Читать книгу Blood Will Out - Jill Downie - Страница 10

The police station in St. Peter Port had at one time been the workhouse, “La Maison de Charité,” a fine eighteenth-century building on Hospital Lane. Hospital Lane was formerly the Rue des Frères, which had led to the ancient friary, now Elizabeth College, the private boys’ school on the island. Ed Moretti had been at school there, thanks to a scholarship. Certainly, his Italian father, who had survived slave-labour on the island during the occupation, and had come back to find and marry the girl who had saved him from starvation, could not have afforded the fees.

Class, he thought, as he got into his vintage Triumph roadster and looked back at his family home. Like the poor, it is always with us, whatever they may say. His own ancestral pile was a cottage, a two-storey building of island granite, that at one time had been the stable and coachman’s quarters for a long-gone grand home. It was now worth more than any workingman could possibly afford. A coral-coloured climbing rose framed the curved stone archway of the traditional Guernsey cottage, with a window on each side and three above. From time to time, Moretti cut the rose back, but the fuchsia, honeysuckle and ivy on the old walls on each side of the property he left alone.

He turned the Triumph around in the cobbled courtyard and exited between the stone pillars of what had once been a gateway, and was now just a gap in the old walls, and made his way down the Grange, the road that led into the town past the old Regency and Victorian homes that had been built on the wealth acquired from privateering and smuggling. Some were divided into flats, one or two were hotels, and some were now in the hands of the new privateers, brought to the island by the billions created by the offshore business.

As he turned into the quadrangle outside the police station, he saw his partner, Liz Falla, getting out of a pretty little Figaro from the driver’s side. Looked like Falla had transformed her Poirets and Delaunays and vintage feather boas into a pale aqua chariot. Not practical, perhaps, but who was he to criticize.

“Nice. Hope it doesn’t turn back into a Paris-designed pumpkin at midnight!” Moretti called out of his car window.

“Hasn’t so far. Hi, Guv. Hope all went well in London with the spooks.”

Moretti watched Detective Sergeant Liz Falla walking towards him in her neat, conservative, dark blue suit, a white shirt open at the neck, her short dark hair feathered around a face once described to him as “Audrey Hepburnish,” and smiled. He was remembering the first time he saw her, when he had wondered what on earth Chief Officer Hanley was playing at, partnering him with this inexperienced young woman with her easy, outgoing manner, so unlike his own approach to his profession. And to life in general, come to that.

“As well as could be expected — but I’m not allowed to tell you anything, of course.”

“Of course.”

Her grin showed the tiny gap between her two front teeth that made her look to his eyes even younger than she was. But, as she had shown on their two earlier cases, her intelligence and her perception outstripped her years and, whatever Hanley had been playing at, the partnership had worked out. He could only hope being saddled with Aloisio Brown was as smart a move by Hanley, because there were others who could have taken on the role quite as well.

As if she had read his mind, Falla said, “I hear you’re babysitting some APSG brainiac. Right, Guv?” He could hear the laughter in her voice above the sound of her heels click-clacking on the stones.

“Watch it, Falla. I was one of those, once. You haven’t met him yet?”

“He’s arriving this morning. I hope that gives me time to fill you in on a couple of things.”

“The death of the hermit? I saw the report in the paper this morning. Suicide, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what it looks like. Dr. Edwards says she’ll get a report to us today.”

“She?”

Moretti stood back and let Falla go through the doors first, and she grinned at him, as she always did at his gesture. “Would you rather I didn’t?” he had once asked her, defensively, and her reply, “No. I quite like it, but don’t tell anyone,” had amused him, defusing the moment and turning it into a shared joke.

“Yes. Irene Edwards, just joined the staff at Princess Elizabeth Hospital. She was on duty when the call came in. Seemed to know what she was doing. I liked her.”

“Good. A couple of things, you said? A rash of burglaries? An outbreak of graffiti? Someone important with ruffled feathers?”

Liz waited until they had signed in at the desk, and Moretti had exchanged a few words with the desk sergeant about his new Centaur. As they moved away she said, “Got it in three, Guv. Ruffled feathers.”

Moretti groaned. “What now? Some constable not tugging his forelock when asking one of the messux or the moneymen to move an illegally parked car? What?”

They were now in Moretti’s office. Liz Falla waited until he sat down and started to check his messages, the familiar pattern when they were not in the middle of an investigation and had anything immediate to discuss. She would have no problem guessing when he got to Chief Officer Hanley’s message, so she pulled out a chair on the other side of the desk and watched his face.

Her Guvnor was looking rested, with a light tan, his usually sombre features more relaxed. The dark hair inherited from his Italian father was touched with grey, and there were lines around his eyes that showed even when he was not laughing. No longer laugh-lines, she thought, but he wasn’t much given to idle banter, which was probably why she hadn’t noticed them before. Gorgeous, Elodie had called him. Not her type, which was just as well. Too much going on beneath the surface. At one point he looked across the table at her and nodded.

“Dr. Edwards. Competent, like you said.”

Then his expression changed. A series of emotions flitted across his face in rapid succession, moving from disbelief to laughter. Moretti switched off the machine and looked across the desk at Liz.

