A Line to Kill Page 5

  I found myself leaving at the same time as Charles le Mesurier, who had worked the entire room and seemed to be in a particularly good mood. From the way he behaved, it wasn’t as if he just sponsored the festival. He owned it. I had already decided that he wasn’t the most attractive of characters, but what happened in the last few moments as we made our way to the door really shocked me. You have to remember that this was a year before Harvey Weinstein was arrested and the Me Too movement really took off, but even so there were standards of behaviour, lines that no man would dare to cross. Or so I’d thought.

  I was standing only a few feet away so I saw it quite clearly.

  Kathryn Harris had positioned herself near the door, keeping her distance from her boss. I have described her as being young, in her twenties, with glasses that covered too much of her face, but I should have added that she was very attractive, slim, with grey eyes and sand-coloured hair curling down to her shoulders. As he made his way towards the exit, Charles le Mesurier noticed her for the first time and I saw him smile in an unpleasant way. He could have moved around her but instead he brushed against her and at the same time his hand suddenly snaked round and took hold of her bottom. She started but before she could break free, he leaned towards her and muttered something in her ear. Kathryn blushed, an angry red.

  I was only a few feet away and what I was witnessing could easily have been described as a fully fledged sexual assault. I was actually quite disgusted and I wondered if I should do something. But I was nervous. If I went charging in, the white knight to the rescue, there was every chance that I would only make the matter worse. It might even seem patronising to suggest that Kathryn needed my help, that she couldn’t look after herself. I stood there, momentarily frozen, but mercifully, before I could make a decision, it was over. Le Mesurier released her. She looked at him with eyes that were full of anger and humiliation. He smiled and moved away.

  I didn’t see what happened next. A couple of people I’d met earlier came over and talked to me and the next time I looked, Kathryn had gone and le Mesurier was just disappearing through the door. I waited a few moments before following him out. I didn’t really want to talk to him again, not after what I had just seen.

  Unfortunately, he was waiting for me in the street. ‘So you write kiddie books, do you?’ he asked, lazily.

  Kiddie books. There it was again. The art of the insult.

  ‘Actually, I write adult fiction too,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh, yes. You’re here with the detective.’

  ‘Hawthorne. Yes.’

  ‘I’ve often been tempted to murder my wife. Maybe he can give me some advice.’ He smiled. ‘What time are the two of you on?’ he asked.

  I told him that my session with Hawthorne would be happening the next day at four o’clock.

  ‘I thought I might come,’ he said. ‘I don’t read much crime fiction myself, although I’m quite fond of Dan Brown. He’s sold millions. Do you know him?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘But there’s a chap who works with me who’s very keen and I said I’d join him. He wants to hear all about Detective Inspector Hawthorne.’

  He was playing with me in exactly the same way that he had with Marc Bellamy. Of course I sold fewer copies than Dan Brown. And why should he have bothered to read anything I had written? At that moment I saw him as a schoolboy at Westland College with Marc Bellamy and knew without any doubt that he would have been absolutely horrible.

  ‘I’m sure you can still get a ticket to my event,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve asked and there are still plenty available.’

  We had been walking down the high street while we talked and we stopped as we reached his car. It was, of course, the Mercedes with the personalised number plate that I had seen earlier. But as le Mesurier pressed the key fob to open the doors, I noticed something had been lodged under the windscreen wipers. It was a playing card. He saw it too and pulled it free. He showed it to me.

  ‘Look at that!’ he exclaimed. ‘Must be my lucky day.’

  The card was the ace of spades.

  He got into the car, taking the playing card with him. The door closed with a soft clunk and about a dozen lights came on in unexpected places, filling the interior with a soft glow. I watched as he started the engine and drove away, and all the time I was thinking that the ace of spades wasn’t necessarily something I would have associated with good luck. Quite the contrary: the card had been printed with a skull and crossbones inside the spade. I had seen it clearly.

