A Line to Kill Read online

  ‘How do!’ he exclaimed when he saw us. This was actually one of his catchphrases. ‘You must be Anthony and Mr Hawthorne – or is it the other way round! Hawthorne and Mr Anthony.’ He laughed at that. ‘Don’t be shy. Come and sit down. I’m Marc. This is my assistant, Kathryn. That’s Maïssa, with two dots over the i, and I’m talking about her name, not her forehead. And Anne Cleary – rhymes with dreary, but she’s anything but! Scribblers United … that’s what we should call ourselves. You’ve got time for a bite. Plane’s on the runway, but they haven’t finished winding the elastic.’ He laughed again. ‘Anyway, we’ve already ordered. What are you going to have?’

  We took our places. Hawthorne asked for a glass of water. I went for a Diet Coke.

  ‘Horrible stuff! Be a good girl and put in the order, will you?’ These last words were addressed to his assistant. She was in her early twenties, slim and a little awkward, hiding behind a pair of glasses that covered most of her face. She had been staring at her knees, trying not to be noticed, but now she stood up and hurried away. ‘She’s a good girl,’ Marc continued, speaking in a stage whisper, shielding his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Only just joined me. Loves my show, which is just as well. It means I don’t have to pay her so much!’

  There was something quite desperate about the way he talked, as if he was always searching for the next joke just around the corner but was afraid he would never quite reach it. I didn’t quite have Hawthorne’s deductive skills, but I’d have bet good money that he was a lonely man, probably on his own, possibly divorced.

  ‘Hello, Anthony.’ Anne Cleary greeted me as if she knew me and I felt my heart sink as although I knew who she was, I couldn’t remember having met her.

  ‘How nice to see you again, Anne,’ I said.

  She scowled but without malice. ‘You’ve forgotten me,’ she said, reproachfully. ‘You and I had a long chat at the Walker Books summer party a couple of years ago. That was when they were still having summer parties.’

  ‘You’re with Walker Books?’ I asked. They published Alex Rider.

  ‘Not really. I just did a one-off for them. It was a picture book. Hedgehogs Don’t Grow on Trees.’

  ‘I ate a hedgehog once,’ Marc chipped in. ‘Roasted in clay. It was actually quite nice. Served up by a couple of Gypsies.’

  ‘I think you mean travellers,’ Anne said.

  ‘They can travel all they like, love. They’re still gyppos to me!’

  Anne turned back to me. ‘We talked about politics … Tony Blair.’

  ‘Of course. Yes. I remember.’

  ‘I bet you don’t, but never mind. Names and faces! I’m exactly the same. That’s the trouble with being a writer. You spend so much time on your own and then suddenly you get fifty people at once. But it is nice to see you again. I thought that when I saw your name on the programme.’

  I remembered her now. We’d talked for about half an hour and we’d even swapped email addresses, although that had come to nothing. She had told me that she lived in Oxford, that her husband was an artist – a portrait painter – and that she had two grown-up children, one of them at university in Bristol. She was one of those Labour voters who had become disillusioned after the Iraq War and had gone on to join the Green Party. I was annoyed with myself and examined her more carefully, determined that I wouldn’t make the same mistake the next time we met. My first thought was that she reminded me of my mother, or somebody’s mother. There was something warm, even protective, about her. The round face, the black hair cut in a sensible way, not hiding the flecks of grey, the comfortable clothes.

  ‘What are you doing in Alderney?’ I asked. What I meant was, why had she accepted the invitation?

  ‘I don’t get invited to many festivals these days. Not like you, I’m sure. Are you talking about Alex Rider?’

  ‘No. I’ve written a detective story …’ I gestured at Hawthorne on the other side of the table ‘… about him.’

  ‘I’m Daniel Hawthorne.’ I had never heard him offer up his first name and, looking at him, I saw that he was actually in awe. ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Anne,’ he went on. ‘My son used to love your books. He’s a bit old for them now, but when he was seven and eight I used to read them to him.’

