Whitlock was standing behind him, holding a hat that she was twisting out of shape. She was quite a bit shorter than him and older too, dressed in a dark blue uniform with a knee-length skirt and dark stockings that did her no favours. Her hair was dark brown and limp, falling over a square forehead and sullen eyes. The two of them could have been a nephew and aunt, visiting Alderney for a day trip and recovering from a particularly rough crossing.
‘It’s a nasty business. Very nasty. We’ve just been over to the building at the bottom of the garden. What is it? An old battery? I have to say, I’ve never seen anything like it. You know, there’s never been a murder on Alderney and we don’t have any experience of it in Guernsey either. I’ve been in the force for twenty-six years and the only dead body I’ve ever seen was some chap who fell off a ladder and broke his neck. Anyway, this is a completely different kettle of fish. John Le Mesurier. Was that his name?’
‘Charles, I think.’
‘Yes. That’s right. I’m getting him confused with the actor. I understand he was wealthy.’
‘So I hear.’
Torode looked at Hawthorne curiously for a moment, then broke into laughter. ‘Ha ha! Yes! Keeping your cards close to your chest. I can understand that. Look, why don’t we go into the kitchen and have a chat?’ He noticed me for the first time. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m working with him,’ I said.
‘Good. Good. Whitlock, would you mind making us some tea? And while you’re at it, maybe you can take a peek at what’s in the fridge. I got up too early for breakfast this morning and of course there was nothing on the plane.’
I was surprised he could treat his deputy so haughtily, but Whitlock was evidently used to it. She grimaced and went into the kitchen ahead of us. We followed, taking our places at the table.
‘Now, look, I’m going to come straight to the point,’ Torode began. ‘Quite frankly, I could use any help I can get with this one. I’ve been over to the crime scene and I can tell you, I don’t like the look of it. Tied to a chair with parcel tape and one hand left free. What the hell’s that all about?’
Hawthorne didn’t reply.
‘All right. It’s clear that we need to come to an arrangement, you and I. You work as a consultant now. Is that the right job description?’
‘It’ll do,’ Hawthorne said.
‘Well, I know your reputation. I made a few phone calls before I came over and I can say, hand on heart, that it would be wonderful to have you on board. I’d be the first to admit that you’ve got much more chance of solving this than me, but I’m sure we’d both agree that’s irrelevant anyway. The most important thing is to catch the bastard who did it and make sure he’s put away.’
‘There are a lot of small-size steak and kidney puddings, sir.’ Whitlock was peering into the fridge. ‘There are also some sausages on sticks.’
‘Chuck some of them into the microwave. And where’s the tea?’
‘On its way …’
Torode rested his elbows on the table and clasped his hands in front of him. ‘So here’s what I’m proposing. I’ll run the police investigation. I’ll do it by the book – interviews, fingerprints, CCTV and all the rest of it. At the same time, you can mount a second investigation, in parallel. You can talk to whoever you like, go wherever you want. I’ll give you complete carte blanche. You’re going to be stuck on Alderney for the foreseeable future anyway, as obviously we can’t let anyone leave. But this way you won’t be wasting your time.’
‘Are you going to pay me?’
‘I have to be honest with you, Hawthorne. We may run into a little difficulty there budget-wise. I’ll be happy to put in a word with the Committee for Home Affairs, but I can tell you now they’re not going to like it, and they control the purse strings. It’s against the rules. Or rather, there aren’t any rules regarding the use of freelancers, as far as I know. But I’m reasonably confident that we’ll be able to work something out … some sort of special contract. How does that sound?’
Hawthorne shrugged. He didn’t really have any choice.
‘How’s that tea coming, Jane?’
‘It’ll just be a minute, sir.’ Whitlock was rummaging through the cupboards. It was hardly a testament to her investigative skills that so far she had been unable to find a tea bag.
‘Well, if you’re in agreement, I’ll get Jane to liaise with you and any information we manage to muster, we’ll pass on to you. Where are you staying?’
