The entry told me nothing that I didn’t already know, but the mention of Japanese haikus reminded me of the final poem she had recited. It had meant something to me, even though, as far as I could see, none of her work had been quoted on the internet and her three books weren’t available on Amazon or Google, so how could I possibly have known it? I tried to remember how it went.

I see the light

And something comes after me.

Your place or mine?

It wasn’t quite that, but I put the words into the search engine anyway. It revealed nothing. I fiddled with the first line, without success, then turned to the third. Your shadow or mine. That was it! I entered the words and immediately the entire poem appeared on the screen, all three lines of it.

I look to the light

But a dark shape pursues me.

Your shadow or mine?

There it was – but the author was not Maïssa Lamar. The very mention of a haiku should have taken me back to my not entirely comfortable encounter with Akira Anno, the feminist writer who had actually produced an entire book containing two hundred haikus. One of them had turned out to be a major clue in the murder of the celebrity divorce lawyer Richard Pryce, but while turning the pages, I had happened to notice an earlier haiku written by Akira and this was it.

Maïssa had stolen it!

I stood up with a sense of excitement. In the course of two investigations with Hawthorne, I had worked out precisely nothing. I had written about him, but I had been no help at all and it was quite possible that everything I had written here, all my deductions so far, were completely wrong. But this was, unquestionably, a breakthrough. I had been right at the airport. Maïssa wasn’t what she seemed.

I couldn’t wait to tell Hawthorne and I was out of my room at twenty-five past seven, on my way to meet him for dinner. In fact, about halfway down the corridor a door opened and Hawthorne emerged. I couldn’t help but notice, incidentally, that his room was rather larger than mine and had a sea view.

‘Hawthorne—’ I began.

He stopped me. I wasn’t going to tell him about Maïssa right then. Nor were we going to have dinner together. The séance was going to be cancelled too, because, it turned out, he’d just had a telephone call from Deputy Chief Torode.

‘It’s bad news, mate,’ he said. ‘Helen le Mesurier has disappeared.’

15

The Isle Is Full of Noises

It was the housekeeper who had raised the alarm. Deputy Chief Torode was waiting for us in the hallway when we arrived at The Lookout and he explained what had happened.