  ‘Thank you!’ She smiled.

  ‘Flashbang Trouble. That was the one with the pirates. It used to make us laugh out loud.’

  ‘Oh! That’s one of my favourites.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  This was a completely different Hawthorne to the one I knew and it only reminded me how distant I still was from him. I had met his ex-wife once, very briefly. I had never seen his son. But he and Anne had bonded immediately and as the two of them continued to chat, I turned to the performance poet, Maïssa Lamar, and asked: ‘How come you’re here at the airport?’

  ‘I am here to take the plane to Alderney!’ She picked each word carefully with a French accent that was several coats thick. Or maybe it was Cauchois. She was looking at me as if I had said something ridiculous.

  ‘I just meant … I thought you’d be coming from France.’

  ‘Last night I give a performance in London. At the Red Lion theatre in Camden.’

  I made a mental note to check her out on YouTube. Maïssa was, at a guess, French Algerian. She was wearing a heavily embroidered jacket and loose-fitting trousers. There was a silver stud in the side of her nose and large silver rings on most of her fingers. Her hair had been cut so short that the scalp showed through, although there was enough left to leave a zigzag pattern on one side. Her large, bright eyes lingered on me briefly before dismissing me. There are contemporary poets whose work I love: Jackie Kay, Sia Figiel, Harry Baker. But I already had a feeling that Maïssa and I weren’t going to get on.

  A waiter arrived with the food and drink: coffee, tea, a salad and a plate of meze, a green tea for Maïssa and a pint of bitter for Marc. We had an hour until the plane left. A few moments later, Marc’s assistant, Kathryn, came back with the extra drinks that Hawthorne and I had ordered. She added the bill to the one left behind by the waiter and sat down next to me.

  ‘So you are a writer also?’ Maïssa asked Hawthorne.

  ‘Not me, love.’ Hawthorne smiled. ‘I’m a detective.’

  ‘Really?’ Her eyes widened. ‘What is it then that you do in Alderney?’

  ‘He’s written a book about me.’ Hawthorne pointed in my direction. ‘He’s going to talk about it. I’m just here for the ride.’

  ‘What do you investigate?’ Anne asked.

  ‘I’m more of a consultant now. Financial crime. Domestic crime. Murder.’ He let that last word hang in the air. ‘Whatever comes my way.’

  There was a long silence. It struck me that all four of our new acquaintances were a little nervous.

  Marc changed the subject. ‘I’ve never got the point of smashed avocado,’ he announced, scooping some onto his pitta bread. ‘And I hate that word – smashed. That’s typical bloody Jamie Oliver. Just slice it up with a sharp knife and that’s good enough for me. Preferably with some crispy bacon on the side.’

  ‘Would you like me to get you some, Marc?’ Kathryn asked. She had ordered a cheese salad for herself.

  ‘No, no. What I’m saying is, it’s just another of these modern food fads. When I was growing up, nobody had heard of the bloody things. They used to call them avocado pears and no-one knew what to do with them. There was one geezer even tried to serve them with custard!’

  We continued to chat, weighing each other up. Marc ate most of the meze, including all the avocado, and finished his beer. Finally, Kathryn looked at her watch. ‘It’s forty minutes until the plane leaves,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we ought to go through.’

  I picked up the two bills. ‘I’ll get this.’ I wasn’t sure why I said that and immediately regretted it. Was I really so desperate to ingratiate myself with the group? The bill came to £29. I left three £10 notes and, as I had no change, £5 for the tip.

  We
all got up. Maïssa disappeared in the direction of the toilets while the rest of us queued up at passport control. That was at least one benefit of Southampton. The airport was small and the queues were short.

  As I reached the security area, I felt in my pocket, instinctively knowing that something was missing. I was right. I had taken out my telephone to check for messages and must have left it on the table. I’m afraid it’s something I do more and more. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I told Hawthorne.

  He was still chatting to Anne, his new best friend, and barely nodded.

