‘Be my guest.’
For the first time I noticed that Meadows was wearing gloves. He had some sort of plastic cap which he used to seal the glass, then lifted it to take it with him.
‘The only fingerprints on it are hers,’ Hawthorne said. ‘And there’s no DNA. Nobody drank out of it.’
‘You’ve seen the report?’ Meadows seemed puzzled.
‘No need to see anything, mate. It’s bloody obvious.’ He smiled. ‘You look at that tin in the kitchen? Prince Caspian?’
‘A few coins. No fingerprints. Nothing.’
‘No surprise there either.’ Hawthorne glanced at the sideboard. ‘How about the credit card?’
‘What about it?’
‘When was it last used?’
‘You’ll find all her financial details in there.’ Meadows nodded at the file. ‘Fifteen thousand quid in her private account. Another two hundred thou’ in savings. She was doing all right.’ He remembered what Hawthorne had asked. ‘The last time she used the card was a week ago. Harrods. That’s where she bought her groceries.’
‘Smoked salmon and cream cheese.’
‘How did you know that?’
‘It was in the kitchen. I had it for breakfast.’
‘That’s evidence!’
‘Not any more.’
Meadows scowled. ‘Anything else you want to know?’
‘Yes. Did you find the cat?’
‘What cat?’
‘That answers the question.’
‘Then I’ll leave you to it.’ Meadows was holding the glass as if he were a magician about to make a goldfish appear. He nodded at me. ‘Nice to meet you,’ he said. ‘But I’d watch out for yourself when you’re around this one. Particularly if you go near any stairs.’
He was pleased with that. He took one last look around the room and then, still holding the glass in front of him, he left.
Five
The Lacerated Man
‘What did he mean … that crack about the stairs?’
‘Charlie Meadows is a pillock. He didn’t mean anything.’
‘Charlie? You called him Jack.’
‘Everyone does.’
We were sitting outside a café close to Fulham Broadway station – fortunately the sun was shining – so Hawthorne could smoke. He had gone through the documents that Meadows had given him, sharing them with me too. There were photographs of Diana Cowper before and after she had died and I was shocked by the difference. The corpse that Andrea Kluvánek had discovered bore almost no resemblance to the smart, active socialite who had invested in theatre and eaten lunch in expensive restaurants in Mayfair.
I come in at eleven o’clock. Is the start of my work time. I see her and I know at once that something very bad has happen.
Andrea’s statement was attached, reproduced word for word in her broken English. There was a photograph of her: a slim, round-faced woman, quite boyish, with short, spiky hair, staring defensively at the camera. Hawthorne had told me she had a criminal record but I found it difficult to imagine her murdering Diana Cowper. She was too small.
There was plenty of other material too. In fact it occurred to me that it might be possible for Hawthorne to solve the murder right here at this table over his coffee and cigarette. I hoped not. If that happened, it would be a very short book. Perhaps it was with that thought in mind that I wanted to talk about other things first.
‘How do you know him?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘Meadows!’
‘We worked in the same sub-command in Putney. He had the office next to mine and although I always held my nose, there were a few times I had to walk down the dark side.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
‘It’s when you have to ask another team for help. When we were doing house-to-house … that sort of thing.’ Hawthorne seemed anxious to move on. ‘Do you want to talk about Diana Cowper?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to talk about you.’
He gazed at the paperwork spread out on the table. He didn’t need to say anything. This was all that mattered to him. But for once, I was on my home ground and I was determined. ‘The only way this is going to work is if you allow me into your life,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to know about you.’
‘Nobody’s interested in me.’
‘If that were true, I wouldn’t be here. If it’s true, the book won’t sell.’ I watched as Hawthorne lit another cigarette. For the first time in thirty years, I was tempted to ask for one myself. ‘Listen to me,’ I went on, carefully. ‘They’re not called murder victim stories. They’re not called criminal stories. They’re called detective stories. There’s a reason for that. I’m taking a big risk here. If you solve this crime right now, I won’t have anything to write about. Worse than that, if you don’t solve it at all, it’ll be a complete waste of time. So getting to know you matters. If I know you, if I can find something that makes you more … human, at least that’s a start. So you can’t just brush aside every question I ask you. You can’t hide behind this wall.’
Hawthorne shrank away. It was funny how, with his pale skin and those troubled, almost childlike eyes, he could make himself seem vulnerable. ‘I don’t want to talk about Jack Meadows. He didn’t like me. And when the shit hit the fan, he was happy to see me go.’
‘What shit? What fan?’
‘When I left.’
That was all he was going to say, so I made a mental note to follow it up later. Obviously, now wasn’t the right time. I opened the notebook which I had brought with me and took out a pen. ‘All right. While we’re sitting here, I want to ask you a few questions about yourself. I don’t even know where you live.’
He hesitated. This really was going to be blood out of a stone. ‘I’ve got a place in Gants Hill,’ he said at length. I’d often driven through Gants Hill, a suburb in north-east London, on the way to Suffolk.
‘Are you married?’
‘Yes.’ I could see that there was more to come but it took a while to arrive. ‘We’re not together any more. Don’t ask me about that.’
‘Do you support a football team?’
‘Arsenal.’ He said it without much enthusiasm and I suspected that if he was a football fan, he was a fairly casual one.
‘Do you go to the cinema?’
‘Sometimes.’ He was getting impatient.
‘What about music?’
‘What about it?’
‘Classical? Jazz?’
‘I don’t listen to music much.’
I’d been thinking of Morse and his love of opera but that had just gone out of the window too. ‘Do you have children?’
He swiped the cigarette out of his lips, holding it like a poison dart, and I saw that I’d pushed too hard, too soon. ‘This isn’t going to work,’ he snapped and at that moment I could easily imagine him in a police station, in an interrogation room. He was looking at me with something close to contempt. ‘You can write what you like about me. You can make it all up if you want to. What difference does it make? But I’m not going to play fucking University Challenge with you now or at any time. I’ve got a dead woman and somebody strangled her in her own front room and that’s all that matters to me right at this moment.’ He snatched up one of the pages. ‘Do you want to look at this or not?’
I could have gone home right then. I could have forgotten the whole thing – and, given what happened later on, it might have been better if I had. But I had just left the murder scene. It was almost as if I knew Diana Cowper and for some reason – maybe it was the photographs I had seen, the violence of her death – I felt I owed her something.