The Sentence is Death

by Anthony Horowitz

  Hawthorne looked bored. ‘It’s a yes or no question. We’re all grown-ups here.’

  ‘What possible difference does it make?’

  ‘It might tell me if she was prepared to lie to protect you.’ Hawthorne paused. ‘Or the other way round.’

  Lockwood considered, but not for long. ‘All right, damn you. Yes. We’d been sleeping together for a while.’

  ‘While you were still married?’

  ‘Yes.’ He took a deep breath. ‘It wasn’t as easy as you might think. You may say we’re all adults but you’re forgetting she had a teenager in the house: her son, Colin. Obviously, we couldn’t go canoodling while he was around and I couldn’t bring her back to Edwardes Square while Akira was there. Anyway, Akira had a nose like a bloodhound. She’d have known if there had been another woman in the house. So we went to hotels – which I didn’t much care for, if you want the truth. It just felt shabby.’

  ‘Did Akira ever discover you were having an affair?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How about Richard Pryce? Did you tell him?’

  ‘Why would I have told Richard? Do you think I had to put that in my Form E? Nobody knew.’

  ‘And now that you’re a free man, is she going to move in?’

  Lockwood laughed out loud. ‘You’ve got to be joking. Davina’s an attractive woman, perfect for a quick squeeze. But there’s no way I’m jumping through that hoop again. My first marriage … well, I just told you. It was a tragedy. My second was a farce. I think that’s enough drama in one life.’

  He’d had enough. I saw his mood change as abruptly as if a switch had been thrown. ‘I think I’ve told you everything you need to know,’ he said. ‘So if you don’t have any further questions …’

  ‘Actually, I have some information for you.’ Hawthorne was in no hurry to leave. ‘The person who broke into your office …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We found him.’

  By now, Lockwood had learned not to trust Hawthorne, particularly when he was at his most co-operative. ‘And … ?’

  ‘His name is Leonard Pinkerman. It turns out he’s a private investigator of sorts. You might be interested to hear that he was working for Richard Pryce.’

  ‘I’m sorry? He was working for Richard?’

  ‘You gave Mr Pryce a bottle of wine. Is that right?’

  ‘I already told you that.’

  ‘And of course you know that a bottle of wine was used to kill Mr Pryce, that he was bludgeoned to death with it.’

  Lockwood was stunned. Any trace of the conviviality with which he had greeted us had been completely stripped away. ‘Are you saying it was the same bottle?’

  ‘A 1982 Château Lafite Rothschild, Pauillac.’ I wasn’t surprised that Hawthorne had remembered the marque and the date.

  ‘Yes. I gave him that.’ It took Lockwood a few moments to realise that nobody was speaking, that he was expected to offer more. ‘Richard had done an exceptional job on my behalf and I wanted to thank him. I’d paid his fees, of course, and they were considerable. But not having to go to court obviously saved me a small fortune and I thought I’d show my appreciation.’

  ‘With a £2,000 bottle of wine?’

  ‘I have a lot of wine.’

  ‘How much exactly?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You keep your wine at a company called Octavian in Corsham, in Wiltshire. How much wine do you actually have?’

  A slow smile spread across Lockwood’s face but it wasn’t a pleasant one. ‘You have been busy, haven’t you, Mr Hawthorne?’

  Hawthorne waited for the answer.

  ‘I have a collection of mainly French wine and champagne which has a market value of around two and a half million pounds. You’re going to ask me why I didn’t declare it, and obviously poor Richard was worried about it if he sent his man round to break into my office … Hardly very ethical, I must say!

  ‘Well, I didn’t declare it because the wine was actually purchased by a company of mine and can no longer be classed as an asset as I’ve used it as collateral against a very large loan. This is for a project of mine, a new housing development in Battersea. It’s all perfectly straightforward and if Richard had ever asked me about it, I’d have been happy to tell him, but I can assure you I had absolutely no idea he was concerned. He never said anything to me.’ He laid his hands, palms down, on the desk. ‘Now, is there anything else?’

