A Line to Kill

14 Some Thoughts

As I reached the door of my hotel room, I heard my telephone ringing. I quickly went in and snatched up the receiver. ‘Yes?’

‘This is reception.’ I had walked past only moments ago. ‘We have a call for you. A Mr McKinley.’

The name meant nothing to me. ‘Do you know what he wants?’

‘He asked to speak to Mr Hawthorne, but he’s not in his room so he asked to speak to you.’

Hawthorne must have gone outside for a cigarette. McKinley? Suddenly, it came to me. He was the driver of the minibus that had taken guests from the hotel to the party and back again. ‘Put him through,’ I said.

There was a click and a moment later a man came onto the line. He had a soft, hesitant voice. ‘Hello? Is that Anthony?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Tom McKinley. I’m sorry I can’t come round right now, but Terry said you wanted to ask me something so I thought I’d give you a call.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Tom.’ I had already opened a notepad, knowing that Hawthorne would want an accurate account of whatever was said. ‘We were wondering if you remembered seeing a particular guest last night.’

‘Mrs Cleary? Yes, I did.’

How did he know this was the information we needed? And how had he been able to recognise her?

He explained: ‘Terry heard you talking in the back of his cab and he told me you wanted to know about someone called Anne Cleary so I googled her. Dark-haired lady. Late forties. Writes children’s books?’

‘Yes. That’s her. She said she spoke to you.’

‘That’s right. She was coming out of the house and she asked me when we were leaving. She was nervous about getting back to her room. She said she had something important.’

‘Did she say what it was?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘And the bus wasn’t full.’

‘It was busy, but not full. I can’t tell you how many passengers there were, to be honest with you, because I didn’t look and anyway, it was too dark. We can seat eleven. Maybe eight or nine?’

‘Is there anything else you can tell me?’

‘Not really. I was going back and forth all night, so I was carrying a lot of people. I wouldn’t have remembered Mrs Cleary if she hadn’t talked to me.’

‘Thanks, Tom. You’ve been very helpful.’

I hung up.

Could Anne Cleary have murdered Charles le Mesurier? I wondered. She had left the party a full forty-five minutes before he had been killed. Kathryn Harris had confirmed the time as nine twenty-five. It was always possible that she could have climbed onto the minibus, made her way along the aisle and jumped out the back, but I was sure the minibus only had one door and anyway, I couldn’t think of a single reason why she might have committed the crime. She had never met le Mesurier. She had no connection with Alderney. And she had just signed a major deal with Walt Disney, including a strict morality clause that, almost certainly, prohibited the act of murder. Anyway, could she really have crept in ahead of him, hit him with something and then dragged him onto a chair? Would she even have been strong enough to lift him?

Once I’d started thinking about it, I couldn’t stop. My room was too small to have a desk, so I propped up the pillows and sat on the bed with the notepad on my lap. I remembered what Hawthorne had said. You need to start with the chair.

All right.

Charles le Mesurier hadn’t just been murdered. He’d been tied down and either threatened or humiliated first. I had thought he might have been tortured, but if there had been any marks on him they would have shown up in the police medical report. Why had one hand been left free? According to Hawthorne, if I could work that out, everything else would make sense.

Someone had brought the parcel tape to the island, which indicated that the murder had been planned in advance. Le Mesurier had even been warned. That had to be the meaning of the ace of spades placed on his car. Leaving one hand free had been part of the plan, but what possible reason could there have been? Was it possible that somebody had forced him to write something – or maybe sign something – before they killed him? It could have been a cheque or a codicil to a will or a confession. I jotted all three down on a blank page and drew a box around them. That was a start.

Of course, there was a more obvious reason. Le Mesurier had been wearing a Rolex watch on his right wrist. His wife had valued it at over £20,000. Could someone have killed him simply for the watch? Or was it possible that someone unconnected with the crime had wandered into the Snuggery, found the dead body and cut one hand free to take it? That made sense – but then again, why wouldn’t they have left the cut piece of tape behind? We hadn’t found it on the floor and surely the police report would have mentioned traces of adhesive on his right wrist if they had been there.

