by Jill Downie
For my brothers, Richard and Christopher.
Remembering our Guernsey years.
… night ghosts, and graves;
Blood cries for blood, and murder murder craves.
— John Marston
1576–1634
Contents
Map
Prologue
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Two
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Curtain Call
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Prologue
Death of a Hermit
No horizon today. The mist gathered close to the land, touching the headland to the west of Rocquaine Bay and hiding the long sandy sweep of the western coastline from view. Certainly from his view. Of all the lost properties of youth, the one he most regretted was his marvellous vision. Cataracts, he supposed. Fixable, he knew that, but it would mean contact. He would think about it when the game became worth the candle and he could no longer read.
The tide was on the rise, but there was still an expanse of bare silver-grey sand, jotted with the red, brown and green of lichen-covered rocks, trails of seaweed, the vraic he had gathered with his father in the dim, distant past, when the world was young, at the first new moon after Candlemas, and then again in midsummer. He could still remember the sharpness of its smell in his nostrils, burning in the hearth, the ashes rich with potash to feed the soil.
He scrambled back from the beach over the rocks at the end of the high wall that protected the road against the high spring tides, something that became increasingly difficult with every passing day. Then he made his way past the Imperial Hotel and along the headland over Portelet Harbour, stopping briefly at the Table des Pions to pay his respects. A fairy ring long before it was used as a resting place by the soldiers of the local seigneurs on their chevauchées around the island parishes, it was a good place for him also to draw breath and courage before the hardest part of his climb, up towards Pleinmont Naval Observation Tower. Built by the Germans during the occupation of the island, deserted for years, it was now reconstructed for the tourists and, thankfully, open only two afternoons a week to disturb the quiet of the headland. Like the fairy ring, it too was haunted, and some of the presences were familiar to him.
After that, it was an easy walk across the Common, to the home he had built for himself. He was not the first solitary to have lived there, and he wondered if he would be the last. Probably so. Well-meaning and not so well-meaning individuals were constantly threatening his solitude and his peace of mind.
Home. He had built it like an Iron-Age roundhouse, and thatched the roof low over the only window. The walls had not been a problem, because he had learned about bricklaying from his father, who had built houses and worked in the granite quarries at St. Sampson. The roof had been a challenge, but he was determined not to use modern tiles. Finally, he had used a combination of turf and thatch, and compromised by lining the interior with batts of pink fibreglass insulation, covered in thick plastic as a moisture barrier. It gave a pleasant rosy glow to the place he called home, particularly in the light of his oil lamp, when the storms blew in across the Hanways and the Hanois Lighthouse wailed. Unlike the Iron-Age denizens of such a structure, he had not made a hole in the centre of the roof for the smoke to escape, but had added a chimney for his fireplace, keeping the thatch and turf well away from it.
He walked around to the door he had installed on the inland-facing wall, the one most protected from the prevailing wind. He never locked it, because less damage was done if the curious and the tearaways could get inside. Nothing of interest for the average thief, anyway: no stereos or televisions, no modern appliances. An intruder once made off with his camp stove, but had abandoned it in some bushes a few feet away. Not worth the effort, presumably. He raised the latch and let himself in.
This time, someone was waiting for him.
“I wondered when you would come,” he said. “I knew you would come, eventually.”
He felt a strange sense of relief, like a burden lifted. The other shoe finally dropping.
Part One
The Opening
Chapter One
Elodie Ashton bent down to pick up the secateurs she had dropped when she opened the door into the garden, and felt a twinge. The damp of approaching autumn was getting to her, and she had forgotten to put the nutmeg in the pocket of her gardening trousers.
Damn. She was far too young for this, she thought, both sore hips and superstitions. But better a nutmeg in her pocket than a needle in her trochanter, as had been suggested by Doctor Clarke.
“Too much sitting in front of a computer,” he said.
“Is that your expert medical diagnosis?”
“Actually, yes. You’re getting to an age where it’s going to catch up with you, and you’ll get fat.”
“Don’t beat around the bush, will you?”
The elderberry bush near the back door of the cottage was loaded with berries, and Elodie was determined to get to them before the wood pigeons and the blackbirds this year. The year before she had been on the mainland at a conference, and had missed the height of the season. As she reached up to cut a particularly luscious branch, she heard the sound of a car turning into her driveway.
Damn again. A voice calling out. Not damn. This voice was always welcome. Her goddaughter, Liz.
“I’m in the garden — come around!”
Detective Sergeant Liz Falla was off duty, wearing comfortable jeans and a black leather jacket. Her open-toed sandals revealed scarlet nails, and she was wearing large golden hoops in her ears. When she smiled, her resemblance to her father was striking, Elodie had often thought, but that was about all Liz had in common with her father — that, and a physical resemblance to those ancient Norman roots.
