It had to be.
I arrived home that evening at the same time as Jill, who came in weighed down by problems from the set. Another location had fallen through. We were now two full days behind schedule. Nothing seemed to be going right.
We had dinner together, not that you could actually call it that. Jill had a salad with a tin of tuna fish. I scouted around in the fridge but all I could find was a bottle of champagne that had been given to me by Orion when I got into the top ten, and two eggs. I scrambled the eggs and ate them with Ryvita as there wasn’t any bread.
‘So how was your day?’ Jill asked.
‘It was OK.’
‘Have you finished the rewrites?’
‘I’ll finish them tonight.’
It was quite normal for the two of us to start work again after dinner. We have a shared office and we’ll often find ourselves sitting side by side well on the way to midnight. Jill is the only person I know who works harder than me, running the company, overseeing the productions, organising our social life, managing the flat. We actually met working together in advertising. She was the account director. I was the copywriter. Two days after meeting me she asked – pleaded – to be moved to any other account in the building but somehow we began a relationship and twenty-five years later we are still together. I had written four shows for her: Foyle’s War, Injustice, Collision and Menace. She was the first person to read my books, even before Hilda Starke. It feels odd to be writing about her and the truth is she has made it clear that she’s uncomfortable being a character in my book. Unfortunately, truth is what it’s all about. She is the main character in my life.
‘You’re working with that detective again, aren’t you?’ she said as we sat there, eating.
‘Yes.’ I hadn’t wanted her to know but I never tell her lies. She can see right through me.
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘Not really. But I have a three-book deal and a case came up.’ I felt guilty. I knew she was waiting for my script. ‘I think it’s over anyway,’ I went on. ‘Hawthorne knows who did it.’
He hadn’t said as much but I could tell. There was something quite animalistic about Hawthorne. The closer he got to the truth, the more you could see it in his eyes, in the way he sat, in the very contours of his skin. He really was the dog with the bone. I’d hoped we might have a drink after our meeting with Adrian Lockwood but he couldn’t wait to get back home. I could imagine him sitting at his table, assembling his Westland Sea King with the same voracious attention to detail he brought to the solving of crime.
‘Do you know?’ she asked.
It was a depressing question. I felt sure that the solution must be obvious by now. All along, it had been my hope that I would actually work it out before Hawthorne. And yet, I was still nowhere near. It really wasn’t fair. How could I even call myself an author if I had no connection to the last chapter – the whole point of the book?
‘No,’ I admitted, then added, hopefully, ‘Not yet.’
After dinner, I went up to the office, which Jill had actually constructed for me on the roof of the flat. It’s about fifteen metres long and quite narrow with uninterrupted views towards the Old Bailey and St Paul’s. At the time, a new building was rising up, adding a streak of silver to the skyscape and completely changing my view. It would become known as the Shard. I sat at my desk, gazing out at the evening sky. Despite what I had said, I wasn’t in the mood for scriptwriting. Instead, I drew out a notepad and began to think about the case.
If Hawthorne could solve it, I could solve it. I was as clever as him. The answer was right in front of me. I went through it all one last time.
Adrian Lockwood.
He was the most obvious suspect. Despite what he’d said, it was possible that he knew Pryce was investigating his secret wine stash and might have overturned the divorce as a result.
According to Akira Anno, he had a temper. His first wife had died. And then there was the spot of green paint I had seen on his shirt. Was it the same green as the number on the wall at the scene of the crime? Of course it was, which meant that he had painted it, although I couldn’t quite see why.
The trouble was, he had a solid alibi for the time of the murder. He had been with . . .
Davina Richardson.
She couldn’t blame Pryce for her husband’s death in Long Way Hole. It had happened too long ago, he had supported her ever since, and – anyway – Gregory Taylor had accepted the responsibility.
But she and Lockwood were lovers. And what had Pryce’s husband, Stephen Spencer, told us? Pryce had got fed up with her. She was bleeding him dry. Suppose Pryce had finally pulled the financial plug on her, sending her into a murderous rage? She could have talked to Adrian Lockwood, who had his own reasons for wanting Pryce dead. They could have planned it together.
Akira Anno.
She was still my main suspect – after her ex-husband. She was the start of everything that had happened with the threat she had made in the restaurant and she had written a haiku that suggested she had murder in mind, even if she insisted it had been addressed to Adrian Lockwood. I could easily believe that she was vengeful enough to kill Richard Pryce and it wasn’t much of a stretch to see her daubing the number 182 on the wall either. It somehow reminded me of Japanese murals with their attendant calligraphy. It suited her. And yet she had an alibi too.
Dawn Adams.
Two women, both divorced, both with a grudge against the smooth-talking solicitor who had humiliated them. More than that, if Richard had discovered the truth about Mark Belladonna and Doomworld, he could have ruined both of them. Now that I thought about it, there was something quite literary about writing a message, leaving a mark at the scene of the crime. In a way, Dawn and Akira mirrored Adrian and Davina. Two sets of people with similar aims, working together.
Stephen Spencer.
He didn’t look like a murderer to me, but I couldn’t rule him out. He had lied about visiting his mother and he might well have lied about the state of his marriage. The fact was that he was being unfaithful. Richard Pryce knew and had discussed his will with one of the partners at Masefield Pryce Turnbull. If Spencer was about to lose his marriage, the house and the inheritance, he certainly had the most straightforward motive for murder.
Susan Taylor.
Nor had I forgotten Gregory Taylor’s widow. Her husband had died one day before Richard Pryce and she had actually come down to London on the day of the murder. Nobody had asked her to account for her movements but had she really been on her own, just sitting there in a cheap hotel? I remembered the curious glint of cruelty in her eyes as she had spoken: What do you think I did? Was there something about Long Way Hole that she hadn’t told us? Richard, Charles and Gregory – all stuck underground with the water rising. All three were now dead. There had to be a connection.
It had to be one of them.
One in six. But which one?
Jill came into the office and, seeing me deep in thought, slid the partition across, closing off her side. We call it the divorce door. I turned another page and began to think of all the clues that I had noted as I accompanied Hawthorne – from the broken bulrushes next to Pryce’s front door to the book that Gregory Taylor had bought at King’s Cross station to the splash of green paint on Adrian Lockwood’s sleeve. I remembered Hawthorne talking about the number painted on the wall and Richard Pryce’s last words: What are you doing here? It’s a bit late. I wrote them down and drew a circle round them. It didn’t help.