‘I understand.’
Just then the door opened and a second man looked in. I recognised him from the photographs. He was short, quite stocky and about ten years younger than Weston, holding a supermarket bag-for-life.
‘I’m just going out,’ he said. ‘Is there anything you want?’
‘I left the list in the kitchen.’
‘I’ve got it. I just wondered if there was anything you forgot.’
‘We need some more dishwasher tablets.’
‘They’re on the list.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything else.’
‘I’ll see you.’ The man disappeared again.
‘That’s Colin,’ Weston said.
It was a great pity that Colin had chosen this moment to introduce himself. I glanced at Hawthorne. Nothing in his manner had changed but I was aware of a certain frisson in the room that had not been there before and I’m sure that the interruption influenced the interview and the direction it now took.
‘The newspapers weren’t too happy with your verdict,’ Hawthorne said – and I saw a hint of malevolence dancing in his eyes.
Weston gave him a thin smile. ‘It was never my habit to look at the newspapers,’ he said. ‘What made them happy or unhappy had nothing to do with the facts.’
‘The facts were that she killed an eight-year-old child, crippled his brother and walked away with a slap on the wrist.’
The smile became even thinner. ‘It was the task of the prosecution to prove death by dangerous driving under Section 2a of the Road Traffic Act of 1988,’ Weston said. ‘This, they failed to do – and with good reason. Mrs Cowper did not ignore the rules of the road and did nothing that created a significant risk. There were no drugs or alcohol involved. Do I need to continue? She had no intention to kill anyone.’
‘She wasn’t wearing her glasses.’ Hawthorne glanced at me, warning me not to interrupt.
‘I agree, that was unfortunate – but you should be aware, Mr Hawthorne, that the incident took place in 2001. Since then, the law has been tightened on this particular point and I think that is entirely correct. But for what it’s worth, if I were trying the case today, even given the new guidelines, I think I might well come to the same conclusion.’
‘Why is that?’
‘I refer you to the transcripts. As the defence successfully demonstrated, the responsibility did not lie exclusively with the accused. The two children ran into the road. They had seen an ice-cream shop on the other side. The nanny briefly lost control of them. She was in no way to blame but even if Mrs Cowper had been wearing her spectacles, it is quite possible she would still have been unable to stop in time.’
‘Is that why you told the jury to let her off?’
Weston looked pained. He took a moment before answering. ‘I did no such thing and, quite frankly, I find your use of language a little offensive. As a matter of fact, it would have been quite within my jurisprudence to advise the jury not to convict and they in turn could have ignored me. I will agree that my summing-up did lean generally in Mrs Cowper’s favour but again you must consider the facts. We are talking about a very respectable person with no criminal record. She had committed no obvious offence given the law of the time. As tragic as it was for the family of the two children, a custodial sentence would have been completely inappropriate.’
Hawthorne leaned forward and once again I was reminded of the jungle animal, going in for the kill. ‘You knew her.’
Three simple words and yet they were followed by a silence that was almost physical, that slammed shut like a mortuary door. It was the moment everything changed, when Nigel Weston knew there was danger in the room. I was aware of the crackling of the fire and felt the heat of it against my face.
‘I’m sorry?’ Weston said.
‘I’m just interested that you knew her. I wonder if that had any bearing on the case.’
‘You’re mistaken. I didn’t know her.’
Hawthorne looked puzzled. ‘You were a close friend of Raymond Clunes,’ he said.
‘I don’t think—’
‘Raymond Clunes, the theatre producer. Not a name you’d forget, I’d have thought. Also, he made you a lot of money.’
Weston was keeping his composure with difficulty. ‘I do know Raymond Clunes, perfectly well. He is a social and a business connection.’
‘You invested in a show.’
‘I invested in two shows, as a matter of fact. La Cage aux Folles and The Importance of Being Earnest.’
‘Damian Cowper starred in the second one of those. Did you meet him and his mother at the first-night party?’
‘No.’