‘The Braye Beach.’
‘Nice place! I looked it up on the internet but unfortunately they’re full. We’re staying up the road. Actually, that’s for the best because I don’t think it would be a good idea for us to be seen together. Official and unofficial … let’s not get the lines crossed. What do you say?’
‘It’s all right with me.’
‘Good. Good. Good. Is there anything you need straight off?’ He took out a pen and a leather notebook.
‘Anything you can get me on le Mesurier would be useful,’ Hawthorne said. ‘A full profile of his life and business activities. Any criminal record, of course. Plus a list of all his appearances on Dad’s Army.’
Torode had been writing this all down but now he stopped, his pen hovering. He laughed briefly. ‘That’s funny. Yes. I saw what you did there.’
‘It might also be useful to know what happens to his money now that he’s dead,’ Hawthorne went on.
‘We might have to wait until Monday for that, but once I’ve got the information I’ll get Whitlock to bring it over. Anything else?’
‘That’ll do for the moment.’
There was a ping and Whitlock opened the microwave. Steam from half a dozen miniature steak and kidney puddings came wafting out.
Torode closed his notebook. ‘Just a couple of things before I let you get on your way,’ he said. ‘I hope you won’t mind me bringing them up.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Thank you.’ He slipped the notebook away. ‘The first thing is that I’ve been made aware that Charles le Mesurier has a financial adviser by the name of Derek Abbott.’ He paused. ‘That wouldn’t be the same Derek Abbott that you pushed down the stairs, would it?’
Hawthorne’s face was stony. ‘I didn’t push him. He fell.’
‘Well, from what I’m told, there was quite a bit of bad blood between you.’ Perhaps there was more to Jonathan Torode than I had thought. It seemed to me that he was suddenly harder and more dangerous. ‘I think it might be best if you kept away from him. We wouldn’t want there to be any more misunderstandings, would we?’
‘I thought you said I had carte blanche.’
‘Leave Abbott to me. I’ll make sure you get a complete transcript of any interview I conduct.’
‘And the other thing?’
‘Well, I’m sure it goes without saying. But if you do happen to crack the case, and I have every confidence that you will, you will make sure that I’m the first to know, won’t you? I wouldn’t dream of taking credit for anything you do, but there is the reputation of the States of Guernsey Police Service to consider. I’m sure you understand.’
‘Completely.’
‘Excellent. In which case – ah, thank you, Whitlock! Here’s my tea, at last. I’ll wish you a good day!’
It was a dismissal, delivered with a genial smile, but a dismissal nonetheless.
The two of us walked out of the front door to where Terry, the young taxi driver who had brought us here, was still waiting. Hawthorne exchanged a few words with him and we both got into the car. I thought we would be heading back to the hotel, but after we had joined the main road, we travelled just a short distance before we stopped again.
‘You can follow the path down from here,’ Terry told us.
‘We’ll be about twenty minutes,’ Hawthorne said.
‘Can I come?’
‘No. Wait for us here.’ We got out of the car and began to make our way down. ‘I’ve hired him,’ Hawthorne told me. It took me a moment
to realise he was talking about Terry. ‘He’s going to drive us the whole time we’re on the island.’
‘That’s a good idea.’
‘I said you’d pay.’
‘Oh.’
We had arrived at a crescent-shaped beach – more shingle than sand – and I wondered what Hawthorne had in mind. We turned left and walked back the way we had come. Looking up, I saw the top half of the Snuggery looming above the edge of the cliff – except that it wasn’t really a cliff at all, more a rocky wall that rose up about ten or fifteen metres with a well-defined walkway zigzagging towards the top. I rather doubted that the path dated back to the war. Why would the Germans have made it easy for Allied forces to climb up to their defences? Charles le Mesurier must have constructed it himself so that when he had finished whatever he did in the Snuggery, he could come down here for a swim.
‘Could someone have got in this way and killed him?’ I asked. I assumed this was the reason we had come down here.
