A Line to Kill

She hesitated, but not for very long. ‘We will pay the account in a minute,’ she told the receptionist and I noticed an immediate improvement in her English. ‘Where do you want to talk?’ she asked.

‘The lounge.’

It was half past six and a few guests had already trickled into the dining room. The four of us made our way to a table in the far corner of the room next door. With everything that had happened – the disappearance of Helen le Mesurier, the discovery of the body, the visit to Derek Abbott – I hadn’t had a chance to tell Hawthorne what I had discovered. ‘She’s not a performance poet!’ I blurted out as we sat down.

Hawthorne looked at me a little sadly. ‘I know that, mate.’

Even Maïssa looked unimpressed. ‘So how do you know about me?’ she asked, addressing Hawthorne.

‘It was pretty easy, to be honest with you, love. At the airport you said you’d just given a performance at the Red Lion theatre in Camden. There’s an Old Red Lion theatre, but it’s in Islington. So then I looked you up on Wikipedia.’

‘I looked at her entry too!’ I said. ‘It didn’t tell me anything.’

‘Well, it told me a lot. For a start, most of it’s rubbish. If you cross-reference, I think you’ll find most of it’s been nicked from another poet, Linda Maria Baros, including her date of birth and the titles of her poems … although they’ve made a few changes. She didn’t win any of those prizes. It took me about five seconds to check and they went to Hubert Mingarelli, Yves Namur and Jean Orizet. Good luck to them! But the biggest mistake was also the most obvious.’

‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘She’s only translated into German, Italian and Spanish, so why would she even have a Wikipedia entry in English? It doesn’t make any sense unless it was deliberately put there for anyone at the Alderney Festival who happened to look her up.’

‘So who is she?’ I asked.

‘Well, since she’s somehow got permission to shove off while the rest of us are stuck here, and since there are no scheduled flights at this time of night, she must be working with the French authorities. I’d say she’s from OLAF.’ Hawthorne glanced at her. ‘Is that right?’

Dr Queripel had told us about OLAF, the European anti-fraud office. He’d said he had written to them.

Maïssa nodded.

‘And while we’re all sharing confidences, why don’t you tell us your real name?’

‘Maïssa Lamar is my actual name. This is my colleague, Emil Odoli.’ She was referring to the fair-haired man who had taken a seat, sullenly, next to her.

‘You’ve been sent here to look into the power line. I mean, the idea of going undercover with a bunch of second-class writers at a festival nobody’s ever heard of sounds pretty lunatic to me – but then I suppose you are French …’

‘Thanks, Hawthorne,’ I growled.

A waitress came over to see if we wanted anything, but Hawthorne waved her away.

‘All right,’ Maïssa began. It was strange how everything she said, and the way that she said it, was completely at odds with her appearance. I wondered if the haircut and the piercings had been imposed on her as part of her disguise. Surely she didn’t always look like that? ‘You are absolutely correct. Emil and I are investigators with OLAF, working with the Hercule Programme. This programme is designed to combat embezzlement and misconduct in public procurement, among many other things.’ She paused. ‘What I am about to tell you is, of course, confidential.’

Hawthorne was losing his patience. ‘Come on, please. I think we’re a bit past that now.’

‘Very well.’ She took a breath. ‘So … six months ago we received information which related to the activities of a company called Électricité du Nord, which is based in Rennes and is involved with the construction of the Normandy-Alderney-Britain power line, or NAB, as it is called here. The information suggested that they were making large payments to a person on the island who, in return, had promised to use his influence to make sure that the States gave their support to the project.’

‘You’re talking about Charles le Mesurier,’ I said.

‘Exactly. He received several cash payments in his capacity as adviser to the company, but we believe that a much larger sum of money was concealed in the purchase of a land parcelle that he owned, which would be used as the site for the converter station. Électricité du Nord agreed to pay five times the actual value of the land once the permission had been granted, and that was how he would make his profit.’

‘But you had no proof,’ Hawthorne said.

‘That is right, Mr Hawthorne. Everything I have told you so far was based on anonymous avertissements. How do you say that?’

‘Tip-offs,’ her partner volunteered.

‘Thank you, Emil. Yes. Tip-offs and speculation. We had no actual evidence. We looked. We went deep. But it was not there.