The Sentence is Death

by Anthony Horowitz

  ‘It was an actor who got killed last time,’ I reminded her. ‘And anyway it doesn’t work like that. I don’t have any choice in the matter. I’m just writing what happens.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She was gloomy. And in a hurry to get on with whatever she was doing. ‘So what’s the problem?’

  I told her what had happened at Daunt’s bookshop.

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Anthony. You could have stolen something a bit classier. The Doomworld series is complete crap – even if it has sold fifty-three million copies. Lucky Dawn Adams is all I can say. Kingston Press were about to go out of business before she stumbled onto that one. But it’s not the sort of thing I’d expect to find up your sleeve.’

  ‘It never was up my sleeve, Hilda. I just explained to you. The police framed me.’

  ‘That’s not going to make any difference, I’m afraid. It’s your word against a respected police officer and you know which side the papers are going to take.’

  ‘I’m not even sure anyone respects Detective Inspector Cara Grunshaw.’

  ‘Well, I’d be very careful before you write anything derogatory about her. You don’t want to get yourself sued.’

  ‘I’m the one who’s being victimised!’ I was about to storm out of the room – not something I’m very good at doing, incidentally – but then I played back what Hilda had just said. ‘Dawn Adams,’ I muttered. ‘She published Doomworld.’

  ‘What about it?’

  From the very start, I’d known the name. Dawn Adams was the publisher Akira Anno had been having dinner with on the night she had threatened Richard Pryce. She had also been with Dawn (or so she claimed) on the night he was killed. And Akira had told us that Dawn had come up against Richard Pryce at the time of her own divorce. Forget the fact that Gregory Taylor had bought the third volume just before he died. He had simply wanted a long book for a long journey. But I suddenly saw that Dawn Adams had to be part of Hawthorne’s investigation, even though he hadn’t yet said he intended to see her.

  Well, at least something good had come out of my turning up here. And there was more to come. Hilda relented. ‘I suppose I can have a word with James,’ she said.

  ‘James?’

  ‘James Daunt of Daunt Books. He knows your work and maybe we can persuade him that there was a misunder-standing.’

  ‘It wasn’t a misunderstanding!’

  ‘Whatever. In the meantime, you really ought to be getting on with that second book for Orion. What happened to that idea of yours about Moriarty?’

  ‘I’m thinking about it.’

  ‘Well if I were you, I’d stop thinking and start writing.’

  ‘Thanks, Hilda.’

  ‘You know the way out …’

  *

  He had been riding for three days, his proud, black destrier picking its way between the Wilder flowers, the twisting thorns and the dense, black forests of the Lands Beyond Time. A silver moon had beckoned him on and the soft breeze from the north had whispered constantly in his ear. He was hungry. He had not eaten since that last feast at the court of King Pellam. But now it was a deeper, more primal hunger that devoured him and his journey was forgotten, the faithful stallion standing idly by.

  The girl could only have been twelve or thirteen and yet already she had blossomed into a desirable woman. She had been leaning over a bubbling stream with cupped hands when he had found her but now she lay on her back on the soft grass, exactly where he had thrown her. He leaned down and tore open her woollen shift to reveal her ripe, curvaceous breasts with nipples that matched the delicious red of her lips. The sight of her skin and of the pubic hair just visible above the edge of her shift turned his bowels to water.

  ‘You are mine,’ he muttered. ‘By the law of the great Table and the might of the magician, Merlin, I claim you as my own.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’ She stretched out her arms and her whole body shuddered, waiting to receive him.

  Barely able to control himself, he jerked off his gambeson, his belt and then everything else until he stood naked, towering over her.