  This time, Hawthorne stood up. I did the same. ‘You’ve been very helpful, Mr Lockwood.’

  ‘I won’t say it’s been a pleasure.’ The words were carefully measured.

  Hawthorne took a step towards the door, then seemed to remember something. ‘One last thing. You said you left Davina Richardson’s house at around eight fifteen. How can you be so sure of the time?’

  ‘I suppose I must have looked at my watch.’

  ‘There’s a clock in the kitchen.’

  ‘We weren’t in the kitchen. We were in her bedroom. I got dressed and I left. Maybe she mentioned the time. I honestly can’t remember.’

  Hawthorne smiled. ‘Thank you.’

  It was the gesture that gave him away. As Adrian Lockwood talked about his watch, he raised his hand to show off the heavy-duty Rolex that he had strapped on his wrist. And that was when I saw it. Not on the watch but on the sleeve of his shirt, very small, half concealed by the cufflink: a spot of green paint.

  And I knew exactly what shade of green it was. I remembered the fancy name that Davina had chosen from Farrow & Ball.

  Green Smoke.

  It had to be.

  I arrived home that evening at the same time as Jill, who came in weighed down by problems from the set. Another location had fallen through. We were now two full days behind schedule. Nothing seemed to be going right.

  We had dinner together, not that you could actually call it that. Jill had a salad with a tin of tuna fish. I scouted around in the fridge but all I could find was a bottle of champagne that had been given to me by Orion when I got into the top ten, and two eggs. I scrambled the eggs and ate them with Ryvita as there wasn’t any bread.

  ‘So how was your day?’ Jill asked.

  ‘It was OK.’

  ‘Have you finished the rewrites?’

  ‘I’ll finish them tonight.’

  It was quite normal for the two of us to start work again after dinner. We have a shared office and we’ll often find ourselves sitting side by side well on the way to midnight. Jill is the only person I know who works harder than me, running the company, overseeing the productions, organising our social life, managing the flat. We actually met working together in advertising. She was the account director. I was the copywriter. Two days after meeting me she asked – pleaded – to be moved to any other account in the building but somehow we began a relationship and twenty-five years later we were still together. I had written four shows for her: Foyle’s War, Injustice, Collision and Menace. She was the first person to read my books, even before Hilda Starke. It feels odd to be writing about her and the truth is she has made it clear that she’s uncomfortable being a character in my book. Unfortunately, truth is what it’s all about. She is the main character in my life.

  ‘You’re working with that detective again, aren’t you?’ she said as we sat there, eating.

  ‘Yes.’ I hadn’t wanted her to know but I never tell her lies. She can see right through me.

  ‘Is that a good idea?’

  ‘Not really. But I have a three-book deal and a case came up.’ I felt guilty. I knew she was waiting for my script. ‘I think it’s over anyway,’ I went on. ‘Hawthorne knows who did it.’

  He hadn’t said as much but I could tell. There was something quite animalistic about Hawthorne. The closer he got to the truth, the more you could see it in his eyes, in the way he sat, in the very contours of his skin. He really was the dog with the bone. I’d hoped we might have a drink after our meeting with Adrian Lockwood but he couldn’t wait to get back home. I c
ould imagine him sitting at his table, assembling his Westland Sea King with the same voracious attention to detail he brought to the solving of crime.

  ‘Do you know?’ she asked.

  It was a depressing question. I felt sure that the solution must be obvious by now. All along, it had been my hope that I would actually work it out before Hawthorne. And yet, I was still nowhere near. It really wasn’t fair. How could I even call myself an author if I had no connection to the last chapter – the whole point of the book?

  ‘No,’ I admitted, then added, hopefully, ‘Not yet.’

  After dinner, I went up to the office, which Jill had actually constructed for me on the roof of the flat. It’s about fifteen metres long and quite narrow with uninterrupted views towards the Old Bailey and St Paul’s. At the time, a new building was rising up, adding a streak of silver to the skyscape and completely changing my view. It would become known as the Shard. I sat at my desk, gazing out at the evening sky. Despite what I had said, I wasn’t in the mood for scriptwriting. Instead, I drew out a notepad and began to think about the case.

