The Word Is Murder

by Anthony Horowitz

  ‘It was because I hated her!’ Godwin’s cheeks had reddened. He had heavy black eyebrows, which accentuated his anger. ‘That woman with her stupidity and her carelessness killed my son, an eight-year-old boy, and turned his brother who was a livewire and who could make anybody laugh – turned him into pretty much a vegetable. She wasn’t wearing her glasses and she destroyed my life. I went to the funeral because I was delighted she was dead and I wanted to see her put in the ground. I thought it would give me closure.’

  ‘And did it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How about the death of Damian Cowper?’ Hawthorne could have been a tennis player, slamming the ball back across the net. He had the same coiled-up energy, the same focus.

  Godwin sneered. ‘Do you think I killed him, Mr Hawthorne? Is that why you asked me what I did after the funeral? I went for a long walk, down the King’s Road and then beside the River Thames. Yes, I know. That’s very convenient, isn’t it? No witnesses. Nobody to tell you where I was. But why would I have wished him any harm? He wasn’t driving the car. He was at home.’

  ‘His mother drove away, maybe to protect him.’

  ‘That was her decision. It was cowardly and selfish but he had nothing to do with it.’

  That chimed in with what I had been thinking. Alan Godwin might have a good reason to kill Diana Cowper but I couldn’t see how it could be extended to her son.

  Both men had stopped as if they were in a boxing ring and had come to the end of a round. Then Hawthorne weighed in again. ‘You went to see Mrs Cowper.’

  Godwin hesitated. ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, Mr Godwin. I know you were there.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Mrs Cowper told her son. She was scared of you. According to him, you threatened her.’

  ‘I did no such thing.’ He stopped himself and took a breath. ‘All right. I went to see her. I don’t see why I should deny it. It was about three or four weeks ago.’

  ‘Two weeks before she died.’

  ‘I’ll tell you when it was. It was two weeks after Judith asked me to leave the house, when we finally realised our marriage couldn’t be saved. That’s when I went to see her, because it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, she might be able to help. I thought she might even want to.’

  ‘Help you? In what way?’

  ‘With money! What do you think?’ He drew a breath. ‘I might as well tell you what you want to know because – you know what? I don’t really give a damn any more. There’s nothing left. My company’s down the pan. Businesses don’t want to spend any more … not on corporate events. Gordon Brown ran this bloody country into the ground and the new lot don’t have a clue. So everyone’s tightening their belts and people like me are the first out the door.

  ‘Judith and me – we’re finished too. Twenty-four years of marriage and you suddenly wake up and realise that you can’t bear to be in the same room. That’s what she said, anyway.’ He pointed at the ceiling. ‘There’s a one-bedroom flat upstairs and that’s where I’m living now. I’m fifty-five years old and I’m boiling eggs on a single gas ring or bringing in Big Macs in brown paper bags. That’s what my life has come to.

  ‘I can put up with all that. I don’t care. But do you know what really hurts … why I went to see that bloody woman? We’re losing my house, the house in Harrow-on-the-Hill. We can’t keep up with the mortgage repayments. And even that wouldn’t matter to me except it’s Jeremy’s house. It’s his home. It’s the one place he feels safe.’ Anger sparked in his eyes. ‘If I could find any way to protect him from that, I would do it. So that is why I swallowed my dignity and went to see Mrs Cowper. I thought she could help. She had a nice address in Chelsea and, from what I read in the newspapers, that son of hers was making a fortune out in Hollywood. I thought, maybe, if she had a shred of decency in her, she might like to make amends for what she’d done and actually help my family by reaching into her pocket.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘What do you think?’ The sneer was back in place. ‘She tried to slam the door in my face and when I forced my way in, she threatened to call the police.’

