The Devil's Claw

by Lara Dearman

  ‘I should never have done it. But once I had, there was no going back. As time went on I was less and less convinced by David’s version of events. I’d never seen him with a girl before Elizabeth, and there were very few afterwards. I snooped around. Heard rumours. Eventually I broke into his house, when he was away at university. Found photos he’d taken of boys. They weren’t pornographic.’ He looked at Jenny, fixed her with his cold stare. ‘There was nothing sexual about them. They were just pictures of little boys, out playing in the park, taken from a distance, nobody was being hurt. But obviously it was wrong. The man is sick, I know that. I took them to his mother, threatened to blow the lid on the whole thing; Elizabeth’s death, the photos, everything.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’ Jenny struggled to keep her voice even as nausea rose from the pit of her stomach. It took every ounce of self-control she possessed not to scream and shout that, yes, he was a fucking monster, that was exactly what he was, because who could keep something like this a secret?

  ‘She promised to get him treatment. He dropped out of university, went to some sort of hospital. They paid me more money and the company was passed on to his sister after his mother died. A punishment, I suppose.’ He dropped his cigarette butt and watched as it fizzled out in a puddle of seawater caught between the cracks of the cobbled slipway.

  ‘Listen, I was knee deep in shit and there was no way out. I’d covered up his involvement in Elizabeth’s death, kept quiet about the photographs, taken bribes, made sure none of Diane’s pet projects received negative coverage.’

  ‘What pet projects?’

  ‘Save the Islander is the latest. She’s an old friend of Tostevin’s, so she discourages any coverage of the immigration debate. I’ve found ways to be OK with it. I’ve given most of what they gave me to charity. And, like I said, I don’t think he hurt anyone.’

  ‘You can’t know that. How could you keep quiet, knowing that children were at risk?’ She made no attempt to hide the contempt in her voice.

  He shrugged. ‘He told me he just liked looking at them. And no one has ever come forward to say any different.’ He paused. ‘I did wonder about Elizabeth Mahy, about whether she found something out and he killed her. And when you came to me with the research into the other girls’ deaths I did panic, thought it could have been him. But it’s not. Which means it’s someone else. Maybe you should be spending your time trying to figure out who because it doesn’t look like the police are getting anywhere.’ He left her standing, shivering on the slipway and walked down on to the beach, dodging between rocks and on to the sand until he reached the sea. He stopped at the edge of the water and lit another cigarette.

  Jenny wished that he’d kept on walking.

  41

  Michael

  He’d spent half the day dealing with this David De Putron mess. Brian Ozanne was in a cell awaiting questioning and he was going to be there a long bloody time because, frankly, Michael had more important things to worry about than that despicable excuse for a man. As for David De Putron himself, he was nowhere to be found. Must have scarpered as soon as they’d released him the night before. Michael had a couple of officers searching the house and talking to the sister. She was a piece of work, he thought, acting like they were inconveniencing her, as if they had no business being there. She knew, though. He could see it in her eyes. Michael had been in two minds as to whether or not to arrest her too but had decided not to on the basis that he couldn’t spare the resources.

  On any other day, this would have been the biggest thing to happen in the station for years: a member of an illustrious Guernsey family, at the very best a sick man who had failed to come forward when a young girl had drowned, at worst, a paedophile, maybe even a murderer. Jenny had floated the idea that he might have killed Elizabeth, if she’d found out his secret, challenged him to protect her brother. It was a possibility. But nobody was really talking about it, due to the fact that they were also dealing with a serial killer and a kidnapping and four officers from Hampshire constabulary had finally arrived and were breathing down everyone’s necks. Rightly so. Four days Lisa Bretel had been missing. They all knew that time was running out.

  He went back to his files. Before Jenny’s call that morning, he’d thought he was getting somewhere. He’d read and reread everything, knew the cases back to front and inside out and was sorting through all of the information in his head, arranging and rearranging the pieces until something made sense. Now the noise, the phones ringing, the chatter, the constant toing and froing of officers in and out of the room, was ruining his concentration. He’d handed over copies of everything to the lads from the UK. Maybe a fresh pair of eyes would do the trick. But he was nearly there, he knew he was.

