‘Harriet’s daughter!’ I muttered.
‘Yes.’
Hawthorne sat down again. ‘Why would she do that? Do the two of you know each other?’
Sky’s shoulders slumped. ‘We’ve met a couple of times.’
‘Where?’
‘The first time was at the Barbican Theatre. It was a production of The Crucible. As usual, Harriet barged her way into the first-night party. Why did she do that? She must have known that nobody wanted her there. Olivia was dragged along too. I could see she was embarrassed. We got talking and we sort of hit it off. We had a lot in common.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, a mother we couldn’t stand, for a start. A stepmother in my case. If you want to make friends with someone, that’s a good place to begin. We kept in touch on Facebook. We met up for a drink a couple of times. It was no big deal. I didn’t even ask her to send me that review. She just thought I’d like to see it.’
‘She hacked into her mum’s computer?’ Hawthorne sounded shocked, as if he had somehow forgotten that only that morning he’d raided the Police National Computer and shut down their forensic laboratory in Lambeth.
‘She didn’t hack into anything,’ Sky protested. ‘She knows the password. She just wanted to let me know that her mum hadn’t slagged me off. And she didn’t, incidentally. She was quite nice about me. The mistake I made was telling everyone that I had it. That was stupid of me. When the police told me what had happened, I couldn’t believe it at first … that Harriet was dead and that someone had killed her. But it never even occurred to me that it might be one of us, despite what Jordan had said. It just didn’t seem possible.’
Her phone pinged a second time – but whoever was trying to reach Sky was concealed from us.
‘The police came to your house?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Where is that?’
‘Victoria Park.’
‘You were there all Wednesday morning? Around ten o’clock, for example?’
She looked down. ‘That’s when it happened,’ she said quietly. When she met Hawthorne’s eyes again, she was defiant. ‘I was at home all day. I was on my own. Why don’t you check the CCTV cameras? There are loads of them down my street, and all around the canal where Harriet lived, for that matter. I didn’t go anywhere.’
‘You live alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Renting?’
Sky hesitated. She was embarrassed, but there was no point lying. ‘It’s my own place,’ she admitted.
‘Acting doing well for you, then,’ Hawthorne remarked.
‘My dad helped me buy it.’
‘And who is your dad?’
She didn’t want to tell him but she had no choice. The police would have probably found out all about her. She was, after all, a suspect in a murder case … or had been until I’d been arrested. I wondered if Hawthorne already knew the answer to his question. It wouldn’t have surprised me.
Sky’s father was the lead singer of one of the UK’s biggest rock groups. Even I recognised the name when she told us. Immediately, everything about her made sense: all the luxury goods, owning a house in her twenties, her ambiguity about the play. She didn’t need to work. She had quite possibly drifted into acting because of her father’s connections in showbiz. It would have been that or some sort of PR or work in a posh Mayfair art gallery. I also remembered his divorce, which had been all over the papers. He had left his wife for a model not all that much older than his daughter.
‘He didn’t come to the first night,’ Hawthorne said. He knew that because it would have been obvious if he’d been at the theatre. Keith would have told us. There would have been paparazzi crowding around the entrance.
‘He didn’t even know it was happening. He’s on tour.’
She looked at us defiantly, but there were tears in her eyes. In a few words she had told us everything we needed to know about her relationship with her father.
‘This is your five-minute call, ladies and gentlemen. Five minutes to curtain.’
‘Can you go now? I really do need to get ready.’
There was nothing more to be said and we did as she asked. I felt a little sorry for Sky as we left the room. I’ve met a few young people with famous parents and it’s often the case that the problems outweigh the privileges.
We went out through the fire escape that led into Lumley Court. The door opened with a push-bar mechanism and didn’t set off any alarms. We hadn’t signed in when we arrived, so there was no need to go back past the stage-door manager’s office. As soon as we were outside, I turned on Hawthorne. ‘I’ve got to explain to you about that magazine—’ I began.