I slid behind the table opposite him and ordered a bacon sandwich.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘I’m all right.’
If I sounded distant, he didn’t notice. ‘I’ve been doing a bit of work on the Godwin family,’ he said. He talked while he ate but somehow the food didn’t get in the way of the words. There was a notepad on the table next to him. ‘The father is Alan Godwin,’ he went on. ‘He’s got his own business. He’s an events organiser. His wife is Judith Godwin. Works part-time for a kids’ charity. They’ve only got the one son. Jeremy Godwin is eighteen now. Brain damage. According to the doctors, he needs full-time care – but that could mean anything.’
‘Can’t you even feel slightly sorry for them?’ I asked.
He looked up from his plate, puzzled. ‘What makes you think I don’t?’
‘Just the way you’re rattling off the facts. “They’ve only got the one son.” Of course they have! The other one was killed. And as for the one who’s still alive, you’re already suggesting that he might be faking it or something.’
‘I can see you got out of bed the wrong side.’ He drank some tea. ‘I don’t know anything about Jeremy Godwin apart from what I’ve been told. But unless Diana Cowper made a mistake, it seems he may well have got out of his bed or out of his wheelchair and hiked down to Britannia Road on the night she died. And let’s not forget that only yesterday, you were the one who was in a hurry to get up here. You’d got them all bang to rights: Alan Godwin, Judith Godwin and – if he was up to it – Jeremy Godwin. Correct me if I’m wrong.’
My bacon sandwich arrived. I didn’t really feel like eating it. ‘I’m just saying you could be a bit more sensitive about people.’
‘Is that why you’re here? Because you want to put your arms around the suspects and hold them close?’
‘No. But …’
‘You’re here for the same reason as me. You want to know who killed Diana Cowper. If it was one of them, they’ll be arrested. If it wasn’t, we’ll walk away and we’ll never see them again. Either way, what we think about them, what we feel about them, doesn’t make a sod of difference.’
He flicked over one of the pages. He had made the notes in handwriting that was very neat and precise, so small that I couldn’t read it without my glasses. ‘I’ve made a summary of the accident. If it won’t upset you too much … an eight-year-old kid getting killed!’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘It’s pretty much like Raymond Clunes told us. They were staying at the Royal Hotel in Deal … just the two brothers and a nanny, Mary O’Brien. They’d been on the beach all day and they were on their way back when the kids ran across the road to get ice-creams. The nanny got a bit of stick for that in court but she swore the road was clear. She was wrong. They were halfway across when a car came round the corner and slammed into them. It missed the nanny by inches, killed one kid, hurt the other, then drove off. There was quite a crowd, plenty of witnesses. If Diana Cowper hadn’t turned herself in a couple of hours later, she’d have been in serious shit.’
‘Do you think it was right she was acquitted?’
Hawthorne shrugged. ‘You’d have to ask a brief.’
‘She knew the judge.’
‘She knew someone who knew the judge. Not the same thing.’ He seemed to have forgotten that he had been suggesting a gay conspiracy only the day before. ‘Judges know lots of people,’ he added. ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean there was something nasty going on.’
We finished the breakfast in a moody silence. The waitress brought the bill. Hawthorne didn’t look at it. He was expecting me to pay.
‘That’s another thing,’ I said. ‘So far, I notice that I’ve paid for every coffee and every taxi fare. If we’re in this fifty-fifty, maybe we should split the expenses the same way.’
‘All right!’ He sounded genuinely surprised.
I was already regretting what I’d said. It was more a reaction to what had happened the day before than a genuine desire to share costs. I watched as he took out his wallet and produced a ten-pound note so limp and crumpled that but for the colour I would have been unsure of its denomination. He laid it on the table like an autumn leaf that’s been fished out of the gutter. There were no other notes in his wallet and even if my point had been justified, all I’d managed to do was to make myself seem petty and mean. That was just about the last time Hawthorne ever paid for anything, by the way. I never complained again.
We walked together from the café. I actually know Harrow-on-the-Hill quite well. We filmed quite a few scenes of Foyle’s War there, with the old-fashioned high street doubling as Hastings’. It’s amazing what a few seagulls added to the soundtrack can achieve. My first boarding school was nearby and it struck me how little the area had changed in fifty years. It was still a slightly improbable enclave, very green and unworldly, rising above the other north London suburbs that sprawled around.
‘So what did you get up to last night?’ I asked Hawthorne, as we continued on our way.
‘What?’
‘I just wondered what you did. Did you go out for dinner? Did you work on the case?’ He didn’t answer, so I added, ‘It’s for the book.’
‘I had dinner. I made some notes. I went to bed.’
But what did he eat? Who did he go to bed with? Did he watch TV? Did he even own a TV?
He wasn’t going to tell me and there wasn’t time to ask.
We had arrived at a Victorian house on Roxborough Avenue, three storeys high, built out of those dark red bricks that always make me think of Charles Dickens. It was set back from the main road with a gravel path and a double garage and from the very first sight it struck me that I had never seen a building that exuded a greater sense of misery – from the scrawny, half-wild garden to the peeling paintwork, the window boxes with dead flowers, the blank, unlit windows.
This was the home of the Godwins … or, at least, the three members of the family who had survived.
Eight
Damaged Goods
One of my favourite screenwriters is Nigel Kneale, the inventor of the eccentric Professor Quatermass. He wrote a chilling television play, The Stone Tape, which suggested that the very fabric of a house, the bricks and mortar, might be able to absorb and ‘play back’ the various emotions, including the horrors, that it had witnessed. I was reminded of it as I entered the Godwins’ home on Roxborough Avenue. It was an expensive house. Any property of this size in Harrow-on-the-Hill would have been worth a couple of million pounds. And yet the hall was cold – colder perhaps than it was outside – and poorly lit. It was crying out for redecoration. The carpets were a little threadbare with too many stains. There was a sense of something in the air that might have been damp or dry rot but was actually just misery, recorded and re-recorded until the memory bank was full.
The door had been opened by a woman in her fifties. She would have been about ten or fifteen years younger than Diana Cowper at the time of her death. She looked at us suspiciously, as if we had come to sell her something; in fact her entire body language was defensive. This was Judith Godwin. I could easily imagine her working for a charity. She had a brittle quality, as if she needed charity herself, but knew that she would never get it. The tragedy that had changed her life was still with her. When she asked you for help or for money it would always be personal.
‘You’re Hawthorne?’ she asked.
‘It’s very good to meet you.’ Hawthorne actually sounded as if he meant it and I saw that he had undergone another of his transformations. He had been hard with Andrea Kluvánek, coldly matter-of-fact with Raymond Clunes but now it was a polite and accommodating Hawthorne who presented himself to Judith Godwin. ‘Thank you for seeing us.’