  ‘You forced your way in? What exactly do you mean by that?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘I mean I persuaded her to let me speak to her. I didn’t make any threats. I didn’t use violence. I almost got down on my bloody knees asking her for ten minutes of her time.’ He paused. ‘All I wanted was a loan. Was it so much to ask? I had a couple of pitches coming up. I might have been able to turn a corner. I just needed a bit of breathing space. But she wasn’t having any of it. I don’t know how any human being can be so bloody cold, so removed. She told me to leave her house and that’s exactly what I did. I actually felt sick with myself for having gone in the first place. It just shows you how desperate I was.’

  ‘Which room did this happen in, Mr Godwin?’

  ‘The front room. The living room. Why?’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘It was lunchtime. Around midday.’

  ‘So the curtains were tied back.’

  ‘Yes.’ He was puzzled by the question.

  ‘How did you know she’d be in?’

  ‘I didn’t know. I went round on the off-chance.’

  ‘And later on, you sent her a letter.’

  Godwin hesitated very briefly. ‘Yes.’

  Hawthorne reached into his jacket pocket and took out the letter which he had been given by Andrea Kluvánek. So much had happened in the last few days that I’d almost forgotten about it. He unfolded it. ‘I have been watching you and I know the things that are dear to you,’ he read. ‘You say you didn’t threaten her but that sounds pretty threatening to me.’

  ‘I was angry. I didn’t mean anything by it.’

  ‘When did you send it?’

  ‘I didn’t. I hand-delivered it.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘It was about a week after I’d seen her. A Friday. I suppose it must have been the sixth or the seventh.’

  ‘The weekend before she died!’

  ‘I didn’t go into the house. I just put it through the door.’

  ‘Did she reply?’

  ‘No. I never heard a word from her.’

  Hawthorne glanced at the letter again. ‘What do you mean – the things that are dear to you?’

  ‘I didn’t mean anything!’ Godwin pounded his fist on the desk. ‘It was just words. You put yourself in my position! It was stupid going to see her. It was stupid writing the letter. But when people are pushed into a corner, sometimes they do stupid things.’

  ‘Mrs Cowper had a cat,’ Hawthorne said. ‘A Persian grey. I don’t suppose you saw it.’

  ‘No. I didn’t see any fucking cat – and actually I’ve got nothing else to say to you. You haven’t shown me any ID. I don’t know who you are. I want you to leave.’

  A telephone rang in the office next door. It was the only sound we’d heard since we’d entered the building. ‘How much longer before you move out of here?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘I’ve got the lease for another three months.’

  ‘Then we’ll know where to find you.’

  We walked through the almost empty office and back out into the rain. Hawthorne immediately lit a cigarette. ‘I’m going to Canterbury tomorrow,’ he suddenly announced. ‘You up for that?’

  ‘Why Canterbury?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve tracked down Nigel Weston.’ I’d forgotten who this was. ‘Nigel Weston QC,’ Hawthorne reminded me. ‘The judge who let Diana Cowper go free. And after that, I thought I’d wander over to Deal. You might like that, Tony. Get a bit of sea air.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, although I didn’t really want to leave London. I was being dragged into unfamiliar territory in every sense and I didn’t feel comfortable having Hawthorne as my guide.

  ‘I’ll see you then.’

  We went our separate ways and it was only when I got to the end of the street that I remembered the one question
I had been meaning to ask. Alan Godwin had said that he was glad she had been killed; in his own words, he was delighted. But when I had seen him at the funeral, he had been crying. His handkerchief had been constantly at his eyes. Why?

  And there was something else.

  ‘She wasn’t wearing her glasses and she destroyed my life.’

  That was what he had said just now, his voice half-strangled by anger. But there had been another witness, Raymond Clunes, talking about Diana Cowper, and he had said something quite different.

  As soon as I got home, I looked through my notes and found what I was looking for. It was something that Hawthorne had missed – but it had been there all along, in front of our eyes, the reason why both the mother and the son had to die, and it told me precisely who had killed them. In fact it was obvious.

  Suddenly I was looking forward to our train journey to Canterbury. For once, I had the upper hand.

  Sixteen

  Detective Inspector Meadows

  With the end of the book in sight, I realised I needed more background. It was time to get in touch with Detective Inspector Charles Meadows.