  I like decks of playing cards. I have a lot of them. And I remembered that the double-sized black pip at the centre of the ace is often thought to resemble, even to have been inspired by, the spade used by an undertaker. The Americans deployed it as a weapon in the Vietnam War, dropping it on the bodies of the soldiers they killed in order to frighten the survivors. In Iraq, the ace of spades was the card that identified and targeted Saddam Hussein.

  Charles le Mesurier thought it was lucky. I knew better.

  It was the death card.

  5

  Blind Sight

  When I say that I had breakfast with Hawthorne the next morning, I mean that I tucked into scrambled eggs and bacon, tea and toast, while he sat, slightly aloof, watching me over black coffee and a cigarette. It’s hard to be close to anyone who refuses to eat with you, but then Hawthorne had an equally difficult relationship with food as he did with people. I had once visited his London flat just next to Blackfriars Bridge and had remarked on his pristine kitchen, his empty fridge. He survived mainly on processed food, the sort that came in plastic trays and never looked anywhere near as appetising as the pictures on the packet. The only alcoholic drink he’d been able to offer me was a rum and Coke and he himself had stuck to water.

  The only time we’d actually sat down to dinner had been at the Station Inn in Ribblehead, Yorkshire. The two of us had been investigating the murder of Richard Pryce, a wealthy divorce lawyer, and we had gone to find out about a potholing accident that had taken place a few years before. Had he been particularly communicative that night? Not really. If I remembered the meal, it was only because of a chance encounter. A complete stranger had wandered into the pub and recognised Hawthorne, but had referred to him as ‘Billy’, insisting that the two of them had met in a nearby village called Reeth. Hawthorne had denied it. Far from bringing us closer together, the meal had left me more mystified than ever.

  As for breakfast, I might as well have been eating it alone, a complete contrast to my dinner with Anne Cleary the night before. That had been warm and increasingly easy-going. I had ordered a bottle of wine but she had told me she wasn’t drinking – she was on antibiotics – and so I’d ended up drinking most of it myself. We had plenty to talk about: Walker Books, other writers, Alderney and the festival so far. Since I had last seen her, Anne had separated from her husband. She told me that she’d been having a bad time – how bad, I was to find out soon enough.

  I looked for her now but guessed that she had left early for her session at St Anne’s School. A few of the other guests were out on the terrace, however. Kathryn Harris was sitting on her own at the table next to us, stabbing with a teaspoon at a bowl of muesli and yoghurt. Marc Bellamy was at the far end, still keeping his distance, his head buried in a copy of the Daily Mail. Elizabeth Lovell and her husband had just finished their breakfast and he nodded at us as they left. Her session was taking place that afternoon and according to Judith Matheson it was sold out.

  I waited until they had gone, then I turned to Hawthorne. ‘Maybe it would be a good idea if we found somewhere quiet and rehearsed how we’re going to run our session,’ I suggested.

  He looked surprised. ‘You think there’s any need?’

  ‘Of course there is!’ This was what I’d been waiting for all along. For once, I knew what I was talking about. ‘People are bound to ask you questions as well as me. You’re the subject of the book, so everyone’s going to be interested in you. It’s much more sens
ible to prepare the answers and make sure we don’t contradict each other.’

  ‘It’s not a performance.’

  ‘Actually, it is. We’re going to be on a stage, with an audience. They’ll have paid money for their tickets.’ He looked doubtful, so I went on. ‘Maybe we should track down Colin Matheson. He’s interviewing us. He can give us an idea of how he wants it to go.’

  Hawthorne shrugged. ‘It’s only questions and answers, mate. And there’ll probably only be half a dozen people there. You’re worrying too much.’

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Maïssa Lamar approaching the hotel, wrapped in tight-fitting black spandex with a headband, wires trailing from her ears. She had been out jogging. As she disappeared from sight I was reminded of what I had seen at the airport. I told Hawthorne.

  ‘It was very strange,’ I said. ‘She seemed to be on her own, but the moment we all got up and left she went and met someone.’ I described the man I had seen. ‘Their conversation seemed very intense.’

