Читать книгу A Grave Waiting - Jill Downie - Страница 9

Day Two

The parish of St. Martin, where Moretti was heading, is in the southeast corner of Guernsey, and contains some of the most spectacular coves and bays on the island. The coastline here is rugged and precipitous, the cliff faces sheer expanses of lichen-covered granite exposed to the elements, dotted in places with trees and undergrowth clinging precariously to an inhospitable terrain.

In 1940 an abortive attempt at a landing had been made by a group of Commandos at Petit Port, one of the little bays. In fact, that was all they had managed, to land and then strand three men who were not strong enough swimmers to get back to the destroyer that had delivered them.

Why there, of all places? And who planned such a cock-up? It was the kind of thing Moretti enjoyed mulling over with the man he was going to see.

Shape-shifter.

Dr. Ludovic Ross, classical scholar, fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, guest lecturer at Harvard and Yale, had taken for himself the name given by Homer to Odysseus the wanderer, the cunning No Man who could change his appearance and outwit the enemy, whether it be Lord of the Earthquake, or a man-eating Cyclops. Much of Ross’s career remained classified, but from what Moretti could discover, the undercover work in which Ludo Ross had been involved had presented him with adversaries as dangerous and devious as any encountered by Homer’s wandering hero.

Ross was not a Guernseyman. He had no true roots, he once told Moretti, because he was a colonial, and still thought of the country of his birth as his own. That country had now ejected foreign rulers from its soil, and he was persona non grata in a place no longer called by the same name. When he retired from academic life he settled in Guernsey, where his income would be taxed at a more modest rate.

“I’ve given enough to my country and I’m damned if I’m going to give back what I earned with the sweat of my brow and the perspiration of utter terror.”

“You admit to fear?”

“Best way to deal with it.”

It was Gwen Ferbrache who first introduced Moretti to Ludo Ross. She had run into him on Lihou Island, a small islet joined to Guernsey by a causeway at low tide. The priory that had been on the island had been the scene of a murder in the sixteenth century, but its appeal for Gwen was that it was on the migration route for countless birds on the wing to Western Europe. The three of them had a drink together one evening at the Imperial Hotel, and then one night Ross turned up at the Grand Saracen Club. He and Moretti talked about Charlie Parker and Billie Holliday, Oscar Peterson and other shared passions, and from time to time Ludo Ross phoned Moretti and invited him over.

Normally he would not go uninvited and unexpected.

“Always delighted to see you, Ed, but let me know if you’re coming, won’t you? There’s a good chap.”

“You’re still cautious?”

“Habit of a lifetime, yes.”

“How about postmen, that sort of thing?”

“It’s the unexpected one looks out for. Though I don’t like it when they change postmen on me.”

What was it the petit salaud had said? Moretti turned his car into the narrow lane that ran above Ludo’s house and braked to allow a startled rabbit in the middle of the road to make a decision. Don’t let down your guard just because you are in the back of bleeding beyond — that’s when they get you.

The rabbit opted for going back the way he came, and Moretti carried on, turning the corner that led to the steep lane down to Ludo Ross’s house. But before that he caught a glimpse of the back of the house beyond an untrimmed hawthorn hedge entangled with blackberry bushes.

There were no windows on this side of the house, which was built against the slope of the cliff that led down steep, winding lanes to the coast. All the windows faced the sea, which could barely be glimpsed from them because of the wild profusion of trees and undergrowth that descended the cliff face. The house itself was curved, rather like a two-tiered cake of ivory plastered stucco. Beneath a steep-sided conical roof of pale grey tiles the upper storey was smaller than the lower, and a semi-circular balcony took up the extra space over the ground floor. No attempt had been made at taming the landscape, apart from a wide, paved courtyard outside the house, and there was no fence, wall, or gate. When Moretti asked why, he was told, “Because the kind of people I had dealings with don’t have any problems with barriers.”

Just before turning into the driveway, Moretti brought the Triumph to a halt, and called Liz Falla on his mobile.

