‘My parents weren’t happy when I told them I wanted to audition for RADA – but do you know what? They let me go ahead because they didn’t think I had a hope in hell of getting in. Secretly, they were laughing at me but they decided that if they let me get it out of my system I’d forget about it and slip back into the family tradition. I applied for RADA and without telling them I applied for Webber Douglas and the Central School of Drama and the Bristol Old Vic too and I’d have applied for a dozen more until I got in. But I didn’t need to. Because the fact of the matter was that I was good. I was really good. I came alive when I was acting. I breezed into RADA. I knew, the moment I auditioned, they were never going to turn me down.’
I said something. It came out as an inarticulate noise because by now the drug had gone to work on my vocal cords and it was difficult to speak. I think I was going to plead with him to let me go but it was a waste of time anyway. Cornwallis frowned, went over to the table and picked up one of the scalpels. As I stared at him, he walked over to me. I saw the light of the neon shimmering in the silver blade. Then, without hesitating, he plunged it into me.
I stared in complete amazement at the handle jutting out of my chest. The strange thing is that it didn’t hurt very much. Nor was there a lot of blood. I just couldn’t believe he’d done it.
‘I told you I didn’t want to hear from you!’ Cornwallis explained, his voice once again rising into a whine. ‘There’s nothing you can say to me that I want to hear. So shut up! Do you understand? Shut up!’
He composed himself, then continued as if nothing had happened.
‘From the first day I entered RADA, I was accepted for what I was and what I had to offer. I didn’t use the name Robert Cornwallis and I never talked about my family. I called myself Dan Roberts … no-one cared about things like that. It was going to be my stage name anyway. And I wasn’t “funeral boy” any more. I was Anthony Hopkins. I was Kenneth Branagh. I was Derek Jacobi. I was Ian Holm. All those names were up there on the boards and I was going to be one of them, just like them. Every time I went into the building I had this sense that I had found myself. I’m telling you now, those were the happiest three years of my life. They were the only happy three years of my life!
‘Damian Cowper was there too. You were right about that – and don’t get me wrong. I liked him. To begin with, I admired him. But that was because I didn’t know him. I thought he was my friend – my best friend – and I didn’t see him for the cold, ambitious, manipulative swine that he was.’
I glanced down at the scalpel, still jutting obscenely out of me. There was a pool of red spreading around it, no bigger than the palm of my hand. The wound was throbbing now. I felt sick.
‘It all came to a head in the third year. Everything was more competitive by then. We all pretended to be each other’s friends. We all pretended to support each other. But let me tell you, when it came to the showcases and the final play, that’s when the gloves came off. There wasn’t a single person in that building who wouldn’t have pushed their best friend off the fire escape if they thought it would help them get an agent. And of course, everyone was sucking up to the staff. Damian was good at that. He’d smile and he’d say the right things and all the time he had his eye on the main prize and in the end, guess what he did?’
Cornwallis paused but I was too afraid to speak. He stared at me, then snatched up a second scalpel and, even as I cried out, stabbed it into me, this time into my shoulder, leaving it there. ‘Guess what he did!’ he screamed.
‘He cheated you!’ I somehow managed to force out the words. I didn’t know what I was saying. I just had to say something.
‘He did more than that. When I was cast as Hamlet, he was furious. He thought he was entitled to the part. He’d already performed it as part of his Tree. He wanted everyone to see how good he was. But it was my turn. The part was mine. That last production was my opportunity to show the world what I could do and he and that bitch girlfriend of his tricked me. They did it together. They deliberately made me sick so that I couldn’t come to rehearsals and they had to recast.’
