‘What can you tell me about Frank Heywood’s death?’
Outside, it was getting dark. The stained-glass windows were slowly losing their definition, the Virgin Mary and her attendant angels fading into the shadows. Adrian Wells reached out and turned on an Anglepoise lamp.
‘It’s interesting you should ask me about that. I was talking about it only this week. I even suggested I might tip a wink to the police.’
‘You mean … Cara Grunshaw?’ I asked.
‘Who? I don’t know that name. It was just something that occurred to me …’
‘What?’ I hoped I didn’t sound too alarmed.
‘I’m sure you know, Frank Heywood died of food poisoning. Well, strictly speaking, the cause of death was heart failure. He smoked like a chimney and hadn’t done any exercise since the year dot, so he wasn’t in great shape. No surprises there. More to the point, he was eating at an Indian restaurant that was notoriously bad. The Jai Mahal near the St Nicholas Market. It was quite popular, particularly among Bristol students, but the health and safety mob had been in a couple of times and they weren’t impressed at all. Our food critic called it the Die Mahal.
‘Frank’s fatal heart attack was brought on by a dodgy lamb rogan josh. Harriet was with him that night and she was taken ill too, although in her case it was just an overnight stay at St Michael’s Hospital. She looked awful when I visited her a couple of days later, but the restaurant had been her choice and she felt terrible in every sense. She blamed herself for his death.’
‘It was food poisoning,’ Hawthorne said. ‘And it was a long time ago. So why do you think the police might be interested now?’
‘Because Harriet’s been killed too!’ He made the answer sound obvious. ‘It made me think. You see, I heard a whisper that she may have been murdered because of something she wrote – a review. I know it sounds insane, but I’d had almost exactly the same conversation with Frank the week before he died. Some of the stuff he wrote – well, he could be a bit harsh. That was something Harriet learned from him, the pleasure that comes with the twist of a knife. So, the two of us were having a pint and he mentioned a play he’d seen – it was only a short piece – but he’d really taken against it. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if the writer didn’t come after me with a pickaxe.’ He was only joking. But a week later … boom!
‘Perhaps I’m letting my imagination run away with me. That’s what comes of having too much time on your hands – but it does make you think. We made jokes about the Jai Mahal, but nobody had ever died there before. And there was no police investigation at the time because two people got sick – not just Frank – and anyway, it was his heart that did for him. You’re a detective. What do you think? A disgruntled writer follows them into the restaurant and slips something into the curry. The revenge of the rotten review.’
‘I don’t suppose you remember the play?’ Hawthorne asked.
‘As a matter of fact, I do. It was only an hour long. It was set in a secure unit for juvenile offenders. It was a bunch of them putting on a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest. Frank said it was the most unlikely scenario he’d ever come across, and here’s the rub – he suggested that the writer might be disturbed. The play was called A Handbag.’
‘And do you know who wrote it?’
I cut in before he could answer.
‘I did.’
22
Safe House
I didn’t enjoy the journey back to London. Of course, Hawthorne hadn’t believed Adrian Wells’s ridiculous assertion that all along I had been a serial killer of critics who didn’t like my work. Or so I told myself. He said nothing. He had taken out his iPad and was methodically thumbing his way through Harriet Throsby’s book.
Incidentally, I was very proud of A Handbag, a short play I had originally written for the National Theatre’s ‘New Connections’ programme and which had subsequently been performed for one week only as part of a youth theatre festival in Bath. As Wells had said, it was about a group of kids locked up in a secure facility. The one hope in their life is their performance of Wilde’s masterpiece, which, they believe, will make them seem normal. Their tragedy is that they can’t understand a word of it. It was a play about failure and the refusal to give in.
I had never read Frank Heywood’s review.
We parted company at Paddington Station, Hawthorne promising that he would call me the next day, and I took the tube back to Farringdon. It was about nine o’clock when I climbed up to street level, and already dark. I was exhausted. This being a Friday, and the rain having finally subsided, the pavements were still crowded with office workers drinking outside the Castle and the Three Compasses. I was about to continue into Cowcross Street when my phone pinged. I took it out and looked at the screen. There was a message from Kevin Chakraborty.