A Line to Kill

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.