A Line to Kill

17 Where the Light Doesn’t Shine

We walked together from the railway line, the lighthouse ahead of us, standing guard against a hostile sea. Quesnard Cottage stood nearby, dark and solitary, almost silhouetted against a streak of crimson light that had seared itself across a darkening sky. A breeze had sprung up. The trees were writhing and long, wild grass was licking at my feet.

I could tell that Hawthorne was uneasy. He didn’t speak. His eyes were fixed straight ahead. And he smoked – mechanically and apparently without pleasure. He had come to Alderney, he had said, because he wanted to see what had happened to Derek Abbott, but all along there had been much more to it than that and I could see it now. He had the appearance of a man on his way to confront some sort of demon. But was it a demon that he had pushed down a flight of steps in a London police station or one that had entered his life a long time before and which had done him harm in ways that I could not understand? Perhaps I was about to find out.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked as we crossed the main road and entered a track that would bring us to the house.

‘Why shouldn’t I be?’ he snapped back.

‘You just seem very quiet.’

‘I’m thinking.’ We took a few more steps. ‘You know, maybe it would be better if you didn’t join me for this one.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I stopped. ‘Of course I’ve got to be there.’

‘I can tell you what happens.’

‘No! You can’t!’ For a brief moment, I was actually quite angry. ‘I never get any credit from you,’ I said. ‘I never do anything right. I think you forget that you were the one who came to me in the first place, and to be honest, there are times when I wish you hadn’t. But right now I’m stuck with you. I don’t get very much pleasure out of your company, but wherever you go, I’m going too. I’m going to describe what I see and what happens, and assuming you manage to track down whoever killed Charles and Helen le Mesurier, I’m going to describe that too. But it’s my book! You don’t tell me what happens. That’s my job!’

I think that was the most I had ever said to Hawthorne in one breath and he seemed amused. ‘What are you going to call it?’ he asked.

‘The book? I don’t know. Not Hawthorne Investigates.’

‘Well, be careful with this one.’ Hawthorne nodded towards the house. ‘Don’t trust anything he says. Don’t let him get under your skin.’

We continued on our way.

On closer inspection, Quesnard Cottage was a solid Georgian farmhouse with three, maybe four bedrooms and a large garden. Sadly, the owner had let it slip into disrepair. There were tiles missing from the roof and tufts of moss had insinuated themselves into the gaps. The glass in the windows was dusty and a couple of the smaller panes were cracked. The garden was full of weeds. I wondered if builders, decorators and gardeners had all refused to come here. As we approached the front gate, I heard classical music – Mozart – playing inside. We had to knock several times before the door opened.

Derek Abbott stood in front of us. He was on his own and at home but he was still wearing a suit, albeit without a tie. It was the first time I had actually been close to him and I was immediately struck by his bad teeth, his receding hairline and the curious sheen of his skin, which gave him the appearance of having had plastic surgery multiple times. He did not have the walking stick. Perhaps he didn’t need it when he was in his own house. He was not pleased to see us. No. That’s an understatement. He would have slammed the door if Hawthorne hadn’t reached out and held it open.

‘Get off my land,’ Abbott snarled.

‘We need to talk to you,’ Hawthorne said.

‘Give me one good reason why I should give you any of my time.’

‘I’ll give you two. Charles le Mesurier. Helen le Mesurier.’

Abbott shook his head. ‘No. I’m not fucking talking to you, Hawthorne. You’re not coming into my house. If you don’t leave, I’ll call the police.’

‘I’m working for the police.’ With his one free hand, Hawthorne produced an envelope I hadn’t seen before. ‘If you don’t believe me, read this. I’ve been officially engaged by Deputy Chief Torode on behalf of the Guernsey police. He knows I’m here now. If you won’t talk to me, he’ll want to talk to you, and the first question he’ll ask you is why you wouldn’t talk to me.’