If, that is, the name Falla was indeed Norman, but it probably was. The theory that some poor Spanish wretch washed up in Guernsey when the Armada was blown off course in stormy waters, and stayed to reproduce, was unlikely, and the romantic possibility of being descended from fifteenth-century Jewish nobility fleeing Spain to escape persecution difficult to prove.
The rest of Liz was pure Ashton. She had her mother’s singing voice, and the Ashton combination of an analytical mind and an intuitive grasp of circumstance and situation. Who knew what that big sister of hers could have done with her life, Elodie had often wondered, if she had not fallen in love with Dan Falla and had Liz when she was just out of her teens. But Joan Falla seemed a happy woman, and had achieved what her little sister had not. Love and marriage. More precisely, a marriage that worked.
Elodie. Such a fancy name, an unlikely choice for her commonsense mother.
“Why?” she had asked.
“Your father’s choice. Joa
n was my choice for your sister,” was her mother’s reply. And there the matter had rested.
“What are you doing around here?” Elodie asked, putting down the basket and hugging Liz.
“I’m on my way to work out at Beau Sejour Recreation Centre, and I left a little early so I could drop in and see you. Easy to do, now that I finally have wheels. Come out and let me show them off to you.”
One of the unexpected bonuses of the last case Liz had worked on had been the gift of some vintage French couture. After checking with Chief Officer Hanley that accepting it was in order, about which he had been satisfactorily vague, she had promptly sold it on eBay and bought herself a car. Or at least made a substantial downpayment on a pretty little Figaro in pale aqua, a so-called “retro car,” made by Nissan. Second-hand, but still … air-conditioning, leather interior in a soft cream colour — and a roof that opened. The stuff of dreams, now made reality.
Elodie’s reaction was gratifyingly enthusiastic. “It’s so … you, Liz. The perfect accessory!”
“I’ve always envied my Guvnor his Triumph, and I can’t wait to show him.” Together they walked back into the house.
“I thought I’d find you at the computer,” Liz said, “working your magic for some verbally challenged mainland medico.”
“Well, I’m working magic, but on my elderberry tree. Give me a hand. You can reach some of the higher branches for me before you go.”
“Ah, come on, El. Not you too!” Liz protested. “Can’t you just trust it to keep the witches away from your kitchen door without mumbling incantations over it?”
“It’s doing a good job of that for me, all on its own. Haven’t seen a witch in these parts, ever.” Elodie chuckled and held out the secateurs to Liz. “I know how you feel about Aunt Becky, but this is Bacchic magic — sort of. My witches’ brew is going to be a really potent elderberry-flavoured vodka. Come on, and I’ll show you how to make a diabolically delicious potion,” she said, pointing to a berry-laden branch near the top of the tree.
As they worked together, talking idly about this and that, Liz Falla thought to herself, not for the first time, what a puzzle this woman was. It was not so much that she had followed a different path from Liz’s mother, Elodie’s older sister — much older sister — but that she had opted for a career so far removed from people. She held the best parties, belonged to the Island Players and enjoyed appearing on stage from time to time, but spent her working career before a computer screen.
Elodie said little to her family about her professional life, largely because of the esoteric and specialized nature of what she did, so Liz had looked her up and found her website. On it, she described herself as a medical researcher, editor and illustrator, and the examples she provided of her work were impressive. They varied from working with academic presses and editing specific research projects to composing speeches.
Elodie also said little about her personal life in London before she came back to Guernsey, but Joan Falla was sure there was heartbreak in her sister’s past.
“She was divorced, Mum. That’s heartbreak,” Liz had responded.
“That’s not what I mean,” her mother had enigmatically replied.
If she had decided to hole up back home in Guernsey to escape from whatever troubles she’d experienced, Elodie could not hide her good looks. Even in her working gear of patched jeans and a loose-fitting green silk blouse that had seen better days, she was striking. From some distant Teutonic ancestor she had inherited curly red hair and the ivory skin of the redhead, but without freckles.
“I wish I’d inherited the tall gene that you and my sister got from somewhere.”
“You are petite, Elodie.”
“I am short. That’s what I always say to your mother, and this is when I’d give a witch’s incantation for a few extra inches.”
Liz grinned. “I must say, it’s useful in my job to have my mother’s extra inches.” She reached up and pulled down another branch. The basket was just about full.
“Why? Because you are as tall as the bad guys?
“Because I am just about as tall as the good guys. Great to look my fellow officers in the eye and say ‘get lost’ when necessary.”
“Like that, is it?”
“Only sometimes. This looks like plenty — how much booze are you planning to make?”
“Liqueur, please. Yup, that’s enough. Do you have time for a coffee?”
