by Jill Downie
“The noise, I think. Clatter-clatter.” Ensor waved his hand as though it weighed about ten pounds.
“So you don’t know for sure if it came through the gate.”
“Mus’ have done. There wasn’t any assassin hidin’ behind the friggin’ ferns.”
Moretti went over to the gate and looked out. Whoever threw the dagger must have been, even briefly, in full view.
“It wasn’t dark, was it? Did you see anything, anybody?”
“I wasn’t looking, mate. I bloody ducked.” Ensor drank the last of the liquid in the glass he held in an unsteady hand.
“I did,” said his wife. “But it was after the knife landed and after Gil — called out. I opened the gate and took a look outside.”
“Did you see anyone?”
“Only a woman jogger on the lower cliff path.”
“Show me.”
Sydney Tremaine walked ahead of him and opened the gate. Moretti noticed the lock was both efficient and sturdy.
“Over there. I called out after her, but she was too far away. There’s always a wind out here.” She shivered in the light wrap she was wearing, pulling it closer around her.
“Let’s go back. We’ll get a description from you later, and we’ll have to have a written statement.” She walked back ahead of him and Moretti saw that her slender build gave her the illusion of being shorter than she was. For a dancer, she was fairly tall.
“Can you think of anyone who might want to harm you?” he asked the figure slumped amid the cushions of the chaise.
“Look, mate, there’s lots of people out there who find talent and genius a threat, and don’t I know it. That’s besides all the loonies and the crazies. Anyway, this island’s covered with pagan remains, isn’t it? For all I know, it’s some Guernseyman following some ancient ritual. For all I know, youse guys throw daggers at the drop of a neolithic hat.” Gilbert Ensor fumbled for a packet of cigarettes in the breast pocket of his pajamas. He managed to extract one, and bent forward precariously to light it from an ornate lighter on a small wrought-iron table near the chaise, cursing as the breeze extinguished the flame.
“Not normally,” said Moretti, stifling both his growing irritation, and the urge to comment on the crude anachronism, which was deliberate, he knew. This man was too intelligent to have made the comment for any other reason than to annoy. “Here —” He pulled out the lighter he still carried, although he was supposed to have given up smoking, cupped the flame, and held it close to the writer’s wavering cigarette. Best to ingratiate himself, perhaps, if that were at all possible.
“Ah, a fellow sinner.” Gilbert Ensor squinted up at Moretti through a cloud of smoke and intoned, “‘There’s daggers in men’s smiles’ — I tend to believe that, Inspector. Don’t you?”
“No more than I believe in air-drawn daggers, sir,” Moretti replied.
“Ah, so besides looking like Dirk Bogarde you’ve got a brain. The ladies must love you.” Gilbett Ensor leered at his wife. “Eh, Syd, me darlin’?”
Sydney Tremaine was quite calm. Moretti thought, She’s used to this.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Perhaps it would be better if —”
“— We left, yes. There’s nothing more to be done now. The dagger is being checked for fingerprints, and we’ll have a word with the hotel staff and the occupants of any of the rooms that face this direction. Maybe someone saw something, but it seems unlikely. Sir, perhaps it would be best if you went inside?”
“I’ll go inside when I want to go inside, Mr. Plod, and right now I don’t want to go inside.” It was said with an oily, drunken calm, and more clearly articulated than anything Ensor had said during the policemen’s visit. Moretti wondered if the drunk act was precisely that — a performance.
So much for ingratiating oneself, thought Moretti. Without responding, he turned and left the patio, followed by Sydney Tremaine and Liz Falla, leaving Gilbert Ensor puffing at his cigarette.
“I apologize for my husband’s rudeness, Inspector. It’s — nothing personal. It’s the way he is,” said Sydney Tremaine when they reached the door of the suite.
“Sorry to hear that, Mrs. Ensor.” Sydney Tremaine’s green eyes widened, but she made no response. “About this business with the dummies and the costumes — can you think of anything that has happened on the set, during the making of the film, anything at all, that could help us establish a link between that incident and this — or anything at all for that matter?”