‘But you discussed the case with Clunes.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘He did.’
Weston had had enough. ‘How dare you sit here in my home and make these accusations,’ he said. He hadn’t raised his voice but he was furious. His hand had tightened around the end of his armchair. I could see the veins bulging out beneath the skin. ‘I had a very distant, tangential connection with Mrs Cowper. Anyone with any intelligence would see that every judge in this country might find themselves in the same position and, according to your logic, would be forced to recuse themselves. I’m sure you’ve heard of six degrees of separation! Anyone in the court could join the dots between themselves and the accused. As it happens, I did go to a party following the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest but if Damian Cowper or his mother were there I did not see them and I did not speak to them.’
‘And Mrs Cowper didn’t ask Raymond Clunes to approach you at the time of the trial?’
‘Why would she have done that?’
‘To persuade you to see things from her point of view. You might have listened to him because you were both … what’s the word I’m looking for?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Angels! You and Mrs Cowper were both investing in his plays.’
‘I’ve had enough of this.’ Weston got to his feet. ‘I agreed to see you because I thought I could help and I also knew you by reputation. Instead, you come here with all sorts of unpleasant insinuations and I can see absolutely no point in continuing with this discussion.’
But Hawthorne hadn’t quite finished. ‘You know that Raymond Clunes is going to jail?’
‘I’ve asked you to leave!’ Weston thundered.
So we did.
Back out in the street and on our way to the station, I turned on him. ‘What exactly did you hope to gain by that?’ I asked.
Hawthorne didn’t seem at all put out. He lit a cigarette. ‘Just testing the water.’
‘Do you really think there was some sort of gay conspiracy going on? That Raymond Clunes and Nigel Weston would have “got together”, as you’d put it, because they happened to have the same sexual orientation? Because if that’s what you think – I have to be honest with you – I think you’ve got a problem.’
‘Maybe I’ve got lots of problems,’ Hawthorne replied. He was walking more quickly, not looking at me. ‘But I didn’t mention anything about sex. I was talking about money. Why have we come all this way? Because we want to know about the accident, the connection between Diana Cowper and the Godwins. Justice Nigel Weston was part of that connection and that was all I was exploring.’
‘You think he had something to do with her murder?’
‘Everyone we meet had something to do with her murder. That’s how murder works. You can die in bed. You can die of cancer. You can die of old age. But when someone slashes you to pieces or strangles you, there’s a pattern, a network – and that’s what we’re trying to work out.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know! Maybe you’re not right for this, Tony. It’s a shame I couldn’t go with one of the other writers.’
‘What?’ I was horrified. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘You heard me.’
‘You spoke to other writers?’
‘Of course, mate. They turned me down.’
&nb
sp; Eighteen
Deal
I didn’t speak to Hawthorne on the train to Deal. We sat across from each other, on opposite sides of the aisle, and there was more distance between us than there had ever been. Hawthorne read his book, resolutely turning the dog-eared pages. I stared morosely out of the window, thinking about what he had said. Perhaps I was wrong to be offended and I did wonder which other writers he’d approached, but by the time we arrived I’d managed to put the whole thing out of my head. It didn’t matter how it had come to me. This was my book and it just made me all the more determined to make sure that I was the one in control.
I’d never visited Deal before but had always wanted to. I read all the Hornblower books when I was at school and this is where they began. It’s the setting of the third James Bond novel, Moonraker: Hugo Drax plans to destroy London with a newfangled V2 rocket fired from his headquarters, nearby. And it’s one of the settings in my very favourite novel, Bleak House. The hero, Richard Carstone, is garrisoned there.
In fact, I’ve always had a fondness for seaside towns, particularly out of season when the streets are empty and the sky is grey and drizzling. At the time when I was reading Hornblower, my parents would often go to the South of France but they would send me, my sister and my nanny to Instow in Devonshire and the whole language of the British seaside has stayed with me. I love the sand dunes, the slot machines, the piers, the seagulls, the peppermint rock with the name printed, impossibly, all the way through. I have a hankering for the cafés and the tea shops, old ladies pouring muddy tea out of pots, slabs of millionaire shortbread, shops that sell fishing nets, windbreaks and novelty hats. I suppose it’s the age I am. These days, everyone leaps on a plane when they want a cheap holiday. But that’s also part of the charm of all those little towns along the coast, the fact that they’ve been left behind.