  I had stopped at Waterstones Piccadilly on the way to meet Hawthorne and had picked up a copy of Prisoners of Blood, the third book in the Doomworld series. Mark Belladonna had been given pride of place on one of the tables in the circular entrance hall and, standing there, I read a few pages. I wanted to remind myself just how terrible it was: the awful language, the use of clichés, its near-pornographic relish. The books must have made Dawn Adams a ton of money, and as I’d learned from my time with Hawthorne, money and murder have a way of going hand in hand. I was certain that he would want to interrogate the publisher soon. She was, after all, Akira’s only alibi – and also lingering in my mind was the question of what the two women might have in common. After all, their literary tastes could hardly have been further apart. I had dipped back into Prisoners of Blood in the hope that it might answer, at least in part, some of that question. It hadn’t.

  I put the book down, then walked the short distance to Green Park station, thinking about the theory I had outlined to Cara Grunshaw. It was becoming ever more likely that Adrian Lockwood could be the killer. What I had told her was true. He had a motive and according to Akira, he had known haiku 182. I had actually seen a copy of the book in his house. Could he have painted the number on the wall at Heron’s Wake as some bizarre statement of revenge?

  Hawthorne was waiting at the station and seeing him I was tempted to ask about his relationship with Kevin, how the two of them had met and what exactly was the arrangement they had made between them. Was he paying the teenager for his work or was it just something Kevin did for fun? And there were wider implications. He always seemed to know where I was and what I was doing. Was this down to brilliant detective work or was he simply hacking into my emails?

  I wanted to confront him but decided against it. I could use Kevin to find out about Hawthorne. It would be much easier than the other way round.

  We set off together, walking up towards Hyde Park Corner. It wasn’t quite raining but there was a fine mist hanging in the air. This was that dead time of the year, after the summer holidays and before the excitement of Guy Fawkes Night, with the Christmas decorations waiting just round the corner to go up. Every year, they seemed to come sooner.

  ‘I read what you gave me,’ he said, affably.

  It took me a moment to realise that he was talking about the pages I had given him describing my meeting with Davina Richardson and my discovery of the haiku.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, carefully. ‘Were they helpful?’

  ‘You seem a bit nervous of me, mate, if you don’t mind my saying so.’ He thought for a moment, then quoted an extract almost word for word: ‘He wouldn’t be too happy, me being here without him. He hated me asking questions even when he was in the room …’

  ‘It’s absolutely true!’ I replied. ‘Every time I open my mouth you stare at me as if I’m a badly behaved schoolboy.’

  ‘It’s not that.’ He was offended. ‘I just don’t like you interrupting my train of thought. And you have to be careful what you say in front of suspects. You don’t want to give stuff away.’

  ‘I haven’t done that.’

  Hawthorne grimaced.

  ‘Have I?’ I was alarmed.

  ‘I hope not. But actually, what you wrote was pretty helpful. The thing about you, Tony, is you write stuff down without even realising its significance. You’re a bit like a travel writer who doesn’t know quite where he is.’

  ‘That’s not true!’

  ‘Yeah. It’s like you’re in Paris and you write how you’ve seen this big, tall building made of metal but you forget to mention that it might be worth a visit.’

  This was completely unfair. I wrote what I saw and almost everything that Hawthorne said. Of course, I had to choose which details I chose to describe – otherwise the book would run into thousands of pages. Take Adrian Lockwood’s house, for example. I had mentioned the bilberries he was eating not because the
y necessarily had anything to do with the crime – they almost certainly didn’t – but because they were there and seemed vaguely noteworthy. At the same time, I hadn’t mentioned that he had cut himself shaving that morning. There had been a nick on the side of his chin. Of course, if it turned out to be significant, if his hand had been trembling after he murdered Richard Pryce, then I would go back and put it in the second draft. This is how it all works.

  ‘So how did I help you?’ I asked. ‘Maybe you can let me know which Eiffel Tower I managed to describe without actually knowing it was there?’

  ‘Well, Davina went on at you about all the things she couldn’t do without a man in her life. I thought that was interesting.’

  ‘She’s a single mother with a teenaged son.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’

  We had crossed Piccadilly and continued up to Curzon Street, heading for Adrian Lockwood’s office. I suddenly became aware that Hawthorne had stopped. He was staring straight ahead of him at a wide corner on the edge of a modern, six-storey building. I could see the name above the front door. Leconfield House. This was where Lockwood had his office suite.