  In fact that turned out to be quite easy. I called the Metropolitan Police, gave his name and was immediately patched through – to his mobile, I think. I could hear a pneumatic drill in the background as we talked. At first, when I told him who I was and why I wanted to see him, he was suspicious. He started making excuses and would have hung up if I hadn’t, frankly, bribed him. That is, I offered him £50 for an hour of his time and suggested we meet at a pub where I could buy him a drink. Warily, he agreed, although I had a feeling he didn’t need much persuading. He didn’t like Hawthorne and would surely take any opportunity to do him down.

  We met that evening at the Groucho Club in Soho. He’d asked for a central London location and I thought he’d be impressed by a private club known for its celebrity clientele. I also knew we could get a seat. He arrived ten minutes late, by which time I’d bagged a quiet corner upstairs. He ordered a vodka martini, which surprised me. The triangular glass looked ridiculous in his oversized hands and he took just three gulps before he needed – and asked for – another.

  I had a lot of questions for him but first he wanted to know about me. How had I come across Hawthorne? Why was I writing a book about him? How much had he paid me? I told him how we had met and why I had agreed to do the job (without being paid) and made it clear that I had misgivings about Hawthorne too, that he wasn’t my friend.

  Meadows smiled at this. ‘A man like Hawthorne doesn’t have that many friends,’ he said. ‘I’ve nicked thieves and rapists who are more popular than him.’

  So I told him about Injustice, how we had worked together and how he had approached me effectively to write about his most recent case. I didn’t mention the encounter at Hay-on-Wye that had changed my mind. ‘It just sounded interesting,’ I said. ‘I write a lot about murder but I’ve never met anyone quite like Hawthorne.’

  He smiled a second time. ‘There aren’t many people like Hawthorne around, thank God.’

  ‘Why exactly do you dislike him?’

  ‘What makes you think I dislike him? I don’t give a toss about him, to be perfectly honest. I just don’t think it’s right to employ people like him to do police work when he’s not a policeman.’

  ‘I’d like to know what happened. Why was he fired?’

  ‘Did you tell him you were seeing me?’

  ‘No, but he knows I’m writing about him. It’s what he asked me to do. And I told him I’d find out everything I could about him.’

  ‘Bit of a detective yourself, then.’

  ‘That had occurred to me.’

  I wondered what anyone would make of us if they glanced in our direction. Built like a rugby player, with his broken nose, lank hair and cheap suit, Meadows didn’t look anything like the usual sort of person who drank at the Groucho. Like Hawthorne, there was something indefinably threatening about him. The waiter brought over a bowl of Twiglets and he plunged his hand into it. When he pulled it out again, the bowl was half empty.

  ‘What did he tell you about the murder squad?’ Crunch, crunch, crunch. The rest of our interview would be punctuated by those damned snacks being mechanically ground between his teeth.

  ‘He didn’t tell me anything. I know almost nothing about him. I’m not even sure where he lives.’

  ‘River Court, Blackfriars.’ That was only a mile or so from my own flat in Clerkenwell. ‘It’s quite a fancy place. Views out onto the Thames. I don’t know what the arrangement is. He doesn’t own it.’

  ‘Do you know the number?’

  He shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘He told me he had a place in Gants Hill.’

  ‘He lost that when he split up from his wife.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’ I paused. ‘Did you ever meet her?’

  ‘Once. She came to the office. About five foot eleven. Caucasian.’ He was describing her as if she were a suspect in an investigation. ‘She was quite pretty, fair hair, a few years younger than him. A bit nervous. She asked to see him and I took her to his desk.’

  ‘What did they talk about?’

  ‘I haven’t got the faintest idea. No-one ever hung around with Hawthorne. I made myself scarce.’

  ‘So what was he like to work with?’

  ‘You couldn’t work with him. That was his problem.’ Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. He wasn’t enjoying the Twiglets. He was just eating them. ‘Can I have another of these?’

  He raised his glass. I signalled at the waiter.

