A Line to Kill (Hawthorne & Horowitz #3)

by Anthony Horowitz

I’m surrounded by silence but at the same time I’m drowning in words and it hardly ever leaves me, that sense of disconnection.

Everyone in the building, no matter what their level, loves books – which has to be a good start.

But perhaps I have never done justice to the way he could dominate a room from the moment he entered it. He had an extraordinary presence that could be saturnine, threatening or magnetic, depending on his mood.

My ears pricked up at that. The truth is that literary festivals are the best thing in a writer’s life. To start with, they get you out of the house, out of your room. You meet people: readers and writers. You get to visit beautiful cities like Oxford, Cambridge, Cheltenham, Bath. Better still, you might find yourself being whisked abroad – to Sydney, Sri Lanka, Dubai or Berlin. There’s even a literary festival on board Queen Mary 2.

‘It reads the same forwards and backwards.’ ‘Do geese see God?’ Hawthorne asked.

‘Dark hair, untidy, going grey. Jewish. Late fifties. Didn’t shave this morning. Short-sleeved shirt, linen trousers . . . crumpled. Doesn’t look too pleased to be here.’ This not entirely flattering portrait of me was rattled out at speed and without emotion by her husband. ‘Hope you don’t mind,’ he went on. ‘Liz likes to know who she’s talking to.’

He’d been complimentary enough, but every word he had spoken had carried its own little knife.

I was thinking that the ace of spades wasn’t necessarily something I would have associated with good luck. Quite the contrary: the card had been printed with a skull and crossbones inside the spade. I had seen it clearly. I like decks of playing cards. I have a lot of them. And I remembered that the double-sized black pip at the centre of the ace is often thought to resemble, even to have been inspired by, the spade used by an undertaker. The Americans deployed it as a weapon in the Vietnam War, dropping it on the bodies of the soldiers they killed in order to frighten the survivors.

In Iraq, the ace of spades was the card that identified and targeted Saddam Hussein. Charles le Mesurier thought it was lucky. I knew better. It was the death card.

Alderney is a lovely place. I had managed to rent a bicycle and spent the rest of the morning exploring the island, captivated by the sense of anachronism, the cobbled streets, the Jane Austen architecture, all the defences – the forts, the barracks, the German pillboxes, the batteries and the bunkers – that had been constructed with almost insane extravagance but never actually used.

I was still waiting to join in but at the same time I was fascinated. I had never heard Hawthorne talk so much – certainly not about himself. And it was true what he had just said. When you think about it, just about every murder mystery you read ends with the arrest. You never see the detective giving evidence. And once the killers have been drawn into the legal process, they become quite uninteresting. They disappear.

There really was something uniquely offensive about Charles le Mesurier, particularly after he’d had too much to drink. The alcohol accentuated his public-school accent, so that everything he said came out with a sneer. His good looks – the swathe of grey hair, the aristocratic nose – only made him seem all the more superior and self-assured. He wasn’t an easy man to like.

Without realising it, I’d had too much to drink. I wasn’t drunk, but I could feel the self-disgust that alcohol always inspires when it doesn’t make you happy. Ten

It was strange, really. I had come to Alderney in the hope that I would be introducing Hawthorne to my world: books, lectures and all the rest of it. But instead, I had once again been dragged into his.

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.

If you read Agatha Christie, you may have noticed that every single one of her killers manages to elicit a modicum of sympathy. You may not approve of what they’ve done, but you understand it.

He was still thumbing through the other messages on the phone. It’s interesting how we all carry around with us a complete record of our lives, where we’ve been, what we’ve been thinking at any given time. Writing the biography of people born in the twenty-first century will be incredibly easy because the researchers won’t have to do any work. It’ll all be there, spelled out in minute detail.

My grandfather planted that lawn and four generations have been looking after it, keeping it perfect – not just for our pleasure but for everyone who passes.’ ‘And George Elkin’s grandfather is buried at Longis Common, which is going to be dug up too,’ Hawthorne said, innocently. ‘Is that the sort of connection you mean?’

Abbott was staring at Hawthorne. All along he had been confident in his anger and his hostility, but right then I saw a look of puzzlement come into his eyes. Was it recognition? Or even fear? It was as if he had become aware of something that had always been there but which he had only just noticed.

was certain that I had just witnessed something that mattered but at the same time I knew I couldn’t ask Hawthorne what it was. This business between him and Abbott was too convoluted. It ran too deep.

I’d never heard of anyone being murdered to benefit a school library, but it still made me wonder who on the island might have known about the money.

‘Charles le Mesurier didn’t call you Tea Leaf because you drank lots of tea,’ Hawthorne interrupted. ‘Do you think I’m an idiot? It’s cockney rhyming slang. Tea leaf . . . thief.

‘I didn’t kill anyone!’ Marc rasped. ‘What sort of person do you think I am?’ ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’ Hawthorne paused. ‘Tell me about Westland College.’

There are victims in every murder story, and not just the ones who are killed.

I was quite gratified to find a hardback edition of Moriarty next to a complete collection of Sherlock Holmes. I didn’t allow it to change my opinion of Derek Abbott in any way, of course.

There’s something about Oxford that has always appealed to authors and it seems to me that it has somehow seeped into their work. Think of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch and, more recently, Philip Pullman. It’s hard to imagine them living anywhere else.

‘Was he a drug addict?’ Hawthorne asked. Anne didn’t reply. ‘That was the natural inference and I think it’s what you wanted us to believe. A drug addict takes a drug overdose and he dies. But there are other sorts of addicts.’ I will never forget the pause that followed. It seemed to stitch itself into the very air. ‘Gambling addicts, for example.’ That was when Anne Cleary knew it was all over.

But they want the punishment to fit the crime, so they give him one chance. Just like William Cleary, they’re going to let him gamble for his life.’ Suddenly I saw it. ‘Heads or tails,’ I said.