‘You have absolutely no right to bring Stephen into this.’ Longhurst leaned forward in his chair, speaking for the first time. ‘It’s bad enough dragging me into your petty accusations, Mr Hawthorne. But Stephen was the victim in all this and you should leave him out of it. He’s completely irrelevant.’

‘I would have said Philip Alden was the victim,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘He was the one who ended up dead with his skull caved in. And as for relevance, let’s not forget that Harriet Throsby wrote a very nasty book about your parents and what happened in Moxham Heath. You told us that you blame her for the break-up of their marriage and the impact that had on your life. You also blamed Frank Heywood, the drama critic of the Bristol Argus. He knew Harriet and brought her into your lives. He fed her the information she needed. And that brings us to our third death, because he was killed too, apparently by food poisoning in an Indian restaurant. That was a very long time ago and we’ll never be sure, but maybe it wasn’t quite the accident it seemed.’

‘I’ve never heard of Frank Heywood,’ Grunshaw complained.

‘That’s because you haven’t done your job,’ Hawthorne returned. ‘You might have asked yourself why Harriet had her book out on the morning of her death. Bad Boys: Life and Death in an English Village. Maybe she was trying to tell somebody something.

‘You see what I’m getting at? All these complications! Quite frankly, it does my head in.’

Hawthorne fell silent.

When, after a lengthy pause, he still hadn’t continued, it was Derek Mills who called out from the stalls. ‘So if it wasn’t Tony, do you know who did kill Harriet?’

‘Oh yes.’ Hawthorne smiled. ‘That bit is easy.’

25

Final Act

‘You know what I never understood?’ Hawthorne asked. ‘As I’ve said, every single person on this stage had a good reason to kill Harriet Throsby. But why frame Tony? I mean, that’s just stupid. Not only is he completely harmless, but it’s obvious he wouldn’t commit a murder. At least, it’s obvious to everyone apart from DI Grunshaw and DC Mills. If anyone was going to be framed, it should have been Jordan Williams. He was the one most upset by the review and he announced it in front of everyone. “I’ll kill her, I swear to you … Someone should put a knife in her!”

‘And here’s another thing. Why use Tony’s knife? If Harriet Throsby had been stabbed with a kitchen knife, there could have been a million and one suspects. Anyone in London could have killed her. But by using one of the Macbeth daggers, the killer narrowed the number of suspects down to the people who are here today.’ Hawthorne swept his hand across the whole group of us. ‘Only one of you sitting in this theatre could have got your hands on the Macbeth dagger.’