A Line to Kill

by Anthony Horowitz

  Hawthorne took pity on her. ‘Thank you, Mrs le Mesurier. You’ve been helpful. There is just one last thing. Was your husband left-handed or right-handed?’

  ‘Why would you want to know that?’ She shook her head and sighed. ‘He was right-handed.’

  ‘Did he wear his Rolex on his right wrist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you know where he got it?’

  ‘He bought it in Hong Kong. It was gold – and very expensive.’

  ‘How expensive?’

  ‘He told me he’d paid £20,000, but it might have been more. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘The watch has gone. Do you know if he was wearing it last night?’

  ‘Of course he was. He never took it off.’ She corrected herself. ‘Only sometimes … before he went to bed.’ She looked uncomfortable. ‘He’d do that as a signal.’

  ‘What sort of signal?’

  ‘When he wanted to be intimate, he took off his watch.’

  Hawthorne considered this. ‘But he didn’t come to bed.’

  ‘Not with me.’ She reached out and picked up her cup of tea as if to say that she’d had enough of these questions and wanted to be left alone. Hawthorne examined her for a moment. Then, with a nod, he left. Colin Matheson and I followed.

  ‘The office …’ Hawthorne said, as we stepped outside.

  Matheson looked at him blankly.

  ‘I want to see where the paperknife came from.’

  ‘Oh, yes … This way.’

  He led us down a corridor painted white with a single dazzle of colour at the end: a photomontage of Charles le Mesurier done in the style of Andy Warhol. There was an open door beside it and the three of us went into a modern home office with lots of bookshelves but very few books. An angular black wooden desk dominated the room. Buy two and put them together and you could have made a swastika. A black leather chair with a high back stood behind. A gleaming chrome desk lamp – possibly Italian, certainly expensive – curved towards a giant computer screen. A mobile phone, presumably le Mesurier’s, lay to one side. Using a handkerchief, Hawthorne picked it up and examined it. He showed it to me.

  ‘What do you make of that, Tony?’

  There was a smear of something rust-coloured on the back. ‘Blood?’ I asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘But how is that possible? If he was killed in the Snuggery, how did the phone get to be here?’ I thought it through. ‘Maybe it’s somebody else’s blood.’

  ‘We’ll have to get a test.’ He laid the phone down again.

  The room was so neat and minimalist that it was impossible to tell if anything had been disturbed. Hawthorne said nothing as he opened three of the desk drawers – the fourth was locked – and tapped the computer to see if it was turned on. It wasn’t. There was another vibrant artwork on the wall, matching the one outside in both size and style. This one showed Helen le Mesurier standing beside a roulette wheel, holding a paddle. The face that launched a thousand chips.

  ‘I’m not sure we should really be here,’ Colin Matheson said.

  ‘Nobody’s asking you to be here,’ Hawthorne replied, affably.

  He searched around, possibly looking for the key to the locked drawer, then gave up. There was nothing here. But at least he had established a sequence of events … or so I imagined. Whoever had killed Charles le Mesurier had come back into the house from the Snuggery and continued upstairs. They had searched for something in the study while Helen le Mesurier slept a few doors away. Perhaps they had picked up the mobile phone, transferring a bloodstain to the back. Could that even be the reason why he had been murdered? Was there something on the phone or in the computer that the killer needed? Le Mesurier had been tied down. Perhaps he had been threatened with torture unless he gave up the password. Yes. That made sense.

  We heard the front door open and I heard Kathryn Harris’s voice coming from downstairs. She sounded indignant. That reminded me of what had happened the night before in the kitchen: Charles le Mesurier almost assaulting her. Quickly, I drew Hawthorne aside and told him what I’d seen.

  ‘If anyone had a motive to kill him,’ I said, ‘it was her.’

  ‘When was this?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘It was just after his wife had gone to bed.’

  Hawthorne smiled. ‘At least he had the decency to wait until she was out of the way.’

