A Line to Kill

‘She was vague. But she seemed to know what she was talking about.’

Hawthorne shrugged. ‘It would have been easy enough to find out.’

I nodded. ‘I did a search on the internet. There’s almost nothing about William except that he took an overdose and died when he was twenty-one. The real story was the university. A lot of the newspapers claimed they weren’t giving their students enough support. They had a very bad record on youth suicide. You might be interested to know that Bill and Kitty Flashbang – those two characters you liked – were named after her own children and that’s why she stopped writing about them. Her marriage also broke up. Her husband is an artist. He had a nervous breakdown and now he lives in Cornwall.’

‘You’ve been busy,’ Hawthorne said.

‘I just think it’s very sad. And it makes it inexcusable, what Elizabeth Lovell did.’

We both fell silent after that. Lost in our quite different thoughts, we continued our journey across the island.

It was a beautiful evening. We were walking along the rue de Beaumont, which followed the curve of the beach with a vista of grassland, then rocks, then white sand and finally a dark sea, turning crimson as the sun began to set. To one side, the stone breakwater at Braye Harbour stretched out an improbable distance, as if the architects had set themselves the task of walking all the way to the horizon. On the other, a series of quite ordinary houses stood side by side, almost ignoring the view. We passed a classic Gilbert Scott telephone box, painted blue not red, and the thought occurred to me that if I ever wrote a book about Alderney, I’d recommend featuring it on the cover.

Eventually, we left the houses behind us. A few seabirds circled overhead, silhouetted against the sky, and as we continued, the grass became wilder, the rocks more rugged and I could hear waves crashing against the cliffs. We were overtaken by a few cars and then by the minibus that had met us at the airport. It was full of people dressed up for the party and I caught a glimpse of Maïssa Lamar leaning against one of the windows, clutching a beaded handbag and wearing a colourful headdress. She might have seen us but she made no acknowledgement as the bus swept past, kicking up a cloud of dust behind it.

Now the road took us past Fort Albert, which I had seen from the hotel. Isolated on a headland at the end of the bay, the construction looked ancient, almost Arthurian. The land around it was hostile, full of dark magic. Hawthorne knew where he was going. He pointed to a track that led to the beach, with more German defences scattered on both sides. I saw lights. There were cars parked ahead of us, along with the airport minibus. We had arrived.

The Lookout was a celebrity house, built to impress. It was shaped roughly like an arrow – or perhaps more like an American stealth bomber, about to blast off across the sea. Its two wings reached out to enclose us as we walked towards it. Spotlights set at ankle level washed over the asphalt approach. Charles le Mesurier had told me that it had only been completed a year ago and the narrow horizontal windows in their steel frames and the double front doors were aggressively modern. But the architect had also been inspired by art deco: the walls were covered in white stucco and there were three flat roofs forming terraces, rising up one above the other, which added to the building’s sense of dynamism and thrust.

The front doors were open and I could hear live music, a local jazz band launching into an enthusiastic rendering of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ arranged for snare drum, banjo and synthesiser. The minibus was empty. Maïssa and the other passengers had already gone inside. Looking into the house, I could see the silhouettes of people passing back and forth like puppets in one of those Indonesian puppet plays. There had to be a chandelier somewhere because it was casting tiny sparkles of light. I got the sense that I was entering another world.

From the moment I went in, I saw that Charles le Mesurier had spared no expense in the creation of his island Xanadu: it was every bit as spectacular as he had promised. Sure enough, a splendid chandelier – modern rather than antique – dominated the hallway above a floor that was a gleaming expanse of white marble. The art on the wall included prints by Damien Hirst and Banksy. An archway in front of us led into a living room with a sun lounge on one side and a dining room with an archway into the kitchen on the other, but sliding walls had been drawn back to turn these rooms into one huge space. I don’t think I’d ever been in a house where the people furthest away were actually diminished in size simply by perspective.