“Has Hanley developed a misplaced sense of humour, or has he lost his marbles?”

Liz replied, taking her voice down an octave. “This is serious stuff, Guv. We have been asked to investigate a report of a threat from a vampire, from the mouth of the undead himself.”

“Who is this vampire? Does he exist? Or can you even say that about vampires?”

“Oh, he exists. I met him last night, as a matter of fact. I’ll get us both a coffee and fill you in, shall I?”

“Let’s start with the vampire and get him out of the way. You met him last night, Falla?”

“Hugo Shawcross. Bit of a coincidence here — I know you’re not fond of coincidences — but he’s rented a place near my godmother, and I dropped over to see if she’d met him, knew anything about him.”

Swiftly, succinctly, Liz filled Moretti in on the details she considered relevant to Marie Gastineau’s complaint: the play, the Island Players, the threat. Moretti listened without interrupting her, but his expression made his feelings quite clear.

“… and I feel myself, Guv, it’s all a storm in a theatrical teacup. Volatile lot, these theatre people.”

“Worse than musicians? Okay, don’t answer that. I’ll tell Hanley that we’ve looked into it, and — well, what you just said.” Moretti finished his coffee with his usual grimace. “Terrible as ever, and yet I go on drinking it. Anything else before we move on to the hermit?”

“Only this.” Falla told him about her conversation with Marla Gastineau in the Beau Sejour change room.

“So the girl is getting poison-pen letters — or the twenty-first century equivalent? You tell me she’s a looker? Par for the course, surely. Lot of that going on in the social media, right?”

“Right.”

“Tell me about the hermit.”

“What did Dr. Edwards say?”

“You first. Not the gist, like your account about Hugo the undead. Everything, Falla. Everything.”

“Poor old bugger! Just as I was bringing him one of his magazines, one of his favourites. Archaeology Today. I was expecting our usual little joke about the title. ‘Boring,’ I’d say and he’d say, ‘Not a seller. I’m their only subscriber.’ Which, of course, he wasn’t. Then we’d laugh. Poor old bugger!”

“You’re Gordon Martel, aren’t you?”

“Gord, yes. I know your dad.”

Liz Falla and the shaken postman stood outside the hermit’s house, watching the SOC people going about their business, shrouded in their white overalls. Jimmy Le Poidevin, head of SOCO, shouted out from inside the police tapes in her direction.

“Take a suit from the van if you’re coming in, Falla!”

As if she didn’t know by now, but with Jimmy it wasn’t sex discrimination. He’d have said the same thing to Moretti. Falla put a hand on the shoulder of the trembling letter carrier. He was wearing the lime-yellow shirt with reflecting bands that all postmen wore on delivery, and the shorts they all favoured, whatever the weather, so some of the shaking could have been from the chill air.

“Come on. We’ll sit in the police car.”

She escorted him over to the police Vauxhall, opened the passenger door, went around and got in herself. Outside the windows of the car, the mist was drifting in again from the sea, hiding the world from them as the glass started to fog up with their breath.

Liz pulled out her notebook, and said, “Go through it from the moment you parked the car.”

She watched his face as he spoke. He would be about the same age as her father, probably close to retirement; a small man with a slight build, sparse sandy hair above a freckled face dominated by a luxuriant ginger moustache. He had been delivering letters as far back as Liz could remember, and the first question was the obvious one.

“Was the hermit’s place part of your normal route? Doesn’t look like he’d be on any route.”

“Call him by his name. Gus Dorey.” Gord Martel sounded angry and his face turned red. “I liked him, and I used to add him to my route when I was done, or when I was taking my lunch break.”

“How did you meet him?”

“On the beach, not when I was working. I was out early, using my metal detector, and we got talking. He said he liked the beach before anyone else got there, but he was friendly enough. He wanted to know if I found anything interesting, and I said all kinds. He said he’d found stuff too, and would I like to see some. I could hardly refuse, could I? You never know, so I said ‘yes.’”

“And had he? Found anything interesting?”

“Shards mostly. He had them put up where they caught the light. But he also had some old bottles, that kind of thing. Said he’d never found a message from a castaway in any of them. He liked to have a laugh, did Gus. Poor old bugger.”

Gord Martel took out a large, pristine white handkerchief, unfolded it and blew his nose with vigour. Beneath the moustache his narrow lips trembled. Liz Falla gave him a moment, then took out her notebook and pen.

“Let’s go through what happened today. What time did you arrive?”

“Around my lunchtime, late morning. I parked the van …”

“Did you see anyone? Anything unusual?”

“Nothing, not a sausage. So I walked up to the house shouting like I always, did, ‘Wharro, mon viow!’”

“You spoke patois together?”

“Not me, but I think he had some of the old language. He used to say ‘Tcheerie’ to me when I left, so I started saying it back to him. Once or twice he said ‘Cheerio’ in a la-de-da kind of way, like a joke — you know, like the plum-in-the-mouth kind do. Gus was not fond of them arseholes, as he called them — sorry, miss, about the language.”

“So you called out. Did he normally come to the door? Or did you have to knock? Get his attention?”

