Читать книгу Daggers and Men's Smiles - Jill Downie - Страница 8

September 15th

Un rocher perdu dans la mer. A rock lost in the sea.

Viewed from above, the island of Guernsey reminded Moretti of Victor Hugo’s description of the place when he was exiled there. Once upon a time, on a fine day, you were blinded by the glare of the sun shining off the greenhouses that covered the island, but many of those were now gone. Once, it was horticulture and tourists that brought in the money. Now, it was money that brought in the money, huge sums of it, most of it perfectly legitimate. Over fifty billion pounds of it. Drawn by low taxes — and no taxes on foreign-source income held by non-residents — the money continued to pour in.

The ATR turboprop was bringing them in across the harbour. First, Castle Cornet at the end of its long pier, looking from above like the eighteenth-century print he had on his sitting-room wall. He could see the projecting stones at the top of the Gunners’ Tower, like the points of a giant granite starfish, the pale green and dusky rose of the castle gardens that cascaded down the cliff face. From the air the tidal swimming pools at La Valette looked like line drawings on a map. Hidden in the thickly wooded slopes beyond, just before the sweep of Val des Terres, the main road leading to the south, was a huge subterranean U-boat refuelling bunker, now refurbished as La Valette Underground Museum.

Not visible from above. Even from the ground, its entrance was well concealed. Beneath the rock of the island existed another world of passages, tunnels, command centres, a hideous granite honeycomb built by human misery. When he was a child, before the reconstruction of Fortress Guernsey for the tourist, no one talked much about that hidden world. They were anxious to move on, to forget starvation, deprivation, fear. Collaboration. Betrayal.

Love affairs.

“They came to Mr. Boutillier, asked him to dig seventeen graves — an explosion, they said. I was terrified. Numb. I only cried when I saw you the next day, alive.”

His mother, talking to his father, late at night, the two of them reliving the agony. His father had been there, underground, digging, dragging trucks of rock in a harness, like a beast, with the Russians, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Czechs, the French. All of them at the mercy of Hitler’s Organisation Todt. Hidden from view, once. Now, reconstructed, open to the public. The giant blood-red oil tanks for diesel, the glass display cases of knives, stilettos, the steel-lined rubber truncheon, the whip with its leather strips.

From the air the Fort George enclave for the wealthy seemed no more remote than it did from the ground. There were two entrances to it: one through Fermain Road off Val des Terres, the other through the gate, all that was left of the old fort. He could see the mansions overlooking Soldiers’ Bay from the Clarence Battery, glimpse the far reaches of forbidden ground from the cliff path that ran past them. Once, on a cliff walk, Moretti had heard loud cackling from one of the properties, saw a flock of geese running toward him beyond a fence, protecting their Capitol. “No, no,” someone was saying.

No, no indeed. No parking on the roads, no vans allowed on driveways, no children playing on the pavements, not a sign of life. Inescapable, really, in a world of haves and have-nots. The rich needed to be as protective of their homes as they were secretive in their businesses, closed away in the Crédit Suisse buildings on the Esplanade or behind the elegant facades around the Plaiderie, near the law courts and the lawyers’ offices, with the CCTV cameras trained on every entrance.

The one-storey airport building came into view, beyond it a couple of smaller buildings, one of them the club for the owners of the private planes that were now as common as gulls on the island. The ATR landed with a gentle bump, taxied to a halt near a couple of Trilanders, the three-engine airplanes used by international banks and financial companies, their logos writ large on their sides. The one closest to him read, “Royal Bank of Canada.” Up on the open viewing area he caught a glimpse of his new colleague, leaning over the parapet. His feeling of depression deepened.

DC Liz Falla.

What had he done to deserve this? Fate in the guise of Chief Officer Hanley had given him this inexperienced girl-woman as his brand new partner. Even from here he could see the brisk, relentlessly youthful spring in her walk. Twenty-sevenish going on seventeen.

