The Twist of a Knife

‘This is her room,’ Arthur said. ‘It doesn’t get enough light … she was never happy with it. That’s the trouble having a house that’s north-facing.’ He looked around him. ‘Your lot have taken her computer and some of her papers,’ he went on. ‘But otherwise this is more or less how she left it.’

Hawthorne peered out of the window. ‘She could see whoever was at the front door,’ he said. ‘So it’s quite likely she knew the person who killed her.’

‘Unless he was dressed as a postman,’ I said.

Hawthorne ignored this. ‘Why did you call your wife?’ he asked.

‘She liked me to ring her every morning around then. She would tell me if she wanted any shopping done.’

‘And did she?’

‘She wanted some avocados. There were avocados in the fridge, but they were too hard.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘She was always going on about that fridge. She hated the temperature control. We could never get it right.’

‘Anything else?’

Arthur thought for a minute and shook his head. ‘I can’t think of anything that might be relevant.’

‘How long had you been married, Mr Throsby?’

‘Twenty-five years.’ He pointed to an ornamental silver candlestick at the end of the table. ‘I bought her that as a wedding-anniversary present. She didn’t much like it, though. She didn’t see the point.’

‘I think it’s very nice,’ Hawthorne said.

‘Thank you.’

Hawthorne hesitated. ‘Would you say you were happily married, Mr Throsby?’

Arthur had to think about that. ‘Well, she wasn’t an easy woman. I’ll be honest with you. She could be …’ He searched for the word.

‘Critical?’ Hawthorne suggested.

‘Yes. I suppose you could say that. Perhaps it went with the territory.’ Astonishingly, he was talking as if it had never occurred to him before. ‘She could be quite judgemental.’

‘You never lost your temper with her?’

‘Certainly not. You’re not suggesting …’ Arthur blushed. ‘I was nowhere near the house when she was attacked, and I can assure you, there were dozens of witnesses who saw me at school. You think I would do anything to harm her? The mother of my child?’ He looked genuinely pained. ‘I loved Harriet! I knew the two of us were going to be together the day I met her. She was a very attractive young woman and a terrific journalist. I’d never met anyone so ambitious, so determined.’

‘Where did you meet?’

‘We were both journalists – at the Bristol Argus. I wrote about politics and education. She was crime.’

‘Not theatre?’

He shook his head. ‘Not to start with. No. She was their senior crime reporter and she was very good at it. She got an honourable mention from the Bevins Trust and she was the Best Regional Journalist at the British Press Awards in 1997.’ His eyes fell on the dining table. ‘She was a published author too.’

Hawthorne spread out the three books. No Regrets: The Strange World of Dr Robert Thirkell. Lady Killer: The Crimes of Sophie Comninos. And Bad Boys: Life and Death in an English Village. I noticed that the titles followed the same pattern, almost like crossword clues with the answers printed next to them. The covers were also similar: black-and-white photographs snatched from old newspapers with gaudy lettering for the title and the author. The books looked determinedly old-fashioned; somehow stuck in the worlds they described.

‘Robert Thirkell was a doctor working in Bristol,’ Arthur explained. ‘He killed off half a dozen elderly patients … put rat poison in their tea. He thought he was doing them a favour. Harriet managed to get close to him before he was arrested and the two of them became good friends. That was how she got the material for the book. Sophie Comninos was a hotshot TV executive until she murdered her Greek husband. She smashed a bottle of pink wine over his head after losing at a game of backgammon and then she killed two more people trying to cover it up.’

‘What about this one?’ Hawthorne had picked up Life and Death in an English Village.

‘She got into a lot of trouble with that,’ Arthur said. ‘It was about Trevor and Annabel Longhurst. You may remember them? Their son came under the influence of an older boy and the end result was that he got involved in the death of a teacher at a local primary school. They were living in a village near Chippenham – Moxham Heath – and they weren’t popular. They were very rich. Incomers. Champagne socialists, you might say. They were both of them into politics, big time. Harriet was accused of doing a hatchet job.’

With everything I had learned about Harriet Throsby, that didn’t surprise me.

‘These were all stories she’d covered for the Argus,’ Arthur went on. ‘The books didn’t sell a lot of copies, but the advances helped pay for this place. Anyway, her heart wasn’t in it. Crime, I mean. When I first met her, she was already thinking about moving on.’