‘If you want me to write about it, you’re going to have to tell me. Otherwise, I’ll have to make it up.’ It was a threat I’d made before.
‘All right.’ He flicked the cigarette over the side of the building. I watched it spin in the air before it disappeared. ‘Start by putting yourself in the killer’s place. Think about what’s going on in his mind.
‘You know Damian’s going to be coming back here from the funeral. That crap with the MP3 player and “The wheels on the bus” was done deliberately to drive him here. Or it could be that you were in the cemetery – in the crowd or hiding behind one of the gravestones. You heard him tell his girlfriend: I’m going home. That’s when you made your plan.
‘The only trouble is, you can’t be certain he’s going to be alone. Maybe Grace will come along after all. Maybe he’ll bring the vicar. So you have to wait somewhere you can see him and if the opportunity doesn’t present itself, you can piss off again.’ He jerked a thumb. ‘There’s a staircase down to ground level.’
‘Perhaps he came up that way?’
‘He can’t have. The door into the living room is locked and bolted on the inside.’ Hawthorne shook his head. ‘He had the key. He let himself in the front door. He looked for somewhere to hide and came out here. It was perfect. He could look in through the window and see if Damian had someone with him. But as things turned out, Damian was alone, which was what he wanted. The killer went back into the living room and …’ He left the rest of the sentence hanging.
‘You said he left this way too,’ I reminded him.
‘There’s a footprint.’ Hawthorne pointed and I saw a red quarter moon next to the fire escape, made by the sole of someone’s shoe after they’d stepped in Damian’s blood. It reminded me of the footprint we’d found at Diana Cowper’s house, presumably left behind by the same foot.
‘Anyway, he couldn’t use the front door,’ Hawthorne went on. ‘You’ve seen the stab wounds. There’d have been a lot of blood. He’d have been covered in it. You think he could stroll down Brick Lane without being noticed? My guess is he put on a coat or something, climbed down here and disappeared down the alleyway.’
‘Do you know how the alarm clock got into the coffin?’
‘Not yet. We’re going to have to talk to Cornwallis.’ He rolled the cigarette between his fingers. ‘But we’re not going to be able to leave here for a while. You may have to give a statement to Meadows when he finally turns up. Don’t say too much. Just play dumb.’ He glanced at me. ‘It shouldn’t be too difficult.’
Over the next couple of hours, Damian Cowper’s flat became more and more crowded while the two of us sat there with nothing to do. The police constables who had first arrived on the scene had summoned their detective inspector, who had in turn called in the Murder Investigation Team. There were about half a dozen of them, wearing those plasticised paper suits with hoods, masks and gloves that made them almost indistinguishable from each other. Every few seconds, the room seemed to freeze as a police photographer captured some section of it with a dazzling flash. A man and a woman, both part of the forensic team, were crouching over Damian’s body, delicately swabbing his hands and neck with cotton buds. I knew what they were looking for. If there had been any bodily contact between Damian and his attacker during the knife attack, they might be able to pick up DNA. Both of his hands had been bagged, the opaque plastic securely taped. It was extraordinary how quickly he had been dehumanised – and worse was to come. When they were finally ready to remove him, two men knelt down and wrapped him in polythene which they sealed with gaffer tape. The process turned him into something that reminded me of both ancient Egypt and Federal Express.
They’d used blue and white tape to create a cordon which began at the front door and blocked off the stairs. I wasn’t sure how they would deal with the neighbours on the upper and lower floors. As for me, although I hadn’t been questioned, a woman in a plastic suit had asked me to remove my shoes and taken them away. That puzzled me. ‘What do they need them for?’ I asked Hawthorne.
‘Latent footprints,’ he replied. ‘They need to eliminate you from the enquiry.’
‘I know. But they haven’t taken yours.’
‘I’ve been more careful, mate.’
He glanced at his feet. He was still in his socks. He must have slipped his shoes off the moment he saw Damian’s body.
‘When will I get them back?’ I asked.
Hawthorne shrugged.
‘How long are we going to be here for?’
Again, he didn’t answer. He wanted another cigarette but he wasn’t allowed to smoke inside and it was making him irritable.
After a while, Meadows arrived, signing himself in with the log officer at the door. He had taken charge – the murder of Damian Cowper was being folded into his current investigation – and this time I saw a different side of him. He was cool and authoritative, checking with the crime scene manager, talking to the forensic team, taking notes. When he finally came over to us, he got straight to the point.
‘What were you doing here?’
‘We came over to offer our condolences.’
‘Piss off, Hawthorne. This is serious. Did he call you? Did you know he might be in danger?’
Meadows wasn’t as stupid as Hawthorne had suggested. He was right. Hawthorne had known. But would he admit it?
‘No,’ he said. ‘He didn’t call me.’
‘So why did you come here?’
‘Why do you think? That business at the funeral – there’s obviously something sick going on and if you hadn’t been so busy chasing your non-existent burglar, you’d have seen it too. I wanted to ask him about what had happened. I just got here too late.’
No mention of the keys. Hawthorne would never admit he’d made a mistake. He’d forgotten that one day Meadows would read it in my book.
‘He was already dead when you got here.’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t see anyone leaving?’
‘There’s a bloody footprint out on the terrace, if you care to take a look. It might give you a shoe size. I’d say the killer left down the fire escape into the alley, so perhaps you’ll catch him on CCTV. But we didn’t see anything. We got here too late.’
‘All right, then. You can get lost. And take Agatha Christie here with you.’
He meant me. Agatha Christie is something of a hero of mine but I was still offended.
Hawthorne got up and I followed him to the front door, both of us padding across the wooden floor in our socks. I was about to point this out when he swept a pair of black leather shoes off the art deco sideboard and handed them to me. I hadn’t noticed when he’d put them there. ‘These are for you,’ he said.
‘Where did you get them?’
‘I nicked them out of the cupboard when I went upstairs. They belonged to him.’ He nodded in the direction of Damian Cowper. ‘They should be about your size.’
I looked uncertain, so he added: ‘He won’t be needing them.’
I slipped them on. They were Italian, expensive. They fitted perfectly.
He put on his own shoes and we walked out, past more uniformed policemen and down into Brick Lane. There were three police cars parked outside and, next to them, a vehicle with the words ‘Private Ambulance’ printed on the side. It wasn’t anything of the sort. It was just a black van brought here to transport Damian Cowper to the mortuary. More policemen were at work, erecting a screen from the front of the house to the edge of the pavement so that nobody would see the body when it was carried out. A large crowd was being held back on the other side of the road. The traffic had been blocked. Not for the first time, I found myself thinking of all the television programmes I’d been involved with. We’d never have been able to afford so many extras and all these vehicles, let alone the central London location.