‘Yes. I wasn’t actually his GP but I’d come over to the house once or twice. He has an office upstairs and it was on his desk.’ He lowered his voice and took a step closer so that Judith Matheson wouldn’t hear. ‘As far as I can see, there’s a single deep incision at the front of the neck. I imagine the knife will be lodged in the vertebral body and may have penetrated the spinal cord. There’s quite a lot of blood, so it could have nicked the carotid artery too.’

‘No chance of suicide?’

‘Absolutely not. You can see for yourself.’

Hawthorne nodded. ‘I should take a look . . .’

‘Of course. We have to go out through the garden.’ Dr Queripel glanced at me, acknowledging my presence for the first time. ‘You’ll go alone?’

‘Actually, if you don’t mind, I’ll take Tony with me. I always find him very helpful.’

‘I suppose I’d better come too,’ Matheson said with reluctance.

‘Well, all right.’

The four of us went out of the sun lounge and into the garden. I was completely thrown by what Hawthorne had just said. How was I ever helpful? All I did was write about him, but of course that was exactly what he was hoping for now. Without realising it, I had stumbled onto – or into – the third book in our three-book contract. For anyone reading this, I suppose it will have been obvious from the start. I wouldn’t have been writing about Alderney if we’d just gone to the island, answered a few questions about books and flown home again.

But for me, everything had changed. To give one example, most of what I have described up to now has been done from memory because I had no idea I was going to need any of the finer details, but from this point onwards I began to take careful notes. It was strange, really. I had come to Alderney in the hope that I would be introducing Hawthorne to my world: books, lectures and all the rest of it. But instead, I had once again been dragged into his.

We followed the path that had been illuminated during the party and for the first time I got a proper view of the gun emplacement at the far end of the garden and its relationship to the house. The Lookout, as its name implied, had views of the sea, presumably visible from the upper floors. The garden actually ran from the back of the house to the edge of a cliff, with a beach some distance below. As we drew nearer, I could see the water through the trees.