I wanted to confront him but decided against it. I could use Kevin to find out about Hawthorne. It would be much easier than the other way round.
We set off together, walking up towards Hyde Park Corner. It wasn’t quite raining but there was a fine mist hanging in the air. This was that dead time of the year, after the summer holidays and before the excitement of Guy Fawkes Night, with the Christmas decorations waiting just round the corner to go up. Every year, they seemed to come sooner.
‘I read what you gave me,’ he said, affably.
It took me a moment to realise that he was talking about the pages I had given him describing my meeting with Davina Richardson and my discovery of the haiku.
‘Oh,’ I said, carefully. ‘Were they helpful?’
‘You seem a bit nervous of me, mate, if you don’t mind my saying so.’ He thought for a moment, then quoted an extract almost word for word: ‘He wouldn’t be too happy, me being here without him. He hated me asking questions even when he was in the room . . .’
‘It’s absolutely true!’ I replied. ‘Every time I open my mouth you stare at me as if I’m a badly behaved schoolboy.’
‘It’s not that.’ He was offended. ‘I just don’t like you interrupting my train of thought. And you have to be careful what you say in front of suspects. You don’t want to give stuff away.’
‘I haven’t done that.’
Hawthorne grimaced.
‘Have I?’ I was alarmed.
‘I hope not. But actually, what you wrote was pretty helpful. The thing about you, Tony, is you write stuff down without even realising its significance. You’re a bit like a travel writer who doesn’t know quite where he is.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘Yeah. It’s like you’re in Paris and you write how you’ve seen this big, tall building made of metal but you forget to mention that it might be worth a visit.’
This was completely unfair. I wrote what I saw and almost everything that Hawthorne said. Of course, I had to choose which details I chose to describe – otherwise the book would run into thousands of pages. Take Adrian Lockwood’s house, for example. I had mentioned the bilberries he was eating not because they necessarily had anything to do with the crime – they almost certainly didn’t – but because they were there and seemed vaguely noteworthy. At the same time, I hadn’t mentioned that he had cut himself shaving that morning. There had been a nick on the side of his chin. Of course, if it turned out to be significant, if his hand had been trembling after he murdered Richard Pryce, then I would go back and put it in the second draft. This is how it all works.
‘So how did I help you?’ I asked. ‘Maybe you can let me know which Eiffel Tower I managed to describe without actually knowing it was there?’
‘Well, Davina went on at you about all the things she couldn’t do without a man in her life. I thought that was interesting.’
‘She’s a single mother with a teenaged son.’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’
We had crossed Piccadilly and continued up to Curzon Street, heading for Adrian Lockwood’s office. I suddenly became aware that Hawthorne had stopped. He was staring straight ahead of him at a wide corner on the edge of a modern, six-storey building. I could see the name above the front door. Leconfield House. This was where Lockwood had his office suite.
There was a man standing there, smoking a cigarette. I saw hair hanging in damp strands, a flapping, stone-coloured raincoat, some sort of marking on the side of his face. But more prominent than all of these, particularly with the distance between us, were his bright blue spectacles. They were like something a child might wear. They didn’t even look real.
The man had been looking up at the third floor but as he lowered his head, his eyes locked onto mine. Neither of us knew who the other was but we immediately recognised the connection. I sprang forward. The man dropped his cigarette, turned and ran. Before I knew quite what I was doing, I was chasing him.
I have written a great many chases in my time. They are, after all, a staple of television drama. There are only so many scenes you can have with your characters talking to each other in a room. Eventually, you have to break into some piece of action and the most popular choices are: a murder, a fight, an explosion or a chase.
Of these, the chase is probably the most expensive. A fight, unless it’s on the roof of a moving bus or involves an entire gang, is usually fairly self-contained and explosions these days are quite easy to achieve. Almost everything you see is a simple blast of compressed air, some dust and a few scraps of paper. The sound is added later and even the flames can be computer-generated. But a chase is all about movement. The characters move. The cameras move. The entire unit has to move. Worse than that, it’s not enough for two actors to go haring after each other. That soon becomes boring. You have to throw in some action. A near miss in front of a car. A few punches thrown. An old woman shoved out of the way.
All of which is an apology for what I must now describe.
I was in my fifties, on foot, and although I think I’m fairly fit, I was no action hero. The man I was chasing was younger and skinnier than me but his smoking habit had played havoc with his health. From the very start, he didn’t run so much as limp and it would have taken a director with incredible talent, even with all the money in the world, to make the next few minutes remotely watchable.
The man with blue glasses crossed the road and although a white van did hoot at him, it came nowhere close. I looked left and right before I went after him. He reached the other pavement and pushed past a few pedestrians, although there was no actual bodily contact. I already had a stitch and paused to catch my breath. I glanced back, expecting to see Hawthorne right behind me, but he hadn’t even moved. He was standing there, holding his mobile phone. I found that extraordinary and also quite annoying. My quarry had ducked down one of the passageways leading into Shepherd Market, a charming enclave of narrow streets and squares that dates back to the eighteenth century. I saw him hurry past a pub on a corner – Ye Grapes – and I went after him. He must have been running at about 7 mph, although his raincoat was flapping behind him in quite a dramatic way.
He disappeared down another alleyway, past dustbins which he did not knock over. I followed, my feet stamping on the pavement, but I was already falling behind and I was some distance from him when I saw him reach the main road and flag down a taxi. I was sweating. A thin sheen of drizzle was clinging to my face. I arrived and would have jumped into a second taxi if there had been one but there wasn’t. I had to wait about a minute before one mercifully appeared, heading down towards Piccadilly Circus. I hailed it. The driver seemed to take for ever to pull over. I yanked open the door and climbed into the back.
I could still make out the taxi with Blue Spectacles. Because of the heavy traffic, he was only a short distance away.
‘Where to?’ the driver asked.
‘Follow that cab!’ Even as the words left my mouth I realised that I had uttered a cliché more grotesque and overused than anything I would have found in the Doomworld trilogy. ‘Please!’ I added.
Ahead of us, a set of lights changed to green. The taxi we were following indicated and swung right along St James’s Street. We crept towards the same turning but before we could reach them, the lights changed back to red. My driver didn’t perform a breakneck U-turn and find another way. He didn’t cut across the traffic with tyres screeching.
‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, as we came to a gentle halt.
18 The Dustbin Diver