  ‘It’s not so unusual to meet someone you know at an airport,’ Hawthorne said.

  ‘At Southampton Airport? And she was talking about you. I’m sure I heard her mention your name.’

  ‘They’re all interested in me. You just said so yourself.’

  It was exactly what I’d expected. He wasn’t taking me seriously. But still I went on. ‘There’s something else,’ I said. ‘Someone stole £5 off the table at that restaurant in the airport.’

  ‘You think it was Maïssa?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe it was the waiter.’

  ‘It could have been any of them.’ He still didn’t seem interested so I finished up with the playing card, the ace of spades that had been planted on Charles le Mesurier’s car.

  Hawthorne shook his head. ‘Tony, mate. You’re putting this stuff together like it’s a book. But nothing’s happened. Nobody’s been killed. So none of it’s of any interest.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘I just think maybe you should relax.’ How could he be so reasonable and so irritating at the same time?

  I got up as soon as I could and walked away, leaving him to his own devices. As I went past the next table, I caught Kathryn Harris’s eye and smiled at her. ‘Is everything OK?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes. It’s lovely here and I’m so excited to be helping. We’ve got the big party tonight. Have you seen Charles le Mesurier’s house?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘It’s amazing.’ She looked up at the sky. ‘It’s going to be a hot one. I’d love to get out and explore the island. But I’m going to be busy most of the day getting things ready.’ She glanced over at the far table. ‘Marc’s putting together quite a feast.’

  She seemed completely unaffected by what had happened the evening before, both her argument with Marc Bellamy and her encounter with Charles le Mesurier at The Divers Inn. It made me think that I might have read too much into them. She was much younger than me. Perhaps she saw things differently.

  Alderney is a lovely place. I had managed to rent a bicycle and spent the rest of the morning exploring the island, captivated by the sense of anachronism, the cobbled streets, the Jane Austen architecture, all the defences – the forts, the barracks, the German pillboxes, the batteries and the bunkers – that had been constructed with almost insane extravagance but never actually used. I cycled all the way from Fort Clonque, a nineteenth-century fortress sitting on its own rocky outcrop at the western end of the island, to The Odeon, a brutalist naval range-finding tower perched on a hillside at the far east. I stopped at Gannet Rock and stood at the edge of the cliff, looking vertiginously down to the churning, crashing sea. In front of me, two rocks of biblical proportions rose out of the water, covered with thousands of brilliant white birds. It was a breeding ground for gannets and one of the wildest and most isolated places I’d ever seen.

  I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as the day before when it seemed I’d been the only writer to miss George Elkin’s presentation, so just before one o’clock I was back at the Alderney cinema in time to catch the last twenty minutes of Maïssa’s performance. The cinema was not a huge place. From the outside it looked more like a shop or perhaps a solicitor’s office and once you were in there, there were only about a dozen rows of bucket seats, upholstered in the red plush of another age. Even so, Maïssa had signally failed to fill it. Only thirty people had come to hear her and they weren’t having a good time.

  Maïssa’s delivery was dreadful. She hadn’t even learned her own work by heart and she stood behind a dais, reading it out with a sort of carelessness as if she just wanted to get it over with. She introduced her poems in broken English and didn’t seem to understand fully what she was saying. The poems themselves, in Cauchois, were indecipherable and the translations – which were being projected onto the screen behind her – weren’t actually much help. As I came in and took my place at the very back, she was in the middle of a poem about Joan of Arc, but I’m afraid, to my ears, it came over as little more than a collection of random words.

  She finished and there was a smattering of the sort of applause that always sounds embarrassing in a half-empty room. Maïssa smiled briefly. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said and she too did not sound enthusiastic. ‘I will end, please, with a haiku. I write it for my boyfriend after we split up. It is my thought for him and it is short, so I can translate.’

  She paused, turned the page and began to speak.

  ‘I look to the light

  But a dark shape pursues me.

  Your shadow or mine?’

