Then she turned her head towards Hawthorne and I saw the terrible scars on the side of her face, a red trelliswork that climbed from her neck to her forehead, darkening around one eye. It wasn’t a cold evening, but she was wearing gloves. I wondered what injuries they covered. I knew at once who she was and I was shocked.
‘This is Sonja,’ Ewan said.
Sonja Childs. Saint Joan.
‘You’re together …’ I muttered.
‘Yes.’
He had been responsible for her injuries and, subsequently, he had left his wife for her. I didn’t know what to say.
Hawthorne stepped in for me. ‘We won’t take up any more of your time,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘You’ve been very helpful. Thank you.’
As far as I was concerned, we couldn’t get out quickly enough.
There were all sorts of questions buzzing in my head as we sat in the taxi on the way back to the City – Farringdon for me, Blackfriars for Hawthorne. Had Ewan Lloyd begun an affair while he was still married? Had he moved in with Sonja because he was in love with her or because he felt responsible for what had happened? I very much doubted that I would ever learn the answers. That was the awful thing about the world in which I found myself. Who had murdered Harriet Throsby? That was what we needed to know. It was all that mattered. It suddenly occurred to me that I’d hate to be a detective, seeing life between such narrow lines.
Neither of us spoke. Hawthorne was deep in thought. I was exhausted after a series of interviews that I was quite certain had taken us nowhere. Of course, I was quite wrong. Between them, the various suspects must have provided us with plenty of clues. The trouble was, I hadn’t seen any of them. I was hungry. I was wondering if there would be any food in the house or whether I would have to pop into the Nando’s chicken restaurant that had just opened round the corner from my flat. That was the full extent of my thoughts.
It was only as we headed south down York Way, coming in behind King’s Cross, that I remembered the text message that Hawthorne had received. I asked him about it.
‘It wasn’t good news,’ he said, trying to dismiss the subject.
‘What was it?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘That’s why I’m asking.’
He took the phone out again. ‘It looks like there’s been a breakthrough. Cara Grunshaw may be on to something.’
‘She knows who did it?’
‘Well, there’s new evidence.’
I was astonished. ‘For heaven’s sake, Hawthorne. What is it? Why didn’t you tell me?’
He stared at the screen. ‘There was a CCTV picture of you taken close to the Maida Hill Tunnel, just a few minutes away from Harriet Throsby’s house. You were wearing a grey puffer jacket, but they can’t be sure it was you because the hood was up. That said, they took a similar jacket from your flat.’
‘What about it?’ I was becoming uneasy.
‘They found some blossom from a Japanese cherry tree … a couple of petals. They were lodged inside the hood.’
‘Of my jacket …’
‘Yes. You know, there are over three hundred different species of Japanese cherry … different varieties and hybrids. The police have been able to identify this one as Prunus yedoensis, the Yoshino cherry. Apparently, they’re quite rare in the streets of London. They have pink flowers which fade to white around now.’
‘And?’ I was feeling the same twisted feeling in my stomach and chilled spine that Ewan had described.
‘There’s a line of them growing in Palgrove Gardens. There’s one right outside Harriet’s house.’
The taxi rattled through a set of traffic lights and continued past the station. Suddenly I wasn’t hungry any more.
15
Clerkenwell at Night
Dinner was waiting when I got back to my flat. Jill had got in ahead of me and defrosted something that I’d cooked while I was writing my last book and which had been waiting in the freezer ever since. We opened a bottle of pink wine and sat down together and for the first time during that long day, I felt a sense of normality. This was my life. A marriage that had lasted thirty years. Two sons doing well in their careers. An elderly dog asleep in his basket. I looked at one end of the room, where the piano I had inherited from my mother stood, its polished surface gleaming in the light. I played it as a break from writing, moving from one keyboard to another. Behind me, a library of about five hundred books, half of them left to me by my father, stood on the shelves I’d had built for them. I’d added to them over the years: all the Bond novels, the 1946 Nonesuch edition of Dickens, a signed copy of I, Claudius that I’d found in Hay-on-Wye. Each book was a friend.