A Line to Kill

I picked up the two bills. ‘I’ll get this.’ I wasn’t sure why I said that and immediately regretted it. Was I really so desperate to ingratiate myself with the group? The bill came to £29. I left three £10 notes and, as I had no change, £5 for the tip.

We all got up. Maïssa disappeared in the direction of the toilets while the rest of us queued up at passport control. That was at least one benefit of Southampton. The airport was small and the queues were short.

As I reached the security area, I felt in my pocket, instinctively knowing that something was missing. I was right. I had taken out my telephone to check for messages and must have left it on the table. I’m afraid it’s something I do more and more. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I told Hawthorne.

He was still chatting to Anne, his new best friend, and barely nodded.

I hurried back to the restaurant.

As I approached the table, I heard someone speaking rapidly in French and, looking around, I spotted Maïssa outside the toilet, talking to a younger man in a black leather jacket. She had her back to me so she didn’t know I was there. The man was in his twenties with long, greasy blond hair, a thin face and a wispy moustache. I suppose he could have been someone she had met by chance but there was something about their body language and the tone of her voice that told me otherwise. Maïssa was speaking very quickly, annoyed about something. I might have been wrong, but I thought I heard her mention the name Hawthorne.

She looked at her watch, then hurried across to passport control. The younger man waited a few moments, then followed. That was odd too. It was as if they didn’t want to be seen together.

It didn’t take me long to find my phone, which had lodged itself under a serviette. I picked it up and was about to leave when I noticed something else. It was very strange. The waiter hadn’t yet cleared the table. The dirty dishes and glasses were still in place, as was the £30 I’d paid.

But the tip that I’d left, the £5 note, had gone.

3 BAN NAB

Marc Bellamy did have a point with his joke about elastic bands. The plane that took us to Alderney was one of the smallest I’d ever flown in – with two propellers and a single wing that could have been strapped across the top. It actually reminded me of one of the models Hawthorne liked to make. He and I were sitting shoulder to shoulder, which made me uncomfortable in all sorts of different ways. He was the sort of person who liked to keep his distance. When I was working with him, we were either confronting each other face to face or I was two steps behind him. A sideways view was strangely unnerving.

The plane rolled along the runway at Southampton Airport, then stopped for a minute as if the pilot was questioning one last time whether it could actually fly. Then the engines rose in pitch and we belted along, finally lurching upwards, our stomachs doing the same but in the opposite direction. We were in the air! We broke through the clouds and buzzed along for about thirty minutes, the clatter of the propellers making any conversation almost impossible. We dipped down again and Alderney came into view. With my face pressed against the window, I looked down on what – from this height – seemed to be a largely uninhabited strip of rock, one that might have been cast loose, floating on the sea. We banked and curved round for landing and I saw a black and white striped lighthouse perched at one end, white froth crashing far below. Hawthorne had been reading his book throughout the journey but as he folded it away, I couldn’t resist it any longer. I leaned over and shouted: ‘Why did you want to come here?’ It was hard to make myself heard against the sound of the engines.

‘What?’

‘In London. You said you’d always wanted to visit Alderney.’

He shrugged. ‘It looks nice.’

In all the time I had known him, I don’t think I’d ever heard Hawthorne shout. It wasn’t just that he was even-tempered. If I had recorded his delivery and transferred it to a screen like a heart monitor, he would have been a flatliner. This was the first time he had raised his voice.

He was also lying to me. I was sure of it. He was here for a reason and it had nothing to do with the scenery.

We landed and then bumped and jolted our way across another stretch of grey concrete. The pilot turned off the engines and I watched the propellers as they slowed down, becoming visible moments before they stopped. The door opened and we uncurled ourselves and made our way out. The airport’s one terminal was right in front of us, managing to look both temporary and thirty years out of date at the same time. We went in through a swing door that led into a small, irregular space: the arrivals hall. Serving the island since 1968 read the sign behind an empty check-in desk. Nothing much seemed to have changed.