‘So what night is it on?’

‘Tuesday.’

‘Sorry, mate.’ The answer came straight back without a moment’s pause. ‘I’m busy that night.’

Well, if he was going to be like that, I wasn’t going to persuade him otherwise. ‘That’s too bad,’ I said, and I left.

I was feeling a little dejected as I walked along the River Thames towards the bridge, heading back to my flat in Clerkenwell. I knew I’d made the right decision about the books, but still I had a sense of a task that I hadn’t completed, of an opportunity I’d allowed to slip away. I really had wanted to know more about Hawthorne. I’d even been thinking of making the journey to Reeth. Now it was almost certain that I’d never see him again.

Here’s the annoying thing …

Despite everything I’ve just written, it’s obvious that there’s going to be another murder because if there hadn’t been, why would I have written anything at all? The very fact that you’re holding this book, complete with compulsory bloodstain on the cover, rather spoils the surprise. It proves how handicapped writers are when they’re dealing with the truth, with what actually happened.

There was one thing that I didn’t know, however. Although the first three books had caused me enough upsets, this one was going to be much, much worse.

2

Mindgame

I love theatre. When I look back at my life, I can remember – vividly – evenings when I have felt myself to be in a state of complete happiness; when performance, music, costume, direction and, of course, writing have combined to make an experience that I know will stay with me for ever. The National Theatre’s 1982 production of Guys and Dolls. Nicholas Nickleby at the RSC. Michael Frayn’s brilliantly constructed comedy, Noises Off. Ian Richardson and Richard Pasco swapping parts every night in John Barton’s Richard II. I went to that when I was eighteen years old and I can still see them holding the ‘hollow crown’ between them, gazing into the mirror that it has become. Theatre, at its best, is a candle that never goes out and all of these productions, along with many more, still burn in my memory.

In my early twenties I worked as an usher at the National and saw Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce perhaps a dozen times each and I was never bored. Earlier in the evening, I would sit down in the backstage canteen wearing my grey nylon shirt and slightly camp mauve cravat and I might find myself a few places away from the likes of John Gielgud or Ralph Richardson, both of them imperious even in their tracksuits and trainers. Of course, I never spoke to them. They were gods to me. Donald Sutherland once tipped me twenty pence when I was working in the NT cloakroom. I still have it somewhere.