‘She threatened to hit him with a bottle.’
‘No. She said he was lucky that he hadn’t ordered a bottle or she would have used that, by which I assume she meant she would have emptied the entire contents over him.’
‘But it’s quite a coincidence, don’t you think, that just a week or so later he was killed with a wine bottle.’
‘It could be a coincidence, I suppose. Although have you considered the possibility that someone in the restaurant might have overheard her?’
That was a thought that hadn’t occurred to me. Akira Anno could have quite accidentally suggested the murder method to someone who knew Richard and who just happened to be there. They might even have done it deliberately to frame her. I wondered if Hawthorne had checked out the names of all the patrons who had been at The Delaunay that night.
‘As to Akira being at my home on Sunday night,’ Dawn went on, ‘there’s nothing very surprising about that either. We’re old friends.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘At a book festival. In Dubai. A week round the swimming pool at the InterContinental Hotel. It’s a good place to get to know people.’
‘How long was she with you?’
‘Do you really consider this a line of enquiry worth pursuing, Mr Hawthorne? Very well! She came for supper at about six o’clock and once again we had rather too much to drink. You’re going to get the impression that we’re a couple of old soaks but it’s not like that. We weren’t drunk. In fact, we’d been working. But Akira had had two or three glasses with me and I thought it was more sensible if she didn’t drive back so I invited her to stay the night.’
‘You say you were working. What sort of work does she do for you?’
Dawn Adams hesitated just for a moment and I had a feeling that for all her bluster, whatever she was going to say next might not be completely true. ‘She advises me on literary manuscripts,’ she said.
‘You pay her?’
‘Of course.’ Dawn looked at her watch, a very delicate Cartier on a thin gold strap. ‘As I told you on the phone, I’m afraid I can’t give you a great deal of my time.’
Hawthorne ignored this. ‘Why did Akira Anno lie about being with you?’ he asked. ‘Having supper with an old friend, a publisher … you’d have thought there was nothing more innocent in the world.’
‘I have no idea. You’ll have to ask her that. Perhaps she found your interview methods offensive and decided to take you for a ride.’
‘Lying to a police officer is an offence.’
‘As I understand it, you’re not a police officer.’
I had to hand it to Dawn Adams. She certainly wasn’t afraid of Hawthorne. But if she’d known him better, she might have been a little less curt with him. I saw the anger stirring in his eyes and it made me think of a crocodile rising from the mud.
‘You say that Ms Anno advises you on literary manuscripts,’ he said. ‘How many literary writers do you actually publish?’
It was a good point. In the window downstairs I had seen one or two well-respected authors, but the books on the shelves in Dawn’s office were less highbrow. I ran my eyes over a children’s picture book, a couple of airport thrillers, the Doomworld trilogy and a book of Greek recipes by Victoria Hislop.
Again, there was just a hint of uncertainty before she recovered. ‘We don’t have any. But it’s an area I very much want to move into. We receive a great many submissions and Akira reads them for me.’
‘Then why not publish her? Since the two of you are such good mates …’
‘I’ve suggested it. But Akira has a contract with Virago. I think we’re done here, aren’t we?’ There was a telephone on the coffee table. Dawn picked it up and dialled a single number. ‘Tom,’ she said. ‘My guests are just leaving. Could you come up to the office … ?’
‘Actually, I haven’t finished.’ Hawthorne’s voice was cold.
She hesitated, the phone still in her hand. ‘Actually, it’s all right, Tom. I’ll call you in a minute.’ She put the phone down.
Hawthorne paused and I knew from experience that he was about to come out with something extraordinary. Even so, his next statement took me completely by surprise. ‘I’d like to speak to one of your other writers,’ he said.
‘Which one is that?’
‘Mark Belladonna.’
She stared at him. ‘I’m afraid there’s absolutely no way Mark will speak to you.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Well, first of all, he’s got absolutely nothing to do with this. And secondly, he’s very reclusive. He lives in Northumberland and he has acute agoraphobia. He never goes out.’