  The mark. Some kind of Devil’s footprint. The straw figures. The locations. They were looking for someone interested in the occult. Someone who knew the island’s history and legends. He thought about the evidence. No fingerprints, no hair, no fibres, no footprints – nothing. Drowning was a nightmare, professionally speaking. Everything was being reprocessed but he held little hope they’d find anything new. He glanced down the list in Mary’s file. They’d collected samples of sand, surrounding pebbles, and some oak leaves.

  A shift. That’s what it felt like. People talked about cogs turning, but for Michael, whenever he’d had these moments of clarity, it felt more like a movement forwards, like his brain had clicked up a gear. Why were there oak leaves on the beach? Yes, there were trees around Bordeaux, but not many. And no oak trees so far as he could recall. He flicked back and forth through the files, as he’d done hundreds of times in the last two weeks. He rechecked each evidence list, then rechecked the photographs taken at each scene, but this time he looked for something new. And he found it. Not on all of them. But there were a couple in the far corner of the crime-scene photograph of Janet Gaudion, right next to her collarbone. One tangled in Hayley Bougourd’s hair, removed and noted at the post-mortem and Amanda … He didn’t even need the evidence list. He squeezed his eyes shut and forced his memories of that night back to the forefront of his mind, checked with himself that he was indeed remembering, not imagining. They had blown over his feet. He remembered the sound of them rustling against his shoes. Oak leaves. On the beach.

  * * *

  ‘Sir?’ Marquis stood over the desk, mug in one hand, a file tucked under his arm. ‘I bought you a coffee.’

  Michael looked up from the computer screen and saw that it was nearly dark outside. There were fewer people in the incident room now and it was considerably quieter.

  ‘What time is it?’ He glanced at the clock at the top of the screen. ‘Five o’clock!’ He took the coffee and swigged it back. He had no need of the caffeine; he felt more awake than he had done in years, but he was dehydrated and it wouldn’t do to keel over now.

  ‘What do you know about oak leaves, Marquis?’

  ‘Not much, sir. I mean, I know what they look like and that they come from oak trees.’ He shifted nervously from one foot to the other.

  ‘It’s not a trick question, Marquis. Until a couple of hours ago, that was all I knew too. But thanks to this wonderful machine,’ he pointed to his computer screen, ‘I now know an awful lot more.

  ‘For example, did you know that oak leaves have been used symbolically throughout the ages, by pagans, Celts and, more interestingly, by the Nazis?’ He was aware he sounded slightly crazed and his eyes were stinging and probably red and he had not taken a break all day – and by the way Marquis was looking at him there was a chance that he wasn’t actually managing to string together his sentences as effectively as he might have liked.

  ‘I didn’t know that, sir, no.’

  Michael rose from behind the desk and began to pace the room.

  ‘And do you know what else interested Nazis, Marquis?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘The occult. Paganism. Black magic. Dark forces. And tell me something else.’ He placed each of the dead girls’ photos in a row, ‘what
do these girls all look like?’

  ‘Well, sir,’ he swallowed hard, ‘we’ve considered the fact that they all look similar in that they are all blonde, blue-eyed…’ Realisation seemed to dawn on him.

  ‘Exactly!’ Michael took a triumphant bite of his sandwich. ‘They all look like something straight off a bloody Aryan-nation poster.’ He paced again. ‘It struck me before, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. The lack of violence prior to death, the marks, the ritual – there’s something almost reverential about it. He doesn’t hate these girls. He’s not punishing them. He’s fixated on them somehow. Worships them, maybe. I don’t know.’ He shook his head. ‘I want lists made up now: anyone who fits the age range, who has any affiliation to any right-wing groups, anyone who’s ever said or done anything that could be construed as racist, fascist, neo-Nazi … What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’

  Marquis stood, pale and trembling, holding the folder that had been tucked under his arm.

  ‘It’s this, sir. The information you asked me to get about Island Books, it’s just come through. I thought it was a strange coincidence but with the Nazi connection … Although, I’m not saying that just because of the Nazi father thing. It wouldn’t be right to think that, would it…?’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘What is it, Marquis?’