  We made our way back downstairs to the entrance hall. Marc Bellamy and Kathryn Harris had arrived together. He was looking very much the worse for wear, pale and dishevelled, as if he had slept badly. Someone had just woken him up, bundled him into a taxi and brought him here. I probably didn’t look much better.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ Marc asked. No ‘How do!’ today. He was wearing a hoody from his own television show, with the words ‘Lovely Grub’ stitched across the chest. He hadn’t had time to shave and the stubble did him no favours, emphasising his poor skin, his jowls. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Let’s talk in the kitchen,’ Hawthorne suggested.

  ‘I’ve made some tea,’ Judith Matheson said. Of course she had. She was the sort of woman who would always make tea no matter what the crisis. Lose your leg in a hideous industrial accident and she’d be there with a nice cup of Earl Grey.

  The Mathesons followed us into the kitchen, then left us together: Hawthorne and me and our two witnesses.

  ‘So what’s going on?’ Marc demanded. ‘Has someone died?’

  ‘Charles le Mesurier has been killed,’ Hawthorne told him.

  I could see all sorts of things going through Marc’s head as he digested the news. ‘Well, I’ll be …! You’re not serious?’

  ‘Are you saying he’s been murdered?’ Kathryn cut in. She was sitting next to her employer and out of the two of them she seemed the more relaxed. Perhaps she had got out of bed earlier, but she looked showered and refreshed, her hair neatly combed, dressed in a tracksuit, her eyes quite calm behind the oversized glasses.

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’

  ‘Well, I’ll go to the foot of the stairs!’ Now that he’d been given a bit of time to consider what had happened, Marc Bellamy couldn’t hide a smirk. ‘How did they do it?’

  ‘He was stabbed.’

  ‘Serves the bugger right. I shouldn’t say it. But he was a nasty piece of work … all that sneering and sniping. No-one’s going to miss him now that he’s gone.’

  Kathryn looked at him in surprise – not because of what he had said but because he had said it at all. ‘Why are we here?’ she asked. ‘You can’t think I had anything to do with this. I never even met him until I came here.’ Another thought occurred to her. ‘And if you don’t mind my asking, what exactly has it got to do with you anyway? You’re just here as part of the festival, the same as us.’

  ‘You don’t need to talk to me if you don’t want to, Ms Harris,’ Hawthorne replied, gently menacing. ‘I’m just trying to work out where everyone was and at what time and it seems to me that you and Mr Bellamy here are best placed to tell me that. You were looking after the guests. It was part of your job to keep an eye on them.’

  ‘I don’t mind talking to you,’ Marc exclaimed. ‘I haven’t got anything to hide. I was working all evening. I was mainly in the kitchen. Left about ten fifteen.’ He stared. ‘Don’t tell me it was a kitchen knife! He had a nice set of Sabatier. Did someone shove one of those into his neck?’

  ‘Who said anything about his neck?’ Hawthorne said.

  Marc faltered. ‘Just a figure of speech.’

  Hawthorne turned his attention to the assistant. ‘How long have you worked for Mr Bellamy?’ he asked.

  ‘Kathryn only joined me six months ago.’ Marc had decided to answer for her. ‘My last assistant – Jo – went on to Saturday Kitchen.’ His little eyes brightened. ‘She was poached!’ It was a joke he had made many times before but this time it fell flat and he knew it. ‘I was about to advertise but Jo recommended Kathryn. I interviewed her an
d we got on like the proverbial burning bungalow, so I hired her on the spot.’

  ‘I spent two years working for a party planner when I came out of uni,’ Kathryn explained. ‘Jo and I were roomies and I was always jealous of her. I thought Marc’s recipes were the best. When she told me she was leaving, I asked her to put in a word for me and she did.’

  Hawthorne glanced across at Bellamy. ‘You were at school with Charles le Mesurier.’

  ‘Westland College. Yes. That’s right.’

  ‘How did you get on?’

  Marc might have been reticent while le Mesurier was alive, but he wasn’t afraid now and he let loose. ‘We didn’t bloody get on. Nobody did. He was a bully and an arsehole and everybody hated him. I spent my whole time there avoiding him.’

  ‘He said that you left the school early.’