“Anything on the CCTV cameras so far I should know about?”

He listened with pleasure to the low register of her disembodied voice. “Yes, Guv. There’s all kinds of stuff, like people leaving the Landsend Restaurant and so on, but what’s really interesting is the out-of-place person who shows up, if you see what I mean.”

“Who is it?”

“Lady Fellowes, Guv. No mistaking her, is there?”

“None.”

Of all the island residents who could have shown up on the CCTV cameras, none would have been more easily identifiable than Lady Coralie Fellowes. In the late 1930s there were few more recognizable faces, or bodies, than those of Coralie Chancho. She had first caught the eye when given a brief solo moment at the Folies Bergère, stepping out of the chorus line in a velvet cache-sexe and a headdress of ostrich plumes, to shoot at a straw-hatted Maurice Chevalier with a jewelled bow and arrow. The public demanded to see her again, and once they heard the unique voice with the sensual growl that came with the face and the body, Coralie Chancho became a star.

When that star declined, as is the fate of every fair from fair, thanks to the passage of time and nature’s changing course, La Chancho made the career move every prudent woman in her position makes: she married money. How she came to Guernsey, Moretti did not know, but it was probably to do with holding on to that money.

“What was she doing?”

“Teetering along the deck, dressed up to the nines. The CCTV shows the time as one thirteen a.m. And she’s the only woman on her own, anywhere near the yacht between ten o’clock and six-thirty the next morning.”

“I’ve seen her at the Landsend, so perhaps she was there.”

“Want me to check, Guv? I’m just on my way to speak to the customs people.”

“Yes. I was planning to talk to Gord Collenette anyway.”

Moretti finished his call and looked up. Ludo Ross was at the window of the Triumph, and alongside him was one of his Rhodesian Ridgebacks, Benz, his lips drawn back in a snarl.

“Put the window down, Ed, so he can get your scent.”

As Moretti did so, the dog relaxed, and his master took his hand off the collar he was holding. “Park the car by the garage, Ed. Good to see you.”

Ludo Ross was an imposing man, somewhere in his late seventies Moretti thought, who had held on to a fine head of grey hair atop a neatly trimmed white beard. The contrast was startling enough that it looked to Moretti when he first met him as if the undercover agent was still in disguise, with a fake beard hooked over his ears. But in no way did this bearded scholar resemble a jolly Father Christmas, with his hawk-like nose and light, uncommunicative eyes — eyes that now brought to mind the hard-boiled stare of the dead man’s housekeeper to Moretti, as he drove into the paved courtyard.

“Good to see you, Ludo, and apologies for arriving unannounced.”

“I was thinking of phoning you, as a matter of fact, to see if you were playing at the club tonight.”

There were dark circles under Ludo Ross’s eyes, as there often were, the loose skin looking bruised and discoloured. An insomniac who accepted his affliction as incurable and therefore, as he facetiously put it, not worth losing sleep over, he had once or twice persuaded Moretti to share his white nights with him after a session at the club. His record collection was exceptional, as was his wine cellar, but it was not a habit Moretti could indulge too often.

“Not a chance. That’s why I’m here.”

“So this is work related?”

“You could say that.”

The dog ran ahead of them into the house, and was joined by his female companion, who made straight for Moretti.

“Hi, Mercedes. Remember me? I hope.”

The ridgeback sniffed Moretti’s extended hand and wagged her tail, then joined her mate. Together the four of them moved through the entrance hall on the right-hand side of the house, leaving a huge space to the left as a living area. This was covered by a pale blue Kirman carpet that extended the full width of the room. The décor and furniture were in spare, modern lines, the tones neutral, the paintings on the wall abstract. There were no photographs, no mementos of past lives or loves. The only indication of Ludo Ross’s former academic occupation was the built-in mahogany bookcase that lined the walls from floor to ceiling.

Moretti accepted his host’s offer of a beer, and waited until he came back, watched by the two dogs, who seemed relaxed, although they didn’t settle until their master returned.

