I didn’t see Hawthorne for a while. After everything that had happened, I needed a break – and I also owed Jill an apology for all the upset I’d caused her. We booked a small hotel in the South of France, in a fortified village called Saint-Paul-deVence, and spent ten days in the sunshine, walking, swimming, visiting art galleries and drinking pink wine on the edge of a dusty square where the locals gathered to play boules.
Tirian had been arrested – with the inevitable result that Mindgame had closed at once. By then, I just wanted to put the whole thing behind me. I felt very sad. The failure of my play was part of it, but, strangely, it was thinking about Tirian that upset me more. I don’t usually have sympathy with murderers, but he’d never had a chance, chewed up by Trevor Longhurst’s lawyers and spat into a system that wasn’t really designed to help him. I’ve visited many juvenile prisons – or ‘secure centres’， as they are now called – and I’ve always had my doubts about putting young people behind bars, particularly when both the costs and the reoffending rates are so high. It goes without saying that there are children who are a danger to both the public and themselves, and I’ve encountered them too. They were the inspiration for my play A Handbag. But the majority of them are mentally unwell rather than criminal and they need help, not punishment. Whatever the newspapers may say, and despite the title of Harriet’s book, every one of the young offenders I’ve met has been more sad than bad. It seems crazy to me that the prison system educates them until they’re eighteen, but then feeds them into adult jail where any good will be undone. Like Tirian, most of them will come out utterly unprepared for normal life.
I also couldn’t help wondering what it must have been like for him negotiating his new career. He had been more than an actor. Everything about him – his accent, the motorbike, the private-school veneer – had been an act. Poor Wayne Howard. He had spent his adult life trapped in a different sort of prison and only by killing Harriet Throsby had he eventually released himself.
Anyway, I finally got back to London relaxed and refreshed, and although I took care not to walk past the Vaudeville – now ‘dark’， as they say in theatreland – my own life felt as if it had returned to normal. I was still working on my new novel, Moonflower Murders, and I immersed myself in the opening chapters, trying to remember all the clues I had already worked into the structure. It wasn’t easy. How had Jordan Williams met Maureen Bates? What had Lamprey said about Stephen Longhurst and how did the statue fit into the story? No – that was real life. The fictional village of Tawleigh-on-the-Water, the setting of my new novel, refused to let me back in as my head was still too full of the events of two weeks before.
It was while I was sitting at my desk, struggling, that my phone pinged and I found myself reading a text from Hilda Starke, asking me to look in and see her that afternoon. This was a surprise. I didn’t see my agent that often and as far as I knew, there was nothing we couldn’t have discussed over the phone. But she was based just round the corner from the Charing Cross Road and it would be pleasant enough to browse in the two or three second-hand bookshops that remained. I walked over, hoping the fresh air would clear my head.
Hilda’s office was in Greek Street, above an Italian café that had been there for ever. I went through the side door and up a narrow flight of steps that could just as easily have found itself in a haunted house. This was a successful agency with several big-name writers, but it always felt cramped and old-fashioned. My books were not on display in the reception area. A young receptionist behind an antique desk greeted me with a smile.
‘I’m here to see Hilda Starke,’ I told him.
‘And you are?’
She’d only been my agent for four years. I told him my name and he rang through. ‘Yes. She’s expecting you. You know where to find her?’
‘Yes. I think I can find the way.’
As I approached the door at the back of the building, there was a sound that I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard before. Hilda was laughing. I think, occasionally, I’d seen her smile when she was reading the bestseller lists, but she usually focused on whatever business was at hand and left any sense of merriment outside the door. I knocked and went in.
Hilda was not alone. Hawthorne was sitting in an armchair, his legs crossed, holding a cup of coffee. Both of them were wearing suits and I suddenly felt very scruffy in T-shirt, jeans and trainers. It took me a moment to remember that Hawthorne was now represented by Hilda. It seemed like an age had passed since he’d told me that he had come to an agreement with her. What were the two of them doing here together? And why did they need me?