A Grave Waiting

by Jill Downie

  “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 d
isappeared into the gloom. Julia King shivered, and Sandra Goldstein held her tight as she locked the front door.

  Chapter Four

  Liz Falla parked the police BMW outside the Landsend Restaurant and sat for a moment in the car, looking at the yacht. She could see it quite clearly, even though the floating dock and gangway were out of sight. The area of the pier along which Lady Fellowes had walked, perilously close to the edge, was in plain view, as was the police guard Moretti had ordered. Some of the SOC crew were still on board, and she had stopped off to ask if they had found anything of interest. Nothing, apparently. All the computers had been taken to Hospital Lane, to await the decision as to whether they, like the bullet, should be sent to Chepstow.

  Liz had fond memories of the Landsend. In its earlier incarnation it had been little more than a glorified fish-and-chips café, her restaurant of choice when she was a kid. No hot dogs or hamburgers for her. Just lovely white fish in chunky golden batter, with a heap of thick-cut, greasy chips on the side and bottled tartare sauce.

  But the Landsend, like Guernsey, had taken on another transformation. When money replaced tourism and tomatoes as the main income earner for the island, the Landsend moved upmarket, changing its menu and its décor. Gone were the wreaths of shiny plastic seaweed, the fishing nets hanging from the ceiling, one with a beautiful plaster-of-Paris mermaid trapped inside, clad in strategically placed seaweed and seashells, smiling seductively at the diners below. Gone was the five-foot-high statue of a cheerful lobster holding the Landsend’s limited menu against his red-checked apron. Now there was a huge glass wall overlooking the harbour, white walls hung with sepia-tinted photographs, white linen tablecloths, single roses in crystal bud vases, fine china, and an ever-changing menu.

  Gord Collenette was still the owner, but he had brought in a French chef and an Italian maître d’hôtel, and his carefully trained servers, both male and female, were chosen for their looks. It was certainly the sort of place where Lady Fellowes might well have dined, but it was hard to imagine she had stayed there until one o’clock in the morning.