Close to Death

‘I never guess!’

‘You know what I mean . . .’

It’s the one thing nobody ever tells you in a detective story. At what point does the detective solve the crime? It’s a remarkable coincidence that he or she only seems to arrive at the solution in the last couple of chapters, but it’s always made clear that the main clues, the ones that gave the whole thing away, turned up long before. Sitting there on the balcony of my flat, with the water trickling down the wall, it quite amused me to put Hawthorne on the spot. At this point, how much had he worked out?

‘I didn’t know who killed Giles Kenworthy,’ he admitted. ‘It’s not like that. You don’t just meet someone and say, “Oh – he’s the killer!” You’ve got to talk to everyone, see how they fit together, and at the point you’ve reached, there were people we hadn’t even spoken to. May Winslow and Phyllis Moore, for a start – and they were just as much suspects as everyone else. Dr Beresford. Kylie the nanny. Damien the carer. Jean-François the French teacher. The picture’s not complete. But I’ll tell you this, Tony. By the end of that first day, the finger was definitely pointing in one direction.’

‘Who?’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t have a name. I just had an idea of what might have happened.’

‘Tell me!’ He didn’t answer. ‘Hawthorne! It’s great if the readers don’t guess who did it. It’s not so brilliant if the author doesn’t know either.’

He took pity on me.

‘Look, mate. I’ve told you everything that happened and you’ve written it down. And if you just read it all again, there’s stuff that should be obvious to you. Things that don’t make any sense.’

‘Such as?’

‘All right. Two purported attacks in the space of a weekend. The old woman in Hampton Wick and Adam Strauss at Richmond station.’

‘You say “purported”. Do you think Adam Strauss falling down the stairs could have just been an accident?’

‘Whatever happened at the station had to be a part of it . . .’

‘That’s why you wanted to see the CCTV footage.’

‘Exactly – although it didn’t help in the end. Anyway, that’s not so important. What you should really be focusing on are the two meetings.’

‘What two meetings?’

He paused, then continued patiently. ‘There were two meetings in Riverview Close. The first one happened six weeks before the murder.’

‘Yes. I’ve described that one. They all got together at The Stables, but the Kenworthys didn’t show up.’

‘That’s right. But what’s interesting is to look at the events before that meeting and then compare them with what happened afterwards.’ I still didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘There was an escalation,’ he explained. ‘Andrew Pennington’s flowers got torn to shreds. The dog got put in the well.’

‘Adam Strauss’s best chess set got smashed. And a man died.’

Hawthorne nodded. ‘Three deaths. Giles Kenworthy. Ellery the French bulldog. And Raymond Shaw, a patient of Dr Beresford.’

I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not, listing them like that. ‘Was Raymond Shaw deliberately killed? I don’t know anything about him. I don’t even know who he is.’

‘He had a heart attack in Dr Beresford’s surgery. It was a natural death.’

I gave up. ‘So when was the second meeting?’ I asked. ‘How do you even know it happened?’

He looked at me a little sadly. ‘You wrote it. Didn’t you see it?’

‘No!’

He looked at me like a teacher with a difficult child. ‘When I was with Roderick Browne, he mentioned that there had been a meeting and the moment he said it, he looked scared. You described it perfectly. “Something close to panic flitted across his eyes . . .” He thought he’d given away too much and he quickly added that this was a meeting that had happened a long time ago. Six weeks.’ Hawthorne waited for me to react. ‘He wanted us to know it had happened a long time ago. It was obvious to me that he was deliberately steering us away from a more recent meeting to one that had happened earlier.

‘The same thing happened with Gemma Beresford, the doctor’s wife. Dudley asked her if she and the neighbours had ever talked about killing Giles Kenworthy and straight away, she went on the defensive. “No. Of course not. When would anyone ever say something like that? I never heard anything!” Too much denial! She went on to say I couldn’t turn her against her friends. She was protecting them. They’d met and they’d talked about murder.

‘And then there was the clincher. I asked Andrew Pennington about the meeting when the Kenworthys didn’t show up and he said: “You’re referring to the meeting we had six weeks ago.” Not a meeting. The meeting. Because there was more than one.’

‘Surely that’s just semantics.’

‘The trouble with you, Tony, is that you’re great with long words, but you never think them through. The semantics! It’s the small things that matter. That’s how criminals give themselves away.’

‘So what happened at this second meeting?’

‘You can find out for yourself . . .’