‘You believe she was killed because of what she wrote?’ Ahmet shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Hawthorne. That is impossible. Sometimes critics upset us. Sometimes they make us angry. But we are never violent!’
‘Jordan Williams was violent. He made threats against her.’
It was Maureen who answered. ‘He did no such thing!’
‘Tony was there. He heard him.’
‘Jordan had been drinking and he was emotional. But it was obvious to everyone in the room that he didn’t mean what he said. He was joking.’
‘A strange sense of humour.’ Hawthorne considered. ‘How well do you know him?’
It was an innocent enough question, but Maureen turned away, leaving it to Ahmet to step in. ‘This was the first time we had worked together. But we got to know each other during rehearsals. Of course he was angry. But I can assure you that he meant nothing by what he said. He was acting!’
‘You were angry too,’ Hawthorne pointed out. ‘You said Harriet Throsby was a liar and that what she wrote was shit.’
Maureen visibly winced when she heard that. She didn’t like bad language. Ahmet glanced at me sadly. ‘Did you tell him that?’ It was clear to me that he felt I had betrayed him. Jordan Williams had said the same. ‘I was upset, of course. It was the first review. But I had no ill feelings towards her personally. She is a woman. She is doing her job. And sometimes, you know, there is nothing you can do. My company has had a run of bad luck. I can blame the critics. I can blame the audiences. But in the end, what good will that do? I made the choices. I blame myself.’
‘You’re going out of business,’ Hawthorne said.
Ahmet didn’t even try to deny it. He nodded. ‘I was meeting with my accountant when you came in. Martin has told me there is no other option. It is not just Mindgame. We lost a great deal of money on Macbeth.’
‘We should have taken out weather insurance,’ Maureen muttered.
‘We discussed this at the time,’ Ahmet snapped back. ‘It was either weather insurance or costumes.’ He collected himself. ‘That was just one in a sea of misfortunes. There are other plays, also, which I have developed and which have never reached the stage and these have also cost money. I have overheads … the rent on this office, the photocopier. Martin has persuaded me that we have come to the end of the road.’
‘It’s a crying shame,’ Maureen exclaimed. She sounded more outraged than upset. Two circles of pink had appeared on her cheeks. ‘Nobody has worked harder than Ahmet. I’ve known him twenty years and he deserves better than this.’
‘Were you also at the Really Useful Company?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘No. We met at the New London Theatre. Ahmet organised a very special evening for me.’ Hawthorne looked at her enquiringly and she realised she was going to have to continue. ‘It was an anniversary.’
‘My software told me that Maureen had seen Cats one hundred times,’ Ahmet explained.
‘I loved that show. I can’t explain why.’ Maureen looked into the far distance. ‘It was the music, of course. “Memory”！ “The Rum Tum Tugger”。 That always used to make me laugh, every time. There wasn’t a song in that show I didn’t know off by heart.’ She stopped herself, aware that she might look foolish. ‘It filled a hole in my life after my husband died,’ she explained. ‘I went once. Then I thought I’d see it again. And after a while I found that I was only happy when I was in the theatre. It was like a barrier against the world.
‘I couldn’t afford the best seats, but that night I got a surprise. I found myself in the front row. Ahmet had arranged that for me. I had a free glass of champagne in the interval and afterwards I went backstage and met some of the cast. It was a wonderful evening and after that we sort of became friends.’
‘Maureen came to work for me when I set up on my own.’
‘What were you doing before that?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘I was a secretary at Hewlett-Packard in Reading.’
Right then I felt a sense of guilt and sadness that might have been unjustified but which nonetheless affected me. Maureen and Ahmet truly were an odd couple. I’d known that from the start, but I’d been so eager to see Mindgame on the stage that I had ignored my misgivings and let them go ahead. But it wasn’t the failure of the play that upset me. It was the sense that it was all my fault. I was the one who’d brought them down, and although I would go on to other things – there were other books in the pipeline – they’d come to the end of the road. Right then, I wanted to go back outside and never see either of them again. I hoped Hawthorne had found out everything he wanted and we could leave.