The Sentence is Death

by Anthony Horowitz

  Spencer turned to his assistant. ‘Why don’t you go back into the office, Faraz?’

  ‘Stephen—’

  ‘It’s all right.’ Spencer waited until the other man had gone, then answered: ‘I already told you.’

  ‘You lied to us. I’ve spoken to your mother at the St Osyth Care Home in Frinton. She has no memory of you visiting her.’

  Spencer bristled. ‘My mother is in the fairly advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. There are times when she doesn’t even remember who I am.’

  ‘And have all the nurses got Alzheimer’s too? None of them remember seeing you either.’

  I thought Spencer would deny it but he was cleverer than that. He considered for a moment, then shrugged. ‘All right. I was lying.’

  ‘You were with your boyfriend, Faraz. Where is he from, by the way? Iran?’

  ‘Yes. He is. But what makes you think—’

  ‘Please don’t treat me like an idiot, Mr Spencer. This is a murder investigation and right now you could be done for obstructing a police officer.’

  ‘You’re not a police officer.’

  ‘You lied to DI Grunshaw and you certainly don’t want to get on the wrong side of her!’ That was true, as I knew only too well. ‘That’s a very distinctive aftershave your Iranian friend wears and your car stank of it.’ Hawthorne sniffed. ‘I can smell it on you now. You didn’t wait very long for your husband to pass on, did you? Has he moved into your place in Hampstead?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘But Richard Pryce had found out about the two of you, hadn’t he? The marriage, the civil contract, whatever you want to call it, was all over as far as he was concerned. He wanted you to move out.’

  ‘That’s not true! Who told you that?’ Spencer’s eyes narrowed. ‘Was it Oliver Masefield?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, it was.’ Hawthorne continued before Spencer could interrupt: ‘Your late husband’s law partner is also the executor of his will. He was actually very discreet but he did mention that the two of them had discussed the contents just a few weeks ago. Now there’s only one reason you talk about a will and that’s if you’re going to change it. And given the fact that you and Davina Richardson are the main beneficiaries and she hasn’t done anything to piss him off, while you’ve been gallivanting around at the weekends with Ali Baba out there’ – he jerked a thumb in the direction of the office and I closed my eyes, quietly adding casual racism to the charge sheet against Hawthorne – ‘it was a fair bet that he’d rumbled you and that he was about to do something about it.

  ‘The telephone call that you made to Richard at eight o’clock on Sunday evening originated in Chiswick, which is, by coincidence, where your mate Faraz Delijani lives. Cara Grunshaw already knows that and I’m surprised she hasn’t been round here already. So before that happens you might as well tell me what you were really up to – you can spare me the graphic details, if you don’t mind – and with a bit of luck it’ll persuade me that you didn’t creep home and commit murder.’

  ‘I didn’t kill anyone!’ There was a bottle of mineral water on a shelf. Spencer went over and twisted it open. I heard the rush of escaping gas. He poured himself a glass. ‘Richard and I had been having difficulties. Yes. We’d talked about spending time apart. And yes – I spent the weekend with Faraz in his flat in Chiswick. Lots of people saw us. On Sunday night we had dinner at a place called L’Auberge on the Upper Richmond Road.’ He took out his wallet and produced a slip of paper that he offered to Hawthorne. ‘Here’s the receipt, but you can ask them if you like. We had a table in the window.’

  ‘I will ask them.’ Hawthorne took the receipt.

  ‘This may surprise you, Mr Hawthorne, but I loved Richard very much and I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt him.’

  ‘Except for sleeping around behind his back.’

  ‘We had an open marriage. We tolerated each other’s indiscretions. And if Richard was going to change his will, it could just as easily have been to do with Davina as me.’

  ‘Why would he have done that?’

  ‘Forget it.’ It was clear that Spencer had decided he’d said too much and was regretting it.

  ‘I think you’d better tell me, Mr Spencer.’