‘I won’t talk to you because you’re a ****.’ Swear words bore me. I don’t like using them. And he had used one that was unprintable.

‘Suit yourself. But right now you’re the prime suspect in two murders—’

‘Helen’s dead?’

‘You knew that already.’

‘I knew she was missing and an hour ago I saw police cars and an ambulance arrive at the quarry. I’m not stupid.’

‘So are you going to cooperate with a double murder investigation or not?’

The Mozart had been playing throughout all this. It was his Requiem Mass. Had Abbott been playing it for Helen le Mesurier? He came to a decision and stepped back, allowing the hall light to reach past him. ‘All right. Come in, you bastard, and ask your questions. But I don’t want to be in any fucking book, so you can forget that for a lark.’ He turned his eyes, behind the steel frames of his glasses, on me. ‘I read about myself, I’ll sue you to hell. Do you understand?’

I nodded but said nothing.

He stepped back and went into a hallway dominated by a central hexagonal table. A large room led off to one side. Looking through the open door, I saw drawn curtains, a luxurious suite of furniture – three armchairs and a sofa – hundreds of books, a massive TV screen mounted on the wall, stand-alone speakers, a desk with a computer and printer, a stack of DVDs, piles of magazines. We didn’t go in. He led us the other way into a kitchen that was similarly over-equipped, with multiple ovens, sinks and saucepans and dozens of storage cupboards. In neither room did I notice any photographs of family or friends. Nor were there any ornaments, souvenirs, curiosities. It was the house of a man who lived entirely alone.

We sat facing him across a pine table with the walking stick lying on the surface. He did not offer us coffee or tea.

‘So this is where you ended up,’ Hawthorne said. There was no malice in his voice. He sounded politely interested.

‘This is where you put me.’

‘It looks quite cosy to me. I’d have put you somewhere very different.’

‘What is it with you, Hawthorne? What did I ever do to you?’ To my surprise, Abbott suddenly turned to me. ‘I went to your session.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I saw you.’

‘What did he tell you about me?’

‘He didn’t tell me anything.’ That happened to be true … at least, until we’d arrived in Alderney. I’d found out about Abbott from another detective, a man called Meadows, and he hadn’t actually known very much. For example, he’d only described Abbott as a former teacher without saying anything about his business interests in advertising and media.

‘He doesn’t know anything about me. He never did.’ Abbott leaned forward. ‘I never laid a finger on any kid, not in my entire life. I was a businessman. That’s all. And you might not have liked some of the stuff that I was producing, but it was all one hundred per cent legal. The simple truth is that the police picked on me. They decided to bring me down and once they’d made that decision there was nothing I could do to stop them.’

It was funny. Five seconds ago, Abbott had been snarling at me not to write about him but now he was giving me his entire life story. Speaking in a low voice, fixing me with his malevolent gaze … he let it all pour out.

‘All that stuff the police said about me, it was lies, every word of it. Yes, I travelled in Thailand and Cambodia and the Philippines. That was where the factories were. The printing presses. But when you’re making money, you make enemies. Anyone will tell you that. People made up stuff about me and the police swallowed it hook, line and sinker because they wanted to – even though they were never able to prove a single word of it. Two years they investigated me. Oh, yes – and they had their trips to Bangkok and Siem Reap too. They enjoyed those! Do you know how many thousands of pounds of tax payers’ money they spent pursuing me? They got nothing! So that’s why they planted the evidence against me. They put that stuff on my computer to justify their own incompetence and corruption. Do I look stupid to you? Do I look like the sort of person who’d keep kiddie porn on his hard drive? Of course not! They were wrong to start the investigation and they knew it, and they brought me down because if they hadn’t it would have been their own jobs on the line.’

