‘And so I came to Alderney. I will admit that I was concerned to encounter you at the airport, Mr Hawthorne. It was foolish of me not to have studied the programme more carefully and I was alarmed when you mentioned that you had investigated financial crime. I did not want my enquiry to become entangled. It was important for me to be acting independently of the British police.’

‘You should have told me who you were,’ Hawthorne said.

‘We did discuss exactly that. Emil was in favour of joining together with you and maybe it would have been for the best. I apologise, but it was the decision that I made.’

‘Go on.’

‘I stayed with the other writers and tried to be part of the esprit de corps, although it did not help that your friend had happened to see Emil talking with me when we were at Southampton. I gave the talk. I had learned a number of poems which I hoped nobody would recognise.’

‘You stole a haiku from Akira Anno.’ It was the one thing I’d managed to guess. I wanted them to know.

She didn’t respond. ‘And so we arrived at the party on the Saturday night. I will tell you now my plan as it had been conceived. The most important thing for me was to get access to le Mesurier’s computer. Emil was here to provide me with technical support and he would find it a simple matter to bypass the security and access the database. We knew already that the office was on the first floor. The question only was how to get into the house without being seen and I found the answer to that almost at once.’

‘The Snuggery,’ Hawthorne said.

Marc Bellamy had seen Maïssa in the garden – but that had been several hours before the murder, at half past seven.

‘Exactly. I found this strange little construction at the end of the garden where le Mesurier liked to hide and at the back there was a door which opened onto the path that led up from the beach. I drew back the bolt so that the door remained unlocked and this would allow me to return later in the night. Then I went back to the party and joined in with everybody else. There were just two other things that I did before I left.’

‘You fixed the kitchen door.’

‘Yes. I placed a little ball of paper into the lock to ensure that it could not close properly . . .’

I remembered now that the newspaper print had been in French. That should have told me something.