  ‘All right.’ He frowned. ‘If you really must know, she was wearing him out … all her demands. He set up her business. He put her son through private education. He was always round there, listening to her problems. But it was never enough. She was bleeding him dry to get more clients who wanted interior decorating and for what it’s worth, he didn’t even much like her taste. It was all reds and yellows and that horrible shade of green. “Gangreen”, he called it! He was desperate to get her out of his life but he couldn’t do it because of what had happened in Yorkshire. I never understood it, personally. It wasn’t as if it had been his fault. I told him to tell her to fuck off – and maybe he did. Maybe he finally got her out of his system.’

  ‘Do you think she killed him?’ Hawthorne asked, a little more gently.

  Spencer shook his head. ‘No. I’ve already told you. It was Akira. I was there in the restaurant when she threatened him and I heard it with my own ears. And there was something else …’

  He paused for effect and for the first time I glanced around the gallery, at the oil paintings and watercolours displayed on the walls, each one carefully isolated in its private pool of light. It would have made a perfect setting if anyone had chosen to film this.

  ‘Richard was on to her,’ Spencer continued. ‘He told me that he’d had her investigated. You need to talk to Graham Hain at Navigant business management. He’s a forensic accountant who worked with Richard and he’d discovered that Akira had a limited company and an income stream that she didn’t want anyone to know about. Richard thought she was doing something illegal.’

  ‘Like what?’ In fact we already knew this. Oliver Masefield had told us as much, although he had put it less baldly.

  ‘He didn’t say. But she’d done everything she could to keep it hidden and it might have had an impact on the divorce. Both sides have to say how much they’re worth and he knew she was lying.’

  Hawthorne made a mental note of it. He never wrote down anything. He had a prodigious memory – and of course he had me. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ he asked.

  ‘I was upset when you saw me in Hampstead and I wasn’t thinking straight. That’s also why I lied to you about Faraz. I didn’t want to drag him into this, but the truth is that I really don’t have anything to hide. Now, if you don’t mind, I have work to do.’

  Spencer padded off towards the office. Hawthorne didn’t try to stop him.

  Back out in the street, I turned on him.

  ‘You can’t behave that way!’ I exclaimed. ‘What happened in there … that Ali Baba joke, your whole attitude. You can’t talk like that!’

  ‘I did what I had to.’ For once, I’d taken Hawthorne by surprise. ‘I had to get under his skin, Tony. Don’t you see it? He’s standing in his smart gallery, surrounded by a million quid’s worth of art. And he’s lying to us! He thinks he can get away with it. I had to break him down and that’s what I did.’

  ‘But I can’t put that sort of stuff in the book,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘People won’t like it.’ I paused. ‘They won’t like you.’

  That jolted him. Just for a second I saw the vulnerability, the child he had once been, spark in his eyes and before he could stop himself he asked: ‘Do you like me?’

  I wasn’t sure how to answer. ‘I don’t know,’ I stammered eventually.

  He looked at me.

  ‘I don’t need you to fucking like me. I just need you to write the fucking book.’

  We stood there, staring at each other. There was nothing more to say.

  14

  Daunt’s Bookshop

  Daunt’s is one of my favourite bookshops in London. It’s halfway down Marylebone High Street, which itself has a pleasant, old-fashioned feel; m
ore a neighbourhood than a shopping precinct. Every time I go in – and it’s not that far from where I live – I get a sense that I’m stepping back into a more civilised city. (Charing Cross Road used to be the same until high rents drove most of the second-hand bookshops away.) It actually occupies two shops, 83 and 84, knocked together with two doorways and two corridors, one on either side of a sales desk that forms a sort of island in between. The interior has the feel of a Methodist chapel, complete with the reticulated window at the end. The books are stacked on old wooden shelves and as an added quirk they are listed not by author or by subject but by country. Everything feels very narrow. About halfway in, a staircase disappears down to a basement, leaving a rectangular space on the other side where authors are invited to give talks. I have given one or two there myself.

