The Sentence Is Death

The first picture was all right, though. It was a posed, portrait shot of Richard Pryce taken while he was still alive and showed a handsome, rather debonair man with an aquiline nose and long, grey hair sweeping back over a high forehead. He was wearing a jersey and half smiling as if he was pleased with himself, and certainly had no inkling that he was about to find himself the subject of a murder investigation. His left hand was folded over his right arm and I noticed a gold band on his fourth finger. So, he was married.

In the next shots, he was dead. This time his hands were stretched out over his head as he lay on a bare wooden floor, contorted in a way that only a corpse can be. He was surrounded by fragments of glass and a large quantity of liquid that looked too thin to be blood and which would turn out to be blood mixed with wine. The photographs had been taken from the left and from the right and from above, leaving nothing to the imagination. I moved on to the other images: jagged wounds around his neck and throat, staring eyes, claw-like fingers. Death close up. I wondered how Hawthorne had got them so quickly but guessed that he had received them electronically and had printed them at home.

‘Richard Pryce was struck with a full wine bottle on the forehead and frontal area of the skull,’ Hawthorne explained. It was interesting how quickly he slipped into officialese. ‘Struck’ instead of ‘hit’, for example. And that ‘frontal area’, which could have come straight out of a weather forecaster’s lexicon. ‘There are severe contusions and a spiderweb fracture of the frontal bone, but that wasn’t what killed him. The bottle smashed, which means that some of the energy was dispersed. Pryce fell to the ground and the killer was left holding the jagged glass neck. He used it as a knife, stabbing at the throat.’ He pointed at one of the close-ups. ‘Here and here. The second blow penetrated the subclavian vein and continued into the pleural cavity.’

‘He bled to death,’ I said.

‘No.’ Hawthorne shook his head. ‘He probably didn’t have time. My guess is he suffered an air embolism in the heart and that would have finished him.’

There was no pity in his voice. He was just stating the facts.

I picked up my coffee meaning to take a sip but it was the same colour as the blood in the picture and I put it down again. ‘He was a rich man living in an expensive house. Anyone could have broken in,’ I said. ‘I don’t see what makes this so special.’

‘Well, quite a few things, actually,’ Hawthorne replied cheerfully. ‘Pryce had been working on a big case . . . a £10 million settlement. Not that the lady in question got very much of it. Akira Anno. Ring any bells?’

For reasons that will become apparent further down the line, I’ve had to change her name, but I knew her well enough. She was a writer of literary fiction and poetry, a regular speaker at all the main festivals. She had been twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and had actually won the Costa Book Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and, most recently, a PEN/Nabokov Award for achievement in international literature, which cited ‘her unique voice and the delicacy of her prose’. She wrote – mainly on feminist issues and sexual politics – for the Sunday Times and other broadsheets. She was often on the radio. I had heard her on Moral Maze and Loose Ends.

‘She poured a glass of wine over Pryce’s head,’ I said. That story had been all over social media and I remembered it well.

‘She did more than that, mate. She threatened to hit him with the bottle. It was in the middle of a crowded restaurant. Lots of people heard her.’

‘Then she killed him!’

Hawthorne shrugged and I knew what he meant. In real life, it would have been obvious. But in the world that Hawthorne inhabited – and which he wanted me to share – an admission of guilt might well mean the exact opposite.

‘Does she have an alibi?’ I asked.

‘She’s not at home at the moment. No one’s quite sure where she is.’ Hawthorne took out a cigarette and rolled it between his fingers before lighting it. I slid my polystyrene cup towards him. It was still half full of coffee and he could use it as an ashtray.

‘So you’ve got a suspect,’ I said. ‘What else is there?’

‘I’m trying to tell you! His house was being redecorated and there were a whole lot of paint pots in the hall. Of course, he didn’t go in for ordinary stuff like Dulux or anything like that. He had to have those poncey colours from Farrow & Ball. Eighty quid a tin with names like Vert De Terre, Ivy and Arsenic.’ He spat out the names with evident distaste.

‘You made up the Arsenic,’ I said.

‘No. I made up the Ivy. The other two are on their list. The paint he had chosen was actually called Green Smoke. And here’s the thing, Tony. After the killer had bludgeoned Mr Pryce and left him bleeding on his posh American oak floor, he picked up a brush and painted a message on the wall: a three-digit number.’

‘What three digits?’