A Line to Kill

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.