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

by Anthony Horowitz

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.

‘Ambition, madam, is a great man’s madness,’ says Antonio in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, a play I first saw at the RSC in 1971 with Judi Dench in the title role.

What could I possibly say? ‘I would like to assert and to place on record the possibility that, as evidenced from the two previous statements, you and your colleagues have absolutely no idea what you’re doing. You’re all idiots. This is completely crazy. And if you don’t let me go, I’m going to sue the whole lot of you . . .’ But I didn’t say that. This probably wasn’t a good place to make enemies. ‘You’re making a mistake,’ I said.

If there’s a book of mine in a room, it’s always the first thing I’ll see.

It was a hatchet job, nothing more, nothing less – written cleverly enough to keep her on the right side of libel.

Like Hawthorne, I had managed to download Harriet’s book on Kindle and I skimmed through it on the train to Chippenham. What was I to make of Harriet Throsby’s writing style? It was a mishmash of treacly sentimentalism and sheer venom, worth every penny of the £0.00 that Kindle had attached to it. I had to agree with what Martin Longhurst had said. 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. It was one thing to trash a play at the theatre, but with Bad Boys she had done the same to people’s lives and almost every sentence demonstrated to me what a thoroughly unpleasant woman she had been. Why should I care what she thought of me? It’s an interesting paradox. The more humane the critics, the more hurtful their opinions.

but even as I swiped the screen from page to wearisome page, I knew that Bad Boys wasn’t going to help me very much either. Harriet distorted everything. It was a sort of ownership. She made the entire world her own – just as she had done with my play, her marriage to Arthur, the production of Saint Joan, all those first-night parties she had insisted on gatecrashing. I was finally getting the measure of the woman. It was just the identity of her killer that defeated me.

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. People who used to be important but now they’ve got nothing to do, so they just get busy blowing everything out of proportion.

I know it was a long time ago, but murders cast long shadows. I’m just trying to shed a little light.’