A Line to Kill

‘Cards and coins. They could have left a bloody roulette wheel if they’d wanted to make it any more obvious. So here’s what was in their heads.’ He was talking directly to me now, ignoring Anne and Kathryn. ‘They’d come to Alderney. Somehow, they’d get le Mesurier on his own. They’d tie him down and they’d make him pay for what he’d done to William. And as it happened, le Mesurier played right into their hands. He took a fancy to Kathryn, which made the whole thing a lot easier. But here’s something else you’ve got to understand, Tony. When they came to Alderney, they only had one target: le Mesurier. We were both there when that changed and – I hate to say this, mate – once again you sort of talked out of turn.’

My heart sank. ‘What did I say this time?’

‘The three of us – you, me and Anne – arrived at The Lookout at about the same time. Anne stopped in the hallway. She’d seen something that had shocked her.’

I remembered. ‘It was Derek Abbott talking to Helen le Mesurier.’

‘That’s right. But it wasn’t Derek that she recognised. It was Helen! You’ve got to remember that Helen wasn’t seen out with her husband very often. They had separate lives. At the same time, she was “the face that launched a thousand chips”. She’d been an actress and he’d employed her to work on his website. If you check it out, you can still see her now. She’s the one spinning the wheel. She’s the one pouting and giving the boys the come-on. All very sexy and sultry, and she was probably William’s pin-up. Anne recognised her at once. And she was shocked.’

‘But she said she’d met Derek in prison!’

‘No, mate. You suggested that she might have met him in prison and she grabbed at that to explain why she was so surprised. I think you’re right. That’s exactly where I met him. Of course, later on, she had to say that maybe, after all, he hadn’t been in one of her reading groups … just in case we asked him and he denied it.

‘Meanwhile, Kathryn had seen what had happened. She had arrived at the house earlier and she had also recognised Helen. That’s why she came rushing over with the drinks and burbled on about the food. She hadn’t been able to warn Anne that Helen would be there. So she came over to rescue her before she gave herself away.’

Mother and daughter were listening to all this in silence. They weren’t looking at each other. They were barely breathing.

‘Anyway, that was when one murder became two murders,’ Hawthorne went on. ‘And let’s see how the rest of the evening plays out.

‘At nine twenty-five, Anne leaves the party. She has a fake conversation with Kathryn which establishes the exact time and also makes it clear that she leaves long before the murder takes place. She does the same thing with the minibus driver, Tom McKinley. She tells him that she’s in a hurry to get back to the hotel. She’s nervous. But that’s ridiculous! The hotel’s only ten minutes away and she’s got thirty-five minutes to get there. She wants him to remember her. She knows that we’ll talk to him.’

‘She said he was standing by the door,’ I said.

‘Yes – but not the door of the minibus. McKinley told you he met her coming out of the house … so it must have been the front door, which gives her a bit more room for manoeuvre. It was too dark to see who was actually on the bus. So all she did was nip out, wait a moment and then slip back into the house again. If anyone had seen her, she could just say that she’d forgotten something. But there were still a hundred people at the party. Who was going to notice one person moving in a crowd?’

It was true. I’d been in the hallway myself at that time. But I’d had my head buried in Marc Bellamy’s cookbook and then I’d been talking to Maïssa Lamar. I hadn’t seen her.

‘Anne Cleary has two people who will swear she’s left the house,’ Hawthorne went on. ‘She tracks back through the kitchen and straight out along the edge of the garden and across to the Snuggery. She knows that Charles le Mesurier is going to be coming there because he’s already arranged a meeting with Kathryn and she’s agreed.’

‘But I spoke to her!’ I said. ‘I went into the kitchen. She was almost in tears.’

‘I think what you saw was an act, Tony. In fact, she couldn’t have been happier. Le Mesurier had played right into her hands.

‘At ten to ten, le Mesurier goes to the Snuggery and Derek Abbott goes with him. They’re still friends. They’re going to take cocaine together. Maybe they notice Elizabeth Lovell in the garden, but neither of them is aware that she can actually see them. It’s only when they’re inside the Snuggery, and perhaps after they’ve had a couple of lines, that Derek demands the £20,000 that he’s owed for his part in blackmailing Colin Matheson. He’d had to pretend to be the bad guy. He was the one with the hidden camera. He was the one who would tell Charles le Mesurier that Colin was having an affair with Helen. Of course, as we now know, all three of them – Charles, Helen and Derek – were in it together.