A Line to Kill

The Mozart had been playing throughout all this. It was his Requiem Mass. Had Abbott been playing it for Helen le Mesurier? He came to a decision and stepped back, allowing the hall light to reach past him. ‘All right. Come in, you bastard, and ask your questions. But I don’t want to be in any fucking book, so you can forget that for a lark.’ He turned his eyes, behind the steel frames of his glasses, on me. ‘I read about myself, I’ll sue you to hell. Do you understand?’

I nodded but said nothing.

He stepped back and went into a hallway dominated by a central hexagonal table. A large room led off to one side. Looking through the open door, I saw drawn curtains, a luxurious suite of furniture – three armchairs and a sofa – hundreds of books, a massive TV screen mounted on the wall, stand-alone speakers, a desk with a computer and printer, a stack of DVDs, piles of magazines. We didn’t go in. He led us the other way into a kitchen that was similarly over-equipped, with multiple ovens, sinks and saucepans and dozens of storage cupboards. In neither room did I notice any photographs of family or friends. Nor were there any ornaments, souvenirs, curiosities. It was the house of a man who lived entirely alone.

We sat facing him across a pine table with the walking stick lying on the surface. He did not offer us coffee or tea.

‘So this is where you ended up,’ Hawthorne said. There was no malice in his voice. He sounded politely interested.

‘This is where you put me.’

‘It looks quite cosy to me. I’d have put you somewhere very different.’

‘What is it with you, Hawthorne? What did I ever do to you?’ To my surprise, Abbott suddenly turned to me. ‘I went to your session.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I saw you.’

‘What did he tell you about me?’

‘He didn’t tell me anything.’ That happened to be true … at least, until we’d arrived in Alderney. I’d found out about Abbott from another detective, a man called Meadows, and he hadn’t actually known very much. For example, he’d only described Abbott as a former teacher without saying anything about his business interests in advertising and media.

‘He doesn’t know anything about me. He never did.’ Abbott leaned forward. ‘I never laid a finger on any kid, not in my entire life. I was a businessman. That’s all. And you might not have liked some of the stuff that I was producing, but it was all one hundred per cent legal. The simple truth is that the police picked on me. They decided to bring me down and once they’d made that decision there was nothing I could do to stop them.’

It was funny. Five seconds ago, Abbott had been snarling at me not to write about him but now he was giving me his entire life story. Speaking in a low voice, fixing me with his malevolent gaze … he let it all pour out.

‘All that stuff the police said about me, it was lies, every word of it. Yes, I travelled in Thailand and Cambodia and the Philippines. That was where the factories were. The printing presses. But when you’re making money, you make enemies. Anyone will tell you that. People made up stuff about me and the police swallowed it hook, line and sinker because they wanted to – even though they were never able to prove a single word of it. Two years they investigated me. Oh, yes – and they had their trips to Bangkok and Siem Reap too. They enjoyed those! Do you know how many thousands of pounds of tax payers’ money they spent pursuing me? They got nothing! So that’s why they planted the evidence against me. They put that stuff on my computer to justify their own incompetence and corruption. Do I look stupid to you? Do I look like the sort of person who’d keep kiddie porn on his hard drive? Of course not! They were wrong to start the investigation and they knew it, and they brought me down because if they hadn’t it would have been their own jobs on the line.’

He went on like this for some time and I could write down a whole lot more of it. But after a while I found myself losing focus and I might as well have been listening to the drone of a mosquito. What did I think of Derek Abbott? The truth is that I understood why Hawthorne had been reluctant to let me come into the house and part of me wished I had taken his advice. Don’t let him get under your skin. That was what he had said – and it was exactly what Abbott had done. I won’t say that he was evil, but he was, undoubtedly, one of the most unpleasant people I had ever met and the more he talked, the more I believed the version of events that Hawthorne had described when we stood below The Lookout on the edge of Saye Beach.

Hawthorne himself was still sitting at the table, his face utterly blank as Abbott continued his monologue.