Maïssa’s delivery was dreadful. She hadn’t even learned her own work by heart and she stood behind a dais, reading it out with a sort of carelessness as if she just wanted to get it over with. She introduced her poems in broken English and didn’t seem to understand fully what she was saying. The poems themselves, in Cauchois, were indecipherable and the translations – which were being projected onto the screen behind her – weren’t actually much help. As I came in and took my place at the very back, she was in the middle of a poem about Joan of Arc, but I’m afraid, to my ears, it came over as little more than a collection of random words.

She finished and there was a smattering of the sort of applause that always sounds embarrassing in a half-empty room. Maïssa smiled briefly. ‘Thank you very much,’ she said and she too did not sound enthusiastic. ‘I will end, please, with a haiku. I write it for my boyfriend after we split up. It is my thought for him and it is short, so I can translate.’

She paused, turned the page and began to speak.

‘I look to the light

But a dark shape pursues me.

Your shadow or mine?’

She bowed her head for a moment. I joined in the applause but at the same time there was something that puzzled me. I’d read that poem before. I was sure of it. But how could that be possible when I’d never heard of Maïssa Lamar before I’d been invited to Alderney?

I was still thinking about it as I came out of the cinema and it was while I was standing there on the pavement that I saw him: the fair-haired man from the airport. He had taken off the leather jacket and wore a polo shirt that clung to him, showing off the muscles in his chest and arms. There was a gold chain around his neck.

On an impulse, I went up to him. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Are you here for the festival?’

He looked at me blankly.

‘I think I saw you at the airport. You were talking to Maïssa.’

‘I’m sorry. You’re making a mistake.’ He turned round and walked away from me but I’d learned two things from the exchange. He was definitely French. And he hadn’t wanted to be recognised.

I watched him disappear, then crossed the road.

The festival had organised a sandwich lunch at The Georgian House, a gastropub and B & B just opposite the cinema, and it was here that I caught up with Hawthorne, who was talking to a man I didn’t know. About forty, lank black hair framing a crumpled face with troubled eyes, he looked like a junior doctor about to break bad news.

‘This is Colin Matheson,’ Hawthorne told me.