‘But he was in The Delaunay the night when you had that dinner.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘It’s not impossible, Ms Adams. It’s true. And as it happens he was also involved in the death of a second man … Gregory Taylor. Taylor visited Richard Pryce on the day he died. The two of them had known each other for years. And just a short while later Taylor was killed, pushed under a train. But before he died, he bought a copy of a book, the latest Mark Belladonna. He didn’t buy it because he wanted to read it. He bought it to send us the message … which is the reason I’m here.’
All of this was news to me. If Hawthorne had checked out who was eating at The Delaunay, he had certainly never mentioned it. But it was true that he had drawn my attention to Prisoners of Blood, which Gregory Taylor had picked up in W. H. Smith at King’s Cross. ‘Why did he buy that book?’ That was what he had asked.
Dawn Adams had lost control of the situation. Suddenly it was as if the sofa was swallowing her whole. She was almost squirming. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
And then, without warning, the door opened and, of all people, Akira Anno came hurrying into the room. Dawn Adams was as surprised to see her as I was. ‘Akira … ?’
‘I came straight over when I got your call.’ Akira looked at us malignantly. ‘I know these two men. I’ve already had confrontations with them. I know their methods and how they will use them to threaten and intimidate you. I didn’t want you to have to see them on your own.’
So Dawn had rung her to say we were coming. It made me think that the two of them must have been colluding … but in what?
‘We were just talking about Mark Belladonna,’ Hawthorne went on. He was utterly unfazed by the interruption. It was as if he had expected it, even welcomed it.
Akira went over to a third chair and sat down. She was as immaculate as ever but suddenly she seemed unsure of herself, perhaps even afraid.
‘I want his address and his phone number,’ Hawthorne said.
‘I won’t give them to you.’
‘You can take that stand if you want to, Ms Adams. Then I’ll call Detective Inspector Grunshaw and Detective Constable Mills and we’ll see how you get on when you refuse co-operate with them.’
‘I can’t …’
‘Why not?’
‘You don’t understand. Mark never—’
And then, from the other side of the room came the two quiet words: ‘He knows.’ It was Akira. Her face was ghastly. She was looking down at the floor.
What did he know? And why didn’t I know it too?
‘Why don’t you just come straight out with it?’ Hawthorne exclaimed. ‘Do you think I’m a complete idiot? Did you really think I wouldn’t work it out?’
He paused, waiting for either of the two women to speak, and when neither of them did, he provided the answer for them. ‘Akira Anno is Mark Belladonna, isn’t she! Mark doesn’t exist.’ He rounded on Akira. ‘You wrote those stupid books.’
There was another silence. I don’t know who was more shocked: me because I had never suspected it or Dawn because he had guessed.
‘Are you going to deny it?’ Hawthorne demanded.
I looked at Akira, who was sitting in her chair looking like a puppet that had been thrown aside, its limbs disconnected. On the sofa, Dawn Adams looked ge
nuinely afraid. ‘You can’t tell anybody,’ she whispered.
‘Wait a minute!’ I exclaimed. ‘Akira Anno wrote Excalibur Rising and Prisoners of Blood and …’ I’d forgotten the title of the first one.
‘The Twelve Men of Steel,’ Akira muttered, still not meeting my eyes.
‘But that’s impossible. They’re full of pornography.’ I searched for the worst thing I could say about them. ‘They objectify women!’
‘They sell millions of copies.’ Despite everything, Dawn had leapt to the defence of her friend. Now she got to her feet and walked over to her desk, taking her place on the other side. That put her closer to Akira, back in control. ‘It was my idea. I met Akira at Dubai, just like I told you. She’s a wonderful writer. Her books have won a great many prizes and there was even a film. But you know the market for literary fiction, Anthony. It’s tiny, almost non-existent.’
There was a bottle of water on the desk. She poured herself a glass. ‘This wasn’t Akira’s idea. It was mine. I had to persuade her, but I knew there was a huge market in sword and sorcery.’
