A Line to Kill

‘You’re absolutely right, Anne. You had no reason at all to kill Charles le Mesurier.’

‘Exactly.’

The clock on the mantelpiece pinged as the minute hand passed the twelve. It was an ugly thing, bronze and white marble with an angel holding a spear in one hand and leaning against the casing with the other. Every hour it would draw attention to itself. It was now one o’clock.

‘Except, perhaps, the death of your son.’ Hawthorne paused. ‘I was there when Elizabeth Lovell talked about him at the cinema.’

Anne scowled. ‘That woman was hateful. And everything about her was fake. You just said so yourself.’

‘She knew about Mary Carrington, the woman who had slipped and drowned in the bath. And she knew about you. She’d done her research.’

‘Mr Hawthorne, this is really—’

‘She knew that your son had committed suicide at university.’

‘My son was an addict. I don’t know why you have to bring this up now. It’s really very cruel of you. I was forced to explain myself in front of a hundred complete strangers. He took an overdose and he died.’

‘Was he a drug addict?’ Hawthorne asked.

Anne didn’t reply.

‘That was the natural inference and I think it’s what you wanted us to believe. A drug addict takes a drug overdose and he dies. But there are other sorts of addicts.’

I will never forget the pause that followed. It seemed to stitch itself into the very air.

‘Gambling addicts, for example.’

That was when Anne Cleary knew it was all over.

‘Internet gambling is a horrible thing,’ Hawthorne went on, and for once he sounded genuinely sympathetic. ‘Your son was one of around three hundred thousand addicts in the country. There are about five hundred deaths a year and most of them are young men, university students, kids living alone. And the big online gambling companies … they know what they’re doing with those bright lights and flashing colours, the personalised texts and emails, the free bets. You must have been sickened when you got an invitation to a literary festival sponsored by Spin-the-wheel.com. I assume they were the same people who killed William.’

Everything in the room had changed. It was like an image on a computer screen that had suddenly frozen. It all looked the same, but I was aware that something had gone terribly wrong.

‘He never told me,’ Anne said. ‘William had always been such a happy boy and of course I knew something was wrong. He’d changed. But I thought it was down to the pressure of starting at university. He’d never lived away from home before. And of course he’d had to borrow the money to pay the tuition fees and that was preying on his mind. It was only after he died that the police found all the evidence on his computer. He’d gone through his savings and he’d maxed out all his credit cards. And he’d sold things.’ Until now, Anne had been strangely dispassionate, explaining her past history as if it was unconnected to her. But for the first time her voice cracked. ‘He’d sold the watch we’d given him for his eighteenth birthday and the laptop when he’d started university. He’d sold his clothes. All the time, he was getting more and more desperate, but he kept on playing, spinning the wheel in the hope that he would make everything right. And when it got to be too much, he took an overdose of paracetamol. That was the drug that killed him.’

Hawthorne was accusing Anne Cleary of murder, and I had been witness to two shocking deaths. But I felt only pity for her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

She stared at me. ‘I don’t want your pity. I made the decision to commit a crime. It was a dreadful thing to do and I always expected to pay the full price.’ Anne turned back to Hawthorne.

‘Two crimes,’ Hawthorne said. ‘You also killed Helen le Mesurier.’

‘Yes.’

Anne Cleary hadn’t even tried to deny it. She was sitting very still. I was aware of the hollow ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. I wanted to get up and silence the wretched thing.

‘When I heard about Derek Abbott, I thought that might be the end of it as far as I was concerned,’ she said. ‘But if you’ve come here to judge me, you’re too late. My judgement has already been made.’

‘It’s not just you, Anne. You weren’t alone.’

That jolted her. ‘Yes, I was.’

‘Do you really think you can lie to me? Even now? You couldn’t have tied Charles le Mesurier to that chair without help, even if you had whacked him with a rock first. You also needed someone to persuade Helen le Mesurier to walk into that cave where you were waiting for her. All of this was carefully planned. And not just by you.’

‘I killed both those people. I will pay for it.’ She looked at him with a growing desperation. ‘What more do you want, Mr Hawthorne?’

‘Colin Matheson asked me that when I was doing my talk in Alderney,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘I told him I wanted the truth, and I suppose that’s close enough. But actually, it’s more than that. I want you to face up to what you did because here you are sitting in this nice house, surrounded by nice things, but you’re not nice, are you? You’re a killer.’