Close to Death

He produced another sheaf of interviews and hand-written notes and handed them to me. ‘You take a look at all this and put something together – maybe without the parakeets and the climbing roses – and we can meet in a couple of weeks and see where we are.’

‘And that’s it?’

‘What else do you need?’

‘I told you. I’d like to meet John Dudley.’

‘That’s not going to happen.’

2

I wasn’t going to let it go.

Hawthorne’s remark had annoyed me. It was unfair to say that I’d never noticed anything when I’d followed him on his investigations. I noticed and described lots of things; it’s just that I wasn’t always aware of their significance. Yes, I did make mistakes. Getting a senior police officer to arrest the wrong person was certainly one of them. My questions did sometimes have unintended consequences: an old man’s house got burned down, for example. And I’d been stabbed twice. Even so, I’d say that I was often quite helpful, especially considering that, unlike Dudley, I had never been in the police force.

I had very little to go on. I had heard Dudley’s voice on the recordings he had made throughout the day, but he had no discernible accent and although he had travelled in and out of London with Hawthorne, I couldn’t be sure he even lived in the city. He had mentioned working in Bristol. I thought briefly of using a computer search engine to track him down, but there seemed little point: I couldn’t even be sure I’d been given his real name.

That gave me another idea.

I’ve already mentioned the book I was working on, Murder at the Vaudeville Theatre. In it, I had described how I had been forced into hiding in Hawthorne’s flat, fearing that I was about to be arrested for the murder of theatre critic Harriet Throsby. While I was there, I had been discovered by a man who had called in, using his own key. This was Roland Hawthorne, who turned out to be Hawthorne’s adoptive brother. It had always infuriated me that I knew so little about the man I was supposed to be writing about, so of course I had used the chance meeting to get some information out of him. It wasn’t easy. Roland knew who I was and he was careful not to give too much away.

However, he had confirmed that his father – another policeman – had adopted Hawthorne, whose own parents had died in a place called Reeth. The two of them worked for an organisation that Roland described as ‘a creative and business development service’, but which sounded like a high-end security firm, employing private detectives and investigators. They also seemed to own several flats in the same block where Hawthorne lived.

Roland had told me very little more, but he had been carrying an envelope with him: it contained details of Hawthorne’s next case. I had seen the name BARRACLOUGH written on the outside and Roland had mentioned that it concerned a husband who had run off with another woman and who was now holed up in Grand Cayman. That was all he had said. But it was enough.

If I could find Barraclough’s wife, I might be able to track down the organisation she had hired to help her. It might be an opportunity to find out more about Hawthorne, and there was a good chance that John Dudley was working for this organisation too. I should have thought of all this sooner. It was time to get out from behind my desk.

I went back to my computer.

With the information I already had, tracking down Mrs Barraclough wouldn’t be too difficult. For a start, her husband must have worked in the world of finance. There are over six hundred banks and trust companies in Grand Cayman, even though the entire island only stretches some twenty miles. Fraud and white-collar crime are as much part of the landscape as coral reefs and cocktails at sunset. I could easily see Mr Barraclough as a crooked financier, cheating on his wife. She would live in Mayfair or Belgravia. She would have a little black book with the names of several discreet detective agencies. She could lead me to the one that had employed Hawthorne.

It helped that she had a fairly uncommon surname. I opened a search engine and found it almost at once, on the second page. There was a report published in the Daily Mail with the headline: BARRACLOUGH ‘FISH & CHIPS’ DIVORCE. It referred to a hearing that had taken place just a few months before and the timeline fitted exactly with my visit to Hawthorne’s flat. I read:

The American wife of a well-known international financier has been awarded a remarkable £230 million in a High Court divorce case which the judge described as ‘one of the most acrimonious I have ever heard’.