  I hurried back to the restaurant.

  As I approached the table, I heard someone speaking rapidly in French and, looking around, I spotted Maïssa outside the toilet, talking to a younger man in a black leather jacket. She had her back to me so she didn’t know I was there. The man was in his twenties with long, greasy blond hair, a thin face and a wispy moustache. I suppose he could have been someone she had met by chance but there was something about their body language and the tone of her voice that told me otherwise. Maïssa was speaking very quickly, annoyed about something. I might have been wrong, but I thought I heard her mention the name Hawthorne.

  She looked at her watch, then hurried across to passport control. The younger man waited a few moments, then followed. That was odd too. It was as if they didn’t want to be seen together.

  It didn’t take me long to find my phone, which had lodged itself under a serviette. I picked it up and was about to leave when I noticed something else. It was very strange. The waiter hadn’t yet cleared the table. The dirty dishes and glasses were still in place, as was the £30 I’d paid.

  But the tip that I’d left, the £5 note, had gone.

  3

  BAN NAB

  Marc Bellamy did have a point with his joke about elastic bands. The plane that took us to Alderney was one of the smallest I’d ever flown in – with two propellers and a single wing that could have been strapped across the top. It actually reminded me of one of the models Hawthorne liked to make. He and I were sitting shoulder to shoulder, which made me uncomfortable in all sorts of different ways. He was the sort of person who liked to keep his distance. When I was working with him, we were either confronting each other face to face or I was two steps behind him. A sideways view was strangely unnerving.

  The plane rolled along the runway at Southampton Airport, then stopped for a minute as if the pilot was questioning one last time whether it could actually fly. Then the engines rose in pitch and we belted along, finally lurching upwards, our stomachs doing the same but in the opposite direction. We were in the air! We broke through the clouds and buzzed along for about thirty minutes, the clatter of the propellers making any conversation almost impossible. We dipped down again and Alderney came into view. With my face pressed against the window, I looked down on what – from this height – seemed to be a largely uninhabited strip of rock, one that might have been cast loose, floating on the sea. We banked and curved round for landing and I saw a black and white striped lighthouse perched at one end, white froth crashing far below. Hawthorne had been reading his book throughout the journey but as he folded it away, I couldn’t resist it any longer. I leaned over and shouted: ‘Why did you want to come here?’ It was hard to make myself heard against the sound of the engines.

  ‘What?’

  ‘In London. You said you’d always wanted to visit Alderney.’

  He shrugged. ‘It looks nice.’

  In all the time I had known him, I don’t think I’d ever heard Hawthorne shout. It wasn’t just that he was even-tempered. If I had recorded his delivery and transferred it to a screen like a heart monitor, he would have been a flatliner. This was the first time he had raised his voice.

  He was also lying to me. I was sure of it. He was here for a reason and it had nothing to do with the scenery.

  We landed and then bumped and jolted our way across another stretch of grey concrete. The pilot turned off the engines and I watched the propellers as they slowed down, becoming visible moments before they stopped. The door opened and we uncurled ourselves and made our way out. The airport’s one terminal was right in front of us, managing to look both temporary and thirty years out of date at the same time. We went in through a swing door that led into a small, irregular space: the arrivals hall. Serving the island since 1968 read the sign behind an empty check-in desk. Nothing much seemed to have changed.

  There was a solid, rather aristocratic woman in her forties waiting for us beside a weighing machine. She was wearing a tweed jacket, scarf and pearl necklace and was carrying a sign with ALDERNEY LIT FEST typed in large letters. It had to be Judith Matheson. She had seemed nervous, standing alone in the empty arrivals hall, but her expression quickly turned into surprise and pleasure that we had actually arrived. She had spent a lot of time working on her make-up and even more on her hair, a wispy chestnut, which had been beaten into submission. She was someone for whom appearances mattered. That was the appearance she gave.