God almighty. He reran the phone conversation he had with her when he was in Italy, attending his godmother’s funeral. The timing couldn’t have been worse, leaving an inexperienced officer behind.

“Anything come up?” he had asked.

“Well, there’s something, Guv. At the moment it doesn’t seem like much. There’s been trouble at that film they’re shooting at Ste. Madeleine Manor. You know the one?”

“Of course.”

Who didn’t? Guernsey was agog from the moment it was announced that an international film company would be on the island to shoot the film version of the hit novel, Rastrellamento, by British bad boy author, Gilbert Ensor. They were the biggest movie-world presence on the island since Guernsey had stood in for Nova Scotia for the filming of Adèle H., starring Isabelle Adjani as poet Victor Hugo’s tragic daughter, and they had arrived about two weeks earlier, taking up the space and the facilities and the support staff usually reserved for tourists. On an island that measured about twenty-four square miles, with under sixty thousand inhabitants, they were markedly noticeable and far more exotic than the tourist trade. No buckets and spades and shandies for this lot; the hotels and watering holes had optimistically stockpiled magnums of champagne and crates of caviar. Some of the top hotels held on to their chefs, whose stay on the island was usually a summer’s lease.

“What sort of trouble?”

“Well, it’s all a bit freaky, really. Like they are. Involves a bunch of costumes. And daggers.”

“Daggers?”

“Right. Daggers. Or a dagger, actually. Chief Officer Hanley’s dead keen to get you back because you speak Italian.”

“Italian? Oh, right. The director is, isn’t he?”

“And some of the others. I’ll tell him you’ll be back tomorrow, shall I?”

* * *

“I see,” said Detective Constable Liz Falla, wondering if she did. She looked again.

A group of dressmaker’s dummies stood facing her against one wall, and in front of them lay six costumes on a foldaway table: three women’s suits tailored in a style she’d seen in black and white films, a flowered dress, a man’s suit, and a Second World War German uniform. They, and the dummies, were ripped and slashed to shreds.

It was stuffy and airless in the lodge, which was always called “the lodge,” but which was in fact the ancient seat of the manorial court of the Manoir Ste. Madeleine, on the channel island of Guernsey. Its original function was long gone, and the building was now serving as storage for the international film crew shooting on the island. The freshly whitewashed walls of the long room were hung with costumes on hangers. Racks of costumes crowded the aisles between a series of tables on which lay a variety of headgear, from hats to helmets.

“I see,” she said again. “When did this happen?”

Lack of oxygen — perhaps that was why I feel particularly dozy, thought DC Falla, looking at the very large, very blond, very angry Englishwoman at her side.

“Some time during the night. I don’t know, but they were all right when I left yesterday evening. Whoever it was came in through the window.” The costume designer indicated a broken pane beyond the lineup of dummies.

There was something undeniably gruesome about the ripped costumes, spread out in a row, the gashes in the fabric like open wounds. Like headless corpses, thought Liz Falla. But still — this woman had been as hysterical on the phone as if actual murder had been committed, and in her new role as Chief Officer Hanley’s blue-eyed girl, she had been sent to investigate.

Eagle-eyed, to be accurate. That’s what the Guernsey Press called her, for spotting the old spare tire with a stain near the rim in the boot of a brand new car that had rolled off the Condor ferry from Poole. Inside lay four one-kilogram packages of cannabis, wrapped in yellow foam, street value around thirty-six thousand pounds. A drop in the ocean, but it meant another mule — it was her third trip — put out of business. High-fives all round, and a foolish young girl sentenced in the Royal Court to a four-year jail term.

But this? It looked more like a destructive prank than the dangerous act of a crazy madman, which was how the costume lady, Betty Chesler, had described it on the phone, and why someone from plainclothes had been sent out. Liz Falla wished that her new boss, Detective Inspector Moretti, were with her.

