Once I’d started thinking about it, I couldn’t stop. My room was too small to have a desk, so I propped up the pillows and sat on the bed with the notepad on my lap. I remembered what Hawthorne had said. You need to start with the chair.

All right.

Charles le Mesurier hadn’t just been murdered. He’d been tied down and either threatened or humiliated first. I had thought he might have been tortured, but if there had been any marks on him they would have shown up in the police medical report. Why had one hand been left free? According to Hawthorne, if I could work that out, everything else would make sense.

Someone had brought the parcel tape to the island, which indicated that the murder had been planned in advance. Le Mesurier had even been warned. That had to be the meaning of the ace of spades placed on his car. Leaving one hand free had been part of the plan, but what possible reason could there have been? Was it possible that somebody had forced him to write something – or maybe sign something – before they killed him? It could have been a cheque or a codicil to a will or a confession. I jotted all three down on a blank page and drew a box around them. That was a start.

Of course, there was a more obvious reason. Le Mesurier had been wearing a Rolex watch on his right wrist. His wife had valued it at over £20,000. Could someone have killed him simply for the watch? Or was it possible that someone unconnected with the crime had wandered into the Snuggery, found the dead body and cut one hand free to take it? That made sense – but then again, why wouldn’t they have left the cut piece of tape behind? We hadn’t found it on the floor and surely the police report would have mentioned traces of adhesive on his right wrist if they had been there.

I was sure I was missing something. I examined my own hand and thought about its different uses. Writing, obviously. Pointing. Getting a manicure. Playing the piano. Was palm reading a possibility? No. Ridiculous. Fingerprints? DNA? Could someone have taken his pulse to make sure he was dead? Unlikely.

I turned to a fresh page and tried to plot out a sequence of events that might make sense of all the clues that Hawthorne had found so far. For the moment, I set aside the two-euro piece. Hawthorne hadn’t shown any particular interest in it, perhaps because it was too random. It could have been dropped on the floor a week ago.