“So,” said Ross, handing Moretti a glass of the Guernsey Brewery’s Special Creamy Bitter, “what’s up?”

“A body with a bullet in the head on a pricey Vento Teso in Victoria Marina, complete with a very pretty Porsche below decks, and a fortune in Euros in a safe in the bed-head.”

Ludo Ross raised one bushy grey eyebrow. He surveyed Moretti over the top of his glass, took a gulp of beer, put down the glass, and smoothed his beard. “Not your average Guernsey crime. What do you know about the body?”

“Bernard Masterson, a Canadian engaged in international deal making. Big-scale stuff, we’re not talking widgets or ball bearings. According to his housekeeper, he just brokered a deal between Canada and Germany involving armoured personnel carriers.”

There was a pause. Ross’s hand on his beard stopped moving and for a minute Moretti thought he was going to tell him something. Instead, he asked a question. “What was a chap like that doing in Guernsey? Even if he had dirty money tucked away here, he didn’t have to come near it.”

“All the more reason not to come here. We are making enquiries, of course, through Interpol and Scotland Yard, and we may yet have to bring someone in, but I’d just as soon we didn’t.”

“Arms dealing.”

Ludo Ross got up from the seat opposite Moretti and moved toward one of the long windows facing the courtyard. Ludo Ross always seemed to be on the lookout, whether he was standing talking outside the club, or on his own driveway, taking in what was going on around him — an unexpected noise, a passing car, a passerby brushing against him.

“You’re in with some dangerous bastards there — at least, he was — many dirty and all of them devious.”

“By devious I assume you mean dishonest.”

“Depends what you mean by dishonest. In the world of these guys there is no black or white, and little grey. Morals of any kind are not part of the equation.”

“No different from drug dealers.”

“They are the drug dealers. Or they often are. Gone are the days when international security forces pursued separate entities that specialized in drugs, or prostitution, or gun-running. Now the world is crisscrossed with a vast, intertwined chain connecting drugs, gun-running, you name it.”

“A perfect fit for Masterson. He was described to me as a financier, a facilitator, and a middleman. When I asked for something more precise, I was told about the Canada-Germany deal.”

“He could indeed fit the frame. I’ll give you an example of what I mean: Heroine from Turkey moves through the old Eastern bloc — Bulgaria, Rumania, across into the Czech Republic. From there it goes into Switzerland, Germany, France, England. The money the drug dealers make in the West buys Russian arms, which are then used by so-called freedom fighters wherever in the world there’s a so-called freedom fight going on. One crazy-paving, interconnecting patchwork quilt, that’s the kind of thing you’re dealing with nowadays.”

Moretti watched Ross walk back from the window, crouch down, and pat both dogs. He was wearing a navy Guernsey, putty-coloured slacks, and brown suede desert boots, his usual uniform, over a body a much younger man might envy.

“Thing is, Ludo, our dead man’s arms deals appear perfectly legit. His right-hand woman was quite open about it.”

“She’s not going to talk about any deal he might have made with a proscribed government, is she? Someone killed him, which suggests there’s something shady going on. We still come back to what he was doing here. It doesn’t make any sense, not on a money-laundering, arms-dealing level. There’s no doubt that Guernsey is part of a chain where dirty money is moved through London from Moscow, for example, but he could set up all kinds of shell companies to do that. Hell, he could be operating from a bank existing in cyberspace, run from a computer somewhere in the United States. Are you sure there’s no personal reason for his murder?”

“Personal? As in a woman?”

“Who is this right-hand woman you mentioned?”

“Adèle Letourneau, also from Montreal. She describes herself as his ex-lover, now his housekeeper. His bodyguard — yes, bodyguard — says she was in on all business meetings. And she told me Masterson ‘loved his babes.’ She even suggested he might have been done in by some dangerous island femme fatale.”

Ross gave a short bark of a laugh. “Damn few of those, but more likely to be a babe than an international arms dealer, or a babe set up by an international arms dealer. Won’t be the first time they got to someone through his loins. A spy has no friends, which should include lovers.”