  ‘I did and he was part of the reason.’ It wasn’t particularly warm in the kitchen, but he was sweating. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. ‘I was born and brought up in Halifax. But my dad was in the navy and he got a posting to the south coast. That’s how I ended up in a bloody boarding school. I didn’t like it there from day one. I was never happy.’

  ‘Why did he call you Tea Leaf?’

  ‘Because I drank a lot of tea! Why do you think? We all had stupid names for each other. We used to call him Flash after the character in those books. Flashman. He hadn’t changed much, growing up, I can tell you that!’

  ‘Did he bully you?’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Marc Bellamy sneered. ‘What are you trying to say, Mr Hawthorne? That I stuck a knife in him because he bullied me at school? No. I just told you. I avoided him like the bubonic and he never came near me.’

  ‘So why did you agree to come to Alderney? You must have known he’d be here.’

  ‘I had no idea.’ Marc folded the handkerchief away. He scowled at his assistant. ‘That was her fault.’

  ‘Actually, that’s not really fair,’ Kathryn said. ‘I told Marc about the invitation and it seemed like a good idea because we weren’t filming and the festival was happening just after his new book came out. I didn’t know anything about Charles le Mesurier and by the time I found out it was too late.’

  ‘I saw his name as the sponsor in the festival programme,’ Marc growled.

  That had been on the Friday evening. I remembered Marc shouting at Kathryn in the room next to mine.

  ‘Did you talk to him last night?’ Hawthorne asked.

  ‘I could hardly avoid him, could I?’ Marc replied. ‘I was in his bloody house. But I wasn’t going to be intimidated by him. I did my job and I left. Sold quite a few books too, for what it’s worth, so the whole thing wasn’t a complete waste of time.’

  ‘Did you notice him go into the garden?’

  ‘No. I can’t say I did. I noticed he wasn’t there at ten o’clock, which was when we stopped serving food. I looked round for him to say goodbye and sod off, but there was no sign of him.’

  ‘Did you see any of the guests go outside?’

  Marc thought back. ‘Only the blind woman. She went out onto the patio quite a few times. Puffing away on a pack of fags. Her husband took her out the first time – that was quite early on – but after that I suppose she was able to find her way on her own.’

  ‘What about Maïssa?’ Kathryn said.

  ‘Who? Oh, you mean the black lady.’ Marc made a little face, as if correcting himself for his casual racism. He pointed towards the corner of the kitchen where another door that I hadn’t noticed before led outside. ‘Yes. She went out that way. But that was much earlier … about half past seven.’

  ‘Did she go down to the Snuggery?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Kathryn and I were just taking out the s and k’s.’

  ‘Steak and kidney puddings,’ Kathryn said.

  ‘The secret is to catch the little bastards at exactly the right moment. If you leave them in too long the suet goes soggy.’

  Hawthorne got up and went over to the door. He looked out into the garden, judging the different angles. It was just possible to see the Snuggery from here, but I imagined that Elizabeth Lovell, sitting on the other side of the house, would have been invisible. He tried the handle and was surprised when the door opened.

  ‘You didn’t lock this when you left?’ he asked.

  Marc Bellamy shook his head. ‘I’d told Kathryn to mind the fort from ten o’clock, when we stopped serving. It was her job to clean up and check that the place was secure.’

  Kathryn scowled, but she didn’t argue with her employer. ‘I assumed Mr le Mesurier would lock up before he went to bed,’ she explained.

  Hawthorne closed the door, then opened it again. There was something wrong. He took out a pen and inserted it into the strike plate, the rectangular opening into which the latch bolt should have slid. There was something blocking it – a little ball of newspaper. He let it fall into his hand, examined it, then showed it to me. The writing was in French. He folded it carefully and slipped it into his pocket.

  He sat back at the table. ‘How did you get home?’ he asked.

  ‘The history bloke gave me a lift in his VW. I left Kathryn with the washing-up, sorry to say. But that’s the job.’

  ‘Can you remember seeing any of the other guests on their way out?’