‘And sex,’ I added.
‘Whatever you want to call it. Game of Thrones was already huge … before the TV series. The two of us were having a cocktail by the pool and I suggested it to Akira almost as a joke, really. If someone like George R. R. Martin could make a fortune out of fantasy fiction then it would be easy for a writer as talented as her.’
‘But it’s everything she despises!’ I insisted. It was almost as if Akira wasn’t in the room. She had been banished, replaced by Mark Belladonna who had come down from Northumberland, somehow overcoming his phobia.
‘There isn’t a writer in the world who doesn’t want to sell!’ Dawn countered.
‘Of course that’s true!’ I agreed. ‘But she … !’ I pointed at Akira. ‘She’s a complete hypocrite!’
Akira looked up. ‘Nobody must know,’ she whispered and even behind the tinted glasses I could see the panic in her eyes. ‘You can’t tell them! It will finish me!’
Dawn nodded. ‘If people found out that Akira was the author, it could do enormous damage to her reputation. And it certainly wouldn’t help my business either!’ She was more reasonable than Akira, more pragmatic. But then she was a publisher, not a writer. ‘You don’t know how hard we’ve had to work to keep Mark Belladonna out of the public eye,’ she went on. ‘It’s true that Akira, in her other work, has a completely different profile but lots of writers have used an alias.’ She sighed. ‘When I suggested the idea, it was just a joke. Neither of us had any idea how huge the series would become.’
So this was the income stream that Stephen Spencer had mentioned, the earnings that Akira had kept from Richard Pryce. Dawn was right, of course. Once the public found out how they had been tricked, Akira, Mark and Kingston Books might well be finished.
But Hawthorne was in an unforgiving mood. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think it’s going to be very difficult to keep this from Detective Inspector Grunshaw.’
Akira said nothing.
‘Anthony, I’m sure you understand the situation here.’ Dawn had decided to bypass Hawthorne and appeal directly to me. ‘I’ve put my life into this business and Doomworld is what holds it all together. And Akira hasn’t done anything wrong.’ She leaned forward. ‘Her series is loved. It’s being filmed for TV. Why ruin her life?’
‘That’s a haiku!’ I exclaimed.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What you just said.’ I glanced at Akira, who had folded herself up, in the depths of misery. Despite everything, I felt sorry for her. ‘I’ll do what I can.’
Next to me, Hawthorne stirred. ‘That’s not usually very much,’ he said.
He was actually laughing when we went back out into the street. I’d seen Hawthorne’s sense of humour, which was subtle and a little devious. But I don’t think I’d ever heard him laugh.
‘How did you know?’ I asked. ‘About Akira Anno and Mark Belladonna?’
‘It’s pretty straightforward.’ He took out a cigarette and we set off, walking back towards Holborn station. ‘To start with, we knew Akira was hiding money. Stephen Spencer had told us. How else could she have been earning it apart from writing? And then there was the way she lied about meeting Dawn Adams. Why make up all that crap about a cottage in the middle of nowhere? Having dinner with a publisher is about the most natural thing in the world for a writer – unless they’re up to something pretty unusual together.
‘But what really did it for me was that moment at Daunt’s. Didn’t you see the look on her face when you were caught nicking Prisoners of Blood? She was horrified. I thought she was going to be sick. But it wasn’t just because you’d stolen a book, it was because you’d chosen that book. She thought you must have rumbled her.’
It was true. She had said nothing. She hadn’t even looked at me. Her eyes had been glued to the book.
‘It still seems quite a leap,’ I said.
‘Not really. She’s a writer and like all writers she’s a bit of an egotist so she couldn’t completely abandon authorship of her crap stories. The last four letters of Belladonna are her own name backwards. And three of the letters in Akira turn up in Mark. I’m surprised you didn’t see that, mate.’
I was surprised too. I do the Times crossword every day. I love anagrams, codes, acronyms …
I was still trying to piece it all together. ‘What you said about King’s Cross just now. Was that true? Was Gregory Taylor trying to send a message?’
