‘I’m thirty-nine.’

‘Have you always investigated crime?’

‘I spent a couple of years in child protection but I felt more comfortable with the CID.’

‘Why did you want to go into policing in the first place?’

Hawthorne sat perfectly still. ‘I read books when I was a kid. Maigret and Father Brown. It interested me.’

‘Did you have any brothers or sisters?’

‘No. I was the only one.’

I was beginning to feel a sense of dismay as I listened to all this. I had known Hawthorne for months. I had worked with him on two murder investigations and I was in the middle of my second book about him. But in the space of one minute he had told Colin Matheson more than he had ever told me. I had never known his age, for example. And I had written that he had spent ten years as a detective, not eleven. Why was Hawthorne answering these questions so readily in front of an audience in an Alderney cinema when with me he’d always been so guarded about his private life? Was he being deliberately provocative or could it be that he had some perverse sense of duty, that having accepted the invitation to come here this was the price he had to pay? As always, his face gave nothing away.

I expected Matheson to turn to me but he still hadn’t finished with Hawthorne.

‘What, for you, is the best thing about being a detective?’

It took Hawthorne a few moments to process that one. ‘That’s a good question, Colin,’ he said, eventually. ‘I suppose the answer’s got to be making the arrest. That’s the bit I always enjoy the most. The thing about murderers is that most of them are as thick as shit, if you’ll excuse my language. Even the clever ones are never quite as clever as they think they are. I’ve met so many of them who think they can get one over on me, but they still make mistakes, and if you ask me what the best thing about being a detective is, it’s that moment when I know that I’ve got them, when the mask comes off, when the whole thing is solved.’

‘So it’s not a question of protecting people, upholding the law?’

‘Well, of course that’s part of it, and you being a barrister, I can imagine that’s important to you. But that’s not my job. I mean, I’m not protecting anyone because when I’m called in, the one person I might have protected is already dead. As for the law, I leave all that to the judges and the lawyers. I don’t like going to court, if I’m going to be honest with you. All these people arguing all day. And ten years in jail, twenty years . . . what difference does it make? My job’s done.’