  If Hawthorne could solve it, I could solve it. I was as clever as him. The answer was right in front of me. I went through it all one last time.

  Adrian Lockwood.

  He was the most obvious suspect. Despite what he’d said, it was possible that he knew Pryce was investigating his secret wine stash and might have overturned the divorce as a result.

  According to Akira Anno, he had a temper. His first wife had died. And then there was the spot of green paint I had seen on his shirt. Was it the same green as the number on the wall at the scene of the crime? Of course it was, which meant that he had painted it, although I couldn’t quite see why.

  The trouble was, he had a solid alibi for the time of the murder. He had been with …

  Davina Richardson.

  She couldn’t blame Pryce for her husband’s death in Long Way Hole. It had happened too long ago, he had supported her ever since, and – anyway – Gregory Taylor had accepted the responsibility.

  But she and Lockwood were lovers. And what had Pryce’s husband, Stephen Spencer, told us? Pryce had got fed up with her. She was bleeding him dry. Suppose Pryce had finally pulled the financial plug on her, sending her into a murderous rage? She could have talked to Adrian Lockwood, who had his own reasons for wanting Pryce dead. They could have planned it together.

  Akira Anno.

  She was still my main suspect – after her ex-husband. She was the start of everything that had happened with the threat she had made in the restaurant and she had written a haiku that suggested she had murder in mind, even if she insisted it had been addressed to Adrian Lockwood. I could easily believe that she was vengeful enough to kill Richard Pryce and it wasn’t much of a stretch to see her daubing the number 182 on the wall either. It somehow reminded me of Japanese murals with their attendant calligraphy. It suited her. And yet she had an alibi too.

  Dawn Adams.

  Two women, both divorced, both with a grudge against the smooth-talking solicitor who had humiliated them. More than that, if Richard had discovered the truth about Mark Belladonna and Doomworld, he could have ruined both of them. Now that I thought about it, there was something quite literary about writing a message, leaving a mark at the scene of the crime. In a way, Dawn and Akira mirrored Adrian and Davina. Two sets of people with similar aims, working together.

  Stephen Spencer.

  He didn’t look like a murderer to me, but I couldn’t rule him out. He had lied about visiting his mother and he might well have lied about the state of his marriage. The fact was that he was being unfaithful. Richard Pryce knew and had discussed his will with one of the partners at Masefield Pryce Turnbull. If Spencer was about to lose his marriage, the house and the inheritance, he certainly had the most straightforward motive for murder.

  Susan Taylor.

  Nor had I forgotten Gregory Taylor’s widow. Her husband had died one day before Richard Pryce and she had actually come down to London on the day of the murder. Nobody had asked her to account for her movements but had she really been on her own, just sitting there in a cheap hotel? I remembered the curious glint of cruelty in her eyes as she had spoken: What do you think I did? Was there something about Long Way Hole that she hadn’t told us? Richard, Charles and Gregory – all stuck underground with the water rising. All three were now dead. There had to be a connection.

  It had to be one of them.

  One in six. But which one?

  Jill came into the office and, seeing me deep in thought, slid the partition across, closing off her side. We call it the divorce door. I turned another page and began to think of all the clues that I had noted as I accompanied Hawthorne – from the broken bulrushes next to Pryce’s front door to the book that Gregory Taylor had bought at King’s Cross station to the splash of green paint on Adrian Lockwood’s sleeve. I remembered Hawthorne talking about the number painted on the wall and Richard Pryce’s last words: What are you doing here? It’s a bit late. I wrote them down and drew a circle round them. It didn’t help.

  What else was there? Hawthorne had gone on about the shape of the crime. We had been sitting in his flat, talking over that glass of rum and Coke. I went back through my notes and found his exact words.

  It’s not like that, Tony. You’ve got to find the shape. That’s all.