  ‘Island Books, sir. I was telling you, there was a bit of a scandal around the family, what with the sister of the owner rumoured to be a Jerry-bag and her son apparently the result of an affair she had with a Nazi officer.’ He swallowed.

  ‘Spit it out, Marquis, for God’s sake!’

  ‘The owner was a Peter Wilson, sir. After he died, the shop, the books – they all went to his nephew, Roger.’

  * * *

  ‘With all due respect, sir, the evidence is circumstantial because that’s all we have to go on.’ He nodded. ‘Yes, yes, he has an alibi, for at least one of the murders, a conference that we’re rechecking as I speak.’ He let out a deep breath. Nodded again. ‘Yes. Yes. OK.’ He slammed the phone down so hard that the handset bounced back off the desk and on to the floor. ‘Bloody idiot!’

  He’d look everything over, Hammond had said. As soon as he’d finished with internal affairs. And Michael needed to get a hold of himself. He should go home, take a shower, get some rest. Rest, my arse, Michael thought. He paced the room, trying to figure out what to do.

  Marquis was proving once again to be something of a trooper and was working with the HOLMES technician, searching for the mark of the Devil and oak leaves and for any other Aryan-looking murder victims who might have popped up recently, to see if they could connect anything to Roger Wilson. Because Michael’s current theory was that the retired chief of police and all-round good-deed-doing-model-bloody-citizen was a crazed Nazi occultist serial killer. He rubbed furiously at the stubble shadowing his chin.

  He needed to get out of the office. Take a walk. Get some proper food. He felt light-headed. He’d worked twelve hours straight on a piece of bread and jam and an egg sandwich. He picked up the newspaper. Lisa Bretel stared back at him. He was struck with the need to run all this by Jenny, see if she thought it sounded plausible. Off the record, obviously. He called her work number. It rang several times before Mark, the news editor, picked up. Jennifer had left, he said, around an hour ago. Michael was surprised.

  ‘She’s gone home?’

  Mark laughed. ‘She’s not gone home. It’s crazy here and she’s gone to talk to Roger Wilson. He called earlier, wanted to speak to her about something to do with the cases he worked on.

  ‘How long ago did she leave?’ Michael’s ear burnt with the pressure of the handset clutched against it.

  ‘About an hour ago, a little more maybe. Is everything OK?’

  Michael hung up the phone and stood quite still. Phones were ringing. Hard drives were humming and whirring. Blood was pounding in his ears.

  Dear God, don’t let this be happening. Don’t you let this happen, God. Not on my watch. Not again.

  ‘Marquis!’

  ‘Yes, sir?’ He looked up from the screen.

  ‘Stop fucking around with that machine and come with me! And you!’ He pointed to another officer who had been eating chips out of a plastic tray. ‘And you too!’ he shouted at Fallaize, who had just walked into the room. ‘Quickly!’ he yelled. His colleagues followed him out of the station, half jogging to keep up.

  ‘What the hell is going on? Where are we going?’ Fallaize shouted.

  Michael stopped. Turned. ‘We’re going to stop a murderer. So, for once in your life, shut your fucking mouth, get in that car and follow me!’

  42

  Jenny

  She pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine. She yawned and rubbed her watering eyes. Sleep felt more and more like something that only happened to other people.

  It was a clear evening, black sky unsullied by cloud. It was only a few yards from the car to the front door, and although most of the house was in darkness, a warm glow from a dormer window in the roof was enough to get her there without the need for her torch.

  Despite the light from upstairs, something about the house felt empty and she was unsurprised when the ring of the doorbell went unanswered. She checked her phone. No messages. Strange. He’d insisted he needed to speak with her. He struck her as the sort of man who would take criticism badly and she presumed he wanted to tell his side of the story, to explain how he could have missed the fact that there was a serial killer at work, undetected, while he was leading the police force. She tried the doorbell again. Waited another minute. Perhaps, if he was at the top of the house, he couldn’t hear her. She opened the door.

