A Line to Kill

The two of us walked out of the front door to where Terry, the young taxi driver who had brought us here, was still waiting. Hawthorne exchanged a few words with him and we both got into the car. I thought we would be heading back to the hotel, but after we had joined the main road, we travelled just a short distance before we stopped again.

‘You can follow the path down from here,’ Terry told us.

‘We’ll be about twenty minutes,’ Hawthorne said.

‘Can I come?’

‘No. Wait for us here.’ We got out of the car and began to make our way down. ‘I’ve hired him,’ Hawthorne told me. It took me a moment to realise he was talking about Terry. ‘He’s going to drive us the whole time we’re on the island.’

‘That’s a good idea.’

‘I said you’d pay.’

‘Oh.’

We had arrived at a crescent-shaped beach – more shingle than sand – and I wondered what Hawthorne had in mind. We turned left and walked back the way we had come. Looking up, I saw the top half of the Snuggery looming above the edge of the cliff – except that it wasn’t really a cliff at all, more a rocky wall that rose up about ten or fifteen metres with a well-defined walkway zigzagging towards the top. I rather doubted that the path dated back to the war. Why would the Germans have made it easy for Allied forces to climb up to their defences? Charles le Mesurier must have constructed it himself so that when he had finished whatever he did in the Snuggery, he could come down here for a swim.

‘Could someone have got in this way and killed him?’ I asked. I assumed this was the reason we had come down here.

‘It’s a possibility. Except that the door was bolted from inside … or at least it was when I looked this morning.’ Hawthorne glanced left and right and I found myself thinking of the trip we had made to Deal in Kent together, the last time we had stood beside the sea. ‘If someone went up to the house from here, they’d have to have had someone at the party to let them in.’

‘What time was le Mesurier killed?’ I asked.

‘The police will tell us that. But we can assume that he went to the Snuggery sometime between ten past nine, which is when he talked to his wife, and ten o’clock, when Marc Bellamy noticed he was missing.’

Hawthorne had been examining the ground. Suddenly, he stopped and pointed. He had found a footprint in a patch of sand just at the foot of the path leading up to the Snuggery. I couldn’t say for sure, but the perfect curve of the toecap looked remarkably similar to the bloody footprint we had found near the body.

‘You’re right, Hawthorne!’ I exclaimed. ‘I don’t know how you do it. But it’s perfectly clear.’ I looked up at the Snuggery. ‘Someone unlocked the door. They had an accomplice who climbed up from the beach. The two of them hit le Mesurier on the head and forced him into the chair. And after they’d killed him, they separated and each went their own way.’

‘It could have happened like that.’ Why did Hawthorne have to sound so unsure when it was perfectly obvious to me? ‘But there’s a problem.’

‘What problem?’

‘Well, for the whole thing to work the way you just described – one inside, one outside – they’d have to know that le Mesurier was planning to visit the Snuggery and at what time.’

‘They could have texted from the house.’

Hawthorne took out his phone and looked at it. ‘No signal.’

I did the same and sighed. ‘Mine too.’

‘Your set-up only works if the accomplice is already there and waiting before le Mesurier arrives – maybe hidden behind one of those curtains. Le Mesurier comes in with someone and that’s when the two of them incapacitate him and force him into the chair. They tie him up – we still don’t know why – and then they kill him.’

‘Suppose they unlocked the door earlier? Someone could have climbed up from the beach and hidden behind the curtains. They could have been inside the Snuggery all evening.’

‘They’d still have to be sure that le Mesurier would go in there. And on his own …’

Hawthorne was still holding his mobile phone. He took a photograph of the footprint.

‘Are you going to tell Torode about this?’ I asked.

‘I’m sure he’ll find it for himself, but I’ll send him a picture if you think it will make him happy.’

He slipped the phone back into his pocket and was about to leave, but I stopped him. ‘Hawthorne,’ I said. ‘There’s something you’ve got to tell me.’

‘What’s that, mate?’

‘Why are you here? Why did you agree to come to Alderney? And don’t tell me it was anything to do with our book. This is about Derek Abbott, isn’t it? I know you don’t want to talk about it, but you’ve got to tell me. You knew from the start that he was living here. When we were invited that day in London, I guessed you were up to something. I don’t want to have an argument with you, but you can’t keep me in the dark, especially if I’m going to end up writing about all this. So what’s going on?’