A Line to Kill

However, he had also told me that he had a dozen suspects in mind. I wrote the name Helen le Mesurier in the middle of the page and drew a circle around it. I saw her sitting in her bedroom, crying her eyes out, surrounded by balled-up tissues. Had it all been an elaborate act?

Certainly, she had a motive – the most obvious in the world. Her husband’s death gave her money and freedom. She had said she still loved him, but she was romantically involved with a French land surveyor and maybe she had decided it was time for a change. I had seen her leave the party at about ten past nine, on her way to the bedroom, but I hadn’t actually seen her go upstairs. I only had her word for it that she was in bed when Charles le Mesurier was killed, and she had definitely seemed defensive and even nervous when Hawthorne had questioned her about what she had seen out of the bedroom window.

Henry Queripel. Susan Queripel. George and Georgina Elkin. They all had the same motive: the power line. More than that, they were actively working together to prevent NAB from being constructed and all of them believed that without le Mesurier there to guide it, it might not go ahead. If he disliked le Mesurier so much, why had George Elkin even gone to the party? He had vehemently denied entering the Snuggery, but he could easily have slipped across the garden and unbolted the door at the back to allow one of the others to climb up from the beach. The three-handed bridge game was very convenient. It drew them all in together and gave each of them an alibi.

Colin Matheson. I added his name to the list and stared at it on the page. The barrister and States member was also implicated with NAB but in a different way. Everyone believed that Charles le Mesurier had some sort of hold over him and that Colin was acting against his conscience by supporting the line. Could le Mesurier have been blackmailing him? Suppose that was the case and Colin had finally decided that he’d had enough. But then again, why that business with the parcel tape and the single free hand? What would have been the point of that?

From everything that I had been told, Colin Matheson was very much under the control of his wife. George Elkin had said that it went further, that he depended on her for his very livelihood. Was she a possible suspect? It was certainly true that of the two of them, she was far more likely to have had the guts to commit a murder. When Hawthorne and I had arrived at The Lookout after the body had been discovered, she hadn’t been shocked or upset. She had been angry. Could it be that she knew her husband had committed the crime? Could they have done it together?

That was eight names so far … if I included Anne Cleary. To reach the full dozen, I would have to fold in some of the other guests who had been invited to the Alderney Literary Festival and I knew at once which name I had to add to the list.

Kathryn Harris.

I had seen Charles le Mesurier trying to impose himself on her not once but twice. And although she had tried to pretend otherwise, she had been seriously upset when I spoke to her in the kitchen on the night of the party. As its name implied, the Snuggery had been used by le Mesurier as his own den of vice, and his behaviour – tiptoeing there in the darkness, the cocaine use – suggested a sexual assignation. Suppose Kathryn had pretended to accept his offer and had tied him down as some sort of bondage thing? That made sense. She could have killed him and then taken the watch: it would be a year’s salary for her. It was true that she looked too ordinary, too vulnerable to be a psychopathic killer, but then, from what I’d read, most psychopathic killers are just like that. It’s why they’re so hard to catch.

Marc Bellamy.

Her boss struck me, frankly, as too much of a buffoon to be a murderer, but then everything about him – his clothes, his catchphrases – was a construct, a television persona. Who could say what it might conceal? He and Charles le Mesurier had gone to the same school – Westland College – at the same time and he hadn’t enjoyed it. If there was one thing that my own experience had taught me it was that the private-education system could create grievances that would stay with you for a lifetime. Good old Flash had been taunting Tea Leaf from the moment the two of them had set eyes on each other at The Divers Inn. Who could say that le Mesurier hadn’t accidentally triggered some childhood psychosis, with lethal results?

I would have dismissed Elizabeth Lovell immediately, but my long experience in the world of murder mystery – what I had written and what I had read – had taught me that the killer was often the most unlikely suspect, which actually propelled her, along with Anne Cleary, to the top of the list. There was no love lost between the two of them, but for the moment they shared a page.