‘I thought about suing her. The theatre fully supported me. But at the time, I was torn to pieces. I had a young, beautiful actress in intensive care with third-degree burns. I’d destroyed her career. How could I have any right to worry about my reputation when I knew that, at the end of the day, it had happened because of me? To this day I don’t know what went wrong. Something short-circuited? A transformer overheated? Somehow a fake fire became a real fire and it was horrible, the worst day of my life – and Harriet Throsby made it worse still. I’ll never forgive her for that.
‘But I didn’t kill her.’ He had seen Hawthorne examining him and returned the stare. ‘I was in this house all morning. I took phone calls. I can give you the names of people who spoke to me.’
‘Did anyone see you?’
‘No. My wife was at the surgery. She’s a sports therapist. There was just me.’
‘So if it wasn’t you, who was it?’
‘I’ve told you. I don’t think it was anyone who was in the green room that night. Not Jordan. Not Sky or Tirian – they had no reason to kill her. She hadn’t said anything bad about either of them.’
‘You haven’t talked very much about Tirian. What do you make of him?’
Ewan took off his glasses and turned them over in his hands, using them almost like worry beads. ‘I can only answer that as a director,’ he said. ‘I don’t really know him – and actually, that’s the worst I can say of him. He’s a loner. It was very hard to make him feel part of the company, but then he only joined the cast at the last minute.’ He sighed. ‘He’s never had any professional training and that doesn’t help. He doesn’t know how to project. He gets bored too easily. It isn’t easy giving him notes. From my experience, I don’t think he’s suited to theatre. He’s one of those actors who need to be famous because then they can get away with murder.’ He stopped himself. ‘That wasn’t appropriate, but you know what I mean. I have a feeling the camera will love Tirian. He’s got real star quality. But that doesn’t necessarily work on the stage.’
‘Sky?’
‘A trouper. We had an extremely difficult time at Middleham Castle, but she never once complained and I was thrilled she joined the cast of Mindgame.’
‘What about Ahmet? And his colleague?’
‘Ahmet’s harmless.’ Ewan smiled for the first time since we came in. ‘As for Maureen, you know she saw Cats over a hundred times?’
‘Is that relevant?’
‘You tell me. I think it’s rather delightful. And she dotes on Ahmet. She’d do anything for him.’
Hawthorne was about to ask something, but just then his mobile phone buzzed. He took it out of his pocket and glanced at the long message on the screen. It was something he had never done before – allow the outside world to interrupt his train of thought. He slipped it away. ‘Thank you, Ewan. You’ve been very helpful.’
We both got to our feet.
Ewan did the same. ‘You know, I was quite certain that something bad was going to happen on the first night of Mindgame,’ he said, ruminatively.
‘Oh, yes? And why was that?’
‘I have premonitions. It’s been the same all my life. I had a motorbike crash when I was at drama school and I knew it was going to happen even before I got on. The opening of Saint Joan, I was sick as a dog. It wasn’t nerves. I had a horrible, twisted feeling in my stomach. And it was the same at the theatre, when I left the green room. I wasn’t feeling great. I’d drunk too much. We all had. But I also had this chill in the back of my neck, like there was something following me.’
‘Maybe it was the reviews,’ Hawthorne suggested.
‘I don’t care about the reviews. It was worse than that. When the police told me that Harriet had been stabbed, I wasn’t surprised at all—’
He stopped. Unexpectedly, the front door had opened.
‘You’re early!’ Ewan was looking past us at a woman who had come in. For a moment, she was silhouetted against the street lamps and I couldn’t see her properly.
‘My last client cancelled,’ the woman said. She sounded puzzled. Obviously, Ewan hadn’t told her he was expecting visitors.
‘This is Detective Inspector Hawthorne. He’s asking questions about Harriet Throsby. And this is Anthony. He wrote Mindgame.’
The woman stepped into the room and I saw her clearly. My first impression was that she was very beautiful, with black hair sweeping down past her shoulders. Slim, wearing a thin, grey mac belted at the waist. Brown eyes. She could have been Italian or Eastern European. She had spoken with a slight accent.