The Twist of a Knife

I’d known she’d ask me this and I’d already rehearsed my answer. ‘I went to see Ewan Lloyd. He has a place in Finsbury Park. We had rather too many drinks together and he invited me to sleep over.’

I hate lying to Jill. We’ve been together so long and she’s so much cleverer than me that it makes no sense to keep anything from her, and anyway, she always finds out. But this time I felt I had no choice. My one hope was that someone would say something or some clue would fall out of the sky and Hawthorne would work it all out. That was what I told myself. She would never need to know.

‘Did you see that a theatre critic got killed?’ Jill asked.

‘No!’ I was amazed. ‘Which one?’

‘I’m surprised Ewan didn’t tell you about it. I heard it on the news.’

It was a wretched evening. We watched a TV show together: season 7 of Game of Thrones. I could never work out what was happening at the best of times, but given everything that had happened, I wasn’t even able to enjoy the gratuitous sex and dismemberments. After an hour, I went up to my office and tried to work, but my thoughts were as blank as the computer screen in front of me. I was tired and wanted to go to bed, but knew I wouldn’t sleep, so I abandoned my desk and took the dog – a chocolate Labrador – out for a walk. It might at least be a chance to clear my head.

It was a little after ten thirty and a particularly dark night in Clerkenwell. At least it was still dry, but the streets were deserted and the moon was hiding behind an impenetrable bank of clouds. One of the joys of living in this part of town was its sense of remoteness, the way it retreated into the nineteenth century as soon as the offices emptied and the pubs and restaurants closed. My flat was on Cowcross Street, literally where the cows once crossed on their way to the meat market. Nando’s, Starbucks and Subway had all muscled their way in – our one bookshop had been forced out fifteen years ago – but the area still clung on to its sense of history, with St Paul’s Cathedral watching over in the distance.

There were three little parks where I could take the dog. The one closest to my flat – St John’s Gardens – had originally been a cemetery but the dead bodies had all been removed (to Woking, which must have surprised them) and what remained was an irregular space penned in by iron railings with a patch of scrubby grass, flower beds, paths and benches. The local council had taken to locking it at night to keep the drug dealers out, but occasionally they forgot – and fortunately that was the case tonight. I slipped inside and let the dog off the lead, then stood there watching him sniff around. The ground was wet underfoot, but I could feel a hint of spring warmth in the air, carrying with it the distinct scent of marijuana. There were empty offices on three sides of me, the back of a terrace of houses on the fourth. The dog ignored me. I felt very alone.

I don’t know what spooked me first. It was the sound of footsteps, I think, coming up the narrow alley that led from Turnmill Street. There was nothing unusual about that. Other dog walkers used the park at night: I didn’t know their names, although I knew their dogs’. However, these footsteps sounded too heavy, too slow and deliberate. Work on Crossrail was continuing day and night at Farringdon Station, which was out of sight around the corner, and they must have left a single floodlight on. A shadow stretched up the road towards me. It led to a single figure that suddenly stopped, silhouetted against the light, very much like Max von Sydow in the poster of the 1973 film The Exorcist. It was a man, standing there, silent and unmoving. And there could be no mistaking it. He was looking at me in a way that made me feel vulnerable, exposed.

‘Lucky!’ I called out. This wasn’t an observation. It was the name of my dog.

The dog refused to come.

Despite everything that had happened, it had never once occurred to me that I might be in danger, that the smiling face of somebody I might have met even today could have been concealing the mind of a psychopathic killer and that they might have further designs on me. After all, one of them had walked round to a house in Little Venice and stabbed Harriet Throsby to death in her own hallway. That same person had tried to frame me. Suppose they now felt threatened? Suppose Hawthorne had said something during one of the interviews that had told them the game was up? They might not have any reason to kill me – but mad people don’t need a reason. If they’d killed Harriet because of something she wrote, might they not do the same to me? In my case it would be Mindgame. She hated it. I created it. Maybe we both needed to be punished.