The Twist of a Knife (Hawthorne and Horowitz Investigate #4)
Anthony Horowitz
For Sophia and Iona, joining the family
1
Separate Ways
‘I’m sorry, Hawthorne. But the answer’s no. Our deal is over.’
I hated arguing with Hawthorne. It wasn’t just that I invariably lost. He managed to make me feel bad about even trying to win. Those murky brown eyes of his could be quite ferocious when he was on the attack, but the moment I challenged him they would suddenly become hurt and defensive and I would find myself backtracking and apologising even though I was quite sure I was right. I’ve said this before, but there was something childlike about his moods. I never really knew where I was with him, which made it almost impossible to write about him and that, as it happened, was exactly what we were discussing now.
I had followed Hawthorne on three investigations and these had led to three books. The first had been published. The second was being read by my agent (although she’d had it for two and a half weeks and I hadn’t heard a word). I would start writing the third at the end of the year and I was confident it wasn’t going to be difficult because of course I’d already lived through it and knew what happened in the end. I had agreed to a three-book contract and as far as I was concerned, three was enough.
I hadn’t seen Hawthorne for a while. From the amount of crime fiction you’ll find in bookshops and on TV, you’d think someone is being murdered every hour of the day, but fortunately real life isn’t like that and several months had passed since we had got back from the island of Alderney, leaving just three bodies behind. I had no idea what he’d been up to in that time and, to be honest, he hadn’t been very much in my thoughts.
And then, quite suddenly, there he was, on the telephone, inviting me round to his London flat – and that in itself was remarkable because usually if I wanted to get in, I had to ring someone else’s doorbell and pretend to be from Ocado. River Court was a low-rise block of flats built in the seventies close to Blackfriars Bridge, and Hawthorne had a space on the top floor. Space was the operative word. There was almost no furniture, no pictures on the walls, no possessions of any sort apart from the Airfix models he liked to assemble and the computer equipment he used to hack into the police database, helped by the teenager who lived one floor below.
This was something that had shocked me when I had first stumbled into Kevin Chakraborty’s bedroom and discovered him cheerfully displaying a private photograph of me and my son as his screensaver. Kevin admitted he had stolen it from my phone and then went on to explain that he had also helped Hawthorne break into the automatic number-plate recognition system used by the police in Hampshire. I hadn’t remonstrated with him, partly because he had provided us with useful information, but also because, at the end of the day, how do you pick a fight with a teenager who’s in a wheelchair? Nor had I ever mentioned it to Hawthorne. After all, this was a man who had been thrown out of the police force for pushing a known paedophile down a flight of stairs. He might have a moral compass, but he was the one who would decide which way it pointed.
He didn’t own the flat, by the way. He didn’t even rent it. He had told me that he was a caretaker, employed by a London estate agent who was ‘a sort of half-brother’. That was the thing about Hawthorne. He couldn’t have a relative who was something simple like a sister-in-law or a first cousin or whatever. He was separated from his wife, but he was still close to her. Everything about him was complicated and it didn’t matter what questions I asked because the answers led me exactly nowhere. It was all very frustrating.
The two of us were sitting in his kitchen, surrounded by gleaming chrome and pristine work surfaces. I had walked down from my own flat in Clerkenwell: we only lived about fifteen minutes apart, which made the emotional distance between us all the more striking. Hawthorne was wearing his usual combination of a suit with a white shirt, although, just for once, he had put on a grey round-neck jersey instead of a jacket. The casual look. He had offered me a cup of tea and he had been thoughtful enough to provide biscuits: four of them, to be precise; two-finger KitKats criss-crossing each other on a plate as if set up for a game of noughts and crosses. He was drinking black coffee with his ever-present packet of cigarettes close by.
He wanted me to write a fourth book. That was what the meeting was about, but I had already decided against it. Why? Well, first of all – and ignoring the visits I had made to the casualty wards of two London hospitals – Hawthorne had never been very kind to me. He had made it clear from the start that this was going to be a business relationship. He wanted someone to write about him because he needed the money and, to make matters worse, he had let me know that I wasn’t even his first choice. For my part, I’d made my decision before I’d come here. Enough was enough. I was fed up of being treated like an appendage. There were lots of stories I wanted to write where I would be in charge and this was something he would never understand. Authors don’t write their books for other people. We write for ourselves.
‘You can’t stop now,’ Hawthorne said. He thought for a moment. ‘The Word is Murder was really good.’
‘You read it?’ I asked.
‘Some of it. But the reviews were great! You should be pleased with yourself. The Daily Mail said it was splendidly entertaining.’