Sydney Tremaine threw back her head and laughed. It was a hearty laugh that made the red curls bounce about her lightly freckled shoulders.
“Any number of things happen on a film set, Inspector, that make any number of people want to throttle someone or other — or throw daggers at them. But no, nothing specific, nothing that seems to connect with the attack on Gil — if that’s what it was.”
“A coincidence then — is that what you’re saying?”
“No.” The laughter was gone now. “I think not. I don’t really believe in that kind of coincidence. I wish I did.” A shadow crossed her face, and Moretti had the feeling she had been about to say something else, but had changed her mind.
“Has anything like this happened before? Your husband has a volatile approach to life.”
“How kind of you to put it like that! Fights and fisticuffs, yes. But no, nothing to do with daggers. Not even knives.”
“Well, if you think of anything, let us know immediately.”
Outside in the car, Moretti and Liz Falla sat for a moment without speaking.
“Talk about Beauty and the Beast, eh, Guv? Felt me up when I came before — very slick. I’m sure his wife didn’t see a thing. What a bastard!”
“A talented, successful, and therefore indulged bastard,” said Moretti, deciding not to comment on Ensor’s liberty-taking with his colleague. She seemed more than capable of looking after herself, and he hoped this wasn’t yet another hazard of having a female as his partner. “If it weren’t for the incident at the Manor I’d say it was some idiot teenager messing about out on the cliff path. We could be dealing with a personal problem, whatever his wife says. I had a feeling she nearly told us something else, but changed her mind for some reason.”
“Could be any number of things with that creep.”
“Too true. Let’s go back to the station, Constable. I should put in an appearance to reassure Chief Officer Hanley.”
* * *
The green Triumph negotiated its way out of the police station, bypassing the winding streets of the town, making for St. Julian’s Avenue. Climbing the road past the eighteenth-century elegance of Regency architect John Wilson’s St. James Church — now used as a concert and assembly hall — and the same architect’s less felicitous drab Gothic pile, his own alma mater, Elizabeth College, Ed Moretti drove the familiar route, deep in thought.
His education had been like the curate’s egg — good in parts, and one of the good parts had been an extraordinary English teacher, the other a history teacher with a fondness for Aristotelian logic. A quotation from the Nichomachean ethics had been a favourite of the history teacher, and it had stayed with the pupil: Every art and every investigation, and likewise every practical pursuit and undertaking, seems to aim at some good: hence it has been well said that the Good is that at which all things aim.
Between the three of them — the English teacher, the history teacher, and the philosopher — he had become a policeman. Not what his parents had in mind for him when he won the scholarship, but still. And, in becoming a policeman, he found himself dealing with members of the human species whose behaviour threw Aristotle’s logic on the topic of Good out the window.
Shifting gears, Moretti headed up the Grange past Doyle Road, named for an earlier lieutenant-governor. Up here, he was in the Regency and early Victorian suburbs into which St. Peter Port had expanded from its narrow sea-edged site, with spacious homes built from the profits of smuggling and privateering, surrounded by gardens
verdant and beflowered with subtropical plants and trees like camellia and palm that flourished in the island’s temperate climate.
Just after passing the Guernsey Academy for Girls, the distaff equivalent of Elizabeth College, the Triumph swung left into a narrow lane between two sizeable houses, finally coming to a halt outside a high stone wall. Moretti slowly negotiated his way between the stone pillars of what had once been a gateway and was now merely a gap in the wall.
Facing him was the cottage left to him by his father — a two-storey dwelling built of rough-hewn granite that had once been the stable and coachman’s quarters for the grand home through whose gateway he had just passed. A solid wooden doorway of faded grey, set in the traditional curved stone archway of the Guernsey cottage, a window on each side and three above, were all of them framed by a deep-pink climbing rose, long ago left to its own devices. On each side of the property, fuchsia, honeysuckle, and ivy covered the old walls with a tapestry of crimson, cream, and dark green that, in the island’s mild climate, lasted most of the year round. What had been the stables to one side of the structure served as his garage. But the manor house was long gone, and all that remained of the fine estate was Ed Moretti’s inheritance.