There was an edge to Ludo Ross’s voice, which suggested the awakening of personal memories. Moretti knew nothing about Ludo’s private life, he had never mentioned a wife, or a family, or friends, and Moretti, who tended to be silent on the social context of his own life, was not about to ask.

“How does the housekeeper’s alibi stand up?”

“Depends on whether you believe the night clerk at the Esplanade Hotel was doing his job.”

Ross laughed, and this time it was the full, generous laugh that warmed his pale eyes. “Enough said. There is another possibility among many possibilities, and theft is still on the cards. Whoever your murderer is may not have been interested in traceable Euros, or put much faith in banks operating in cyberspace, but he may have preferred something else Masterson had in his safe, or on his person. Diamonds, for instance. They are portable, easily hidden, decidedly valuable, and a useful form of payment for less than squeaky clean deals. Have you found the gun? And what about the bullet?”

“A hollow-point, according to Nichol Watt.”

“Nichol? He has experience in America, hasn’t he? I think he told me he worked there for a number of years. I’ve always wondered why he left.”

“In Nichol’s case, probably to do with a babe. Like our victim, Nichol likes his babes.” Both men laughed. “The bullet’s gone to Chepstow for further tests, and I’ll send divers down tomorrow if no gun turns up on the yacht. But I think whoever did this took the gun with him — or her. Why leave it around?”

“You’re probably right. This kind of character often carries a gun himself. Did Masterson?”

“Yes, or his bodyguard did.”

“That’s right, you mentioned a bodyguard. So he expected trouble.”

“Anywhere but here, apparently, because he’d sent him on shore for the night. The gun was a Glock 17 and it’s disappeared. In your opinion, could a gun largely made of plastic that takes to pieces be smuggled through customs?”

“Highly unlikely in this day and age, and the bullets present another problem. It’s more likely he got the weaponry he needed from sources close at hand, then discarded it. He’d have contacts, this chap.”

Ludo Ross went back to the seat opposite Moretti and picked out a pipe from a rack on a nearby table. Pulling out a pouch from his pocket he started to fill the pipe and, as he lit up, the fragrant heady aroma of tobacco drifted across the room. Apricot essence and honey, some Oriental tobaccos, a touch of Turkish latakia. October 89, bought in bulk from the Dunhill store in London. Moretti put his hand in his pocket and touched the lighter he still carried.

“Sorry,” said Ross, seeing the gesture. “Still on the wagon?”

“Clinging to the buckboard by my nails. Don’t stop for my sake.”

Ross smiled and put the pipe down. “I can wait. Where’s that pretty partner of yours?”

“Is she? I suppose she is. Doing desk work, filling in forms, you know, all that shit.”

“I heard her sing the other night.”

“You did?” Moretti finished his beer. “What’s she like?”

A sudden gust of wind outside the long windows of the living room shook the trees around the courtyard, blowing some loose twigs against the glass. Immediately the two dogs were up and over by the window. Moretti heard the male, Benz, growl softly in his throat. Ludo Ross looked toward the window and then back at Moretti.

“You haven’t heard her? Shame on you, Ed. Not my kind of music, I thought, and then she sang Byron’s ‘So We’ll Go No More A’roving.’ Fair took my breath away, she did, and that’s not easily done anymore.”

“A friend told me she sounds like Enya with a touch of Marianne Faithfull.”

Ross gave a short bark of a laugh. “Yes. The Enya is deliberate, but the Faithfull comes unbidden from God knows where in such a young woman.”

His cool, pale eyes looked beyond Moretti, beyond the windowless wall, back to some past from which he had not yet detached himself.

Old mortality, the ruins of forgotten times.

“I nearly forgot —” Moretti pulled himself back to present priorities and took out from his pocket the scrap of paper taken from the magazine rack. “What do you make of this?”

Ross took the paper and walked over to the window. He looked at it a moment, then turned back to Moretti. “I assume there was something out of the ordinary about where you found this?”

