A Line to Kill

Could Anne Cleary have murdered Charles le Mesurier? I wondered. She had left the party a full forty-five minutes before he had been killed. Kathryn Harris had confirmed the time as nine twenty-five. It was always possible that she could have climbed onto the minibus, made her way along the aisle and jumped out the back, but I was sure the minibus only had one door and anyway, I couldn’t think of a single reason why she might have committed the crime. She had never met le Mesurier. She had no connection with Alderney. And she had just signed a major deal with Walt Disney, including a strict morality clause that, almost certainly, prohibited the act of murder. Anyway, could she really have crept in ahead of him, hit him with something and then dragged him onto a chair? Would she even have been strong enough to lift him?

Once I’d started thinking about it, I couldn’t stop. My room was too small to have a desk, so I propped up the pillows and sat on the bed with the notepad on my lap. I remembered what Hawthorne had said. You need to start with the chair.

All right.

Charles le Mesurier hadn’t just been murdered. He’d been tied down and either threatened or humiliated first. I had thought he might have been tortured, but if there had been any marks on him they would have shown up in the police medical report. Why had one hand been left free? According to Hawthorne, if I could work that out, everything else would make sense.

Someone had brought the parcel tape to the island, which indicated that the murder had been planned in advance. Le Mesurier had even been warned. That had to be the meaning of the ace of spades placed on his car. Leaving one hand free had been part of the plan, but what possible reason could there have been? Was it possible that somebody had forced him to write something – or maybe sign something – before they killed him? It could have been a cheque or a codicil to a will or a confession. I jotted all three down on a blank page and drew a box around them. That was a start.

Of course, there was a more obvious reason. Le Mesurier had been wearing a Rolex watch on his right wrist. His wife had valued it at over £20,000. Could someone have killed him simply for the watch? Or was it possible that someone unconnected with the crime had wandered into the Snuggery, found the dead body and cut one hand free to take it? That made sense – but then again, why wouldn’t they have left the cut piece of tape behind? We hadn’t found it on the floor and surely the police report would have mentioned traces of adhesive on his right wrist if they had been there.

I was sure I was missing something. I examined my own hand and thought about its different uses. Writing, obviously. Pointing. Getting a manicure. Playing the piano. Was palm reading a possibility? No. Ridiculous. Fingerprints? DNA? Could someone have taken his pulse to make sure he was dead? Unlikely.

I turned to a fresh page and tried to plot out a sequence of events that might make sense of all the clues that Hawthorne had found so far. For the moment, I set aside the two-euro piece. Hawthorne hadn’t shown any particular interest in it, perhaps because it was too random. It could have been dropped on the floor a week ago.

What about the footprints? It seemed to me that they told their own story. Someone had been on the beach and that person could have been Dr Henry Queripel, who had claimed he was hoping to catch sight of a black-winged kite. What size were his feet? He or she had climbed up to the Snuggery, knowing that the door had been left open for them by someone at the party. They had killed le Mesurier, but had accidentally stepped in his blood. After that, they had continued into the house and had gone up to the office, where they had left a further bloodstain on the back of le Mesurier’s mobile phone. But what had they done once they got there? What had they been looking for?

I’d arrived at a brick wall, so I decided to draw up a list of all the people who might have had a reason to kill le Mesurier, although, as Hawthorne had said, that could easily include half the island – anyone who opposed NAB. It was one of the peculiarities of being involved in a murder investigation. Why should I automatically assume that I had met the killer (or killers)? There had been over a hundred guests at The Lookout last night and not all of them had been connected with the festival. Worse still, I’d only spoken to about a dozen of them. It could have been someone whose name I didn’t know: the percussionist with The Channelers, for example, or one of the taxi drivers. This was the biggest risk I faced writing about Hawthorne. There was always a chance that I could write three hundred pages and only encounter the killer in the final paragraphs.