Which was not how she was feeling when she got up that morning. Be careful what you wish for, the Chinese said — didn’t they? — and she’d got it. Out of uniform, assigned to one of the premier investigating officers on the island, but not the one she’d have chosen. He had a reputation for being a maverick, since he played with that jazz group, but also a loner, and certainly not a laugh a minute. No merry chatter in the squad car to while away the hours, not with this one. Unmarried, not too long in the tooth, reasonably good-looking, if you liked your men darkish, thinnish, and sort of brooding. Which she didn’t — she personally preferred the lively ones. Anyway, she wasn’t in the least interested in finding a life mate. She was relieved when he told her he had to take a few days compassionate leave and now here she was, on her own.

“You look very young for this.”

“Sorry?”

“Didn’t they think this important enough for a senior officer, then?”

The costume lady’s voice rose sharply and cracked in indignation at the end of her query.

Film people, stage people, thought DC Falla. All the same, just like her uncle Vern who hung out with the Island Players and tended to weep at the drop of a hat at family celebrations. The artistic temperament, he called it. Histrionics, her father called it.

“Do you know how the damage was caused?”

“Yes I do, because the bastard left it behind.”

Betty Chesler pointed to something that gleamed on the table between a small black beret and a broad-brimmed straw hat.

“Like something out of an Errol Flynn movie. He came through the window, that — butcher — holding a dagger. And did this. With a dagger, for God’s sake, which he had the bloody cheek to leave behind.”

With dramatic theatricality the sun suddenly disappeared beyond the thick glass panes of the windows of the lodge and, just as swiftly, the room darkened. Liz Falla felt the skin on her arms prickle. No lack of oxygen now, but a heightened awareness of something hanging in the air. It’s chilly in here, she told herself, nothing to do with those ancestors of yours, those poor benighted women who took the long, winding walk down from the prison of Beauregard Tower to the gibbet built above the brushwood, at the foot of Fountain Street.

By the pricking of my thumbs, something evil this way comes. The “gift,” her grandmother called it.

“Now, young lady,” said Betty Chesler, her hands planted aggressively on her voluminous hips, “what are you going to do?”

“You’re a bastard, Gil.”

“I know. It’s one of my strong points. It’s why you fell in love with me.”

“Too true,” said Sydney Tremaine wearily. She got up from the rumpled sheets on the floor, pulling her peignoir around her. Her husband lay spreadeagled on the carpet, naked and unashamed, the bird’s head motifs of the Turkoman rug around him pecking at his privates. Or so, vindictively, she fantasized. A man in his condition should be ashamed, she thought. He should be the one covering himself, pulling the bedclothes over his ever-increasing belly. But he knew only too well the power he had over her.

Not love, not even sex anymore. Money. Moolah. The comfortable cushion of life in couture clothes and five-star hotel suites, even if it was a luxury hotel on some Godforsaken minuscule island that she had never heard of before the film shoot. That was why, instead of turning away from him with a yawn, she joined him on the floor, straddling him with her strong dancer’s legs. His renewed desire for her was a sign that the only hold she had over Gilbert Ensor was restored to her.

“Christ, I don’t believe it. The sun’s out. Get me a Scotch, baby, will you?” He grinned as she cringed at his pathetic attempt at her American accent. “I’m going out on the patio.”

“I don’t know why you keep trying to sit out there. It’ll still be soaking from that shower. This isn’t the Riviera, you know.”

“Don’t I friggin’ know. But I’ve got to keep close to these shysters, or they’ll have my masterpiece in fucking tatters.”

“Why do you bother?” Sydney called after his departing figure, legs wobbling slightly from his recent exploits. “They’re paying you a fortune. And shouldn’t you put something on?”

“Oh, right.”

Gilbert Ensor picked up a pair of corduroy trousers from a chair and, hopping from foot to foot, hauled them over his legs, zipping them up around his protruding stomach where they hung comfortably and baggily. He opened the door onto the small private patio that adjoined the suite and stepped outside.

