I had rung ahead, of course, but she seemed surprised to see me. ‘What are you doing here? How’s the next book?’
For someone so petite, she had an extraordinary presence. I found her wearing a double-breasted jacket and wide-collared shirt, hunched over her desk, gazing into a laptop computer like a fortune-teller with a crystal ball – and I wouldn’t have put it past her to divine the future with her exhaustive knowledge of past deals, Nielsen charts and international trends. Ask her how many copies the last Harlan Coben has sold or what titles are trending on Amazon and she would have the answer without so much as touching the keypad. If Hilda was married – and she had never told me – her husband wouldn’t have got a word in edgeways. This was a woman who didn’t just go to bed with a book. She went to bed with a library.
I sat down opposite her. ‘I may have a problem.’
‘Have you started the next Sherlock Holmes?’
‘No.’
‘That is a problem. You know that Orion wants it by March. The House of Silk is doing well. You’ve slipped off the bestseller list but it’s a very crowded week.’ There was always a reason for a fall in sales: the weather, the time of year, other writers. I was still disappointed.
‘I’m writing another book about Hawthorne,’ I said.
She glared at me. She hadn’t actually been too pleased when I had told her the idea in the first place and she had only come round when she had managed to get a contract with Penguin Random House. ‘Why are you doing that?’ she asked. ‘They haven’t even published the first one yet.’
‘I didn’t really have any choice,’ I said. ‘Someone got killed.’
‘Who?’
‘His name was Richard Pryce. He was a divorce lawyer.’
She didn’t like the sound of that. ‘I don’t think readers will give a damn about a divorce lawyer,’ she said. ‘Can’t you make him something more interesting . . . like an actor or a musician?’
‘It was an actor who got killed last time,’ I reminded her. ‘And anyway it doesn’t work like that. I don’t have any choice in the matter. I’m just writing what happens.’
‘Oh yes.’ She was gloomy. And in a hurry to get on with whatever she was doing. ‘So what’s the problem?’
I told her what had happened at Daunt’s bookshop.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Anthony. You could have stolen something a bit classier. The Doomworld series is complete crap – even if it has sold fifty-three million copies. Lucky Dawn Adams is all I can say. Kingston Press was about to go out of business before she stumbled onto that one. But it’s not the sort of thing I’d expect to find up your sleeve.’
‘It never was up my sleeve, Hilda. I just explained to you. The police framed me.’
‘That’s not going to make any difference, I’m afraid. It’s your word against a respected police officer and you know which side the papers are going to take.’
‘I’m not even sure anyone respects Detective Inspector Cara Grunshaw.’
‘Well, I’d be very careful before you write anything derogatory about her. You don’t want to get yourself sued.’
‘I’m the one who’s being victimised!’ I was about to storm out of the room – not something I’m very good at doing, incidentally – but then I played back what Hilda had just said. ‘Dawn Adams,’ I muttered. ‘She published Doomworld.’
‘What about it?’
From the very start, I’d known the name. Dawn Adams was the publisher Akira Anno had been having dinner with on the night she had threatened Richard Pryce. She had also been with Dawn (or so she claimed) on the night he was killed. And Akira had told us that Dawn had come up against Richard Pryce at the time of her own divorce. Forget the fact that Gregory Taylor had bought the third volume just before he died. He had simply wanted a long book for a long journey. But I suddenly saw that Dawn Adams had to be part of Hawthorne’s investigation, even though he hadn’t yet said he intended to see her.
Well, at least something good had come out of my turning up here. And there was more to come. Hilda relented. ‘I suppose I can have a word with James,’ she said.
‘James?’
‘James Daunt of Daunt Books. He knows your work and maybe we can persuade him that there was a misunderstanding.’
‘It wasn’t a misunderstanding!’
‘Whatever. In the meantime, you really ought to be getting on with that second book for Orion. What happened to that idea of yours about Moriarty?’
‘I’m thinking about it.’
‘Well if I were you, I’d stop thinking and start writing.’
‘Thanks, Hilda.’
‘You know the way out . . .’
He had been riding for three days, his proud, black destrier picking its way between the Wilder flowers, the twisting thorns and the dense, black forests of the Lands Beyond Time. A silver moon had beckoned him on and the soft breeze from the north had whispered constantly in his ear. He was hungry. He had not eaten since that last feast at the court of King Pellam. But now it was a deeper, more primal hunger that devoured him and his journey was forgotten, the faithful stallion standing idly by.
The girl could only have been twelve or thirteen and yet already she had blossomed into a desirable woman. She had been leaning over a bubbling stream with cupped hands when he had found her but now she lay on her back on the soft grass, exactly where he had thrown her. He leaned down and tore open her woollen shift to reveal her ripe, curvaceous breasts with nipples that matched the delicious red of her lips. The sight of her skin and of the pubic hair just visible above the edge of her shift turned his bowels to water.
‘You are mine,’ he muttered. ‘By the law of the great Table and the might of the magician, Merlin, I claim you as my own.’
‘Yes, my lord.’ She stretched out her arms and her whole body shuddered, waiting to receive him.
Barely able to control himself, he jerked off his gambeson, his belt and then everything else until he stood naked, towering over her.
I had stopped at Waterstones Piccadilly on the way to meet Hawthorne and had picked up a copy of Prisoners of Blood, the third book in the Doomworld series. Mark Belladonna had been given pride of place on one of the tables in the circular entrance hall and, standing there, I read a few pages. I wanted to remind myself just how terrible it was: the awful language, the use of clichés, its near-pornographic relish. The books must have made Dawn Adams a ton of money, and as I’d learned from my time with Hawthorne, money and murder have a way of going hand in hand. I was certain that he would want to interrogate the publisher soon. She was, after all, Akira’s only alibi – and also lingering in my mind was the question of what the two women might have in common. After all, their literary tastes could hardly have been further apart. I had dipped back into Prisoners of Blood in the hope that it might answer, at least in part, some of that question. It hadn’t.
I put the book down, then walked the short distance to Green Park station, thinking about the theory I had outlined to Cara Grunshaw. It was becoming ever more likely that Adrian Lockwood could be the killer. What I had told her was true. He had a motive and according to Akira, he had known haiku 182. I had actually seen a copy of the book in his house. Could he have painted the number on the wall at Heron’s Wake as some bizarre statement of revenge?
Hawthorne was waiting at the station and seeing him I was tempted to ask about his relationship with Kevin, how the two of them had met and what exactly was the arrangement they had made between them. Was he paying the teenager for his work or was it just something Kevin did for fun? And there were wider implications. He always seemed to know where I was and what I was doing. Was this down to brilliant detective work or was he simply hacking into my emails?