‘I don’t smoke,’ Olivia said.
Hawthorne ignored this. ‘Martin Longhurst has ninety minutes unaccounted for between leaving this theatre and arriving at his office. We don’t know where Jordan Williams was at that time.’
‘You didn’t ask me,’ Jordan protested.
‘You want me to ask you now?’
‘I was at home, in bed.’
‘I wish people wouldn’t tell so many lies. It does make my job very difficult.’ Hawthorne shook his head sadly. ‘But we’ll get to all that in a minute. The point is, the crime itself was very straightforward and, more than that, the killer was obvious from the start. He’d threatened Harriet on the night of the party and he’d made it clear that he thought she should be dead. He knew where she lived. He was seen on CCTV near her flat. He used a murder weapon that could only have belonged to him and he stupidly left his fingerprints on the hilt. He dropped a hair at the scene of the crime and he managed to get some cherry blossom, identical to the sort that grows in Palgrove Gardens, on his coat. Worse still, it turns out that Harriet may not have been the only theatre critic he’s killed.’
‘Who are you talking about?’ Sky Palmer asked.
‘I think you all know who I mean.’
‘He’s talking about Anthony,’ Cara Grunshaw called out, her voice expanding into the great emptiness around her. ‘So if you’ve said your piece, Hawthorne, maybe we can arrest him and everyone can go home.’
There was a brief silence. I could feel everyone looking at me.
‘I always knew it was him,’ Maureen said. She turned to Ahmet. ‘The first time he walked into the office, I warned you against him. All the violence in that play! You can’t write things like that without being disturbed.’
‘That’s not true,’ Ewan remarked, unexpectedly taking my side. ‘Shakespeare wrote some extremely violent tragedies. Look at the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear or the multiple killings in Titus Andronicus, some of them utterly disgusting, and yet—’
‘I think we can manage without a lecture in English drama, thanks all the same,’ Hawthorne cut in. ‘The point is, if it was Tony, why are there still so many unanswered questions?’
‘What unanswered questions?’ Cara demanded.
‘I can think of half a dozen straight off.’ Hawthorne counted them out on his fingers.
‘Why were there three broken cigarettes in the dustbin in the green room? Why did Ewan Lloyd have a premonition that something bad was going to happen as he left the theatre that night? Why was a light bulb deliberately broken on the ground floor? How did Sky Palmer manage to read Harriet’s review when it hadn’t been posted on the internet? Why did Jordan Williams lie about the time he left the theatre and why did Maureen Bates agree to help him?’
‘I did nothing of the sort!’ Maureen sniffed.
‘But let’s imagine for a minute that, as improbable as it sounds, DI Grunshaw got it wrong and Tony didn’t commit the murder. Now we’ve got another, bigger question to consider. Why did someone deliberately set out to frame him? A lot of the evidence is circumstantial. The CCTV camera only shows someone wearing a jacket that’s similar to Tony’s. There are actually quite a few Yoshino cherry trees in different parts of London including, as it happens, one in St John’s Gardens, which is where he walks his dog. Did he know Harriet’s address? Perhaps not. But the knife with his fingerprints and a strand of his hair found on the body. There’s no arguing with that. Either he was incredibly clumsy or they were deliberately planted. So what had he done to upset anyone so much that they wanted to see him in jail?’
‘He wrote the play,’ Tirian said.
‘That seems a bit harsh,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘Like killing Harriet because she wrote a bad review. Maybe I’m biased, but I don’t believe Tony did it and I certainly don’t think he did it because he was pissed off by a review.
‘And here’s the last thing. How many murders are we investigating here? Harriet Throsby was the start. But she also wrote a book about a teacher who was killed in Wiltshire and it turns out that one of the killers was Martin Longhurst’s kid brother, Stephen.’
‘You have absolutely no right to bring Stephen into this.’ Longhurst leaned forward in his chair, speaking for the first time. ‘It’s bad enough dragging me into your petty accusations, Mr Hawthorne. But Stephen was the victim in all this and you should leave him out of it. He’s completely irrelevant.’
‘I would have said Philip Alden was the victim,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘He was the one who ended up dead with his skull caved in. And as for relevance, let’s not forget that Harriet Throsby wrote a very nasty book about your parents and what happened in Moxham Heath. You told us that you blame her for the break-up of their marriage and the impact that had on your life. You also blamed Frank Heywood, the drama critic of the Bristol Argus. He knew Harriet and brought her into your lives. He fed her the information she needed. And that brings us to our third death, because he was killed too, apparently by food poisoning in an Indian restaurant. That was a very long time ago and we’ll never be sure, but maybe it wasn’t quite the accident it seemed.’
‘I’ve never heard of Frank Heywood,’ Grunshaw complained.
‘That’s because you haven’t done your job,’ Hawthorne returned. ‘You might have asked yourself why Harriet had her book out on the morning of her death. Bad Boys: Life and Death in an English Village. Maybe she was trying to tell somebody something.
‘You see what I’m getting at? All these complications! Quite frankly, it does my head in.’
Hawthorne fell silent.
When, after a lengthy pause, he still hadn’t continued, it was Derek Mills who called out from the stalls. ‘So if it wasn’t Tony, do you know who did kill Harriet?’
‘Oh yes.’ Hawthorne smiled. ‘That bit is easy.’
25
Final Act
‘You know what I never understood?’ Hawthorne asked. ‘As I’ve said, every single person on this stage had a good reason to kill Harriet Throsby. But why frame Tony? I mean, that’s just stupid. Not only is he completely harmless, but it’s obvious he wouldn’t commit a murder. At least, it’s obvious to everyone apart from DI Grunshaw and DC Mills. If anyone was going to be framed, it should have been Jordan Williams. He was the one most upset by the review and he announced it in front of everyone. “I’ll kill her, I swear to you … Someone should put a knife in her!”
‘And here’s another thing. Why use Tony’s knife? If Harriet Throsby had been stabbed with a kitchen knife, there could have been a million and one suspects. Anyone in London could have killed her. But by using one of the Macbeth daggers, the killer narrowed the number of suspects down to the people who are here today.’ Hawthorne swept his hand across the whole group of us. ‘Only one of you sitting in this theatre could have got your hands on the Macbeth dagger.’
‘I couldn’t have got it,’ Olivia said.
‘That’s true,’ Hawthorne agreed. ‘But someone could have got it for you.’
‘And who might that have been?’
‘Your friend, Sky Palmer.’
‘We hardly know each other.’
‘Really?’ Hawthorne went over to her. ‘When we were at your home, you told your dad he didn’t need to pretend any more.’
‘So what?’
‘So why are you still pretending now? What are you afraid of? Your mum isn’t here to call you out any more.’