  ‘Hello! Hello!’ she announced as we gathered around her. ‘I’m Judith. Welcome to Alderney! I hope you all had a good flight. Plane nicely on time, I see. The luggage will come through in a minute and if anyone needs to use the loo, it’s just over there.’

  ‘How far is it to the hotel?’ Anne asked. She seemed a little breathless and I wondered if the flight had made her nervous.

  ‘Ten minutes.’ Judith managed to sound enthusiastic about everything. ‘Nothing’s very far on Alderney. There’s a minibus outside. Can I get you anything? A glass of water? The luggage really should be here very soon.’

  ‘No. I’m all right, thank you.’

  I heard the revving of a motor, a vehicle approaching, and a minute later the first cases appeared, pushed through a rubber curtain onto a silver table. I noticed Kathryn Harris, who had taken her own case but was also struggling with two more belonging to her employer and I went over to her.

  ‘Can I help you with one of those?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh – thank you.’

  I grabbed one and almost dislocated my shoulder with the weight of it. I was surprised it had even been allowed on the plane.

  ‘It’s full of Marc’s new book,’ Kathryn explained. ‘I’m sure it’ll be a lot lighter going home!’

  Marc Bellamy had overheard us. ‘It had bloody well better be!’ he chimed in.

  My own case came through, then Hawthorne’s. Somehow we all managed to disentangle ourselves and made our way out into a car park with taxis and car rentals on one side and a white minibus with Alderney Tours painted above the sliding door waiting just ahead.

  Judith continued to fuss over us as we stowed our luggage and climbed into the bus, then finally we were away. Alderney is just three miles long and a mile and a half wide and my first impression as we drove down the very straight lane from the airport was how little of it seemed to be developed. There were no buildings nearby. Fields stretched out in every direction, the grass strangely etiolated, as if the colour had been swept away by the strong breezes coming in from the sea. We came to a main road – not that there was anything very main about it – and at the junction I noticed a makeshift wooden sign hammered into the soft earth with a message in red paint. BAN NAB. I wondered what it meant. I wasn’t even sure what language it was in.

  We turned left and passed a farm but no other houses or any buildings, continuing downhill until we came to what looked like a Napoleonic fortress, very square and solid, with tall, evenly spaced windows and a great many chimneys. It was sitting on its own in a swathe of grass with the sea behind. In front of me, Kathryn Harris held her iPhone against the window and took several shots. My eyes were drawn to an old oil drum standing abandoned in the grass with, once again, the same words – BAN NAB – painted in red letters on the side. I wanted to ask Judith Matheson about them but she was deep in conversation with Anne Cleary.

  ‘Did you see that?’ I asked Hawthorne.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ban Nab. It
’s a palindrome.’ He said nothing, so I added: ‘It reads the same forwards and backwards.’

  ‘Do geese see God?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Hawthorne shook his head and looked away.

  The road curved round and we came to an ill-defined harbour area that should have been prettier than it was: too much of it had been given over to retail and industry. Even the chip shop could have been more welcoming, standing on its own, surrounded by concrete. But things changed when we reached the Braye Beach Hotel on the other side. This was a traditional seaside hotel, the sort of place I associated with childhood, long summers and ice-cream cones. It was made up of several houses joined together with a conservatory at one end and a long veranda looking out over the sand. The bus pulled up in front of the main entrance and Judith led us inside, talking all the while.

  ‘If you want to collect your keys and pop up to your rooms, you’ve got free time until the first session at half past four this afternoon. That’s George Elkin talking about the occupation of Alderney at the town hall on the rue de l’Église, which opens the festival. You’ll find welcome packs with maps and telephone numbers on your beds. We thought we’d all meet for a drink straight afterwards at The Divers Inn, which is right next door. Dinner tonight is at the hotel. If anyone has any questions they can call me any time.’

  The inside of the hotel was bright and airy, with comfortable, mismatched furniture, dried flowers, ships made out of driftwood and books on shelves.

  ‘I’ll see you later, Tony.’ Hawthorne started to move towards the reception desk.