“Someone had taken the trouble to remove whatever it was from a rack otherwise full of semi-pornographic magazines, knocking it over in the process.”

“On the surface it looks like part of a brochure for high-priced yachts, but there is something unusual about it. See this?” Ross pointed at something in small print below the words Offshore Haven. The lower part of the letters had disappeared with the rest of the brochure, and it was virtually illegible. “That looks to me like ‘limited partnership,’ a phrase often used in business enterprises of various kinds, but not that often if you’re just interested in selling a yacht. Looks like the middleman facilitator had something else on the boil, something that your murderer didn’t want anyone to know about.”

“We’ll check. Shouldn’t be too difficult if that’s the name of the outfit.”

“What about all those CCTV cameras? Did they pick anything up?”

Moretti thought about the ex-star of the Folies Bergère teetering, to use Falla’s word, across the screen in the small hours. Better not, he decided. Lady Fellowes might have a perfectly good explanation, and she had friends in high places. As did Ludo Ross.

“I don’t know yet,” he prevaricated. “That’s one of the jobs Liz Falla’s doing.” Moretti stood up, and the two ridgebacks were instantly alert. “I must go. Perhaps I could talk to you again, when we get more information.”

“Of course. Let me know, anyway, when you’re going to be at the club.”

The wind was blowing hard enough to shake the lilac blossoms off the trees near the end of the drive, and somewhere a cuckoo was calling. Benz loped along by the Triumph until he reached the end of the property, then turned back to his master. In his rear-view mirror, Moretti watched Ross bend down to pat him, wave, and turn back into his house, closing the door behind him.

From the window beside the door, the one through which he could see out and those outside could not see in, Ludo Ross watched Moretti’s car turn the corner, and listened until the sound of the engine was swept away by the wind. He walked back into the living area, crossing the blue stretch of Kirman, making for the wall unit that extended the length of the room opposite the windows. From an unlocked drawer he removed a folder, and placed it on the polished surface of the desk incorporated into the unit. Opening it, he shuffled through some papers, giving a grunt of satisfaction when he found what he wanted. It was a photograph, somewhat faded now, dog-eared, as if it had long been carried in a pocket, and often taken out by the wearer. Ludovic Ross smiled at the black-and-white image.

“He could use your talents,” he told the face in the picture. “God knows I did.” The smile turned to a grimace. “But then, could he trust you? Should he have trusted me?”

Holding the photograph by one corner, Ross started to tear it, then stopped. He placed it back in the folder, but this time it was not returned to the unlocked drawer. It was carried upstairs to the wall safe hidden behind the false bathroom cabinet, installed by a locksmith from East Sussex who had been flown in to do the job.

From the bathroom doorway, Benz watched his master stroke the cabinet mirror before turning away.

The rain was still holding off. Moretti thought about Liz Falla and the group she sang with, Jenemie. Why hadn’t he made the effort to hear her? Not his type of music either, like Ludo, but that wasn’t the reason. They had been together professionally for just over a year now, and he found her quick thinking, competent, and, from time to time, amusing. He wanted things to stay that way, compatibility with no confusion between the professional and the personal. He’d been down that road before, and it was a road that had brought him back from the mainland to the island.

Moretti headed back from the coast, picking up the main route through the parish of Forest toward the parish of St. Peter’s, and the rented cottage owned by Gwen Ferbrache. She had pointed it out to him once when they made an excursion to some protected meadowlands nearby in La Rue des Vicheries to look at some wild orchids. Normally he would have asked Liz Falla to pay an informal call on the two women, on the pretext of checking on their personal safety. But since there was a gun and a family friend involved, making himself the target seemed the decent thing to do.

About ten minutes later he turned off the main road, drove past Torteval Church, with its conical nineteenth-century witches’ hat of a tower, described in an old guidebook as “a supreme example of ugliness,” and crossed over into the western section of St. Peter’s. Slowing the Triumph to a crawl, he kept his eyes open for the menhir he remembered that marked the entrance to Verte Rue. The island was dotted with ancient stones and pre-Christian monuments, of which the most impressive was La Gran’mère du Chimquière in the gateway of St. Martin’s churchyard.