I didn’t understand quite what he was talking about but right then nor did I care. I was sitting there like a bull in the ring with two scalpels sticking out of me, both hurting more and more. I was certain I was going to be killed. He seemed to be waiting for me to speak. Fearful that my silence would only enrage him more, I muttered: ‘Amanda Leigh …’
‘Amanda Leigh. That’s the one. He used her to get at me but I caught up with her in the end and made her pay.’ He giggled to himself. It was the most convincing portrayal of a lunatic I’d ever seen. ‘I made her suffer and then she disappeared. Do you know where she is? I can tell you if you like – but if you want to find her, you’ll need to dig up seven graves.’
‘You killed Damian,’ I rasped. It took every effort to form the words. My heart felt as if it was going to explode.
‘Yes.’ He brought his hands together and bowed his head as if he was praying and even then I got the sense that there was something mannered about what he was doing. This was a performance for an audience of one. ‘People said I was great in the run-up to Hamlet,’ he continued. ‘I should have been Hamlet. But I couldn’t do that because I was ill, so I ended up as Laertes and I was great as Laertes too. But the problem is, Laertes only has half a dozen scenes. He spends most of the play off-stage. I had about sixty lines. That’s all. And at the end of it I didn’t get the agent I wanted and when I left RADA I didn’t get the career I wanted either. I tried. I kept myself in shape. I went to acting classes. I went to auditions. But it never clicked.
‘There was a season playing Feste in Twelfth Night at the Bristol Old Vic and I thought that was going to be the beginning of everything. But after that, nothing happened for me. I came so close! I had three call-backs for The Pirates of the Caribbean before they gave the part to someone else. There were TV shows, new plays … and I was always thinking it was going to happen for me but for some reason it never did and all the time I was getting older and the money was running out and as the months became years I had to accept that there was something broken inside me and that something had been broken by Amanda and by Damian. When you’re an actor, unemployment is like cancer. The longer you have it, the less chance there is of finding a cure. And all the time my fucking family was watching from the sidelines, waiting for me to fail, to come back into the fold. They were almost willing it to happen.
‘Well, one thing after another: my agent decides to drop me. I’m drinking too much. I wake up in a filthy room with no money in my pocket and I realise I’m not having any sort of life. And finally the penny drops. I’m not Dan Roberts any more. I’m Robert Cornwallis. I put on a dark suit and I join my cousin Irene in South Kensington – and that’s it. Game over.’
He paused and I flinched, wondering if he was going to pick up another scalpel. The first two were burning into me. But he was too absorbed in his own story to hurt me any more.
‘I was actually very good at the job. I suppose you could say it was in my blood. I hated every single minute of it but then is there such a thing as a cheerful undertaker? The fact that I was miserable probably made me more suited to the role. In the words of the song, I lived the life I was given. I met Barbara at her uncle’s funeral – isn’t that romantic? – and we got married! I never really loved her. It was just something I had to do. We had three sons and I’ve tried to be a good father but the truth is they’re foreign objects to me. I never wanted them. I never wanted any of it.’ He half smiled. ‘It amused me when Andrew said he wanted to be an actor. Where do you think he got that from? I’ll never let it happen, of course. I’d do anything to protect him from that particular circle of hell.
‘Hell pretty much describes my life for the last twelve years. I managed to catch up with Amanda in the end. One day, when I couldn’t bear it any more, I tracked her down and invited her out to dinner. She was the first one I killed and doing that gave me a real sense
of gratification, I’ll admit it. You probably think I’m crazy but you don’t understand what she did to me, she and Damian. He was the one I really wanted to deal with: Damian Cowper, who was winning awards and getting more and more famous and making films in America. But I knew it was just a dream, that he was out of my reach. How could I get anywhere near him?
‘So you can imagine how I felt when, one day, his mother walked into the funeral parlour. Come into the parlour, said the spider to the fly! I recognised her at once. She had come to RADA quite a few times and she’d been there for Hamlet. She’d even complimented me on my performance. And here she was, sitting in front of me, arranging her own funeral! She didn’t recognise me but then why should she have? I’ve changed a lot in the time since I left drama school. I’ve lost my hair and then there is the beard and the glasses. And at the end of the day who looks at an undertaker anyway? We’re a type. People who deal with the dead live in the shadows and nobody really wants to acknowledge that we’re there. So she chatted to me and chose her willow coffin and her music and her prayers and she didn’t notice that I was sitting there quite stunned.
