‘I can’t be certain. This all happened years ago and there are no witnesses. The police never suspected foul play, but then why would they even have looked? Both Harriet and Frank were poisoned. The restaurant was well known for its dodgy cuisine. Anyway, Frank died of a heart attack.
‘But one thing we do know. Harriet chose the restaurant. Wells told us that when we met him. She knew it had a bad reputation, so why did she want to go there? And here’s something else to consider. When she was writing her first book, No Regrets, she managed to get close to the main suspect, a man called Dr Robert Thirkell who was eventually arrested for poisoning a series of old ladies using rat poison – active ingredient, arsenic. Is it too far-fetched to suppose that she might have got a couple of doses from him just in case she might need it one day?’
‘Are you saying that my wife might have killed Frank Heywood?’ Arthur Throsby demanded.
‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘A big dose for him. A smaller one for her. The curry will disguise the taste. And the restaurant will get the blame. Do you really think it so unlikely?’
Arthur Throsby thought for a moment, then he gave a sniff of laughter. ‘I wouldn’t put it past her!’ he exclaimed. ‘She was capable of anything, my Harriet. If she slept with him, it was only because she wanted something from him.’ He thought back. ‘You know, it’s very strange, but now that I think about it, I remember walking into her bedroom the next day, after she’d been released from hospital. She was sitting up in bed, writing Frank’s obituary for the Argus.’
‘What was so strange about that?’ Olivia asked.
‘He hadn’t died yet.’
There was a shocked silence.
‘So much for Frank Heywood,’ Hawthorne continued. ‘But what about Philip Alden? There’s no mystery about who was responsible for his death, even if the whole truth has never really come out. It was Stephen Longhurst who thought up the trick that killed him because it was Stephen Longhurst who really hated him.’ Hawthorne approached Martin Longhurst. ‘Did you know the truth about your brother, Mr Longhurst? That he was the one in charge, not the other boy?’
‘I only knew what my parents told me.’
‘Your parents, or their lawyers, bribed one of the witnesses. They perverted the course of justice. A poor little kid got the bigger sentence – ten years in jail – when it should have been Stephen who took the rap.’
‘I had no idea.’
‘Why did you go back to the school? Why did you pretend you were going to send your own children there?’
‘I can’t answer that, Mr Hawthorne.’ Longhurst bowed his head. ‘All my life, I’ve been haunted by what happened at Moxham Heath Primary School. It tore my family apart. Even if Harriet hadn’t written her book, it would have destroyed us. I just wanted to see where it happened, to try to understand. I couldn’t explain myself to the head teacher, so I made up a story about my own children. I suppose you could say I was trying to lay a ghost to rest.’
‘I’d like you to know, incidentally, that I did write to you,’ I said. I couldn’t resist chipping in, even if no one on the stage had a clue what I was talking about.
Nor did Martin Longhurst. He looked at me blankly. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘The head teacher said you used to read my books. You wrote to me and you didn’t get a reply.’
‘No.’ He scowled. ‘She’s got that wrong. It wasn’t you. It was Michael Morpurgo.’
‘Oh.’ I felt my cheeks burning and twisted in my seat.
Fortunately, Hawthorne had already moved to the front of the stage, working his way towards the final act. ‘Are you still awake, Cara?’ he called out.
‘This had better be good, Hawthorne.’
He turned his back on her.
‘The reason Harriet Throsby was killed had nothing to do with the play and nothing to do with Tony,’ he said. ‘The big mistake I made at the start was to believe that somebody had tried to frame him. His hair. His dagger. That made no sense at all. Worse than that, it twisted the whole crime out of shape. I should have listened to my instincts, which told me he was irrelevant. But it was only after I’d talked to all of you that I got the complete picture and realised what had happened.
‘Jordan Williams had said he wanted to murder Harriet Throsby. He’d shouted it out in front of everyone. So it made complete sense for the killer to frame him. But that’s what went wrong. Tony was a mistake.
‘Think what happened on the night of the party. Tony arrives, soaking wet, and Jordan hands him a towel.’
‘I dried my hair!’ I said.
‘Yes, mate, and at your age you’re losing some of it too. Later on, someone went into Jordan’s dressing room and picked a hair off his towel, thinking it was Jordan’s. But in fact they took yours. Simple as that.’
‘And they left it on the body!’
‘Yes. As for the knife, that was another mistake. Keith came down and took Jordan’s dagger and carried it over to the sink. Meanwhile, Tony had left his own dagger somewhere in plain sight and, once again, the killer took it, thinking it was Jordan’s. Of course, the killer was careful not to add his own fingerprints to the hilt and since nobody else had handled it from the moment Tony unwrapped it from the tissue paper – wiping it clean at the same time – only his own fingerprints appeared.
‘So the question we have to ask ourselves is not who would want to frame Tony, but who might have had it in for Jordan? And I think everyone here knows the answer to that.’
Suddenly, he was standing in front of Tirian.
‘I like you, Tirian,’ he said. ‘I sort of feel sorry for you. But I’ve got to tell you. I know everything.’
‘No. You can’t.’
‘I wish it could be otherwise, mate. But you can’t hide any more. I know.’
Tirian gazed at him for what felt a very long time. Then, to my astonishment, tears appeared in his eyes and when he spoke again he sounded almost like a child. ‘But I was so clever!’ he wailed. ‘I got it all right!’
‘That’s not quite true. You mucked up with the hair and the weapon, just for a start.’
‘Apart from that!’ The tears were flowing freely down his cheeks.
At once, Cara Grunshaw was on her feet. ‘Tirian Kirke killed Harriet Throsby?’ she exclaimed.
‘Well done, Cara! You got there in the end!’ Hawthorne smiled at her. ‘You just needed a bit of help.’
‘But why? Because she didn’t like the play?’
‘Haven’t you been listening? How many times do I have to tell you? It had nothing to do with Mindgame.’
‘Then … why?’
Tirian was slumped in his chair, silent, crying. He hadn’t even tried to deny what Hawthorne was saying. The other actors, Martin Longhurst, Ahmet and especially Maureen were staring at him in horror.
‘Let’s start with the night of the party,’ Hawthorne suggested, calmly. ‘Tirian had decided to kill Harriet before he even left the theatre. We’ll come to the reason in a minute. When Jordan Williams made his death threat, it provided Tirian with an opportunity he couldn’t ignore. Jordan would be the scapegoat. Easy enough to nip upstairs and nick one of his hairs off a brush or a towel – but he also needed the dagger with Jordan’s fingerprints. That would be the clincher.
‘He was the first to leave the green room – at about twenty minutes past midnight. He signed out at twelve twenty-five. But he knew he’d have to come back when the theatre was locked for the night and there was only one way in: the fire exit, which only opened from the inside. So what he did was, he nicked a packet of Ahmet’s cigarettes, which he was going to use as a wedge. He’d push the bar to open the door into the alleyway and then slide the packet underneath to make sure it never completely shut.