  There was a man standing there, smoking a cigarette. I saw hair hanging in damp strands, a flapping, stone-coloured raincoat, some sort of marking on the side of his face. But more prominent than all of these, particularly with the distance between us, were his bright blue spectacles. They were like something a child might wear. They didn’t even look real.

  The man had been looking up at the third floor but as he lowered his head, his eyes locked onto mine. Neither of us knew who the other was but we immediately recognised the connection. I sprang forward. The man dropped his cigarette, turned and ran. Before I knew quite what I was doing, I was chasing him.

  I have written a great many chases in my time. They are, after all, a staple of television drama. There are only so many scenes you can have with your characters talking to each other in a room. Eventually, you have to break into some piece of action and the most popular choices are: a murder, a fight, an explosion or a chase.

  Of these, the chase is probably the most expensive. A fight, unless it’s on the roof of a moving bus or involves an entire gang, is usually fairly self-contained and explosions these days are quite easy to achieve. Almost everything you see is a simple blast of compressed air, some dust and a few scraps of paper. The sound is added later and even the flames can be computer-generated. But a chase is all about movement. The characters move. The cameras move. The entire unit has to move. Worse than that, it’s not enough for two actors to go haring after each other. That soon becomes boring. You have to throw in some action. A near miss in front of a car. A few punches thrown. An old woman shoved out of the way.

  All of which is an apology for what I must now describe.

  I was in my fifties, on foot, and although I think I’m fairly fit, I was no action hero. The man I was chasing was younger and skinnier than me but his smoking habit had played havoc with his health. From the very start, he didn’t run so much as limp and it would have taken a director with incredible talent, even with all the money in the world, to make the next few minutes remotely watchable.

  The man with blue glasses crossed the road and although a white van did hoot at him, it came nowhere close. I looked left and right before I went after him. He reached the other pavement and pushed past a few pedestrians, although there was no actual bodily contact. I already had a stitch and paused to catch my breath. I glanced back, expecting to see Hawthorne right behind me, but he hadn’t even moved. He was standing there, holding his mobile phone. I found that extraordinary and also quite annoying. My quarry had ducked down one of the passageways leading into Shepherd Market, a charming enclave of narrow streets and squares that dates back to the eighteenth century. I saw him hurry past a pub on a corner – Ye Grapes – and I went after him. He must have been running at about 7 mph, although his raincoat was flapping behind him in quite a dramatic way.

  He disappeared down another alleyway, past dustbins which he did not knock over. I followed, my feet stamping on the pavement, but I was already falling behind and I was some distance from him when I saw him reach the main road and flag down a taxi. I was sweating. A thin sheen of drizzle was clinging to my face. I arrived and would have jumped into a second taxi if there had been one but there wasn’t. I had to wait about a minute before one mercifully appeared, heading down towards Piccadilly Circus. I hailed it. The driver seemed to take for ever to pull over. I yanked open the door and climbed into the back.

  I could still make out the taxi with Blue Spectacles. Because of the heavy traffic, he was only a short distance away.

  ‘Where to?’ the driver asked.

  ‘Follow that cab!’ Even as the words left my mouth I realised that I had uttered a cliché more grotesque and overused than anything I would have found in the Doomworld trilogy. ‘Please!’ I added.

  Ahead of us, a set of lights changed to green. The taxi we were following indicated and swung right along St James’s Street. We crept towards the same turning but before we could reach them, the lights changed back to red. My driver didn’t perform a breakneck U-turn and find another way. He didn’t cut across the traffic with tyres screeching.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said, as we came to a gentle halt.

  18

  The Dustbin Diver

  Hawthorne didn’t seem to have moved. He was still standing there, waiting for me outside Leconfield House when I finally arrived back in the taxi, which had charged me £10 for a circular journey that had got me precisely nowhere. He watched me as I got out and crossed over to him.

