A Line to Kill

‘And then we discovered that there was to be a festival of literature on the island and we had the idea to create a performance poet who could take part and who would be able to get close to Monsieur le Mesurier, even into his house. We were very pleased when we heard that there would be a party actually inside The Lookout. It was the perfect opportunity.’

‘How did you make sure you were invited?’ I asked.

‘That was not difficult. A cultural foundation in Paris made a financial contribution to the festival on the condition that a French poet was included. It was at the same time that a fake entry in Wikipedia was constructed. We thought it unlikely that anyone would take interest in an obscure poet working in a language that was almost unknown, but in the event that anyone looked, it was there.

‘And so I came to Alderney. I will admit that I was concerned to encounter you at the airport, Mr Hawthorne. It was foolish of me not to have studied the programme more carefully and I was alarmed when you mentioned that you had investigated financial crime. I did not want my enquiry to become entangled. It was important for me to be acting independently of the British police.’

‘You should have told me who you were,’ Hawthorne said.

‘We did discuss exactly that. Emil was in favour of joining together with you and maybe it would have been for the best. I apologise, but it was the decision that I made.’

‘Go on.’

‘I stayed with the other writers and tried to be part of the esprit de corps, although it did not help that your friend had happened to see Emil talking with me when we were at Southampton. I gave the talk. I had learned a number of poems which I hoped nobody would recognise.’

‘You stole a haiku from Akira Anno.’ It was the one thing I’d managed to guess. I wanted them to know.

She didn’t respond. ‘And so we arrived at the party on the Saturday night. I will tell you now my plan as it had been conceived. The most important thing for me was to get access to le Mesurier’s computer. Emil was here to provide me with technical support and he would find it a simple matter to bypass the security and access the database. We knew already that the office was on the first floor. The question only was how to get into the house without being seen and I found the answer to that almost at once.’

‘The Snuggery,’ Hawthorne said.

Marc Bellamy had seen Maïssa in the garden – but that had been several hours before the murder, at half past seven.

‘Exactly. I found this strange little construction at the end of the garden where le Mesurier liked to hide and at the back there was a door which opened onto the path that led up from the beach. I drew back the bolt so that the door remained unlocked and this would allow me to return later in the night. Then I went back to the party and joined in with everybody else. There were just two other things that I did before I left.’

‘You fixed the kitchen door.’

‘Yes. I placed a little ball of paper into the lock to ensure that it could not close properly …’

I remembered now that the newspaper print had been in French. That should have told me something.

‘This was my route back into the house. I also went upstairs. I needed to know the exact location of the office so that Emil and I could easily find it. We would return at three o’clock. Le Mesurier and his wife would be sound asleep. We would take the information that we needed and we would leave.’

‘But that’s not how things worked out,’ Hawthorne said.

‘It was a nightmare,’ Emil muttered in a low voice.

‘It was exactly that. We returned to the beach at three o’clock the next morning and climbed back up to the Snuggery. Of course, the intention was only to pass through, to continue through the garden and into the kitchen, using the door that I had prepared. But instead, when we entered the Snuggery – we locked the door behind us – we were confronted by a scene of the worst horror. Le Mesurier was sitting in a chair. He had been tied down. There was a knife coming out of his throat. It was evident that he had been dead for many hours.’

‘But you didn’t raise the alarm,’ Hawthorne said. There was something in his voice that sounded almost like admiration. ‘You didn’t even hesitate. You weren’t going to let something trivial like a violent murder get in your way.’

The two investigators glanced at each other uncomfortably. ‘Of course we considered every possibility,’ Maïssa admitted. ‘It was not an easy decision to make. But in the end we realised that, no matter what had occurred, we had been given an opportunity and it would be foolish not to exploit it. Le Mesurier had a mobile phone. We could see the outline quite clearly in his trouser pocket.’

‘So you took it out. And you used the fingerprint of his right hand to unlock it.’

She cast her eyes down. ‘You think we are disgusting.’

‘I don’t think of you at all, Ms Lamar. Just tell me this. You needed his print to open the phone. So did you cut the tape that was holding him down?’