  But if there was a shape, I couldn’t see it. I was still convinced that the answer must be found in a single clue, something that had been right in front of me but the significance of which I had missed.

  I cast my mind back to the visit we had made to Adrian Lockwood’s house: the umbrella by the door, the vitamin pills, the bilberries. I tried to remember why I had written them down in my notes. Why had I mentioned them at all?

  That was my eureka moment.

  I fired up my computer and went on the internet. What a wonderful device … a gift to writers and detectives alike! In seconds I had the answer I needed and at that moment everything came together in a rush and I suddenly saw with blinding clarity exactly who had killed Richard Pryce. It was something I had never thought I would experience. Agatha Christie never described it, nor did any other mystery writer I can think of: that moment when the detective works it out and the truth makes itself known. Why did Poirot never twirl his moustache? Why didn’t Lord Peter Wimsey dance in the air? I would have.

  I spent another hour thinking it through. I saw Jill turn off the light and heard her go to bed. I made more notes. Then I rang Hawthorne. I didn’t care that it was late.

  ‘Tony?’ It was almost midnight but he didn’t sound upset to hear from me.

  ‘I know who did it,’ I said.

  There was an empty silence at the other end of the telephone. Of course he didn’t believe me. ‘Tell me,’ he said, eventually.

  So I did.

  21

  The Solution to the Crime

  It was with a mixture of excitement and dread that I made my way back up the steps and into the police station at the corner of Ladbroke Grove where I had first attended the interview with Akira Anno. The memory of my conversation with Hawthorne was still buzzing in my head.

  ‘Tell me I’ve got it right.’

  ‘You’ve nailed it, mate. More or less …’

  ‘Hawthorne … !’

  ‘You’ve got it right.’

  From the start I had known that it was possible to get there ahead of him, but I was disappointed that he was so grudging in his respect for what I’d done. Maybe he was a little peeved. To be fair to him, he had corrected me on a few points where I had got things confused. More importantly, he had agreed to the course of action I was taking now, although I wasn’t going to let Cara Grunshaw know that.

  I had to share what I knew with her and her unpleasant sidekick, DC Mills. I didn’t want either of them to get the credit but I owed it to Jill and the series. I was still certain that Grunshaw was behind many of the problems that the production team was facing and it wa
s the only way I could get her off our backs. It didn’t matter that much to Hawthorne. He was paid by the day; one of the reasons he was so painstaking in his enquiries. He didn’t seem to be particularly interested in taking the credit. Even so, he had chosen not to come with me. I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Grunshaw myself.

  She was waiting in the same dingy interrogation room where we had met before. She was wearing a bright orange jersey and a multi-coloured bead necklace, but they contrasted with the sourness of her expression, her refusal to smile or to look anything but threatening. Darren Mills was looking jaunty in a sports jacket and trousers with a very slight flare. Generally, I have quite a lot of admiration for the British police. They’re always extremely helpful to writers, giving us access to operations, control rooms and all the rest of it. They must get fed up always being depicted as aggressive or corrupt – but where these two are concerned, I have no regrets.

  ‘So what do you want?’ Grunshaw asked. She was sitting at the table with Mills leaning against the wall behind her. She hadn’t offered me a cup of coffee. She didn’t look at all pleased to see me.

  ‘You wanted information,’ I said. ‘We know who killed Richard Pryce.’

  ‘You mean, Hawthorne worked it out?’

  ‘We worked it out together.’ That wasn’t strictly true but I needed his authority.

  ‘Does he know you’re here?’

  ‘No. I didn’t tell him.’

  I was worried for a moment but she didn’t see through the lie. ‘Well, go on then.’

  ‘Can I have a glass of water?’

  ‘No. You can’t have a fucking glass of water. And get on with it. We haven’t got all day.’

  I was tempted to turn my back on her and walk out. But it was too late for that now. This was my moment. I plunged in.

  ‘This has been an investigation into not one death but two,’ I began. ‘There was the murder of Richard Pryce at his home in Fitzroy Park—’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Grunshaw interrupted. ‘We know where he lived.’