‘Richard invited him in. He could probably see that Colin was upset, although he had no idea what had brought him to the house. He got them both a drink. You remember what we saw on the table in his study?’
‘Two cans of Coke.’
‘Exactly. There was alcohol in the house but Richard didn’t drink it – and nor did his visitor. That’s one of the reasons I figured it wasn’t Davina. She drinks like a fish. Again, who drinks Coca-Cola at eight o’clock in the evening?’
‘A child.’
‘To be honest with you, Tony, there were a lot of things about this murder that struck me as childish. I mean, that number on the wall for a start! What sort of person bludgeons someone to death and then wastes time painting cryptic messages for the police to find?’
‘But what did it mean? Had he read the haiku?’
‘No, no, no, one eight two had nothing to do with the haiku. That was just Davina making things up. You’ve got to get inside Colin’s head. When I first walked into that room, before we’d even heard of Akira Anno and her stupid poetry, I told you what it might mean.’
‘You said it could be a bus route, the name of a restaurant . . .’
‘. . . or an abbreviation used in texting. That’s something a teenager would know all about, isn’t it ?’
‘What does one eight two mean? In texting.’
‘I hate you.’ Hawthorne smiled. ‘He couldn’t really have put it more clearly, could he?’
‘But why did he do that? You say you understand the way he was thinking. But I can’t imagine why any kid would do a thing like that.’
‘Who was Colin’s favourite author – after he stopped reading your books?’ Hawthorne asked. ‘His mum told you. And the funny thing is, the same writer seems to have been tiptoeing along three paces behind us ever since we started this investigation.’
‘Conan Doyle!’
‘Sherlock bloody Holmes. That’s right! Didn’t the parallels jump out at you when we were reading A Study in Scarlet at the book group? I quite liked the book, by the way. I think the others were a bit hard on it and for what it’s worth, A Multitude of Gods is fucking unreadable. I’m not sure I’ll get to the end . . .’
‘What parallels, Hawthorne?’
‘The writing on the wall! Enoch Drebber is poisoned in Lauriston Gardens and the killer writes “RACHE” on the wall . . . not in paint but in blood. And then at the end of the book, in Utah, numbers keep appearing all over John Ferrier’s house. It’s a warning from the Mormon elders.’
‘What? He copied it?’
‘Or he could have been thinking of The Sign of Four.’
Hawthorne sighed, then began again.
‘Look, maybe Colin didn’t mean to kill Richard Pryce. Maybe he went over there just to shout at him. He probably wanted to get a bit of teenaged angst off his chest and tell his loving godfather to fuck off out of his life. But you can imagine it. Things get out of hand. Colin starts by accusing him of leaving his dad on his own in the bottom of a flooded cave. To start with, Richard denies it, but he’s smart enough to know that the game is up. So he tries to explain himself – but that just makes things worse. Colin is shouting at him. Richard tries to calm him down. Maybe he even puts a hand on him and that makes Colin think he’s gay and that he’s trying it on. Anything’s possible. But the point is, he completely loses it and then he sees the bottle of wine that Richard’s got on his desk or somewhere in the room. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He picks it up and he smashes it into his godfather’s face and then he stabs him and he stabs him and the next thing he knows, he’s standing over a dead body with blood and wine everywhere.
‘What next? Now he’s scared. He’s committed murder. He’s got to cover his tracks and because he’s a kid, and not even a very bright kid, he thinks of Sherlock Holmes. He remembers the paint pots he saw in the hallway and he gets a brush and paints a number on the wall, just like in a Sherlock Holmes story. And the first number that comes into his head is one that he knows well and exactly expresses what he’s feeling. I hate you.’
He stopped. I couldn’t have written it any better than the way it had just been described.
‘It didn’t end there,’ Hawthorne went on. ‘When we went to see Davina Richardson, he came into the kitchen and he couldn’t resist joining in. By now the cocky little sod probably thought he’d got away with it, so he decided to spin us a story, again straight out of Sherlock Holmes. Richard Pryce is being followed. And it can’t be anyone normal. There’s something wrong with his face. That was what he told us.’
‘I thought he was talking about Lofty.’
‘Lofty won’t win any beauty prizes but there’s nothing particularly wrong with his appearance. And also he wasn’t following Richard Pryce. He was working for him! No. There’s a story – ‘The Yellow Face’. It starts with a client, Grant Munro, who says he’s seen a ghastly face watching him from an upstairs window. You look in your notes. I think you’ll find Colin used almost exactly those words.’
I was embarrassed. I should have been the one to know all this, not Hawthorne. I was the one who had written about Sherlock Holmes. His shadow had been there the whole time. I’d even spent a whole evening talking about the books. But maybe because they were written more than a century ago, I hadn’t seen their relevance to the case we were pursuing.
‘When did his mother know?’ I asked. ‘Was she protecting him all along?’
Hawthorne hesitated and I realised he wished I hadn’t asked that. And suddenly I was wishing it too. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘she only found out when you told her.’
My wound was throbbing. I could taste the sugar in the hot chocolate sticking to my lips. ‘Go on,’ I said.
‘I did warn you about chipping in when I’m interviewing someone,’ Hawthorne said. ‘And the thing is, the first time we were with Davina Richardson, without meaning to you changed everything.’
‘What did I say?’
‘You told her about the number written on the wall. And you said it was written in green paint.’
‘What was so bad about that?’
‘Do you remember what was happening in the kitchen when we were there?’
I cast my mind back. ‘She was smoking. There were plates in the sink.’
‘And the washing machine was on. She was washing Colin’s clothes. She’d already told us that he couldn’t look after himself, that he was always in a mess. My guess is that he’d come home on Sunday night with green paint on his jacket or shirt and probably quite a lot of blood and wine too. He’d have washed those out himself in the sink or covered them with mud or whatever – but the green paint he couldn’t get rid of. Mum found the clothes, still stained, and put them in the wash. It explains why, the moment you mentioned green paint, she got up and stood against the washing machine and she never moved, as if she didn’t want us to see what was on the other side of the round window. She also got Colin out of the room as fast as she possibly could. She’d been pleased enough to see him when he came down, but suddenly it was bath night and homework and all the rest of it. She was terrified he would give himself away.
‘That was when she started changing her story – or adapting it. All of a sudden, Colin – who’s tall for his age and can certainly look after himself – is being bullied at school. It was darling uncle Richard who sorted it out. Richard and Colin were inseparable. He was just a sweet kid in need of a dad. No way the little chap would go round and batter him to death with a bottle.
‘It didn’t stop there. The next time we went round to Priory Gardens – and this time she made sure Colin wasn’t there – she had it all set up. She had to divert our attention. If we weren’t going to suspect her son, there had to be someone else in the frame. The person she picked was Adrian Lockwood. He might have been her lover but she would sacrifice him in the blink of an eye to save her kid. Maybe she knew the significance of one eight two. Maybe Colin had told her what it meant. Well, she’d got an answer for that too. First of all she fed you that haiku. Did you really think that book, brand new by the way, just happened to be lying there – and just one page away from the poem she wanted you to see?’