He went on like this for some time and I could write down a whole lot more of it. But after a while I found myself losing focus and I might as well have been listening to the drone of a mosquito. What did I think of Derek Abbott? The truth is that I understood why Hawthorne had been reluctant to let me come into the house and part of me wished I had taken his advice. Don’t let him get under your skin. That was what he had said – and it was exactly what Abbott had done. I won’t say that he was evil, but he was, undoubtedly, one of the most unpleasant people I had ever met and the more he talked, the more I believed the version of events that Hawthorne had described when we stood below The Lookout on the edge of Saye Beach.

Hawthorne himself was still sitting at the table, his face utterly blank as Abbott continued his monologue.

‘Everything I had was taken away from me,’ he was saying. ‘My business. My savings. My reputation. My life. I was locked up with animals – real animals – for six months and every single day I was threatened and degraded. I will never go back to prison. I don’t care what happens to me in my life, but I will never let that happen again. Every minute of that place was like death to me.

‘And do you know what it’s like to come out again into a world where nobody wants you?’ He wasn’t asking us for our pity. He was telling us the facts. ‘Nobody would see me any more. All my friends had deserted me, of course. Even my family … I have a sister and my mother was still alive then. They say what happened to me killed her. Collateral damage. Nobody ever recognised that I was the victim in all this.

‘I moved to Alderney because I had nowhere else to go. It was an island, small enough and far away enough to let me be anonymous. I bought the most isolated house I could find … near to the lighthouse.’ He half smiled. ‘When I first got here, the light used to shine at night, but they shut it down a few weeks after I moved in and now it’s pitch-dark. I prefer it like that.

‘Of course, most of the people here know who I am and what happened to me. But you know the great thing about this island? Live and let live. People aren’t judgemental. When Charles le Mesurier asked me to help him with his finances – particularly the publishing end of his business – it wasn’t just a job. It was a lifeline. He believed in me and because of that a lot of other people on this island were prepared to do the same. To see me for what I am, not for what you made me out to be.’

That hadn’t been my impression. Nobody had so much as looked his way when he came into the theatre and they hadn’t been queuing up to chat to him at the party either. Even the state of his house told me something about him. No Norah Carlisle for him. She wouldn’t have come near.

‘Why don’t you tell me about le Mesurier?’ At last Hawthorne broke his silence.

‘I didn’t kill him.’

‘How long did you work for him?’

‘With him. Not for him. About five years.’

‘But it wasn’t going to be much longer, was it? Things were over between you.’

That surprised Abbott … the fact that Hawthorne knew. ‘Who told you that?’

‘It doesn’t matter who told me. The two of you had a falling-out.’

In fact, we had got the information from Anne Cleary. She had heard it from Charles le Mesurier himself at the party. He had told her that he’d argued with his former friend and was about to fire him.

‘He owed me money. That was all it was. Charles never knew what he was saying after he’d had a drink. He would have come to his senses in the morning.’

‘So the two of you argued, then? Did he fire you that night?’

Abbott faltered, realising that he had given away more than he intended. ‘Of course not,’ he snapped. ‘He’d never have been able to manage without me.’

‘Then what did you mean when you said he’d come to his senses?’

‘I meant he might actually apologise. He drank too much, like he always did, and he said some stupid things. If anything, I should have been the one who resigned.’

‘How much money were you owed?’

‘That’s none of your fucking business. It was peanuts. Do you know how rich he was? And thanks to me, thanks to the advice I gave him, he got even richer. As for the job, I didn’t need it. I’ve got savings. And there’s nothing to spend money on in this shithole anyway.’

And just a few moments ago he’d been extolling the island of Alderney for its sense of fair play.

‘Did you go into the Snuggery?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘No, I did not go into the Snuggery.’

‘You didn’t take cocaine with Charles le Mesurier?’

Abbott let out a brief bark of laughter. ‘No, I don’t do drugs. No, I did not put a knife in him. When are you going to stop making up lies about me?’

‘Tell me about Helen le Mesurier.’

‘What do you want to know about her?’

‘How often did you see her?’

‘I saw her when I saw him.’

