‘What are you talking about?’ Arthur Throsby demanded.
It was Sky Palmer who answered. ‘He’s talking about me.’ She stood up and went over to Olivia, resting her hands on her shoulders. ‘You might as well tell him. He knows.’
Olivia glanced briefly at her father, then placed one of her own hands on Sky’s. ‘We’re together,’ she said, simply.
Sky glared at Hawthorne. ‘Who told you?’
‘Nobody needed to tell me. It might have just been a coincidence that Olivia was wearing a T-shirt printed with a well-known gay icon at the first-night party. But obviously the two of you were close. She’d been round to your place loads of times.’
‘I never said that,’ Sky protested.
‘No. But when we met at the theatre you mentioned all the CCTV cameras along the canal, which meant you knew the flat was near one. And you must have been there because you’d seen them.’ Sky said nothing, so he went on. ‘Why else would Olivia have bust into her mum’s computer and sent you the review? I did wonder why you were hiding your relationship – I mean, these days, two girls like you should be out having a nice time – but it all made sense when I talked to Harriet’s old editor in Bristol. He said that Harriet slated the first play she ever reviewed because she hated gay relationships. I could imagine that would have made life awkward for you.’
These last words had been addressed to Olivia, who nodded. ‘I couldn’t tell her. It would have been more trouble than it was worth.’
‘I hate to say this, but it does give you both a real reason to want to do away with her.’
Sky looked Hawthorne straight in the eye. ‘I can’t disagree with that.’ She dragged another chair from the side and sat down next to Olivia.
Hawthorne walked back to the centre of the stage.
‘It’s a funny thing about you theatre people,’ he went on, ‘but nothing is ever straightforward, is it! These two aren’t the only ones lying about their relationships. What about Jordan and Maureen? Now there’s an odd couple if ever I saw one.’
‘What are you insinuating?’ Maureen was outraged.
‘Don’t worry, darling. I know you two haven’t been to bed together. But are you going to tell me you’re not just a little bit in love with him?’ Maureen made no reply, so he went on. ‘When we were in your office, you leapt in to defend him – what he’d said about Harriet in the green room at the theatre. He was joking. He didn’t mean it. You wouldn’t even consider that he might have killed her, even though secretly you believed that he’d made good on his threat and done exactly that.’
‘How can you possibly know that?’
‘Because he’d asked you to cover up for him the night before the murder and you’d agreed. He never actually left the theatre. You know that. You lied to the police … and to me.’
‘Leave her alone!’ This was Jordan Williams, getting angrily to his feet.
‘Are you going to deny it, Jordan?’ Hawthorne smiled. ‘We know you’d been arguing with your wife. We know she didn’t come to the first night. And there were a whole load of clothes in your dressing room … You’d even brought along your wedding photograph – the two of you outside Islington Registry Office. You’d had a fight, hadn’t you? You had nowhere else to go, so you were camping out at the theatre.’
‘This has nothing to do with the death of Harriet Throsby!’
‘No? You threaten to kill her – and the night before it happens, you ask Maureen to lie on your behalf—’
‘I didn’t!’
‘—and she agrees because she must have met you when you were playing Mr Mistoffelees in Cats. Maybe it was you who met her backstage that night when she saw it for the hundredth time.’
Jordan took a breath. ‘It was,’ he admitted.
‘He was brilliant!’ Even now, Maureen couldn’t resist a whisper of excitement.
‘Which is why you could be sure she’d agree to sign you out of the theatre that night.’ Before anyone could interrupt, Hawthorne went on. ‘Keith didn’t really know who was entering and leaving. He didn’t see Tony leave either.’
‘I can’t see everything!’ Keith complained, still half concealed in the wings.
Hawthorne ignored him. ‘It was easy enough for Maureen to register that you had left five minutes before her, at ten to one. She made just one mistake. Everyone else had used the twelve-hour clock. You yourself had written that you’d arrived at ten thirty p.m. But she used the twenty-four-hour clock. She arrived at twenty-three twenty-five and left an hour and a half later at zero fifty-five. And she wrote down zero fifty for you.’
‘I was there all night,’ Jordan admitted in a hoarse voice. ‘Jayne and I had had a stupid row – maybe that was why I was so emotional about the review. After the party, I went back to my dressing room and fell asleep almost at once. It had been a long day and I was exhausted. The next morning, I slipped out, using the fire exit downstairs. I went straight home and – Jayne will tell you – I was there by half past ten …’
‘Still enough time to make a detour via Little Venice.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about Harriet Throsby! I wanted to see my wife … to apologise for the things I’d said.’
‘All of you were thinking about Harriet Throsby! We already know about Martin Longhurst and her book. Her review was the first nail in the coffin for Ahmet and his production company, and Maureen wouldn’t have been too happy about that either. Tirian would have had his career screwed if she’d repeated the comments she’d heard him making about Christopher Nolan …’
I thought Hawthorne had dismissed this when I had suggested it to him. But maybe he was just trying to needle Tirian. It worked. ‘That’s ridiculous!’ Tirian snapped. ‘She couldn’t have heard a word I was saying, and why would I care if she did? It was a private conversation. She wouldn’t have been allowed to write about it.’
‘And then there’s Ewan,’ Hawthorne went on. ‘He had a particular loathing for Harriet because of what she’d written about his production of Saint Joan.’
‘That was a long time ago,’ Ewan said.
‘Yes. But as you told us, she chose her words very carefully and she deliberately baited you when you met at the party. It was as if she was mocking you. “Those big hotels don’t exactly light my fire.” Given that you’re now in a relationship with the actress who suffered those injuries, it would hardly be surprising if you were goaded into taking revenge.’
‘Sonja and I have learned to live with what happened. Harriet meant nothing to me.’
‘So you say.’ Hawthorne sounded doubtful.
‘You’ve been talking for a long time, Hawthorne. Is this actually going anywhere?’ The interruption came from the stalls, of course, from Cara Grunshaw.
Hawthorne beamed down at her. ‘Don’t worry if you’re finding it hard to follow, Cara. I’ll go through it all again later.’ He turned back. ‘We all know where we are now,’ he concluded. ‘But before I can tell you who killed Harriet, we need to look at the other two deaths: Frank Heywood and Major Philip Alden. Both of those men were connected to Harriet, so you have to ask – did they in some way inform her murder all these years later?
‘Let’s start with Heywood, the drama critic who supposedly died of a heart attack after eating a dodgy lamb curry at a restaurant called the Jai Mahal. He was a close friend of Harriet’s and it may even be that they were having an affair. That’s what Adrian Wells, her editor, believed. He also told us, by the way, that she always got what she wanted, which I think we already knew, but it does make me ask – if she wanted to take over as drama critic, did she also want him dead?