‘He told me that.’
Hawthorne grinned unexpectedly. ‘It had to be somebody on the inside, putting that music player into the coffin. Think about it. They had to know what type of coffin it was, that it was the sort that could be opened in a couple of seconds. They had to know exactly the moment they could reach it and Cornwallis was the one giving the instructions. He could have been alone with it at any time. He knew how much the nursery rhyme would mean to Damian; he’d heard all about it in acting class. He must have been skulking in the cemetery, watching the whole thing. The idea was to get Damian back to the flat and murder him there – and it worked perfectly. You know, when I called Cornwallis after the funeral, he was probably waiting on the terrace. And when Damian arrived on his own, that was it. Psycho time!’ Hawthorne slashed at the air with an invisible knife.
‘How did he get there so quickly?’ I asked. He couldn’t have left the funeral that long before Damian.
‘He had a motorbike. Didn’t you see it parked in his garage? And of course he was wearing leathers, which would have protected him from the blood splatter. After he killed Damian, he took off the leathers and either dumped them or took them home. He was clever, that one. When we saw him that afternoon, his wife asked him why he was still wearing his suit. It was because he knew we were coming and he wanted to show us that it was clean, that it wasn’t covered in blood. He went to the school play. He went home. He had tea. And all that on the same day he’d chopped up his best mate.’
I lay there, thinking about what Hawthorne had said. It all made sense and yet at the same time there was something missing. ‘And Deal had nothing to do with it?’ I asked.
‘Not really.’
‘So who attacked Nigel Weston? Why did you say that was my fault?’
‘Because it was.’ Hawthorne took out a packet of cigarettes, remembered he was in a hospital and put them away again. ‘When we interviewed Robert Cornwallis that first time, you asked him if Diana Cowper had said anything about Timothy Godwin.’
‘You were angry with me.’
‘It was a rookie error, mate. What you did was, you told him that we were interested in the accident that had happened in Deal. And so he decided to use it to misdirect us. It was also what gave him the idea of “The wheels on the bus go round and round”. He knew it would upset Damian but at the same time it would send us in the wrong direction. And setting fire to Weston’s place was genius. Weston was the judge who’d let Diana walk free, so he became a target too. But it was like I told you all along: it wasn’t the tenth anniversary of the accident. It was nine years and eleven months. If Alan Godwin or his wife had really wanted to pay Diana Cowper back for what she’d done, you’d have thought they’d choose the right day.’
‘But what about the text that Diana Cowper sent?’
Hawthorne nodded slowly. ‘Let’s go back to the first murder,’ he said. ‘It’s unplanned … a bit spur of the moment. Cornwallis has Mrs Cowper in his office. He knows where she lives. It’s possible that she’s mentioned she’s alone – I’m sure he got as much information out of her as he could. But he needs an excuse to see her, at her house, later. You remember I asked if she was ever left on her own? I was trying to find out her exact movements at the undertaker’s and it turns out that she used the loo. My guess is that she left her handbag behind in Cornwallis’s office and that was when he nicked it.’
‘What?’
‘Her credit card. It was on the sideboard in her living room and I wondered at the time what it was doing there. We also know that Cornwallis telephoned her just after two, when she was at the Globe Theatre. I asked him about that and he gave us some bullshit about needing to know the plot number of where her husband was buried. Why would he think for a minute that she would have that information? Why didn’t he just ring the Chapel Office and get it from them? I knew he was lying to us. What he did was to ring her, all sweetness and light, and tell her that he’d found her credit card and that he would drop it in later that evening: “Don’t worry, Mrs Cowper. No trouble at all.”
‘So later on, he turns up at her house and although it’s getting dark and she’s on her own, of course she lets him in. “Here’s the credit card!” He puts it down but stays for a chat. And that’s when the penny drops. Diana Cowper remembers the quote from Hamlet that she saw in the window. There are the programmes on the stairs and the fridge magnets and maybe they help. Suddenly she recognises Robert Cornwallis and remembers where she has seen him before. It was a long time ago and they probably only exchanged a few words. He’s changed a lot. He’s an undertaker in a dark suit. But she knows that he’s Dan Roberts and maybe there’s something about his manner that’s a little bit creepy and she’s afraid. She knows that he’s come to do her harm.
‘What does she do? If she raises the alarm, he’ll attack her. Perhaps she can see that he’s a complete nutcase. So she smiles at him and offers him a drink. “Yes, please. I’d like a glass of water.” She goes into the kitchen – and that’s when Cornwallis unties the cord from the curtain that he’s going to use to strangle her. At the same time, as quickly as she can, Diana sends her son a text.’
At last, one second before he said it, I realised. ‘The phone auto-corrected!’ I said.
‘That’s right, mate. I have seen the boy who was Laertes and I’m afraid. She couldn’t remember his real name but she wanted her son to know who it was in her living room. She was texting quickly – she was nervous. She didn’t even have time to add the final full stop.
‘And she didn’t see that the text had auto-corrected and it came out: I have seen the boy who was lacerated. I thought it was a bit odd. Surely Mrs Cowper wouldn’t have referred to Jeremy Godwin as the boy who was lacerated, even if she was in a hurry. The boy who was injured, maybe. The boy who was hurt – that’s only four letters. It was just bad luck that we saw brain lacerations in the newspaper report and leapt to the wrong conclusion.’
I wondered if that was true. Hawthorne was paid by the day. The wider the investigation, the more places he visited, the more he earned. It may be stretching it but it was in his interest to examine every possibility.
He went on. ‘After she’d sent the text, she went back into the living room, taking the water with her. She was probably going to ask Cornwallis to get out of her house. I can imagine she was a bit braver, now that Damian knew what was going on. But Cornwallis was too quick. The moment she put the water down, he slipped the cord over her neck and strangled her. Then he went round the house, taking a few things, making it look like a burglary. Then he left.’
Hospitals are strange places. When I had first arrived at Charing Cross, the entire place had been bright, busy, chaotic. But quite suddenly, after visiting hours, everything seemed to have stopped as if someone had thrown a switch. The lighting had dimmed. The corridors were silent. There was a stillness that was almost uncomfortable. I was tired. My stitches were hurting and although I could at least move my limbs, I didn’t want to. It was possible I was still in shock.
Hawthorne could see it was time to leave.
‘How long are they keeping you here?’ he asked.
‘I’ll go home tomorrow.’
He nodded. ‘You’re lucky I got there in time.’
‘How did you know to get to the mortuary?’
‘I rang your assistant to check in with you. She told me where you’d gone. I couldn’t believe it when I heard that. I was worried about you.’