  ‘Not really. No.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t really help you either,’ Kathryn said. ‘I was in the kitchen until a quarter to eleven, give or take. I heard the band packing up their things and I cadged a lift with them back to the hotel. They had a van.’ She suddenly remembered. ‘I did see the children’s writer leave, if that’s any use. Mrs Cleary. That was a few minutes before half past nine.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘I met her as she was going out of the front door. She was in a bit of a hurry and she asked me the time. She said she had to get back to the hotel for a call.’

  There was a pause while Hawthorne took all of this in. ‘I wonder if I could have a word with you on your own, Ms Harris?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course. But please call me Kathryn.’

  ‘Don’t you want me any more?’ Marc Bellamy was offended. He was too used to being the star of the show.

  ‘Not for the moment, thanks, Mr Bellamy.’

  ‘All right. But you be careful. Anything that girl says about me is not true, unless she’s being nice about me, in which case it’s an understatement!’

  It was his last hurrah. He got up and left.

  As soon as he was gone, Hawthorne began again. ‘Do you understand why I want to have this conversation with you in private, Kathryn?’

  She looked him straight in the eye. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Well, it’s fairly clear that Charles le Mesurier was taking an interest in you.’

  She blushed. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘What I mean is that he fancied you. I saw it for myself when we were at the opening-night drinks. It didn’t take him long to start pawing at you. And according to my mate Tony here, the same thing happened again last night – the two of you in the kitchen with his tongue halfway down your ear.’

  ‘That’s not quite how I described it,’ I muttered.

  ‘What exactly did he say to you?’ Hawthorne demanded.

  He was being deliberately hard on her. I had seen him do it before when he was interrogating someone. If Hawthorne thought you were standing in his way, he would knock your feet from under you. That was his technique.

  Kathryn was angry now. ‘Why should I tell you?’ she demanded. ‘What he said has got nothing to do with you.’

  ‘This is a murder investigation. It’s got everything to do with me.’

  She stared at him defiantly. ‘If you tell Marc Bellamy, I’ll lose my job.’

  ‘I’m not telling anyone, Kathryn, but I need to know.’

  She paused, then said in a low voice: ‘He asked me to go with him to the gunnery at the bottom of the garden. He called it his “snuggery”, which ju
st made me feel sick. He wanted me to—’ She broke off. ‘He suggested something really obscene.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  Before she answered, she removed her glasses and wiped them with a serviette. By the time she had put them on again, she was back in control. ‘I don’t know what you think of me, Mr Hawthorne, but I already told you I’ve worked in the hospitality industry and I’ve met enough middle-aged men who’ve had too much to drink and think I can be served up like a canapé. I told Charles le Mesurier to get lost and I didn’t see him again. I’ll tell you this, though. I think Marc may have had a point. If somebody’s killed him, they’ve probably made the world a slightly better place.’ She smiled briefly. ‘Anything else?’

  But before Hawthorne could answer, Colin Matheson appeared in the doorway. He was looking pleased.

  ‘Mr Hawthorne,’ he said, ‘I thought you should know. The police have arrived.’

  10

  Bad Blood

  Two police officers were in the hallway. They had not come alone. A group of men and women were passing through the house carrying metal cases, cameras and other equipment. A couple of them were dressed in those white overalls you see on TV programmes. There were more of them in the garden. I could see a spool of police tape fluttering in front of the Snuggery.

  ‘Mr Hawthorne, I believe! What a great pleasure to meet you and how fortunate for us that you were here!’

  I had shadowed Hawthorne on two investigations and it would be fair to say that the regular police had not taken kindly to him on either occasion, resenting his interference as much as they needed his expertise. However, this time I was pleasantly surprised. The man who had spoken was very tall, with a crumpled appearance, pockmarked cheeks and fair hair hanging down in strands. He was dressed in plain clothes – a jacket and tie. But the most remarkable thing about him was that he was positively beaming. His blue eyes had lit up at his first sighting of Hawthorne.

  ‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ he went on. ‘Deputy Chief Jonathan Torode. This is Special Constable Jane Whitlock.’