We were about to go up to our separate rooms but as we arrived at the reception desk to pick up our keys, we found Special Constable Jane Whitlock waiting for us. She was sitting in a chair with her hat perched on her knees and looked no happier than she had that morning.

‘Deputy Chief Torode asked me to see you,’ she said. She produced a thick padded envelope. ‘I have some information for you.’

‘Let’s go in the dining room,’ Hawthorne suggested.

The tables had been made up but we were alone in the room, which was long and bright with an archway leading into the bar. Whitlock looked around her. ‘This is a nice hotel,’ she said.

‘It’s a shame you couldn’t get in,’ I said.

‘That’s what they said. But they were probably thinking about the budget. They’ve put us up at a place in St Anne.’ Wherever she was staying, she clearly didn’t like it.

‘Have you been to Alderney before?’ I asked.

‘No.’

She wasn’t a great conversationalist, but I persevered. ‘What does it mean, exactly? Special constable?’

‘I’m not a full-time police officer. I’m a volunteer.’

‘So what do you do when you’re not with the police?’

‘Social work. I’m a community psychiatric nurse.’

‘Do you enjoy that?’

She shook her head. ‘Not really.’

Meanwhile, Hawthorne had opened the envelope and was removing a handful of photographs taken at the crime scene – the usual black and white horrors. There were also twenty or thirty pages of text and assorted diagrams. He picked up one of them and read it. ‘You have the time of death at around ten past ten,’ he said.

‘That’s right. We got witness statements.’

Hawthorne turned the page. ‘Two of the guests heard le Mesurier cry out, but neither of them knew what it was at the time,’ he told me. ‘The jazz band was playing and they couldn’t hear above the noise of the music. One of them thought it was a screech owl.’ He looked up at Whitlock. ‘Are there screech owls in Alderney?’

She shrugged.

‘The other one thought it was someone in the garden and went out to see but there was nobody there.’ He turned another page. ‘The footprint in the Snuggery. Size five shoes.’

‘If you say so.’

‘That’s what it says here. That must be a woman.’

‘Could be a child.’ Was Whitlock being deliberately difficult? I wondered.

‘Is that what Torode thinks?’

‘He hasn’t told me what he thinks.’

Hawthorne continued browsing until he came to the medical report. ‘Death caused by a penetrating stab wound to the neck which severed the common carotid artery, the left internal jugular and both jugular veins. No surprises there. He bled to death.’

‘Can I go?’ Whitlock asked.

Hawthorne glanced at her, surprised. ‘Aren’t you interested in this?’