‘It’s a possibility. Except that the door was bolted from inside … or at least it was when I looked this morning.’ Hawthorne glanced left and right and I found myself thinking of the trip we had made to Deal in Kent together, the last time we had stood beside the sea. ‘If someone went up to the house from here, they’d have to have had someone at the party to let them in.’
‘What time was le Mesurier killed?’ I asked.
‘The police will tell us that. But we can assume that he went to the Snuggery sometime between ten past nine, which is when he talked to his wife, and ten o’clock, when Marc Bellamy noticed he was missing.’
Hawthorne had been examining the ground. Suddenly, he stopped and pointed. He had found a footprint in a patch of sand just at the foot of the path leading up to the Snuggery. I couldn’t say for sure, but the perfect curve of the toecap looked remarkably similar to the bloody footprint we had found near the body.
‘You’re right, Hawthorne!’ I exclaimed. ‘I don’t know how you do it. But it’s perfectly clear.’ I looked up at the Snuggery. ‘Someone unlocked the door. They had an accomplice who climbed up from the beach. The two of them hit le Mesurier on the head and forced him into the chair. And after they’d killed him, they separated and each went their own way.’
‘It could have happened like that.’ Why did Hawthorne have to sound so unsure when it was perfectly obvious to me? ‘But there’s a problem.’
‘What problem?’
‘Well, for the whole thing to work the way you just described – one inside, one outside – they’d have to know that le Mesurier was planning to visit the Snuggery and at what time.’
‘They could have texted from the house.’
Hawthorne took out his phone and looked at it. ‘No signal.’
I did the same and sighed. ‘Mine too.’
‘Your set-up only works if the accomplice is already there and waiting before le Mesurier arrives – maybe hidden behind one of those curtains. Le Mesurier comes in with someone and that’s when the two of them incapacitate him and force him into the chair. They tie him up – we still don’t know why – and then they kill him.’
‘Suppose they unlocked the door earlier? Someone could have climbed up from the beach and hidden behind the curtains. They could have been inside the Snuggery all evening.’
‘They’d still have to be sure that le Mesurier would go in there. And on his own …’
Hawthorne was still holding his mobile phone. He took a photograph of the footprint.
‘Are you going to tell Torode about this?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure he’ll find it for himself, but I’ll send him a picture if you think it will make him happy.’
He slipped the phone back into his pocket and was about to leave, but I stopped him. ‘Hawthorne,’ I said. ‘There’s something you’ve got to tell me.’
‘What’s that, mate?’
‘Why are you here? Why did you agree to come to Alderney? And don’t tell me it was anything to do with our book. This is about Derek Abbott, isn’t it? I know you don’t want to talk about it, but you’ve got to tell me. You knew from the start that he was living here. When we were invited that day in London, I guessed you were up to something. I don’t want to have an argument with you, but you can’t keep me in the dark, especially if I’m going to end up writing about all this. So what’s going on?’
Hawthorne took his time before replying. We were standing on the very edge of the beach, with the rocks behind us and nobody else in sight. It was still early and the great stretch of sand looked wild and unwelcoming. With the wind tugging at the seaweed and the steel-coloured waves rolling in relentlessly, this was not a beach for deckchairs and pedalos. A seagull hovered overhead. The sun was behind the clouds.
‘I will tell you about Abbott,’ he said. ‘But only if you never ask me again. All right? It makes me sick even to talk about him.’
‘He was a paedophile.’
Hawthorne nodded slowly. There was a terrible bleakness in his eyes. ‘He was more than that,’ he began. ‘Mr Derek bloody Abbott. He wasn’t some barrow boy selling dirty DVDs off the back of a lorry. And he wasn’t weird and bearded, downloading stuff off the net and sharing it with his friends. He was a businessman. He was respectable.’
Hawthorne made that last word sound the exact opposite.