  This was where Akira Anno was speaking at half past six that evening. Hawthorne and I arrived in time to get a couple of seats at the back. It was interesting to see how relaxed he was inside the bookshop; certainly more than he had been in Yorkshire. He was completely cheerful as we sat down and it reminded me that he was a member of a book club, one which I would be joining on Monday night. I hadn’t read A Study in Scarlet for some time. I’d have to spend a few hours with it on Sunday.

  About a hundred people had turned up for Akira’s event and every seat was taken. There were more people standing at the back. When she finally appeared, making her way down the side, the applause was loud and enthusiastic. I was quite surprised. She didn’t have a new book out so there was actually no reason for her – or her audience – to be there. And the title of the talk certainly wouldn’t have dragged me out on a miserable November evening.

  She was interviewed by a slim man with a tangle of black hair, black glasses, a black jacket and a black polo neck, a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies whose name I didn’t catch. He spent much of the hour discussing her earlier work, A Cool Breeze in Hiroshima. The main character, a Korean comfort woman called Jung-soon, finds redemption in the days after the atom bomb is dropped, only to die a few chapters later of leukaemia. I knew the book from the blurb on the back cover and drifted in and out during the next forty minutes, but I did manage to jot down some of what she said.

  ‘The sexualisation of the nuclear arsenal, as a trope, is of course self-evident. It is no coincidence that the first two bombs were Fat Man and Little Boy, while both the cities have inherently feminine-sounding names, particularly with the unvoiced phoneme at the start of “Hiroshima”. As I’ve explained, I use the rape of Jung-soon that opens the book to some extent to prefigure what history informs us will come. History or, in this case, her story. But I think we have to be careful. For too long we have allowed such issues as missile proliferation, cyberwarfare and nuclear strategy to be seen from a state-centric and male-dominated perspective. If we accept the masculinised identity of the discussion, then it becomes more difficult to challenge it. We cannot allow politics to become gender hierarchical and I think that language can all too easily affect the very way we think.’

  All of this may be true but I’m afraid it went right over my head. It wasn’t just the sense of what Akira was saying that lost me, it was the manner of her delivery. She spoke very softly and with almost no emotion so that if her talk had been translated into one of those wavelengths you see in medical dramas, it would have appeared as an almost flat line.

  The audience loved it. That line about the unvoiced phoneme even got a laugh and the university man was nodding so much his glasses almost fell off. There’s no lonelier place than an audience where you’re the only person having a bad time – I’ve often felt this in the theatre – and I was glad when the first part of the talk came to an end and Akira took questions from the floor. At the same time, Hawthorne (who had been blank-faced throughout) nudged me and pointed to a pair of seats about five rows in front of us.

  I felt my stomach shrink as I recognised Detective Inspector Cara Grunshaw and her leather-jacketed assistant. They had come to the talk as well, presumably planning to interview Akira a second time when it was over. My worry was that I hadn’t informed them we would be there and the moment they saw me they would know I wasn’t living up to my side of the agreement that had been forced on me. Worse still, what would I do if she referred to our recent telephone conversation in front of Hawthorne?

  I sweated out the question-and-answer session and didn’t hear very much of it. I’ve admired the work of feminist writers from Virginia Woolf to Doris Lessing and Angela Carter, but Akira’s brand of humourless introspection – along with her audience’s appreciation of it – left me cold. At long last there was a round of applause, an announcement that Akira would be signing books, including her recent collection of haikus, and everyone got to their feet. Hawthorne and I stayed where we were, watching as a short line formed. For all their enthusiasm, not many people stayed to buy books, but presumably they had them already. Grunshaw and her friend Darren were sitting with their backs to us. I wondered if they knew we were there.

  We waited until everyone had gone, then moved forward, all four of us descending on Akira in a pincer movement, coming at her from both sides. She was clearly alarmed to see us, giving the lecturer a quick peck on each cheek and sending him hastily on his way. Grunshaw noticed Hawthorne and turned to him first.

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you here.’ She glanced at me and I couldn’t escape the glint in her eye which underlined what she had just said with a streak of malevolence.