  She bowed her head for a moment. I joined in the applause but at the same time there was something that puzzled me. I’d read that poem before. I was sure of it. But how could that be possible when I’d never heard of Maïssa Lamar before I’d been invited to Alderney?

  I was still thinking about it as I came out of the cinema and it was while I was standing there on the pavement that I saw him: the fair-haired man from the airport. He had taken off the leather jacket and wore a polo shirt that clung to him, showing off the muscles in his chest and arms. There was a gold chain around his neck.

  On an impulse, I went up to him. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Are you here for the festival?’

  He looked at me blankly.

  ‘I think I saw you at the airport. You were talking to Maïssa.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You’re making a mistake.’ He turned round and walked away from me but I’d learned two things from the exchange. He was definitely French. And he hadn’t wanted to be recognised.

  I watched him disappear, then crossed the road.

  The festival had organised a sandwich lunch at The Georgian House, a gastropub and B & B just opposite the cinema, and it was here that I caught up with Hawthorne, who was talking to a man I didn’t know. About forty, lank black hair framing a crumpled face with troubled eyes, he looked like a junior doctor about to break bad news.

  ‘This is Colin Matheson,’ Hawthorne told me.

  I was completely thrown. At breakfast I’d suggested meeting Colin Matheson, but Hawthorne had shown no interest at all. ‘Oh – you’ve met!’ I said.

  ‘Yes. We’ve just had a bit of a run-through … how we’re going to do the session.’ He looked at me accusingly. ‘Where were you, mate?’

  ‘I was listening to Maïssa Lamar.’

  ‘I’m afraid I decided to give that one a miss,’ Matheson said, managing to sound both regretful and relieved. Judith had told me he was a barrister and I have to say I was surprised. He was softly spoken. He didn’t seem assertive enough. ‘I’ve just been going through some of the questions with Mr Hawthorne,’ he went on. ‘We’ve almost sold out, by the way.’

  I wasn’t sure if that ‘almost’ was good or bad news. After all, the cinema only had about ninety seats.

  ‘Maybe you and I could have a quick chat about it?’ I suggested, weakly.

  ‘I’m not sure we’ve got the time.’ Colin
smiled. ‘Anyway, I’m sure you don’t need any rehearsal, a pro like you.’ He glanced at his watch as if that settled the issue. ‘We thought we might go to Elizabeth Lovell’s session after lunch,’ he added. ‘Judith managed to snag some seats. You’ve probably heard, they’re a bit of a hot ticket! Would you care to join us?’

  I’d had no intention of going, but if Hawthorne planned to be there …

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Good. I’ve heard her talk before and she is quite remarkable. If you believe in that sort of thing …’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘I try to keep an open mind.’

  I became aware of a figure moving towards us, making his way through the lunchtime crowd with obvious determination. It was the historian, George Elkin, and he didn’t look happy. Colin Matheson turned round, saw him and visibly flinched. He knew what was coming.

  ‘I’ve just heard the news …’ Elkin said.

  ‘George! Have you met—’

  ‘The power line. You’ve decided on the route.’

  Matheson had no fight in him at all. His eyes seemed to sink deeper into his head. ‘Actually, George, we haven’t announced it yet.’

  ‘I know you haven’t announced it. I can understand that you wouldn’t want to announce it. But you’ve done it all the same.’ He turned to Hawthorne and me. ‘There are five mass graves on Longis Common. A thousand poor souls murdered by the Nazis, finally at peace. My grandfather is one of them. Think of it! He was in his twenties when they starved him and worked him to death. But these people …’ There were actually tears in his eyes as he fought for control. ‘They’ll desecrate the whole area, tear it up for a handful of euros and to hell with what everyone else thinks.’

  ‘Actually, there are quite a lot of people on the island who support NAB,’ Matheson said.

  ‘And there are a great deal more that don’t.’ Elkin stood there, seething. ‘This is all about Charles le Mesurier, isn’t it? He’s the guiding light behind NAB and you’re all dancing to his tune.’