  It was darker inside than out and she used the glow of her phone screen to find the light switch. She stood in a narrow corridor, two closed doors to the left and a staircase to the right. The air smelt damp and stale. Cream Artex covered the ceiling and the walls with a complicated pattern of swirls and dimples, which had bubbled and lifted in patches, leaving flakes of plaster on the floor. It was a beautiful floor, an intricate mosaic of brown and orange tiles arranged in stars and squares, but it too was in disrepair. Many of the tiles were chipped or absent altogether, the black spaces where they once were like the gaps left by missing teeth. How different and disconnected this corridor felt to the homely kitchen she had visited last time. As if it belonged to a different house, a different person.

  She was aware she should call out. Hello? Roger? But the words stuck in her throat, and instead of trying to get them out she found herself keeping them in, swallowing them back down and treading lightly across the tiled floor.

  She opened the first door. A sitting room, the faded floral wallpaper peeling at the corners and the heavy velvet curtains covered in dust. In the next room, a beautiful grand piano stood in the alcove of the bay window, the light reflecting off of its highly polished surface. Stacked next to the piano were boxes. She walked over to them. They were unsealed and she carefully lifted a flap. The unmistakable musty vanilla smell of old books. She picked up the top one. It had a heavy, faded green cover. Black’s Guide to the Channel Islands. The one underneath, a slim pamphlet, the paper soft with age, Cartulaire de Guernesey, 1924. She flicked through the pages, bent down to pick up the loose paper which fell from between them. The title of the book, the price, a space for the date to be filled in. A receipt. From Island Books. She tried to still her shaking hands enough to take some decent pictures before she left the room, pulling the door shut with a gentle click, which, in the silence of the corridor, reverberated like a clap of thunder.

  Roger was connected to Island Books somehow. A coincidence, surely, another consequence of this place being so small. It wasn’t as if having an interest in local history and folklore made him a killer. Anyway, he had an alibi for one of the murders, Michael had told her. A police conference. Nothing could be more watertight than that. Why, then, did she feel like the only sensible thing to do was run out of the front door,
back to her car, and then drive away as fast as she could? To call Michael, to let the police do their jobs, to leave the story, because following it now would be reckless and what else did she need anyway? There were hundreds of books in that room. If she looked she knew she would find the MacCulloch in there. And he was the right age. And in the perfect position to make sure the cases were never connected, to limit the investigations, to hurry them along. To fabricate an alibi? She listened. Not a breath of noise.

  She looked at the front door. Took a step towards it. Lisa Bretel could be somewhere in this house. She turned and took the stairs.

  The landing was carpeted in the same faded red as the stairway and opened out on one side into a seating area in front of a bay window. She looked out on to the gravel driveway to her car, the red security light blinking from the dashboard every few seconds to show her it was safe and secure.

  She shouldn’t be here. She was breaking the law. I was worried about him. We’d arranged to meet. I thought perhaps he’d fallen ill upstairs.

  The first room she looked in was a study with an old desk, clear of paperwork and with empty drawers, an old-fashioned dial telephone and a swivel chair. The next was stuffed with furniture, a polished wardrobe, tall lamps with their shades askew and a bed covered with piles of women’s clothing. She picked up a couple of pieces. Outdated. Not a young woman’s wardrobe. There were books too, Jackie Collins, some historical romances, cookery books. His wife’s things. A bathroom was notable only in that it was as shabby as the rest of the house and in stark contrast to the fourth room, the master suite, which was fresh and modern and neat, with a cream carpet and fitted wardrobes filled with neatly hung rows of jackets and trousers and shirts. A glass of water stood on the nightstand, next to a lamp and a book, a popular airport thriller. She sat on the end of the bed. Calmed her breathing. Tried to think rationally. What had she been expecting? Some kind of psychopath’s lair, walls covered with pictures of dead women, diaries filled with the scrawlings of a madman? It would have made a great story. But other than the fact that Roger Wilson seemed inconsistent in his approach to home décor, there was nothing to see here. In fact, all she had was wild speculation and the books. She hadn’t even looked through them properly. Perhaps the rest of them were bestsellers and self-help books. Perhaps she just happened to pick up the two that had come from Island Books.