‘You see, I’d been struck by the most remarkable thought: if I killed her, Damian would come to her funeral and then I would be able to kill him! That was what came to me in the space of about one minute. And that’s exactly what I did. She had given me her address and I went round to her house and I strangled her. And then, a couple of weeks later, I stabbed Damian to death in his fancy flat. I enjoyed doing that more than you can possibly imagine. I’d been careful to avoid him at the funeral. I let Irene have all the personal contact. But you should have seen his face when I told him who I was! He knew I was going to kill him even before I took out the knife. And he knew why. I just wish I could have made it last longer. I’d have liked him to suffer more.’
I waited for him to continue. There was so much he hadn’t explained and while he was talking he wasn’t attacking me. But he’d stumbled to a halt and I think we both knew at the same moment that he had nothing more to say. There was still no movement in my legs and arms. I wondered what drug I had been given. But if I was paralysed, I wasn’t numb. The pain in my chest and arm was radiating outwards and there was a lot of blood on my shirt.
‘What are you going to do with me?’ I just about managed to articulate the words.
He looked at me, dully.
‘I’ve got nothing to do with this,’ I said. ‘I’m just a writer. I only got involved because Hawthorne asked me to write about him. If you kill me, he’ll know it was you. I think he knows already.’ I was having to work to make myself understood but it seemed to me that the more I spoke to him, the greater my chances of surviving. ‘I have a wife and two sons,’ I said. ‘I understand why you killed Damian Cowper. He was a shit – I thought so too. But killing me is different. I’m nothing to do with this.’
‘Of course I’m going to kill you!’
My heart sank deep into my bowels as Cornwallis snatched a third scalpel off the table. This one was going to be the murder weapon. He was a little wild now, his face livid, his eyes unfocused.
‘You really think I’m going to tell you all this and leave you alive? It’s your fault!’ He sliced the air with the scalpel, emphasising the point. ‘Nobody else knows about RADA …’
‘I told lots of people!’
‘I don’t believe you. And it doesn’t matter anyway. You should have stuck with your stupid children’s books. You shouldn’t have interfered.’
He advanced towards me, measuring his steps.
‘I’m really sorry …’ he said. ‘But you brought this on yourself.’
In that last moment, he had the soulful look of the professional undertaker greeting a new customer. The scalpel was in his hand, slanting upwards. He ran his eyes over me, wondering where to strike.
And then a door which I hadn’t even noticed burst open and a figure moved into the room, on the very edge of my field of vision. I managed to turn my head. It was Hawthorne. He was holding his raincoat in front of him, almost like a shield. I didn’t have a clue how he had got there but I couldn’t have been happier to see him.
‘Put that down,’ I heard him say. ‘It’s over.’
Cornwallis was standing in front of me, no more than a couple of metres away. He looked from Hawthorne back to me and I wondered what he was going to do. I also saw the moment when he made up his mind. He didn’t put the scalpel down. Instead, he lifted it to his own throat, then drew it across in a single, decisive, horizontal slash.
The blood exploded out of him. It gushed over his hand, curtained down his chest, pooled around his feet. He remained standing with a look on his face that still gives me nightmares to this day. I would say he was gleeful, triumphant. Then he collapsed, his entire body twitching spastically as more blood spread around him.
I didn’t see any more. Hawthorne had grabbed hold of the wheelchair and spun me away. At the same time, I heard the comforting wail of sirens as police cars approached, somewhere high above.
‘What are you doing here? Jesus Christ!’
Hawthorne crouched beside me, staring wide-eyed at the two scalpels, wondering why I wasn’t getting to my feet. And I can honestly say that Watson had never looked up to Sherlock Holmes nor Hastings admired Poirot more than I loved Hawthorne right then and my last thought before I passed out was how lucky I was to have him on my side.
