The Twist of a Knife (Hawthorne & Horowitz #4)

by Anthony Horowitz

we only lived about fifteen minutes apart, which made the emotional distance between us all the more striking.

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.

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.

His parents were Turkish Cypriots who had emigrated to the UK in the seventies, fleeing ethnic fighting and terrorism.

It was very hard to tell when he was acting and when he wasn’t – sometimes with unfortunate consequences.

They were an audience … perhaps even a jury. My stomach was still churning. I felt like the condemned man.

‘Nothing about that woman is good. Nothing! She’s a complete bitch, and you might as well know that I’ve never had a good review from her.’

Christopher Nolan may be a big-shot director, but he’s got his head right up his arse. Not that I care. Eleven weeks shooting. A ton of money. And I go to France.’

What struck me more than anything was the malice that ran through the review, the sense that she had enjoyed thinking up her little bons mots and spitting them in my direction. That joke about the stool, for example. Did she really have to do that?

She had no human side. For the next few minutes, she said nothing, sitting at my table like some sort of malevolent Buddha, unmoving and imperious, letting me sweat it out as I wondered what was going to happen next.

Another false arrest coming so soon after the last one isn’t going to look too good on your CV, is it!’

She had been dominating, assertive. He was softly spoken, downtrodden, with thinning hair and a face that was mournful now for good reason but which might have been the same since the day he got married.

And just because I’m not standing here tearing out my hair or whatever it is you’d like me to do, it doesn’t mean I’m not deeply upset.’ He didn’t sound deeply upset.

‘She’s gone, Dad. She was a total cow and she ruined our lives. Neither of us has to pretend any more.’

Oh, and since the state received a thousand dollars in federal funds for every child taken into custody, it was a nice little earner

‘Why would I believe someone who spends his entire life making stuff up?’

She had quite possibly drifted into acting because of her father’s connections in showbiz. It would have been that or some sort of PR or work in a posh Mayfair art gallery. I also remembered his divorce, which had been all over the papers. He had left his wife for a model not all that much older than his daughter.

warned him against your play. I said that it was too peculiar for a modern audience and that nobody would understand what you were trying to get at. Is it a comedy? Is it a thriller? What is it, exactly? But he had complete faith in you, and now you turn up with your detective friend and cast aspersions on a man who is absolutely blameless and wouldn’t dream of hurting anyone.

wish Sky had never told us she had the review. I don’t know what she was thinking, anyway. She could have at least read it first.’

He had been responsible for her injuries and, subsequently, he had left his wife for her. I didn’t know what to say.

‘You write about me and I will make sure that all hell comes in your direction. I have my life. I have my experiences. And you have no right at all to appropriate my story, turn me into a cultural stereotype, simply to embellish your own view of the world.’

Murder and cigarettes. That about summed him up.

was in his mid-thirties, with the easy confidence that comes from either inherited wealth or early success, a completely different man to the one I had met in Euston. Could it be that he changed his persona depending on the client he found himself with, that the richer and more established they were, the more suave and self-confident he became?

This was a time when the Tories were losing power, and maybe there was a degree of resentment in what had always been a true-blue Tory shire. I don’t know. My parents weren’t just rich. There were plenty of rich people in Moxham. They were rich socialists. They supported the Labour opposition to hunting. They wanted to build a wind turbine, and you can imagine that that put a great many people’s backs up.

‘Bad Boys was nothing less than a complete travesty of the truth. It turned my parents into the villains of the piece.

Oliver Twist had found his Artful Dodger … in this instance, a young lout who had been born, quite literally, into a life of crime – slumbering in a pram that had been stolen from John Lewis. Wayne must have thought he had struck gold when he first set foot in Moxham Hall.

Ironic, isn’t it! A group of socialists who had espoused the values of New Labour and who were loudly beating the drum for equality of opportunity and education were ready to pile onto a working-class kid who’d never had one-tenth of the privilege of their own son.

There was something deeply offensive about turning a tiny incident, a tragedy in an English village, into some sort of Mills & Boon morality tale, and reading it, I felt less bad about her review of Mindgame.

You know the trouble with this part of the world? It’s full of retired bankers and lawyers with too much time on their hands.

Moxham was strikingly beautiful, the sort of place that turns up in jigsaw puzzles or Harry Potter films.

‘You can call it that if you like, but what was I to do? I was desperate. I would have had to move out. I had no job, no income, nowhere to go. Philip was in the cemetery and nobody cared about me.’

think there was a part of her that was attracted to people who kill.’ ‘She admired them?’

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.