bookshop down. You’ve let your readers down. You’ve let yourself down.’ I could almost hear her saying it. ‘Could I have it back?’ That was what she actually said.
I handed the book to her. I could feel my cheeks burning.
‘The policy at Daunt’s is to refer all shoplifters to the police,’ she went on. ‘I have to say, I’m surprised and very disappointed, but it’s up to the police to decide if they want to take any further action.’
‘I didn’t do it!’ I knew I sounded pathetic. I couldn’t help myself.
‘I will say, though, that you’re not welcome back in this shop, Anthony. I’m very sorry. And I don’t think we’ll be stocking you after this.’
I’d had enough. I really couldn’t take any more. I pushed past Hawthorne and Akira and, with their eyes burning into me, hurried out into the rain.
15 Rum and Coke
I didn’t see Hawthorne again until Monday evening, when, instead of going to see Ghosts at the Almeida, I rang the doorbell at River Court to join him at his book club. At least this time I was expected. Normally, which is to say on the last two occasions, I had to resort to subterfuge to get anywhere near the flat where he lived. We’d arranged to meet at seven o’clock and the idea was that we would go together to wherever the group met.
He was standing in the corridor when the lift doors opened and I was afraid he was going to step in and take me straight back down. But his own front door was open and he seemed quite genial as he led me back towards the flat.
‘How are you, Tony?’
‘I’m all right.’ But I wasn’t, not after what had happened at Daunt’s and I wanted him to know it.
‘You sound like you got out of bed on the wrong side. Come in and have a rum and Coke. That’ll cheer you up.’
I hardly ever drink Coca-Cola and I don’t much like rum, but the invitation intrigued me on all sorts of levels. I followed him in.
Hawthorne’s flat would have told me more about him if it had actually belonged to him but it was exactly as I remembered from the one time I’d been there, bare to the point of depressing with windows that were too narrow for the wonderful view they could have provided: the River Thames flowing darkly through the evening gloom. There were still no pictures, no flowers, no clutter . . . nothing that would suggest he did anything but sleep here.
Except, of course, for the models. I had discovered Hawthorne’s liking for Airfix kits on my first visit and although he had been sheepish at first, he had allowed his enthusiasm to take over and this had led to one of our very few conversations that wasn’t about crime. The surfaces were crowded with tanks, jeeps, ambulances, anti-aircraft guns, battleships, aircraft carriers and so on, while dozens of different aircraft dangled from the ceiling on wires. I noticed the Chieftain Mark 10 that he had been working on the last time I came. It had been perfectly assembled, with not a smear of glue nor a paint stroke out of place. The collection must have taken up thousands of hours of his time. I could imagine Hawthorne, hunched over the table, working into the night. They would also be hours when he could completely cut himself off from the world outside.
I had asked him when he had started model-making. It was a hobby when I was a kid. The more time I spent with Hawthorne, the more I suspected that something traumatic must have happened to him when he was young and it had created the adult he had become. I don’t just mean the casual homophobia, the moodiness, his attitude to me. Becoming a detective, marrying, separating, living alone in an empty flat, making models . . . all of it seemed to be driven by the same catastrophe, which might have happened in Yorkshire and which might have led him to change his name.
‘You’ve started a new model,’ I said.
It was spread out on the table, a helicopter with RAF RESCUE printed on the side.
‘Westland Sea King,’ he said. ‘WS-61. Used in the Falklands, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan . . . Search and Rescue. You want that drink?’
‘Do you have any wine?’
‘No. I’ve got some rum.’
‘That’s fine.’
Hawthorne didn’t drink. He had never told me that but nor had I ever seen him with anything alcoholic. Even at the Station Inn in Ribblehead he’d stuck to water. I followed him into the kitchen, which connected to the living area through a wide doorway. You can learn a lot about someone from their kitchen – but this one was useless. Everything was high-end, brand new and looked as clean as the day it had been fitted. It doesn’t matter how many times I clean my own flat, I’m always embarrassed by the oven, which greets visitors with the carbonised memories of a hundred meals. Hawthorne’s oven had pristine glass doors and silver gas rings that I doubted had ever been switched on.
And there, standing on a marble counter, was the bottle of rum he had offered me. Had he gone out and bought it? I thought it was more likely that he had been given it by someone as a gift, like Richard Pryce and his £2,000 bottle of wine. Either way, the plastic around the cap was unbroken. Along with the single glass that had been placed next to it, it was somehow totemic. I knew at once that this was the only alcohol in the house and that it had been placed there deliberately for me.
Hawthorne went to the fridge and opened the door. Casually, trying not to look too nosy, I turned my head to examine the contents. I wasn’t surprised to see that the interior was as clinical as the rest of the kitchen. In my house, we either have too much food or none at all and there are times when I find myself furiously ransacking the fridge to find the single ingredient I need. Hawthorne’s fridge was monastic by comparison. He mainly seemed to eat ready meals. There were about half a dozen of them in plastic trays, stacked so neatly and with so much space around them that they had become quite unappetising, like an artwork by Damien Hirst. The vegetable trays were half empty, although I could see what looked like a bunch of carrots through the frosted plastic. It was the fridge of a man who had no particular interest in food. He would take out a packet and microwave it and he might not even examine the lid to see what he was going to eat. Now, he plucked a can of Coke out of the door, took some ice from the freezer and brought them over to the table.
‘You’re not going to join me,’ I said.