As far as I was concerned, we couldn’t get out quickly enough.
There were all sorts of questions buzzing in my head as we sat in the taxi on the way back to the City – Farringdon for me, Blackfriars for Hawthorne. Had Ewan Lloyd begun an affair while he was still married? Had he moved in with Sonja because he was in love with her or because he felt responsible for what had happened? I very much doubted that I would ever learn the answers. That was the awful thing about the world in which I found myself. Who had murdered Harriet Throsby? That was what we needed to know. It was all that mattered. It suddenly occurred to me that I’d hate to be a detective, seeing life between such narrow lines.
Neither of us spoke. Hawthorne was deep in thought. I was exhausted after a series of interviews that I was quite certain had taken us nowhere. Of course, I was quite wrong. Between them, the various suspects must have provided us with plenty of clues. The trouble was, I hadn’t seen any of them. I was hungry. I was wondering if there would be any food in the house or whether I would have to pop into the Nando’s chicken restaurant that had just opened round the corner from my flat. That was the full extent of my thoughts.
It was only as we headed south down York Way, coming in behind King’s Cross, that I remembered the text message that Hawthorne had received. I asked him about it.
‘It wasn’t good news,’ he said, trying to dismiss the subject.
‘What was it?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘That’s why I’m asking.’
He took the phone out again. ‘It looks like there’s been a breakthrough. Cara Grunshaw may be on to something.’
‘She knows who did it?’
‘Well, there’s new evidence.’
I was astonished. ‘For heaven’s sake, Hawthorne. What is it? Why didn’t you tell me?’
He stared at the screen. ‘There was a CCTV picture of you taken close to the Maida Hill Tunnel, just a few minutes away from Harriet Throsby’s house. You were wearing a grey puffer jacket, but they can’t be sure it was you because the hood was up. That said, they took a similar jacket from your flat.’
‘What about it?’ I was becoming uneasy.
‘They found some blossom from a Japanese cherry tree … a couple of petals. They were lodged inside the hood.’
‘Of my jacket …’
‘Yes. You know, there are over three hundred different species of Japanese cherry … different varieties and hybrids. The police have been able to identify this one as Prunus yedoensis, the Yoshino cherry. Apparently, they’re quite rare in the streets of London. They have pink flowers which fade to white around now.’
‘And?’ I was feeling the same twisted feeling in my stomach and chilled spine that Ewan had described.
‘There’s a line of them growing in Palgrove Gardens. There’s one right outside Harriet’s house.’
The taxi rattled through a set of traffic lights and continued past the station. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry any more.
15
Clerkenwell at Night
Dinner was waiting when I got back to my flat. Jill had got in ahead of me and defrosted something that I’d cooked while I was writing my last book and which had been waiting in the freezer ever since. We opened a bottle of pink wine and sat down together and for the first time during that long day, I felt a sense of normality. This was my life. A marriage that had lasted thirty years. Two sons doing well in their careers. An elderly dog asleep in his basket. I looked at one end of the room, where the piano I had inherited from my mother stood, its polished surface gleaming in the light. I played it as a break from writing, moving from one keyboard to another. Behind me, a library of about five hundred books, half of them left to me by my father, stood on the shelves I’d had built for them. I’d added to them over the years: all the Bond novels, the 1946 Nonesuch edition of Dickens, a signed copy of I, Claudius that I’d found in Hay-on-Wye. Each book was a friend.
‘What sort of day have you had?’ Jill asked.
My sense of comfort and security disintegrated instantly.
‘Not great,’ I said. ‘This morning I woke up in a police cell. Did I mention I’d been arrested on suspicion of murdering a critic who didn’t like my play? I was locked up overnight at a custody centre in Islington and interrogated. I’m afraid it’s not looking too good. They’ve got enough evidence to put me away for twenty years, including – news just in – a petal from a Japanese cherry tree growing outside the house where the murder took place …’
Actually, I didn’t say any of this, much as I wanted to. I’d just had the worst two days of my life and I was terrified that the next two were going to be worse still. What would happen if Hawthorne failed to find the killer before the DNA evidence came in? How was I going to tell my sons that I was about to be arrested for murder? Of course I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Jill had enough on her plate running a company, currently raising the finance for an eight-part series based on my Alex Rider books. There was nothing she could do to help me. This was something I had to deal with on my own.
‘I saw Hawthorne,’ I said.
‘Oh – really? I thought you weren’t going to do another book with him.’
‘Well … he’s investigating something that might be worth thinking about.’
She was surprised. ‘What about Moonflower Murders?’
That was a mystery novel – fiction rather than true crime – I had been working on for six months. I’d worked out most of the structure, but so far I hadn’t written a word. Would they let me have a laptop in jail? I doubted it.
‘I might write some of that tonight,’ I said, vaguely.
That reminded her. ‘Where were you last night?’ she asked.
I’d known she’d ask me this and I’d already rehearsed my answer. ‘I went to see Ewan Lloyd. He has a place in Finsbury Park. We had rather too many drinks together and he invited me to sleep over.’
I hate lying to Jill. We’ve been together so long and she’s so much cleverer than me that it makes no sense to keep anything from her, and anyway, she always finds out. But this time I felt I had no choice. My one hope was that someone would say something or some clue would fall out of the sky and Hawthorne would work it all out. That was what I told myself. She would never need to know.
‘Did you see that a theatre critic got killed?’ Jill asked.
‘No!’ I was amazed. ‘Which one?’
‘I’m surprised Ewan didn’t tell you about it. I heard it on the news.’
It was a wretched evening. We watched a TV show together: season 7 of Game of Thrones. I could never work out what was happening at the best of times, but given everything that had happened, I wasn’t even able to enjoy the gratuitous sex and dismemberments. After an hour, I went up to my office and tried to work, but my thoughts were as blank as the computer screen in front of me. I was tired and wanted to go to bed, but knew I wouldn’t sleep, so I abandoned my desk and took the dog – a chocolate Labrador – out for a walk. It might at least be a chance to clear my head.
It was a little after ten thirty and a particularly dark night in Clerkenwell. At least it was still dry, but the streets were deserted and the moon was hiding behind an impenetrable bank of clouds. One of the joys of living in this part of town was its sense of remoteness, the way it retreated into the nineteenth century as soon as the offices emptied and the pubs and restaurants closed. My flat was on Cowcross Street, literally where the cows once crossed on their way to the meat market. Nando’s, Starbucks and Subway had all muscled their way in – our one bookshop had been forced out fifteen years ago – but the area still clung on to its sense of history, with St Paul’s Cathedral watching over in the distance.