‘He started out as a teacher, but when that didn’t work for him he moved into classified advertising and by the end of his twenties he was advertising manager for a big group of leisure magazines. Sailing, horse-riding and – as it happened – naturism. From there it was a small step to founding his own company, Free for All. Their first big success was a listings magazine given away outside tube stations. He was ahead of his time. I’ll say that for him.
‘Listings didn’t pay, so he moved into lifestyle and celebrity and from there it wasn’t such a huge step into porn. This was the early nineties, Tony. We hadn’t quite arrived at the day when you could get it all at the touch of a computer keyboard, so Abbott’s girlies often came folded in the middle with staples running down their chest. And it was all legal. Bored Housewives. Ladies of Leisure. My Secret Fantasies. The sort of stuff you’d find on the top shelf of any corner newsagent.
‘But Abbott moved with the times. Come the millennium, he had his own satellite TV station: the Adult Channel. At the same time, all his publications had moved online, of course. And in the middle of it all, inside this great spider’s web of filth, there was one website that was only available to a very select group of subscribers. The title didn’t give very much away either, even though it described exactly what it was offering. It was called Asia Minor.’
‘Child pornography.’
‘Kids from Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, mainly. And it was in a different league to the rest of his stuff. He’d be looking at a twenty-year sentence for supplying and distributing hard-core pornography with young children. So here’s the question you might like to ask yourself. Why would a man who was making millions out of legal porn, as well as all his other business interests, want to risk the whole thing on a single website that hardly even paid for itself? By the time it was closed down, it only had a few hundred subscribers, dirty old men paying twenty quid a month. Why was he doing it? That’s what the Paedophile and Child Pornography Unit who were running the investigation wanted to know, and in the end they found out. Derek Abbott, the CEO of Free for All, was getting access to the models. That was his little perk. Some of those kids were eleven and twelve years old, and Asia Minor was giving him a constant, fresh supply.’
He took out a cigarette and lit it with cupped hands.
‘When Derek Abbott was arrested in London, he didn’t care. I still remember the day he came in, sitting there with this look on his face like he was the lord of the manor who’d accidentally wandered into the servants’ quarters. The police weren’t going to get anywhere near him, not in a hundred years! He knew from the start that he’d set up his business in a way that made him untou
chable and he’d brought in a team of lawyers who didn’t care who he was or what he’d done so long as they got their retainers. He’d pay his way out of trouble no matter how much it cost – and that’s exactly what happened. No-one could connect him to Asia Minor. His own staff had been paid off or intimidated. None of the witnesses, the kids he’d abused, came forward. He’d cocked his nose at us from the very start and he was right.’
‘But he went to prison.’
‘Yeah. In the end, he made one mistake – a bit like Al Capone and his tax returns. It would almost be funny except that it wasn’t. You see, he had to keep souvenirs. He couldn’t resist it. He was a subscriber to his own channel and the vice team managed to crack into a private account on one of his computers and they found a cache of about five hundred images. They arrested him a second time and brought him in for further questioning, and that was when he had his accident on the stairs. And it was an accident, Tony.’ Hawthorne jabbed a finger in my direction. ‘Never say otherwise.’
‘How many years did he spend in prison?’ I asked.
Hawthorne looked at me bleakly. ‘Not even one,’ he said. ‘That’s the law. If he’d been done for the manufacture or distribution of child pornography – I told you – that could have meant twenty years, which is what the bastard deserved. Unfortunately, all they could get him for was possession, which carries a maximum two-year sentence.’ He paused. ‘Because of his injuries, which put him in hospital, and the fact that his lawyers made a formal complaint about his treatment in custody, the judge did him a favour. He was given six months, which destroyed him and brought down every single one of his businesses – but it still wasn’t enough.’ Hawthorne rolled the cigarette between his thumb and finger. The smoke twisted away in the wind. ‘Not nearly enough.’
I thought for a moment before I spoke.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can understand your frustration. But I still don’t see what you hoped to gain by coming here.’
‘I didn’t plan to come here until we were invited,’ Hawthorne reminded me. ‘But … all right. I was interested to see what had happened to him.’
A Line to Kill Page 12