  ‘Hawthorne came to us in 2005,’ he said. ‘He’d been in other sub-commands – in Sutton and Hendon – and they weren’t having him and we soon found out why. They say there’s a lot of competition working in murder. It’s true that the teams can be at each other’s throats. But at the same time, we rub along. We’ll drink together after work. We try to help each other out.

  ‘But he wasn’t like that. He was a loner and if you want the truth, nobody likes a loner. I’m not saying people didn’t respect him. He was bloody good at the job and he got results. We have something called the murder manual. You ever heard of that?’

  ‘I can’t say I have.’

  ‘Well, there’s no secret about it. You can download the whole thing on the internet if you want to look at it. It came out about twenty years ago and it’s the definitive guide to homicide investigation. It says that on page one. Basically, it’s the manual to everything from first response to crime scene strategy to house-to-house and post-mortem procedure and there are some investigating officers who carry it around with them like born-again Christians with their Bible. That’s the thing about our job. Process is king. The trouble is, you can take it too far. There was one man I knew, he was investigating a skeleton that had been dug up in the crypt of a church, victim of a murder that had taken place back in the fifties. He was trying to work out a CCTV strategy because that’s what it tells you to do in the manual – even though it was twenty-five years before CCTV was invented.

  ‘Now the thing about Hawthorne was, he did things his own way. He’d just disappear without so much as a by-your-leave, because he had a hunch or maybe it was just a lucky guess or Christ knows really how he knew. But almost every single time he was right. That was what pissed people off. He had an arrest record that was second to none.’

  ‘So what didn’t they like?’

  ‘Everything. On a day-to-day basis he was a pain in the arse. He was rude to the boss. He never clicked with anyone. And he didn’t drink. I’m not holding that against him but it didn’t help. Seven o’clock in the evening, he’d disappear. Maybe he went home to his wife although I heard whispers he was playing the field. It’s no matter. If he’d made a few more friends, maybe there’d have been someone to stand by him when the shit hit the fan.’

  ‘You told me not to go near any stairs.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that really. I couldn’t resist having a dig at Hawthorne.’
The third vodka martini arrived. He threw it back. ‘There was a man called Derek Abbott, a 62-year-old retired teacher, living in Brentford, who’d been arrested as part of Operation Spade. It was an international operation involving fifty countries, looking into the trafficking of child pornography by mail and internet. It had started in Canada and eventually there’d be more than three hundred arrests. Abbott was suspected of being the main distributor in the UK and so he’d been brought in for questioning. I’m not even sure what he was doing in Putney, but there he was.

  ‘Anyway, he was in the custody office, which was on the second floor. He’d been booked in, pockets searched and all the rest of it and someone had to take him to the interview room, which was in the basement. Normally, that would have been a civilian but there was nobody around and to this day I don’t quite know what happened but Hawthorne volunteered. He took him down a corridor to the staircase – I forgot to mention he’d decided that Abbott needed to be handcuffed. There was no need for that. He was in his sixties. He had no history of violence. Well, you’ve probably guessed what happened next and a guess is all we have because the CCTV wasn’t working in that part of the building. Abbott swore that Hawthorne tripped him. Hawthorne denied it. All I can tell you is that Abbott went head first down fourteen steps and because his hands were cuffed behind his back, there was nothing to break his fall.’

  ‘How badly was he hurt?’

  Meadows shrugged. ‘Did his neck in, broke a few bones. He could have been killed and if so, Hawthorne would probably be in jail. As it was, Abbott was in no position to make too much fuss and basically the whole thing was hushed up. That said, it couldn’t all be brushed under the carpet. Too many people knew and, like I say, too many people had it in for him. So Hawthorne got the boot.’

  There was nothing particularly surprising about this story. I had always been aware of a sort of smouldering violence in Hawthorne’s make-up, a sense of outrage, even – ironically – injustice. If he was going to kick someone down a flight of stairs, of course it would be a paedophile. It reminded me of his behaviour when we had visited Raymond Clunes.