Deal seemed to be surprisingly charmless as we came out of the station and walked down the main street with the seagulls screaming at us from the rooftops. It was May but the season had yet to kick off and the weather was utterly miserable. I wondered what it must be like to live here, trapped in the triangle formed by the massive Sainsbury’s and the inevitable Poundland and Iceland supermarkets. A drink at the Sir Norman Wisdom pub, dinner at the Loon Hin Chinese restaurant and then on to the Ocean Rooms night club and bar (‘Entrance next to the Co-op’).
We came to the sea, as cold and uninviting as only the English Channel can be. Deal has a pier but it is one of the most depressing in the world, an empty stretch of concrete, brutalist in style, lacking any entertainments whatsoever: no penny arcades, no trampolines, no carousels. I wondered why the Godwins had sent their children here. Surely there must have been somewhere more fun?
But gradually the little town won me over. It had that peculiar defiance of all coastal resorts, that sense of being quite literally outside the mainstream, on the edge. Many of the houses and villas fronting the sea were brightly painted and had overflowing window boxes. The pebble beach, sloping down to the water, stretched into the distance, with a wide promenade and dozens of benches. There were flower beds, lawns and parkland, old fishing boats leaning on their side, dogs running, seagulls hovering. We came to a miniature castle and I began to see that in the sunshine Deal might provide a host of adventures. I was being too cynical. I needed to look at it with a child’s eye.
We did not visit the accident site to begin with.
Hawthorne wanted to see where Diana Cowper had been living and so when we reached the sea, we turned right – towards the neighbouring village of Walmer. We still weren’t talking to each other but as we continued along the seafront we passed an old antiques shop and Hawthorne suddenly stopped and looked in the window. There wasn’t much there: a ship’s compass, a globe, a sewing machine, some mouldering books and pictures. But as if to break the silence he pointed and said, ‘That’s a Focke-Wulf Fw 190.’
He was looking at a German fighter plane with three black crosses and the figure 1 on the fuselage, suspended on a thread. There was a tiny pilot just visible in the cockpit. It was from one of those plastic kits – Revell, Matchbox or Airfix – that children used to assemble although to be fair it had been so well made that I doubted that a child had been involved.
‘It’s a single-seat, single-engine fighter, developed in the thirties,’ he went on. ‘The Luftwaffe used it throughout the war. It was their favourite aircraft.’
It was quite a different Hawthorne who was speaking and I understood that he had given me this scrap of information as a peace offering, to make up for what he had told me on the train. It wasn’t the history of the Focke-Wulf that interested me. It was the fact that Hawthorne had shown it to be one of his enthusiasms. He had actually revealed two things about himself in the space of one day. There was the reading group and there was this. It didn’t add up to a character I particularly understood but it was a start and I was grateful.
We walked for another fifteen minutes and at some stage Deal turned into Walmer and we arrived at Stonor House, which was where Diana Cowper had lived until the accident that had forced her to move. It was sandwiched between two roads, Liverpool Road at the back and The Beach at the front, a private drive connecting them, with ornate metal gates at each end. From the little that I knew about Diana Cowper, I would have said the house had suited her very well. Certainly, I could imagine her living here. It was pale blue, solid, well maintained, with two floors, several chimneys and a garage. A pair of stone lions stood guard in front of the door. It was surrounded by topiary that had been precisely clipped and semi-tropical plants, equally disciplined, in narrow beds. The whole place was walled off so that it was both prominent and private. Of course, some of these particulars could have been installed by the new owners but I got the feeling that it was more likely they had inherited it the way it was.
