The Twist of a Knife

Longhurst thought back. ‘No. I don’t think I did. The pen was out of ink. But you can ask … I made no attempt not to be seen.’

‘Thank you, Mr Longhurst. You’ve been very open with us. I’m sorry we had to make you go through it all again.’

It was rare to hear Hawthorne apologise for anything and the moment we were back in the street, I had to ask: ‘Did you believe him?’

We were walking along Queen Square, a private garden laid out on one side. The sun was still shining and the trees were in blossom, not that the sight of them did much for me. Hawthorne was already deep in thought. ‘Believe what, exactly?’ he said.

Why did he have to be so difficult?

‘All along, we’ve assumed the dagger was taken after the party, at night,’ I explained. ‘But Martin Longhurst could have taken it early the following morning.’

‘I haven’t assumed anything,’ Hawthorne said.

I ignored this. ‘An hour and a half would have been enough time to go to Little Venice and back again. He could have killed Harriet Throsby and gone straight into work.’

‘Covered in blood?’

‘He could have worn a coat!’

‘But why would he have wanted to frame you?’ he asked.

‘Well, you heard what he said. His client’s going bankrupt. Maybe he blamed me for the play.’

Hawthorne stopped. ‘It’s just possible that Longhurst could have picked up the dagger when he went to the theatre the next morning,’ he said. ‘But there are three questions you’ve got to ask yourself. How did he know it was there, and if he happened to come across it, how would he know it was yours?’

‘And the third question?’

‘How did he get hold of a strand of your hair?’

It was true. ‘Longhurst wasn’t anywhere near me,’ I admitted. ‘He couldn’t have got a sample of my hair … not unless he followed me into a hairdresser, and I haven’t been to one for weeks!’

Hawthorne stopped. I could see the main road and Holborn station ahead of us.

‘Let’s just suppose for a minute that the two things – the murder and your involvement – aren’t connected,’ he said. ‘Let’s imagine that you’re completely irrelevant.’

‘Thanks!’

‘An old man died in the village of Moxham Heath. Two kids killed him. And Harriet turned it all into a book.’

‘You think someone didn’t like what she wrote?’

‘Nobody ever liked what she wrote. That was her intention. But emotions always run high when someone dies. And you’ve got to ask yourself – what was that book doing, sitting on Harriet’s desk?’

‘Bad Boys …’

‘Maybe she was trying to tell us something.’

‘We’re not going to Moxham Heath, are we?’

‘Tony, mate. Cara Grunshaw can’t be too far behind. By the end of today, she’s going to have everything she needs to nail you.’

One hour later, we were on the train.

17 Extract from Bad Boys by Harriet Throsby

They were, of course, very young boys. Nobody can say if they intended to kill Major Philip Alden, a twice-decorated veteran who served with the Royal Marines and who saw action in the Falklands, a family man and a teacher loved by all those he taught. When they balanced a marble bust of Cicero on the door of his study, I am sure they were giggling. Oh what a lark! The defence made much of the fact that an eleven-year-old would be unlikely to have the words ‘fractured skull’ in his vocabulary, although both the defendants would have seen episodes of Casualty and Peak Practice on TV.

When Philip Alden was laid to rest at the lovely Norman church of St Swithin’s on a sunny spring afternoon – two weeks after his death on 19 April – the vicar spoke of forgiveness and understanding. Well, I’m trying to understand. That has been the purpose of this book … to make sense of a senseless waste of life. But like the crowd who packed into the little cemetery, with mourners coming from as far as Arbroath and Port Stanley, I struggle to forgive. Standing next to Rosemary Alden, Philip’s widow, as she wiped away the tears only to have them replaced by more tears in a constant stream of sorrow, I reflected on the circumstances that had brought us here, to this ugly rectangular trench cut into the emerald sward.

Trevor and Annabel Longhurst had sent flowers. At least, their personal assistant had. Their wreath had to be bigger than anyone else’s and it dominated the entrance to the church: £200 worth of white orchids and lilies tied with a black ribbon and the name of the donors on a label, writ large so there could be no mistake. The Longhursts themselves did not make an appearance. Out of decency or shame? one had to ask. Perhaps both, came the answer, echoing like a funeral bell.