The Twist of a Knife

Neither of us spoke. Hawthorne was deep in thought. I was exhausted after a series of interviews that I was quite certain had taken us nowhere. Of course, I was quite wrong. Between them, the various suspects must have provided us with plenty of clues. The trouble was, I hadn’t seen any of them. I was hungry. I was wondering if there would be any food in the house or whether I would have to pop into the Nando’s chicken restaurant that had just opened round the corner from my flat. That was the full extent of my thoughts.

It was only as we headed south down York Way, coming in behind King’s Cross, that I remembered the text message that Hawthorne had received. I asked him about it.

‘It wasn’t good news,’ he said, trying to dismiss the subject.

‘What was it?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘That’s why I’m asking.’

He took the phone out again. ‘It looks like there’s been a breakthrough. Cara Grunshaw may be on to something.’

‘She knows who did it?’

‘Well, there’s new evidence.’

I was astonished. ‘For heaven’s sake, Hawthorne. What is it? Why didn’t you tell me?’

He stared at the screen. ‘There was a CCTV picture of you taken close to the Maida Hill Tunnel, just a few minutes away from Harriet Throsby’s house. You were wearing a grey puffer jacket, but they can’t be sure it was you because the hood was up. That said, they took a similar jacket from your flat.’

‘What about it?’ I was becoming uneasy.

‘They found some blossom from a Japanese cherry tree … a couple of petals. They were lodged inside the hood.’

‘Of my jacket …’

‘Yes. You know, there are over three hundred different species of Japanese cherry … different varieties and hybrids. The police have been able to identify this one as Prunus yedoensis, the Yoshino cherry. Apparently, they’re quite rare in the streets of London. They have pink flowers which fade to white around now.’

‘And?’ I was feeling the same twisted feeling in my stomach and chilled spine that Ewan had described.

‘There’s a line of them growing in Palgrove Gardens. There’s one right outside Harriet’s house.’

The taxi rattled through a set of traffic lights and continued past the station. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry any more.

15 Clerkenwell at Night

Dinner was waiting when I got back to my flat. Jill had got in ahead of me and defrosted something that I’d cooked while I was writing my last book and which had been waiting in the freezer ever since. We opened a bottle of pink wine and sat down together and for the first time during that long day, I felt a sense of normality. This was my life. A marriage that had lasted thirty years. Two sons doing well in their careers. An elderly dog asleep in his basket. I looked at one end of the room, where the piano I had inherited from my mother stood, its polished surface gleaming in the light. I played it as a break from writing, moving from one keyboard to another. Behind me, a library of about five hundred books, half of them left to me by my father, stood on the shelves I’d had built for them. I’d added to them over the years: all the Bond novels, the 1946 Nonesuch edition of Dickens, a signed copy of I, Claudius that I’d found in Hay-on-Wye. Each book was a friend.

‘What sort of day have you had?’ Jill asked.

My sense of comfort and security disintegrated instantly.

‘Not great,’ I said. ‘This morning I woke up in a police cell. Did I mention I’d been arrested on suspicion of murdering a critic who didn’t like my play? I was locked up overnight at a custody centre in Islington and interrogated. I’m afraid it’s not looking too good. They’ve got enough evidence to put me away for twenty years, including – news just in – a petal from a Japanese cherry tree growing outside the house where the murder took place …’

Actually, I didn’t say any of this, much as I wanted to. I’d just had the worst two days of my life and I was terrified that the next two were going to be worse still. What would happen if Hawthorne failed to find the killer before the DNA evidence came in? How was I going to tell my sons that I was about to be arrested for murder? Of course I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Jill had enough on her plate running a company, currently raising the finance for an eight-part series based on my Alex Rider books. There was nothing she could do to help me. This was something I had to deal with on my own.

‘I saw Hawthorne,’ I said.

‘Oh – really? I thought you weren’t going to do another book with him.’

‘Well … he’s investigating something that might be worth thinking about.’

She was surprised. ‘What about Moonflower Murders?’

That was a mystery novel – fiction rather than true crime – I had been working on for six months. I’d worked out most of the structure, but so far I hadn’t written a word. Would they let me have a laptop in jail? I doubted it.

‘I might write some of that tonight,’ I said, vaguely.

That reminded her. ‘Where were you last night?’ she asked.