‘You’re quite right. I needed the plot number of her husband’s grave.’ Cornwallis smiled. ‘I had to contact the Royal Parks Chapel Office to register the interment. It was the one piece of information she hadn’t given me. There’s something I should perhaps mention. She was having some sort of argument when I spoke to her. I heard voices in the background. She said she’d call back but of course she never did.’
Irene Laws returned with Hawthorne’s tea. The cup rattled against the saucer as she set it down.
‘Is there anything else I can help you with, Mr Hawthorne?’ Cornwallis asked.
‘I’d be interested to know … did you both speak to her?’
‘Irene showed her into this office—’
‘I spoke to her briefly in the reception area but I didn’t stay for the meeting,’ Miss Laws interrupted, as she took her place.
‘Was she ever in here on her own?’
Cornwallis frowned. ‘What a very odd question. Why do you want to know?’
‘I’m just interested.’
‘No. I was with her the whole time.’
‘Just before she left, she used the cloakroom,’ Miss Laws said.
‘You mean the toilet.’
‘That’s what I said. That was the only time she was on her own. I took her to the room, which is just along the corridor, and then came back with her while she collected her things. I’d also like to say that she was in a perfectly pleasant state of mind when she left. If anything, she was relieved – but that’s often the way when people come here. In fact, it’s part of our service.’
Hawthorne downed his tea in three large gulps. We stood up to leave. Then one thought occurred to me. ‘She didn’t say anything about someone called Timothy Godwin, did she?’ I asked.
‘Timothy Godwin?’ Cornwallis shook his head. ‘Who is he?’
‘He was a boy she accidentally killed in a car accident,’ I said. ‘He had a brother, Jeremy Godwin …’
‘What a terrible thing to happen.’ Cornwallis turned to his cousin. ‘Did she mention either of those names to you, Irene?’
‘No.’
‘I doubt they’re relevant.’ Hawthorne had cut off the discussion before it could go any further. He stretched out a hand. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Cornwallis.’
Outside, in the street, he turned on me.
‘Do me a favour, mate. Never ask questions when you’re with me. Never ask anything. All right?’
‘You just expect me to sit there and say nothing?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’m not stupid,’ I said. ‘I may be able to help.’
‘Well, you’re wrong on at least one of those counts. But the point is, you’re not here to help. You said this was a detective story. I’m the detective. It’s as simple as that.’
‘Then tell me what you’ve learned,’ I said. ‘You’ve been to the crime scene. You’ve seen the phone records. You’ve talked to the undertaker. Do you know anything yet?’
Hawthorne considered what I’d said. He had a blank look in his eyes and, for a moment, I thought he was going to dismiss me out of hand. Then he took pity on me.
‘Diana Cowper knew she was going to die,’ he said.
I waited for him to add something more but he simply turned and stormed off down the pavement. I considered my options, then followed, in every sense struggling to catch up.
Six
Witness Statements
I didn’t know very much about Diana Cowper but it was already clear to me that there couldn’t have been whole crowds of people queuing up to murder her. She was a middle-aged woman, a widow, living on her own. She was well-off without being super-rich, on the board of a theatre and the mother of a famous son. She had difficulty sleeping and she had a cat. True, she’d lost money to a theatrical producer and she’d employed a cleaner with a criminal record but what reason would either of them have had to strangle her?
The one thing that stood out was the fact that she had killed a little boy and badly injured his brother. The accident had been caused by her own carelessness – she hadn’t been wearing her spectacles – and, worse still, she had driven away without stopping. Despite all this, she had walked free. If I had been Timothy and Jeremy Godwin’s father, if I had been related to them in any way, I might have been tempted to kill her myself. And all of this had happened exactly ten years ago: well, nine years and eleven months. Close enough.
It was an obvious motive for murder. If the Godwin family was living in north London, in Harrow-on-the-Hill, I couldn’t understand why we weren’t heading there straight away and I said as much to Hawthorne.
‘One step at a time,’ he replied. ‘There are other people I want to talk to first.’
‘The cleaner?’ We were actually sitting in a taxi that was taking us around Shepherd’s Bush roundabout on our way to Acton, which was where Andrea Kluvánek lived. Hawthorne had also telephoned Raymond Clunes and we were seeing him later. ‘You don’t suspect her, do you?’
‘I suspect her of lying to the police, yes.’
‘And Clunes? What’s he got to do with this?’
‘He knew Mrs Cowper. Seventy-eight per cent of female victims are killed by someone they know,’ he went on before I could interrupt.
‘Really?’
‘I thought you’d have known that, you being a TV writer.’ Ignoring the no-smoking sign, he pressed the button to lower the window of the cab and lit a cigarette. ‘Husband, stepfather, lover … speaking statistically, they’re the most likely killers.’
‘Raymond Clunes wasn’t any of those things.’
‘He could have been her lover.’
‘She saw the boy with the lacerations, Jeremy Godwin! She said she was afraid. I don’t know why you’re wasting your time.’
‘There’s no smoking!’ the driver complained over the intercom.
‘Fuck off. I’m a police officer,’ Hawthorne replied, equanimously. ‘What were those words you used? Modus operandi. This is mine.’ He blew smoke out of the window but the wind just whipped it back into the cab. ‘Start with the people who were closest to her and work outwards from there. It’s like doing a house-to-house. You start with the neighbours. You don’t start at the end of the street.’ He turned his eyes on me, once again interrogating. ‘You got a problem with that?’
‘It just seems a bit crazy to be haring around London. And at my expense,’ I added quietly.
Hawthorne said nothing more.
After what seemed like a very long drive, the taxi pulled up on the edge of the South Acton Estate, a sprawling collection of slab blocks and high-rise towers that had sprung up over the decades, starting at the end of the war. There was some landscaping – lawns, trees and pedestrian walkways – but the overall effect was dispiriting if only because there were so many homes packed together. We walked beside a skateboard park that looked as if it hadn’t been used for years and then down into an underpass, the walls covered with crude graffiti images, bleeding garishly into one another. No Banksies here.
A huddle of twenty-somethings in hoodies and sweatshirts were sitting in the shadows, watching us with sullen, suspicious eyes. Fortunately, Hawthorne seemed to know where he was going and I stayed close to him, thinking back to what the woman at Hay-on-Wye had said to me. Perhaps this was the dose of reality she had prescribed.
Andrea Kluvánek lived on the second floor of one of the towers. Hawthorne had telephoned ahead and she was expecting us. I knew from the police files that she had two children, but it was one thirty in the afternoon and I guessed they were both at school. Her flat was clean but it was very small, with no more furniture than was needed: three chairs at the kitchen table, a single sofa in front of the TV. Even the most optimistic estate agent wouldn’t have called the living room open-plan. The kitchen simply blended into it with no way of saying where one ended and the other began. This was a one-bedroom flat and I have no idea how they managed at night. Maybe the children had the bedroom and she slept on the sofa.