“Mostly he heard the van and was at the door by the time I got there. When he didn’t this morning I didn’t think much of it. But when I called out again and he didn’t come, then I got worried. So I went in.”

Gord Martel gulped, and held the handkerchief to his mouth.

“Went in? The door was unlocked?”

“That was usual. He never locked it, said it was for the best. Less damage than if the yobbos broke in.”

“Had he had problems that way?”

“In the past. But not recently, from what he said.”

“Then you saw him?”

“Right. I couldn’t believe it. Swinging on that rope. I got out my mobile and got hold of you lot.”

The postman was clearly in shock, his body trembling violently beside her on the seat.

“Had he said anything before this that gave you the impression he was depressed? Suicidal?”

“Nothing. He was his usual self.”

“Which was …?”

“Cheerful. But he could get mad as a wet hen about some things. Like telephones, and tourists and the social services.”

“Things that interfered with his life?”

“Right. The maddest I ever saw him was talking about some — ‘girlie,’ he called her — from the social services who came to talk to him about his ‘lifestyle.’ It wasn’t so much at her as at that word. ‘Lifestyle.’ He did a whole speech about language and the death of it. I wish I’d written it down. He was a beautiful talker, Gus. I don’t mean ‘posh’ — he hated that too — but all the words.”

“Did he ever ask you inside?”

“If the weather was bad, yes. But mostly we talked outside.”

“What sort of mail did he get, besides magazines?”

“Nothing much. I learned not to bring him junk mail. That was another thing he hated, and the closest he got to yelling at me.”

“All those books he had — did you ever deliver books to him?”

“Some. He had a mailbox in the post office in town, on Smith Street, and once or twice he asked me to take the key and check it for him.”

“Did you always hand the key back?”

“Of course. He’d stick it back in his pocket.”

“We’ll probably find it.” Liz closed her notebook and put it away. “That’ll be all for now, Mr. Martel, but we’ll need a written statement from you. One other thing — did you notice anything different about Mr. Dorey’s place when you went in today? Was it all as it usually was, when he asked you in? Did you touch anything? SOCO have not found a note, for instance.”

“Touch anything?” Gord Martel sounded outraged at the suggestion. “I got the fright of my life seeing him hanging there, and I went straight back to the van. I didn’t even check to see if he was still alive.” At this, the postman burst into loud sobs. Liz put a hand on his shoulder, at which Gord Martel gave a loud gulp and turned to face her.

“There was nothing you could have done, Gord. The doctor said he died instantly. As it usually was, you said?”

“All I noticed was there was some stuff laying around on the floor and that, like he’d been looking for something, I thought. I’d forgotten about that.”

“So he wasn’t an untidy person?”

“Gus? No. Finicky, I used to call him, everything just so, ’specially his books. Meticulous was his word for it. Can’t have been himself, because there they were, on the floor.” Gord Martel put his handkerchief away and smiled tearfully as he looked out of the window towards the roundhouse of the hermit. “Poor old bugger,” he repeated, “Poor old bugger.”

Moretti had listened in silence to Falla’s account, watching as she consulted her notes from time to time. When she finished, she closed her notebook and said, “Poor old bugger. That’s what Gord Martel said, and that’s how I feel. And Martel’s right, Guv, about the tidiness. I was expecting to walk into a tip, but the place was all clean and tidy. He’d strung himself up from a girder that connected to the chimney, kicked the chair away, and there were books on the ground around that area. I’ve asked to have them left there, where they are, until you have a chance to take a look. But it seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it?”

“Lonely old hermit does away with himself, yes. But listen to this.” Moretti handed the phone over to Liz. “Not the chief officer and the voodoo, Falla, but Dr. Edwards.”

Dr. Edwards’s voice came as a surprise to Liz. In person, she was an imposing woman, tall and big-boned, with striking features. Although she had long, dark hair she always wore it coiled up into a chignon, which probably made it easier to fit under the hoody-like protective headgear. On the phone, though, detached from her appearance, her voice was light, almost girlish.

“Hello, DS Falla. This is Dr. Edwards. Here is my first impression, as promised. Mr. Dorey probably died the morning he was found — I’ll be more precise, I hope, after the post mortem. He was an old, frail man, and the drop caused a cervical fracture from the look of it — in other words, he broke his neck. Doesn’t always happen, and the PM will tell me if he was asphyxiated, or died from occlusion of the blood vessels, or the fracture did him in. But there is something else that’s a bit of a bother.” A moment of silence and then the girlish voice added, “He still had quite strong leg muscles, perhaps from doing a lot of walking, but his upper body on the other hand — it was skinny and weak to the point of emaciation, which is why his neck snapped like a twig.” Another pause. “So, what I’m saying is — how did he manage that humungous knot on that massive rope? Thought I’d throw that at you.” A silvery laugh and then a click.

Moretti and Falla looked at each other. Liz spoke first.

“Is she saying what I think she’s saying?”

Moretti looked across the table at his partner. “If you think she’s saying the hermit had a helper. then, yes. I think that’s exactly what the observant Dr. Edwards is saying.”