Twenty-three
Visiting Hours
In retrospect, it’s a pity that I decided to write all this in the first person as it will have been obvious all along that I wasn’t going to die. It’s a literary convention that the first-person narrator can’t be killed although it’s true that one of my favourite films, Sunset Boulevard, breaks all the rules with its opening shot and there are one or two novels, The Lovely Bones for example, that do the same. I wish there had been some way to disguise the fact that I would make it through to this chapter and wake up in the A&E Unit of Charing Cross Hospital, just a short way down the Fulham Palace Road, but I’m afraid I couldn’t think of one. So much for suspense!
I’m a little embarrassed that I had managed to pass out a second time during the course of a single investigation but the doctor assured me it was more to do with the drug I had been given than my own faint-heartedness. This turned out to be Rohypnol, the date-rape drug no less. We would never discover where Cornwallis had managed to get it from – although his wife, Barbara, was a pharmacist so perhaps he had got it through her. I never found out what happened to her and her children, by the way. It can’t have been much fun discovering that she had been married to a psychopath.
I was kept in overnight for observation but generally I wasn’t in such bad shape. My two scalpel wounds hurt a lot but needed just two stitches each. I’d been badly scared. It would take between eight and twelve hours for the effects of the drug to wear off.
I had visitors. My wife came first, interrupting a busy production schedule to make her way up to the second floor where I had now been transferred. She wasn’t too pleased to see me. ‘What on earth have you been doing?’ she demanded. ‘You could have been killed.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘And you’re not really going to write about it, are you? You’ll look ridiculous! Why did you even go into the building? If you knew he was a killer …’
‘I didn’t know it was empty. And I didn’t think he was the killer. I just thought he might know more than he was saying.’
It was true. I had recognised Robert Cornwallis in the photograph that Liz had shown me but the trouble was, in the back of my mind, I’d already decided that if it wasn’t Alan Godwin, then Grace’s father, Martin Lovell, must have been responsible for the murders. He’d been in the photograph too, the man with the flowers on the edge of the frame. He had a good reason to want Damian Cowper dead. He would have done anything to protect his daughter and help her restart her career. I’d been so sure I was right that I hadn’t thought it through and had almost got
myself killed.
‘Why did you never tell me you were writing this book?’ my wife asked. ‘You don’t normally keep things from me.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’ I felt wretched. ‘I knew you’d think it was a bad idea.’
‘I don’t like the idea of you putting yourself in danger. And look where it’s got you: intensive care!’
‘It was only four stitches.’
‘You were very lucky.’ Just then her mobile phone rang. She glanced at the screen and got up. ‘I brought you this,’ she said.
She’d brought a book and laid it on the bed. It was The Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West, the book I was reading for Foyle’s War. ‘ITV are waiting to hear about the new series,’ she reminded me.
‘I’ll write it next,’ I promised.
‘Not if you’re dead, you won’t.’
My two sons sent nice texts but they didn’t come to the hospital. It was the same when I’d had my motorbike accident in Greece the year before. They were quite squeamish about seeing me horizontal.
Hilda Starke looked in though. I hadn’t seen or heard from my agent since our lunch and she was in a hurry, on her way to a BAFTA screening. She came bustling into my room, perched on a chair and examined me briefly. ‘How are you?’ she asked.
‘I’m all right. They’re really only keeping me in for examination.’
She looked doubtful.
‘I was drugged,’ I explained.
‘This man, Robert Cornwallis, attacked you?’
‘Yes. And then he committed suicide.’
She nodded. ‘Well, I have to admit that will make a terrific end for the book. I’ve got news on that front, by the way. Good news and bad news. Orion don’t want it. I told them the idea and they just weren’t interested. At the same time, they want you to stick to the three-book contract so it may be a while before you can write it.’
The Word Is Murder Page 27