I was sure I was missing something. I examined my own hand and thought about its different uses. Writing, obviously. Pointing. Getting a manicure. Playing the piano. Was palm reading a possibility? No. Ridiculous. Fingerprints? DNA? Could someone have taken his pulse to make sure he was dead? Unlikely.

I turned to a fresh page and tried to plot out a sequence of events that might make sense of all the clues that Hawthorne had found so far. For the moment, I set aside the two-euro piece. Hawthorne hadn’t shown any particular interest in it, perhaps because it was too random. It could have been dropped on the floor a week ago.

What about the footprints? It seemed to me that they told their own story. Someone had been on the beach and that person could have been Dr Henry Queripel, who had claimed he was hoping to catch sight of a black-winged kite. What size were his feet? He or she had climbed up to the Snuggery, knowing that the door had been left open for them by someone at the party. They had killed le Mesurier, but had accidentally stepped in his blood. After that, they had continued into the house and had gone up to the office, where they had left a further bloodstain on the back of le Mesurier’s mobile phone. But what had they done once they got there? What had they been looking for?

I’d arrived at a brick wall, so I decided to draw up a list of all the people who might have had a reason to kill le Mesurier, although, as Hawthorne had said, that could easily include half the island – anyone who opposed NAB. It was one of the peculiarities of being involved in a murder investigation. Why should I automatically assume that I had met the killer (or killers)? There had been over a hundred guests at The Lookout last night and not all of them had been connected with the festival. Worse still, I’d only spoken to about a dozen of them. It could have been someone whose name I didn’t know: the percussionist with The Channelers, for example, or one of the taxi drivers. This was the biggest risk I faced writing about Hawthorne. There was always a chance that I could write three hundred pages and only encounter the killer in the final paragraphs.

However, he had also told me that he had a dozen suspects in mind. I wrote the name Helen le Mesurier in the middle of the page and drew a circle around it. I saw her sitting in her bedroom, crying her eyes out, surrounded by balled-up tissues. Had it all been an elaborate act?

Certainly, she had a motive – the most obvious in the world. Her husband’s death gave her money and freedom. She had said she still loved him, but she was romantically involved with a French land surveyor and maybe she had decided it was time for a change. I had seen her leave the party at about ten past nine, on her way to the bedroom, but I hadn’t actually seen her go upstairs. I only had her word for it that she was in bed when Charles le Mesurier was killed, and she had definitely seemed defensive and even nervous when Hawthorne had questioned her about what she had seen out of the bedroom window.

Henry Queripel. Susan Queripel. George and Georgina Elkin. They all had the same motive: the power line. More than that, they were actively working together to prevent NAB from being constructed and all of them believed that without le Mesurier there to guide it, it might not go ahead. If he disliked le Mesurier so much, why had George Elkin even gone to the party? He had vehemently denied entering the Snuggery, but he could easily have slipped across the garden and unbolted the door at the back to allow one of the others to climb up from the beach. The three-handed bridge game was very convenient. It drew them all in together and gave each of them an alibi.

Colin Matheson. I added his name to the list and stared at it on the page. The barrister and States member was also implicated with NAB but in a different way. Everyone believed that Charles le Mesurier had some sort of hold over him and that Colin was acting against his conscience by supporting the line. Could le Mesurier have been blackmailing him? Suppose that was the case and Colin had finally decided that he’d had enough. But then again, why that business with the parcel tape and the single free hand? What would have been the point of that?

From everything that I had been told, Colin Matheson was very much under the control of his wife. George Elkin had said that it went further, that he depended on her for his very livelihood. Was she a possible suspect? It was certainly true that of the two of them, she was far more likely to have had the guts to commit a murder. When Hawthorne and I had arrived at The Lookout after the body had been discovered, she hadn’t been shocked or upset. She had been angry. Could it be that she knew her husband had committed the crime? Could they have done it together?

That was eight names so far … if I included Anne Cleary. To reach the full dozen, I would have to fold in some of the other guests who had been invited to the Alderney Literary Festival and I knew at once which name I had to add to the list.

Kathryn Harris.