  ‘You didn’t catch him then,’ he observed.

  ‘No. He got away.’ I was in a bad mood. The rain had stopped but I was damp all over. ‘You weren’t much help,’ I muttered. ‘You could have at least tried to catch him.’

  ‘There was no need to.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I know who he is.’

  I stared at him. ‘Then why didn’t you stop me?’

  ‘I shouted out to you but you didn’t hear me. You went off like a bloody stampeding bull and you didn’t give me a chance.’

  ‘So who was he?’

  Hawthorne took pity on me. ‘You can’t go into Lockwood looking like that,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you a cup of coffee.’

  We walked down to a Costa at the bottom end of Curzon Street and I went into the toilet while Hawthorne ordered the cappuccinos. Looking into the mirror, I saw that he was right. The short burst of activity had left me flushed, my hair bedraggled and damp from the rain and the exertion. I made myself as presentable as I could and by the time I came out Hawthorne had chosen a table with, I noticed, three chairs.

  ‘Are we waiting for someone?’ I asked.

  ‘We might be.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Something had amused him and it was all the more hilarious because he wasn’t going to share it with me. I understood why a few minutes later when the door opened and someone walked in. He cast around nervously, then saw us and came over. I scowled. It was the man in blue spectacles whom I’d last seen fleeing down St James’s Street in a cab.

  ‘Hawthorne—’ I began.

  But Hawthorne was looking past me. ‘Hello, Lofty,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Hawthorne.’

  ‘You want a coffee?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Get yourself one anyway and bring it over.’

  Lofty wasn’t his real name, of course, and – equally obviously – it was the last word I would have used to describe the small, lightweight man who had appeared. He couldn’t have been more than five foot three or four, with sandy-coloured hair hanging limply down to his collar, an upturned nose and the pallid skin of someone who didn’t get out often or who ate unhealthily or perhaps both. As he had come towards us, he had taken off the spectacles to reveal frightened eyes that twitched and flickered around him constantly.
The skin condition which both Adrian Lockwood’s receptionist and Colin Richardson had mentioned – I was assuming this was the same man – was actually nothing more than a bit of scarring from acne he must have had as a teenager.

  ‘Lofty?’ I asked as he ordered himself a drink.

  ‘Lenny Pinkerman. That’s his real name. But we always called him Lofty.’

  ‘I get that. Is he a policeman?’

  ‘He used to be.’

  ‘So what’s he doing here?’ I stopped, remembering my last sighting of Hawthorne as I set off on the chase. He’d been on his mobile. ‘You called him!’

  ‘That’s right. I’ve got his mobile number. I asked him to join us.’

  ‘So who is he? What’s he got to do with all this?’

  ‘He’ll tell you …’

  Lofty had ordered tea. He sat down at the table and tore open four sachets of sugar which he added to the cup. He stirred it with a plastic spoon. All this happened in a silence that was finally broken by Hawthorne.

  ‘Nice to see you, Lofty.’

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s not nice to see you at all, Hawthorne.’ Lofty had a whiney voice and crooked teeth. I think he wanted to sound angry but the best he could manage was petulant. He put the glasses down on the table and looking at them closely, I saw that they were clearly fake with no magnification. He had also taken off the raincoat. He was wearing shapeless corduroy trousers and a paisley shirt, buttoned up to the neck. If he sat on a pavement, people would have been quick to give him their spare change.

  ‘It’s been a while.’

  ‘Not bloody long enough, mate.’ He looked balefully across the table, clearly afraid of Hawthorne and disliking him in equal measure.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what were you doing outside Leconfield House?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘Lofty … !’

  ‘Why should I tell you anything?’

  ‘Old times’ sake?’

  ‘Sod that!’ He considered. ‘Fifty quid. I’ll talk to you for fifty quid. Fifty-three quid. You can pay for the tea as well.’ He looked with disgust at the murky brown liquid in front of him. ‘How can they charge three quid for a cup of tea? That’s a bloody liberty.’