A Line to Kill

I was standing only a few feet away so I saw it quite clearly.

Kathryn Harris had positioned herself near the door, keeping her distance from her boss. I have described her as being young, in her twenties, with glasses that covered too much of her face, but I should have added that she was very attractive, slim, with grey eyes and sand-coloured hair curling down to her shoulders. As he made his way towards the exit, Charles le Mesurier noticed her for the first time and I saw him smile in an unpleasant way. He could have moved around her but instead he brushed against her and at the same time his hand suddenly snaked round and took hold of her bottom. She started but before she could break free, he leaned towards her and muttered something in her ear. Kathryn blushed, an angry red.

I was only a few feet away and what I was witnessing could easily have been described as a fully fledged sexual assault. I was actually quite disgusted and I wondered if I should do something. But I was nervous. If I went charging in, the white knight to the rescue, there was every chance that I would only make the matter worse. It might even seem patronising to suggest that Kathryn needed my help, that she couldn’t look after herself. I stood there, momentarily frozen, but mercifully, before I could make a decision, it was over. Le Mesurier released her. She looked at him with eyes that were full of anger and humiliation. He smiled and moved away.

I didn’t see what happened next. A couple of people I’d met earlier came over and talked to me and the next time I looked, Kathryn had gone and le Mesurier was just disappearing through the door. I waited a few moments before following him out. I didn’t really want to talk to him again, not after what I had just seen.

Unfortunately, he was waiting for me in the street. ‘So you write kiddie books, do you?’ he asked, lazily.

Kiddie books. There it was again. The art of the insult.

‘Actually, I write adult fiction too,’ I told him.

‘Oh, yes. You’re here with the detective.’

‘Hawthorne. Yes.’

‘I’ve often been tempted to murder my wife. Maybe he can give me some advice.’ He smiled. ‘What time are the two of you on?’ he asked.

I told him that my session with Hawthorne would be happening the next day at four o’clock.

‘I thought I might come,’ he said. ‘I don’t read much crime fiction myself, although I’m quite fond of Dan Brown. He’s sold millions. Do you know him?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘But there’s a chap who works with me who’s very keen and I said I’d join him. He wants to hear all about Detective Inspector Hawthorne.’

He was playing with me in exactly the same way that he had with Marc Bellamy. Of course I sold fewer copies than Dan Brown. And why should he have bothered to read anything I had written? At that moment I saw him as a schoolboy at Westland College with Marc Bellamy and knew without any doubt that he would have been absolutely horrible.

‘I’m sure you can still get a ticket to my event,’ I said.

‘Oh yes. I’ve asked and there are still plenty available.’

We had been walking down the high street while we talked and we stopped as we reached his car. It was, of course, the Mercedes with the personalised number plate that I had seen earlier. But as le Mesurier pressed the key fob to open the doors, I noticed something had been lodged under the windscreen wipers. It was a playing card. He saw it too and pulled it free. He showed it to me.

‘Look at that!’ he exclaimed. ‘Must be my lucky day.’

The card was the ace of spades.

He got into the car, taking the playing card with him. The door closed with a soft clunk and about a dozen lights came on in unexpected places, filling the interior with a soft glow. I watched as he started the engine and drove away, and all the time I was thinking that the ace of spades wasn’t necessarily something I would have associated with good luck. Quite the contrary: the card had been printed with a skull and crossbones inside the spade. I had seen it clearly.

I like decks of playing cards. I have a lot of them. And I remembered that the double-sized black pip at the centre of the ace is often thought to resemble, even to have been inspired by, the spade used by an undertaker. The Americans deployed it as a weapon in the Vietnam War, dropping it on the bodies of the soldiers they killed in order to frighten the survivors. In Iraq, the ace of spades was the card that identified and targeted Saddam Hussein.

Charles le Mesurier thought it was lucky. I knew better.

It was the death card.

5 Blind Sight