I had seen Charles le Mesurier trying to impose himself on her not once but twice. And although she had tried to pretend otherwise, she had been seriously upset when I spoke to her in the kitchen on the night of the party. As its name implied, the Snuggery had been used by le Mesurier as his own den of vice, and his behaviour – tiptoeing there in the darkness, the cocaine use – suggested a sexual assignation. Suppose Kathryn had pretended to accept his offer and had tied him down as some sort of bondage thing? That made sense. She could have killed him and then taken the watch: it would be a year’s salary for her. It was true that she looked too ordinary, too vulnerable to be a psychopathic killer, but then, from what I’d read, most psychopathic killers are just like that. It’s why they’re so hard to catch.

Marc Bellamy.

Her boss struck me, frankly, as too much of a buffoon to be a murderer, but then everything about him – his clothes, his catchphrases – was a construct, a television persona. Who could say what it might conceal? He and Charles le Mesurier had gone to the same school – Westland College – at the same time and he hadn’t enjoyed it. If there was one thing that my own experience had taught me it was that the private-education system could create grievances that would stay with you for a lifetime. Good old Flash had been taunting Tea Leaf from the moment the two of them had set eyes on each other at The Divers Inn. Who could say that le Mesurier hadn’t accidentally triggered some childhood psychosis, with lethal results?

I would have dismissed Elizabeth Lovell immediately, but my long experience in the world of murder mystery – what I had written and what I had read – had taught me that the killer was often the most unlikely suspect, which actually propelled her, along with Anne Cleary, to the top of the list. There was no love lost between the two of them, but for the moment they shared a page.

Elizabeth was blind. Even with Sid’s help she would have found it hard to stab le Mesurier, particularly with such surgical precision. Could Sid have tied him down to allow her to strike the final blow, helping her to get revenge for something that we didn’t yet know about? It was a neat idea and one that would have looked good in a television dramatisation, but even as I wrote it down it seemed extremely unlikely. First of all there was no motive … not unless le Mesurier knew something about the couple that nobody else did. But secondly, there was a question of timing. I had seen Elizabeth in the garden, on her own, not that long before the murder had taken place. Would she have sat there smoking a cigarette if she was about to take part in a killing?

Derek Abbott. That was the next name I wrote down. I underlined it twice.

I hadn’t spoken to him at all so far, and Hawthorne had also done what Deputy Chief Torode had told him and kept away from his old enemy. Even so, Derek Abbott was definitely involved. Quite apart from his own unpleasant background, he had been close to le Mesurier, working as his financial adviser until the two of them had fallen out. It was Anne Cleary who had provided this information and it still had to be corroborated, but for the moment I assumed it was true. There had been a disagreement about money. Derek Abbott was about to be fired. He was an obvious suspect, but even so I really hoped that he had nothing to do with the crime. I had known from the start that he was going to be a major problem for me. It would have been better if I’d never heard of him at all.

Paedophiles are not at all easy to write about because, at the end of the day, what is there to say? They’re sick. They’re disgusting. They’re evil! We all know that and I’d have to be out of my mind to write anything positive about such a man even if he was an accomplished pianist, a great raconteur, a philanthropist. Who would care? The crime is so uniquely unpleasant that it’s like a black hole, sucking everything else into it, and as I sat on my bed in my hotel room I was annoyed that when I did write the book he would end up being in it. What Abbott represented was completely at odds with everything I would enjoy writing about: blue telephone boxes, beaches and fortifications, seagulls, miniature steak and kidney puddings, ginger-haired taxi drivers.

It was also quite likely that Abbott was the one who had killed le Mesurier. Despite his crippled leg, he was a large man and could easily have stunned him – perhaps with his walking stick – and then forced him into that chair. He had a motive. He’d been there on the night of the crime. But if Derek Abbott was revealed to be the killer at the end of the book, who would actually care? If you read Agatha Christie, you may have noticed that every single one of her killers manages to elicit a modicum of sympathy. You may not approve of what they’ve done, but you understand it. Derek Abbott was beyond the pale.

I put him out of my head and turned instead to my last suspect: Maïssa (and I enjoyed putting the two dots above the i) Lamar. It wasn’t a name I’d come across before. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a great deal more I could add. She had refused to speak to Hawthorne and in the brief moment I’d met her, she had denied having a friend here on the island, even though I had seen him at the airport and later in the street. The man in the leather jacket had no name so I represented him with a question mark in a circle. It was impossible to guess their relationship. Friends? Lovers? Accomplices? He hadn’t been at the party, but she had. And she had also been up to the first floor – even if this had been before le Mesurier was killed.