Moretti had almost passed the stone when he caught sight of it, overgrown with brambles and wildflowers. Campions, violets, and primroses ran riot in the hedgerows at this time of the year, before the obligatory hedge cutting in June, and only the weather-worn head of the stone peered through a coronet of white cow parsnip and nettles. Moretti stopped the car and backed up, turning cautiously into the narrow lane until he could see what condition it was in. To his relief the ground seemed firm, and ahead of him he could see a series of ruts leading to the cottage about a quarter of a mile down the lane. At least if he was in the car he had a better chance of escaping injury if they took a potshot at him.

It was a short, sharp switchback of a journey, the car wheels jolting alarmingly in and out of the ruts and over the occasional cross-channel made by escaping winter rains. By the time he got to La Veile, Moretti was more concerned with the car’s suspension than with gunfire, and it was a relief to pull up outside the cottage and get out.

La Veile was a solidly built two-storey granite cottage, with a window on each side of the central door, set in a small porch. The two windows on the upper floor were framed by the tiled roof, which came down in an inverted triangle and squared off low over the front door. The place appeared deserted. Two bicycles, one with a child’s seat on the back, rested against the porch overhang, and there was a multi-coloured beach ball perched in an empty flower box under one window.

Mindful of Gwen’s experience, Moretti slammed the car door loudly, so that no one could be taken by surprise. As he did so, he saw a movement in one of the downstairs windows. Someone had pulled open the slats of the blinds installed in both of the ground floor windows. A moment later, the front door opened.

“Hello!” he called out. “My name’s Ed Moretti, a family friend of Gwen Ferbrache. I thought I’d just drop by and introduce myself.”

A woman stepped out from the darkness of the porch into the relative light of late afternoon, her long, dark hair swinging against her shoulders as she turned and shut the door behind her. Sandra Goldstein presumably.

“You must be the policeman,” she said. “Hi, how are you? I’m Sandra.”

She smiled at Moretti, but she did not extend her hand. As Gwen had said, she was above average height, but what Gwen had called an olive complexion looked more to Moretti like a fading tan. She was barefoot, wearing the jeans Gwen had called predictable, and a grey sweater with what looked like the logo of an American sports team on it, involving the head of a snarling jungle cat beneath the word Panthers. With her dark hair and intense, wary gaze, it seemed like a fitting logo for Sandra Goldstein.

“I’m a policeman,” Moretti replied. “But this is just a courtesy visit to welcome you to the island and to make sure all is well.”

“Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be in this perfect place?”

Sandra Goldstein laughed, and the sound was warm and happy. “Nice car,” she said, nodding toward the Triumph.

“So you’ll know who it is if you see it bumping and rolling up the lane.”

I must at least see the child, thought Moretti, even if I have to invite myself in.

“Are you managing all right, so far from the bus stop, with your friend and the little girl?”

Sandra Goldstein laughed again, sounding genuinely amused. “After the States, Mr. Moretti, nothing seems so far on this island — heck, the longest bus ride is twenty minutes!”

Just as he was thinking he would have to make some excuse about checking the furnace or the door locks, the front door opened and a voice called out, “Sandy?”

Sandra Goldstein turned back to the house. “It’s okay, Julia,” she called. “It’s Miss Ferbrache’s policeman friend — you know, the one she told us about.” Turning back to Moretti she said, “Won’t you come in and meet the other inhabitants of La Veile? If you have time, that is?”

Standing in the doorway was Julia King, and what Gwen had not said was that she was remarkably pretty. In appearance she was at the other end of the colour spectrum from her friend, with a porcelain complexion, wavy blond hair cut like a cap around her face, and a pair of deep blue eyes. She too wore jeans, and an emerald-green sweater that reached her knees and looked about four sizes too big for her. She smiled at Moretti, and there were dimples in her cheeks.

“So you are Edward,” she said. “Miss Ferbrache is very fond of you, as she was of your mother.”

