What about the footprints? It seemed to me that they told their own story. Someone had been on the beach and that person could have been Dr Henry Queripel, who had claimed he was hoping to catch sight of a black-winged kite. What size were his feet? He or she had climbed up to the Snuggery, knowing that the door had been left open for them by someone at the party. They had killed le Mesurier, but had accidentally stepped in his blood. After that, they had continued into the house and had gone up to the office, where they had left a further bloodstain on the back of le Mesurier’s mobile phone. But what had they done once they got there? What had they been looking for?

I’d arrived at a brick wall, so I decided to draw up a list of all the people who might have had a reason to kill le Mesurier, although, as Hawthorne had said, that could easily include half the island – anyone who opposed NAB. It was one of the peculiarities of being involved in a murder investigation. Why should I automatically assume that I had met the killer (or killers)? There had been over a hundred guests at The Lookout last night and not all of them had been connected with the festival. Worse still, I’d only spoken to about a dozen of them. It could have been someone whose name I didn’t know: the percussionist with The Channelers, for example, or one of the taxi drivers. This was the biggest risk I faced writing about Hawthorne. There was always a chance that I could write three hundred pages and only encounter the killer in the final paragraphs.

However, he had also told me that he had a dozen suspects in mind. I wrote the name Helen le Mesurier in the middle of the page and drew a circle around it. I saw her sitting in her bedroom, crying her eyes out, surrounded by balled-up tissues. Had it all been an elaborate act?

Certainly, she had a motive – the most obvious in the world. Her husband’s death gave her money and freedom. She had said she still loved him, but she was romantically involved with a French land surveyor and maybe she had decided it was time for a change. I had seen her leave the party at about ten past nine, on her way to the bedroom, but I hadn’t actually seen her go upstairs. I only had her word for it that she was in bed when Charles le Mesurier was killed, and she had definitely seemed defensive and even nervous when Hawthorne had questioned her about what she had seen out of the bedroom window.