  ‘You don’t mind if we join you, do you?’ Hawthorne asked, indifferently.

  ‘Not at all.’ Now she focused on Akira. ‘We need to have a few more words, Ms Anno. Do you mind?’

  ‘Does my opinion really matter?’

  ‘Not really. Is there somewhere we can go?’

  One of the managers showed us downstairs. It wasn’t completely private but there was a wicker table and some chairs tucked away in an alcove and it was at least a little quieter. Grunshaw had come on her own, leaving Darren upstairs. Hawthorne took the chair next to her, facing Akira, who sat with her legs crossed, glowering behind her mauve spectacles. I stood leaning against West Africa with South Africa in front of me and Italy just across the corridor. There was little natural light down here. Glass tiles in the ceiling gave a blurry view of the area where Akira had just been speaking.

  Once we were settled, Grunshaw weighed in with the obvious question that had brought her here. ‘So where were you on Sunday night, Miss Anno?’

  ‘I told you …’ Akira began.

  ‘We know that you weren’t at Glasshayes Cottage in Lyndhurst. Did you really think we wouldn’t check what you’d said?’

  Akira shrugged as if to suggest that was exactly what she’d expected.

  ‘You realise that lying to a police officer involved in a murder investigation is a very serious offence?’

  ‘I didn’t lie to you, Detective Inspector. My life is a very busy one. I sometimes have difficulty remembering.’

  It wasn’t true. She didn’t even try to make it sound so.

  ‘So where were you?’

  She blinked a couple of times, then pointed at me. ‘I’m not talking in front of him. He is a commercial writer. He has no business here.’

  I had never heard anyone make the word ‘commercial’ sound so dirty.

  ‘He’s staying,’ Hawthorne said. I was surprised he had taken my side, but then of course he would want me to write what happened.

  ‘Where were you?’ Grunshaw repeated the question. I was quite surprised she didn’t try to get rid of me.

  Akira, too, had seen that she wasn’t going to get her way. She shrugged a second time. ‘With a friend. In London.’

  ‘And the name of your friend?’

  Still Akira hesitated and I wondered what she was so desperate to hide. But she had no choice. ‘Dawn Adams.’

  That was the publisher she had been having dinner with the night she threw a glass of wine over Richard Pryce.
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br />   ‘You were with her over the whole weekend?’

  ‘No. On Sunday. She lives in Wimbledon.’

  This last piece of information was offered grudgingly, as if it would get Grunshaw off her back. But the detective inspector had only just started. ‘What time did you arrive? What time did you leave?’

  Akira sighed in an ill-natured way. She would rather have been answering questions about unvoiced phonemes. I wondered if she and Dawn Adams had been having an affair, although I’d have thought she would have volunteered such information willingly. Still, there was definitely something she didn’t want us to know. ‘I arrived maybe six o’clock. I left the next day.’

  ‘You stayed overnight?’

  ‘We talked. We had too much to drink. I didn’t want to drive. So she put me up.’

  ‘You do realise we’ll ask Ms Adams for a statement.’

  ‘I’m not lying to you!’ Akira scowled. ‘I don’t like telling you about my private life. Certainly not in front of him.’ Again the finger with its long, pointed nail jabbed in my direction. ‘She’s a friend of mine. That’s all. She got divorced last year and now she’s on her own.’

  ‘She went to court?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who represented her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Who represented her ex-husband?’

  There was a long pause. Akira really didn’t want to tell us. ‘It was Richard Pryce.’

  I didn’t like to admit it, but DI Grunshaw had certainly hit the nail on the head. Two women, one a writer, the other a publisher, had both come up against the same lawyer. At least one of them had been trashed by him and had threatened to kill him. And now the other one was providing an alibi for her.

  I managed to catch Hawthorne’s eye and silently urged him to ask the one thing I wanted to know. For once, he obliged. ‘I’ve been reading your poetry,’ he said brightly, addressing Akira.

  Akira might have been flattered but she said nothing.

  ‘I was interested in one of your haikus …’