“And to see what you do with these little suckers. Time for both brews. It was a rough morning, which is why I’m on my way to Beau Sejour, to work it out of my system.”
“Want to tell me? Or can you?”
Liz shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t see why not. You know the old hermit who lives in that weird place near Rocquaine Bay? He topped himself.”
The flippant tone did not surprise Elodie. She had heard it before in similar situations, or during family discussions. It drove her sister to distraction, but she knew it was her niece’s way of coping — not just with her job — but with other people’s anger, or pain. Or her own.
“Poor old fellow. Who found him?”
“The postman, believe it or not. Delivering magazines.”
Elodie watched as Liz walked towards the kitchen door, then appeared to change her mind. She took a few steps down the path that led to the row of chestnut trees that separated her cottage from the garden behind her. The grass on each side of the path was scattered with windfalls from the apple trees, and soon the prickly cases of the chestnuts would join them.
“Looking for conkers? A bit early yet,” she called out.
“There are going to be some beauts. Pity you weren’t here when I was a kid.”
“To me, you’re still a kid.” Elodie laughed. She paused, then asked, “So, no more about the hermit?”
Liz did not respond immediately, and when she did her voice was serious, flippancy gone.
“What do you know about your neighbour, the one who is renting Brenda Le Huray’s place? The property that backs on to yours?”
Elodie came down the path and joined her niece. “Brenda moved in with her daughter, and I don’t really miss her. She was always complaining about the chestnut trees. ‘Messy,’ she called them. His name is Hugo Shawcross and he’s a folklorist, he tells me, a researcher, and certainly the Internet confirms that. He’s the author of a number of books on the subject.”
“You’ve met him?”
An early conker fell from one of the trees, and Liz picked it up. It lay in the palm of her hand still in its case, like a tiny hedgehog with greenish bristles.
“Yes.” Elodie turned and looked at her niece. “This is not just idle curiosity, is it?”
“No.” Liz gently returned the chestnut-hedgehog to the ground. “Let’s have that coffee and make your potion.” They started back towards the house.
“What do you think of him?” Liz had dropped her voice.
Elodie picked up the basket they had left by the door and shrugged her shoulders. “A bit too chatty for my liking. But he seems pleasant enough, certainly non-threatening.”
Liz held the door as her aunt went in with the basket, and put it on the kitchen table. Elodie had made many changes in the early-eighteenth-century cottage, but, apart from its modern appliances, the kitchen was very much as it had been when its original owners roasted their beef and mutton on the spit over the giant fireplace. She knew how lucky she had been when the cottage had come onto the “open” market. Once you had left the island, it was difficult to get back as a homeowner, because of the protective property laws.
And the other piece of luck was a colossal divorce settlement. Every cloud, as they say. It had certainly helped when it came to putting in a bedroom and bathroom beneath the roof in what had been a loft, and taking out some of the interior walls downstairs to open up the space. She had replaced the white trim around the windows, put in a flagged driveway for her car, keeping the old limestone gateposts marking the edge of the property, and reti
led the sloping roof in softly glazed coral-pink terra cotta tiles. Then, having taken care of the personal, she had had the whole place rewired to accommodate her professional working life.
“So, this is by way of being an official call?”
Liz laughed, took off her leather jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. “Not official, no. We’ve had a complaint about him, and since my boss has been off the island, I was asked to look into it. Discreetly.”
“Discreetly?”
Elodie was transferring three large Mason jars to the worn pine surface of the sizeable table that stretched across the centre of the kitchen. She fetched a bottle of vodka from the equally sizeable sideboard, and some chopped-up lemon rind.
“Is he anything I should worry about? Here,” Elodie pointed to a large crockery bowl high on a shelf near the fireplace, “get that down for me, would you?”
Liz obliged. “I don’t think so, and the complaint is so bizarre it could be that we should be looking into the complainer rather than your new neighbour.”
She pulled out a branch of berries from the basket, holding them up against the light, admiring their purple translucence in the sunlight streaming through the window. “Now what do we do?”
Elodie took another branch from the basket. “We’ll need something for the stems and so on. They are mildly toxic. We’ll use this.” She pulled out a plastic pail from under the table, then a tall stool. “You’ll be fine with a chair, but this suits me better.
“So, tell me — is he a flasher? A con artist?” She hopped up on to the stool, and started to pull off the berries, her fingers swiftly turning purple.
“Nothing so run-of-the-mill, El.”
Liz hesitated. It had all sounded so ridiculous this morning, and she couldn’t believe Chief Officer Hanley had asked her to look into it. But he had, and she knew why. Because the complainant was the wife of one of the major estate agents on the island, a man not to be trifled with. It was a familiar theme. She watched the juices trickle over her hands and thought of Lady Macbeth, and blood, and said, “We have been told he is a vampire.”