‘Yes, he was. Just not the message you think.’
What message was that? And had we just eliminated Akira Anno from our enquiries? Both she and Dawn Adams had been insulted by Richard Pryce and they had provided each other with an alibi on the night of the murder. Added to which, Pryce had been investigating Akira’s income. Suppose he had stumbled onto the truth about Mark Belladonna? That would have given them both a powerful incentive to kill him.
I thought I’d narrowed the list of suspects down to one of five. Now it had slipped back up to half a dozen.
20
Green Smoke
‘You do realise that Akira is trying to land me in it. There’s nothing she’d like more than to see me arrested for something I didn’t do. I mean, all that stuff she said about me. I don’t have a violent temper! If I did, I can tell you, I’d have done her in years ago. She was the most annoying person I ever met. She’d have tried the patience of a Shinto saint – and probably did, for all I know.
‘As for that bloody haiku of hers, yes, she showed it to me. She seemed to think it was terribly clever but I’m afraid it went right over my head. The sentence is death? What’s that meant to mean exactly? She took a great deal of pleasure in reading it to me but she might as well have been quoting from a Japanese washing-machine manual for all the sense it made.’
The strange thing about Adrian Lockwood was that even when he was in a bad mood, as he was now, he still seemed quite laid-back and jovial. The sunglasses and ponytail were still in place, along with the white shirt splayed open at the neck. His office was less extravagant than his house, a utilitarian set of suites so lacking in style that it could have belonged to one of those management companies that lease space by the month, and I suspected that he didn’t come here very often. The laptop that Lofty Pinkerman had hacked into was on the desk in front of him. He was in a padded leather chair, bent several ways to follow the contours of his body. He was sitting with his hands folded behind his head.
‘And if either of us was going to paint that number on the wall, it would have been her. What did you say it was? A hundred and eighty-two? Do you really think I’d have been able to remember that? It could just as easily have been the one about the flower blossoming in the car park or the sparrowhawk losing its feathers or any of the other rubbish she saw fit to print.’
‘The haiku was about you,’ Hawthorne said.
‘Was it?’
‘Akira told you so. And anyway, you’d have remember
ed the number quite easily.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s the date of your marriage! You told us you got married just after your birthday – on the eighteenth of February.’ Hawthorne gave Lockwood one of his dangerous smiles: ‘18/2.’
I should have seen it for myself. I had been in the room when Lockwood told us the date. I had even made a note of it. But once again I had missed the connection.
‘Look!’ Lockwood spread his hands, metaphysically embracing us, man to man. ‘The marriage was a bloody disaster. I’ve already told you that—’
‘It was your second marriage to end in disaster,’ Hawthorne interrupted. ‘Your first wife, Stephanie Brook—’
‘You can leave her out of this!’ Lockwood was red-faced. This was a side of him I hadn’t seen before. ‘That’s completely out of order. The fact is, you’re as bad as some of those scum journalists who reported it. Stephanie was a lovely girl, lovely, and for a time we were happy together. But she was a mess. She drank and she took recreational drugs and in the end she died in Barbados. But I wasn’t even on the boat when it happened. It was a tragic accident. Maybe she killed herself, like they said. I don’t know. I don’t think it makes much difference when you fool around with that stuff. At any event, it’s got nothing to do with what happened to Richard.’
‘Except that in both instances, you were involved.’
‘I wasn’t anywhere near Richard either.’
‘You were in Highgate. Not so far.’
Lockwood hesitated, knowing where this was heading. ‘That’s right. I was there.’
‘With Davina Richardson.’
Lockwood sighed loudly. ‘Yes. I told you … I went round for a drink.’
‘Just a drink?’
‘I don’t quite understand what you’re implying.’
‘Then let me put it more simply, Mr Lockwood. Were you and Mrs Richardson going to bed together?’
‘That’s an extremely impertinent question. Just because you’re a detective – or an ex-detective, rather – does that give you the right to poke around in my private life?’
The Sentence is Death Page 22