‘Are we going to ring the bell?’ I asked. We were standing on the Liverpool Road side. As far as I could see, there was nobody at home.
‘No. There’s no need.’ He took a key out of his pocket and I saw the name of the house on the tag dangling underneath it. For a moment, I was puzzled. Then I realised. He must have taken it from Diana Cowper’s kitchen, although I wasn’t sure when. I didn’t think the police would have allowed him to remove evidence, so they were probably unaware it even existed.
The key was solid and chunky. Not a Yale. I saw now that it couldn’t have fitted the front door. It was much more likely to open the gate. Hawthorne tried it a couple of times, then shook his head. ‘Not this one.’
We walked around to the other side of the house and tried the gate that opened onto The Beach but the key didn’t fit that one either. ‘That’s a pity,’ Hawthorne muttered.
‘Why did she hold on to the key?’ I asked.
‘That’s what I wanted to find out.’
He looked around him and I thought we were going to walk back to Deal – but then he noticed a second gate on the other side of the road. Stonor House had a quite separate, private garden right next to the beach. Smiling to himself, he crossed the road and tried the key a third time. This time, it turned.
We entered a small square area, with bushes on all four sides. It wasn’t exactly a garden; more a courtyard with miniature yew trees and rose beds surrounding a pretty marble fountain and two wooden benches that faced each other. The ground was paved with York stone. The effect was theatrical – like a scene from a children’s story. Even as we walked up to the fountain, which was dry and hadn’t been used for some time, I felt a sense of sadness and had a good idea what we were going to find.
And there it was, carved onto the stone shelf of the fountain: Lawrence Cowper. 3 April 1946 – 22 October 1999. ‘To sleep, perchance to dream.’
‘Her husband,’ I said.
‘Yes. He died of cancer and she built this place as a memorial to him. She couldn’t stay in the house but she always knew she’d want to come back. So she kept a key.’
‘She must have loved him very much,
’ I said.
He nodded. Just for once, we were equally uncomfortable, standing there. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.
The accident that had changed Diana Cowper’s life had taken place close to the Royal Hotel in the centre of Deal. The Royal was the handsome Georgian building where Mary O’Brien had been staying with Jeremy and Timothy Godwin. The three of them had only been minutes from tea and bed when the car ran them down.
I remembered what Mary had told us. The children had come off the beach, which was behind us, with the pebbles sloping down. The pier was nearby. The road was wider here than at any other point in Deal and subsequently the cars travelled faster, sweeping down from King Street which formed a junction over to the right. There was a shop selling Deal rock and an entertainment arcade on the corner. This was the way Diana Cowper had come. In front of me, there were more shops in a short parade: a pub, a hotel, a chemist – it advertised itself as Pier Pharmacy. Finally, next to it, stood the ice-cream shop with a front made up entirely of plate-glass windows and a bright, striped canopy.
It was all too easy to see how it had happened: the car coming round the corner, moving quickly to avoid the cross traffic. The two children, choosing exactly that moment to slip away from their nanny, running across the pavement and then into the road in their hurry to reach the ice-cream shop in front of them. Nigel Weston might have been right. Even with glasses, Diana Cowper would have been hard-pressed to stop in time. The accident had taken place at exactly this time of the year, almost to the day. The promenade would have been just as empty, the late afternoon light just beginning to dim.
‘Where do we start?’ I asked.
Hawthorne nodded. ‘The ice-cream shop.’
We could see it was open. We crossed the road and went in.
It was called Gail’s Ice-Cream and it was a cheerful place with plastic chairs and a Formica floor. The ice-cream it sold was home-made, stored in a dozen different tubs in a freezer that had seen better days. The cones were stacked up against the window and looked as if they might have been there a while. Gail’s also sold fizzy drinks, chocolate, crisps, and ready-mixed bags of sweets, another seaside staple. A menu on the wall advertised eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms and chips: The Big Deal Fry-Up. I’d wondered how long it would be before I saw the obvious pun based on the town’s name.