Beyond the high stone wall was a stretch of grass, and beyond that was the steep cliff that lay between St Martin’s Point, the southernmost tip of the island, and St. Peter Port, the capital of Guernsey. A wrought-iron gate set in the wall led to one of the cliff paths that encircled the island — not that Gilbert had ever pulled back the bolt. Exercise was anathema to him.

“All that walking and running and huffing and puffing uses up creative energy. Any I have left over I save for sex.”

Sydney knew that was true. She also knew that his precious spare energy was not always saved for her. She sighed and poured him out a triple Scotch. With any luck he’d then fall asleep and stay out of trouble. Not sexual trouble. She was used to that. The trouble she dreaded was the constant fighting with any member of the film company who came close enough. She poured herself a Perrier and picked up both glasses.

“Sydney!”

His scream was high-pitched, shrill. Oh dear God, she thought. Not his bee allergy again, not a mad dash to the hospital — in which of all those expensive matching suitcases was the Epipen? She put down the glasses and ran on to the patio, the stones unpleasantly moist beneath her bare feet.

“Have you been stung?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

Gilbert Ensor’s quivering forefinger was pointing at something that lay on the ground, gleaming in the slanting rays of the afternoon sun.

“It’s a dagger.” Sydney picked it up, turning it over in her hands.

“No kidding, genius. It came hurtling through the gate, just as I was about to sit down. Landed at my feet.”

“Through the gate? You sure it wasn’t just lying there?”

“Perfectly.”

Sydney ran over to the gate. The design of leaves and ferns was certainly far enough apart to allow a narrow knife through, but hitting the target — any target — would have been well-nigh impossible. She struggled with the bolt, and pushed it back.

“Where are you going, for God’s sake?”

“To take a look. You stay there.”

The rough path on the grassy expanse beyond the patio was deserted. Sydney ran to the edge, and saw that beneath what appeared to be the lip of the cliff was another path. Above her head a couple of black-back gulls whirled and screamed in avian mockery of Gilbert’s shriek. In the distance, somewhere, she could hear the noise of some kind of engine, or motor. Sydney stood on the edge of the slope and peered in the direction of the sound.

The path below her was thickly hedged, the undergrowth and trees beyond it hiding the edge of the cliff and the sea below, but it ran reasonably straight at this point. Out of the corner of her eye she was aware of movement, and turned swiftly to her right. A woman was running with athletic strides along the rough track and, even at this distance, Sydney Tremaine, the ex-ballerina, could see that this was no casual jogger.

“Hey!”

Either the woman didn’t hear, or she chose not to hear. Sydney caught a glimpse of long blond hair flying, the faint gleam of the reflective tape on the heels of her running shoes before she turned the corner of the cliff and was out of sight.

Back on the patio, Gilbert seemed to have recovered. He had fetched the glass of Scotch and was already halfway through it.

“Well? Could you see anyone?”

“A jogger, a woman jogger. That was all.”

She picked up the dagger again from the small table by Gilbert’s chair. It was about twelve inches long, its steel blade bolted into a mother-of-pearl handle. She touched one edge of the two-sided blade and winced. “Sharp. And pretty, but I think that’s imitation mother-of-pearl. Looks like a modern copy of a medieval one.”

“How would you know? Oh, right, that godawful Borgia movie you were in.”

Sydney grimaced. But he was right. A disaster, with herself as Lucrezia Borgia, and the casting directors had stopped calling. The arrival of Gilbert Ensor in her life had been a godsend. As her mother always used to say: you pay for your pleasures. Oh God, did you ever. Two of his nastiest insults were to call her a Moira Shearer wannabe and “Lucrezia to the ends of your blood-red nails, darling — typecast to a T.” Both hurt, because both contained a grain of truth, and she knew it.

“I think we should call the police, Gil.”

“For chrissake — it’s just some idiot on this speck in the Atlantic who thinks he’s still in the Dark Ages.”

“Perhaps. But I think we should. After all, there was that creepy business with the costumes.”

“Jesus. I’d forgotten. That was daggers, wasn’t it? Right. Phone the police. But first, honeybunch, pour me another drink.”