The Sentence is Death

He wasn’t being deliberately offensive. It was just that offensive was his default mode.

If you’ve ever read the French philosopher Alain Badiou, you’ll know that he defines jokes as a type of rupture that opens up truths.

This was a woman who didn’t just go to bed with a book. She went to bed with a library.

When people keep secrets, those secrets have a nasty way of festering. They can turn into poison. They can kill.

From my experience, law firms are always quiet places. Maybe it’s because they make words so expensive that they tend to use them sparingly among themselves.

It’s a simple fact of life that a clever private detective needs a much less clever police officer in much the same way as a photograph needs both light and darkness.

Adrian Lockwood was the sort of man who was hard to dislike although he was doing everything he could to help us on our way.

It’s funny but I never quite know what to say when people tell me that they like my books. I almost feel embarrassed. ‘That’s great,’ I muttered. ‘Thank you.

A novel is a container for 80,000 to 90,000 words and you might see it as a jelly mould. You pour them all in and hope they’ll set.

And I can absolutely see her beating someone to death because she was annoyed with them. Mind you, she’d probably torture them first by reading them one of her poems.

I've met police dogs with more intelligence than those two. You could tell them everything we've done, down to the last word, and they'd still end up running around in a circle, sniffing each other's arses.

relationship and twenty-five years later we are still together. I had written four shows for her: Foyle’s War, Injustice, Collision and Menace. She was the first person to read my books, even before Hilda Starke. It feels odd to be writing about her and the truth is she has made it clear that she’s uncomfortable being a character in my book. Unfortunately, truth is what it’s all about. She is the main character in my life. ‘You’re working with that detective again, aren’t you?’ she said as we sat there, eating. ‘Yes.’ I hadn’t wanted her to know but I never tell her lies. She can see right through me. ‘Is that a good idea?’ ‘Not really. But I have a three-book deal and a case came up.’ I felt guilty. I knew she was waiting for my script. ‘I think it’s over anyway,’ I went on. ‘Hawthorne knows who did it.’ He hadn’t said as much but I could tell. There was something quite animalistic about Hawthorne. The closer he got to the truth, the more you could see it in his eyes, in the way he sat, in the very contours of his skin. He really was the dog with the bone. I’d hoped we might

thought for a moment. A very public threat from a well-known feminist writer. A mysterious message in green paint. An incredibly expensive bottle of wine.

Davina had a pretty Victorian house, tall and narrow, with a tiny front garden and a chessboard front path leading to a door with stained-glass windows.

One fucking smoke and it cost me my job, my pension, my marriage, my whole fucking life.

could imagine Akira Anno and Alain Badiou together, talking into the small hours. I’m sure it would have been a barrel of laughs.

But that’s impossible. They’re full of pornography.’ I searched for the worst thing I could say about them. ‘They objectify women!

That’s what he said, Mum. He often used to say that he made an enemy every time he did a divorce, because someone had to win and someone had to lose.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Did you tell them he was being followed?

know I shouldn’t say it in this day and age but I’m absolutely useless without a man. There isn’t a moment I don’t miss Charlie. I never get anything right. I can’t work out the buttons on the TV remote control. Parking the car is a nightmare even though it’s only a Toyota Prius and it isn’t that big.

What do you mean by that?’ Hawthorne looked genuinely sympathetic and sounded so interested that even Akira was taken by surprise. That was another of his tricks. He had a way of getting people to tell him perhaps more than they intended

It feels odd to be writing about her and the truth is she has made it clear that she’s uncomfortable being a character in my book. Unfortunately, truth is what it’s all about. She is the main character in my life.

figured it wasn’t Davina. She drinks like a fish. Again, who drinks Coca-Cola at eight o’clock in the evening?

closed my eyes, quietly adding casual racism to the charge sheet against Hawthorne

The fact is, you’re as bad as some of those scum journalists who reported it. Stephanie was a lovely girl, lovely, and for a time we were happy together. But she was a mess. She drank and she took recreational drugs and in the end she died in Barbados. But I wasn’t even on the boat when it happened.

Hawthorne ignored this. ‘Why did Akira Anno lie about being with you?’ he asked. ‘Having supper with an old friend, a publisher … you’d have thought there was nothing more innocent in the world.

Akira Anno is Mark Belladonna, isn’t she! Mark doesn’t exist.’ He rounded on Akira. ‘You wrote those stupid books.

And of course there are all sorts of tax advantages. It’s a bonded warehouse. No VAT. And no capital gains tax either because you’re talking about a wasting chattel.

You used me to get back at Grunshaw.’ ‘I thought you’d be pleased, mate. She’s going to have egg all over her face. The Assistant Commissioner isn’t going to be pleased.

It often seems that the entire city is deliberately doing everything in its power to stop the cameras turning. Planes will fly overhead. Pneumatic drills and car alarms will burst into angry life. Police cars and ambulances will race past with their sirens blaring.

These days, I hardly know anyone who smokes but Hawthorne was still getting through about a packet a day, which was why we usually met outside coffee shops, sitting in the street.