Finally, I wasn’t convinced by her performance poetry. No poet was as bad as that. I thought back to the haiku she had recited, the one about her ex-boyfriend. On an impulse, I reached for my phone and opened Google Chrome. First I went to Wikipedia.

W

IKIPEDI

A

The Free Encyclopedia

Maïssa Lamar

Maïssa Lamar is a French spoken-word artist, author and poet.

Contents

1 Early life

2 Career

2.1 2012 to present

3 Selected works

4 Awards and honours

Early life

Born in Rouen on August 6 1981, Maïssa Lamar has become one of the most powerful new voices in today’s poetry scene, with a particular love of Norman culture. Her writing began with a visit to the Seine-Maritime department, where she holidayed as a child.^[1][2] She lives in Paris, France.

Career

2012 to present

Lamar has won numerous awards for her poetry, which draws on many inspirations, from the Petrarchan sonnet to the Japanese haiku. Her poems have been published in several countries and she has been a member of the Académie Mallarmé since 2013.

She performs much of her work in Cauchois, a largely forgotten dialect which she learned from her grandfather. Le Monde described her as ‘a leading light in the revival of Cauchois culture’ and in 2011 she was given the Freedom of the City of Lille. Her poems have been published in French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Selected works

L’Autostop et autres poèmes (Hitchhiking and Other Poems), Cheyne éditeur, France, 2009, ISBN 978–2-84116–147-8

L’École en lames de rasoir (The School Made of Razor Blades), Cheyne éditeur, France, 2006, ISBN 978–2-84116–116-4, republished in 2008^[14]

Le Livre de feuilles et d’ombres (The Book of Leaves and Shadows), Cheyne éditeur, France, 2004, ISBN 978–2-84116–096-9

Awards and honours

Prix Louis-Guilloux – 2014

Prix Mallarmé – 2012

Grand Prix de poésie de la SGDL – 2009

The entry told me nothing that I didn’t already know, but the mention of Japanese haikus reminded me of the final poem she had recited. It had meant something to me, even though, as far as I could see, none of her work had been quoted on the internet and her three books weren’t available on Amazon or Kindle, so how could I possibly have known it? I tried to remember how it went.

I see the light

And something comes after me.

Your place or mine?

It wasn’t quite that, but I put the words into the search engine anyway. It revealed nothing. I fiddled with the first line, without success, then turned to the third. Your shadow or mine. That was it! I entered the words and immediately the entire poem appeared on the screen, all three lines of it.

I look to the light

But a dark shape pursues me.

Your shadow or mine?

There it was – but the author was not Maïssa Lamar. The very mention of a haiku should have taken me back to my not entirely comfortable encounter with Akira Anno, the feminist writer who had actually produced an entire book containing two hundred haikus. One of them had turned out to be a major clue in the murder of the celebrity divorce lawyer Richard Pryce, but while turning the pages, I had happened to notice an earlier haiku written by Akira and this was it.

Maïssa had stolen it!

I stood up with a sense of excitement. In the course of two investigations with Hawthorne, I had worked out precisely nothing. I had written about him, but I had been no help at all and it was quite possible that everything I had written here, all my deductions so far, were completely wrong. But this was, unquestionably, a breakthrough. I had been right at the airport. Maïssa wasn’t what she seemed.

I couldn’t wait to tell Hawthorne and I was out of my room at twenty-five past seven, on my way to meet him for dinner. In fact, about halfway down the corridor a door opened and Hawthorne emerged. I couldn’t help but notice, incidentally, that his room was rather larger than mine and had a sea view.

‘Hawthorne—’ I began.

He stopped me. I wasn’t going to tell him about Maïssa right then. Nor were we going to have dinner together. The séance was going to be cancelled, too, because, it turned out, he’d just had a telephone call from Deputy Chief Torode.

‘It’s bad news, mate,’ he said. ‘Helen le Mesurier has disappeared.’