“She’s quite a lady,” said Sandra Goldstein. “Come on in.”

Moretti did not remember ever being inside La Veile, so he could not tell what, if anything, its new tenants had added to the décor. But the furniture in the sitting room to the right of the front door, and the armchair to which he was steered near the unlit fireplace, had a generic look about them. The place felt comfortably warm, and he saw a space heater against one wall.

“We don’t light the fire until Ellie has gone to bed,” Julia King explained. “She’s much too fascinated by it. She’s napping at the moment, but she’ll be up again quite soon.”

Accepting the offer of a cup of tea, so as to be around when the child got up, Moretti watched Sandra Goldstein leave the room and turned to Julia King. “I was sorry to hear from Gwen that you had been ill. You are convalescing here, I understand.”

Julia King had taken the chair opposite him, and Moretti watched the colour rise up her neck and flood her face. “Yes, I feel much better than when I arrived. The rest has been good for me.”

“You are an illustrator, so Gwen tells me.”

“Yes.” Julia King relaxed again, her face brightening. “I do illustrations for Sandy’s books, but I do other work too. Would you like to see some?”

“Very much.”

She got up and went over to a desk under the window and switched on the lamp, leaving the slats of the blinds closed, Moretti noticed. “Here we are, some of my other work.”

“These are — exquisite.”

Julia King’s “other work” consisted of pen and ink drawings, some with a wash of colour, of country scenes, townscapes, shells, flowers, animals. None were bigger than postcard size, some tiny miniatures. The detail was painstaking, the control of her medium seemed to Moretti’s untrained eye to be outstanding.

“Thank you. Your island has given me some great new material — see, one of your granite walls, bursting at the seams with flowers. I think they’re just too wonderful.”

From somewhere upstairs came the sound of a child calling out.

“That’s Ellie. Please excuse me while I go get her up.”

As she ran out of the room, Sandra Goldstein returned with a tray. “Julia’s been showing you her work,” she said, handing a mug of tea to Moretti. “She’s very talented, and a terrific illustrator.”

“Nice to have a friend as your illustrator.” Moretti helped himself to milk, and refusing the offer of a biscuit. “Have you known each other long?”

“Since school days. I was originally a journalist, and when I thought up the characters of Warren and Wilma, I knew who I wanted to draw them.”

“Warren and Wilma?”

Sandra Goldstein smiled broadly, lifting the slanting lines of her cheekbones. “Warren and Wilma Woodchuck. Julia and I are now doing our fifth book together.”

There came the sound of a child’s laughter, and a small girl ran into the room. She had curly dark hair, a skin like bronze satin, and huge brown eyes.

“Cookies,” she said to Sandra Goldstein, pointing at the plate on the tray. “Cookies for Ellie. Please?”

Then she saw Moretti. She stopped and turned back to her mother, held out her arms, and started to cry.

From the door of the porch the two women watched Ed Moretti leave. The rain was just starting, and soon Verte Rue would be a nasty, messy, muddy, comfortingly impassable morass.

“Do you think he came because she saw the gun?” Julia King leaned against the taller woman.

“I don’t know. He’s got a difficult face to read. Not a poker face exactly, but you get the feeling he’s looking at one thing and thinking another.”

“It’s an interesting face, isn’t it? Didn’t Miss Ferbrache say his father was Italian and his mother a Guernsey girl?”

“Yes. I was amazed at how quickly Ellie settled down. He must give off good vibes.”

“What do you want to do with this?” Julia looked down at the card she held in her hand.

“Put it in the trash, I guess.”

Sandra took the business card Ed Moretti had left with them, then saw the hand-written number on it. “On second thoughts, let’s hang on to it, honey. Moretti gave us his probably unlisted home phone number. You never know.”

“Then nothing will happen. Like an insurance policy.”

“Right. Then nothing will happen.”

The tail lights of the Triumph disappeared into the gloom. Julia King shivered, and Sandra Goldstein held her tight as she locked the front door.