‘Why did you arrange to meet her yesterday?’

‘I didn’t.’ He gave Hawthorne the full gun-barrel eyes. ‘That’s another lie.’

‘She sent you a text. She’d seen you go into the Snuggery with her husband just before he was killed and she wanted to know what was going on. You told her to come here at half past two, but she would have cut across the railway line and you were waiting for her there. You killed Charles le Mesurier because he’d fired you and you killed her because she saw you.’

‘I never texted Helen. I didn’t kill Charles. She didn’t see anything.’

‘I’ve also spoken to Colin Matheson.’ It was like some kind of vicious chess game between the two men. Each move was another attack. Hawthorne waited a moment for a response and when it didn’t come he went on. ‘He’s told us that you were blackmailing him.’

‘So now it’s murder and blackmail?’

‘You had compromising photographs of him and Mrs le Mesurier. You coerced him into supporting the Normandy-Alderney-Britain line.’

‘And why would I do that?’

‘Because you have shares in Électricité du Nord. You wanted to raise their value.’

For the first time, Derek Abbott seemed to relax, finding himself on safe ground. He sneered at Hawthorne. ‘That’s another lie and this time I can prove it. You can check out the shareholders of Électricité du Nord. It must be on public record. You won’t find my name. I don’t have any shares in anything any more.’

He reached for his walking stick, as if signalling the end of the interview. I saw that his hand was shaking.

‘Colin Matheson is a prat. He never liked me and now he’s trying to stir up trouble for me. But whatever he says, it’s his word against mine. I never threatened him. I don’t have any photographs of him. I never received anything from him and I didn’t know he was shagging Helen le Mesurier. But since you’ve been so kind as to mention it to me, perhaps I’ll have a word with his wife. I’m sure she’ll be very interested to hear about all this.’

It was his one small victory and in his twisted smile I got a clear picture of the unbridled nastiness of the man. Derek Abbott struggled to his feet, but before he could move away from the table, Hawthorne reached out and grabbed hold of his walking stick, pinning him in place. ‘I haven’t finished,’ he said.

‘Yes, you have.’ Abbott jerked the stick free. ‘You’ve got absolutely nothing on me, just like the last time. Only the difference is, you’re not even a detective any more. You’ve been thrown out, like me, and now you’re on the sidelines, scrubbing around for whatever petty cash you can persuade the police to throw your way and employing a second-rate hack author to write about you because you need the money. That’s what you’ve come to and I’m not afraid of you. Hawthorne Investigates? You’re pathetic!’

The two of them were standing close together and at that moment something very strange happened. Abbott was staring at Hawthorne. All along he had been confident in his anger and his hostility, but right then I saw a look of puzzlement come into his eyes. Was it recognition? Or even fear? It was as if he had become aware of something that had always been there but which he had only just noticed. For his part, Hawthorne twisted away, turning his back on the other man. ‘We don’t need to stay here any more,’ he said to me.

A minute later we were standing outside and I was desperately searching for something to say. I was certain that I had just witnessed something that mattered but at the same time I knew I couldn’t ask Hawthorne what it was. This business between him and Abbott was too convoluted. It ran too deep.

Terry had driven round in the car and neither of us spoke as we walked over to him.

In the background, the recording of Mozart’s Requiem had reached the last section and I heard the words of the Communio sung by an alto voice that seemed to cut through the gloom. Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine. ‘May eternal light shine on them, O Lord.’ And as I listened, it occurred to me that there was some sort of justice in the world and that even if he had escaped a long prison sentence, Derek Abbott had been punished for his past sins. He was utterly alone, not just trapped on a tiny island but further isolated from it in a house to which nobody came. The living room I had seen was exactly that: the room in which he lived his life. Charles le Mesurier might have decided to champion him for his own amusement, but that too was over.

Even the lighthouse had given up on him. That was his fate. To be an outcast, lost and forgotten in a place where the light never shone.