He loved the place. One of the disadvantages of leaving the island, as he had done earlier in his career, was that the property laws were so strict that inheritance was not always enough to hold on to such a possession. But Moretti had been lucky, because he had returned to the island to work and thus qualified for the house when his father died. It was the source of much ill feeling among expatriate islanders that the rich might buy their way in to avoid supertax, but a poor native might sometimes not be able to return to his, or her, roots.
He had made few changes to the decor and furnishings of the house, and it had taken a while to get over the feeling of waking in the morning and expecting to find his parents downstairs. The most significant addition was the sound system he had installed, to carry the music that was so important to his sense of well-being — a vintage quad system that drove a set of ESL speakers. The large speaker panel gave an incredibly smooth, sweet sound that had not, in Moretti’s opinion, been bettered in over forty years.
He had not had to add a piano. His own love of music came from his mother, and one of his earliest memories was of listening to her playing “Roses of Picardy,” singing the words in her soft, crooning voice. A very early memory. She had been gone a long time.
“Going back to the womb, you are.” That was one of Valerie’s cuts, just before he walked out the door. “Grow up, Ed, and face the music,” she admonished him in one of their final fights. An unfortunate image in the circumstances, since she was of the opinion that it was the musician who was “a bloody Peter Pan,” and the policeman who was the grown-up. Not so simple. Having watched his father dwindle and diminish after his mother’s death, he wondered if he’d ever risk an emotional involvement that brought so much pain.
You’re terrified of commitment, shit-scared of it, aren’t you?
The first thing he did when he went into the cottage was put a disk on the record player. Oscar Peterson.
How did the man do it? The marvellous internal rhythm that could sing without benefit of percussion or bass, creating melody and miracles of harmony, fireworks and lyricism and tenderness. Like the perfect love affair. Only, unlike love affairs, the mood created was constant, the same perfection when played for the umpteenth time. Now, that was commitment. And it was a commitment devoutly to be wished, of which he was not afraid.
Oh lady, be good to me.
The music continued to play in his head, long after he had gone to bed. Finally, sleep came.
* * *
It was barely light when Moretti was awakened by the persistent ringing of his bedside phone. It was the desk-sergeant from Hospital Lane.
“Sorry to wake you at this hour sir —”
“What hour is it?” Moretti surfaced groggily through the layers of sleep.
“Six-thirty. But it’s the film people out at Ste. Madeleine Manor and you’re down on my sheet as the one to call. There’s been some sort of accident. Nasty business.”
“Was it a human target this time?”
“Oh yes.” Moretti could hear the surprise in the officer’s voice. “It’s the location manager. Albarosa. Italian.” And, feeling it necessary to make the message even clearer to Moretti’s sleep-addled brain, he added, “He’s dead, Guv.”
September 16th
The limousine wound its way through the quiet early morning lanes southwest of the capital, St. Peter Port, making its way to the parish of St. Andrew’s. Even before Guernsey was divided into parishes, the island was separated into fiefs, holdovers from the ancient feudal system, in which tenants owed allegiance to the local seigneur. Many of the old customs were long gone, as were the ancient fiefdoms, of which the Manoir Ste. Madeleine had been one.
On an island the size of Guernsey the past and present were often juxtaposed with almost jolting speed. The driver made his way past one of the smaller former fiefdoms, the Manor of Ste. Hélène, now in private hands like the Manoir Ste. Madeleine, and on past St. Andrew’s Church, carefully restored to its twelfth-century self. Hardly past the squat spire and castellations of the old church, then they were crossing the Candie Road, close to the site of the vast German underground hospital.
“The underground hospital’s over in that direction,” said the driver, Tom Dorey, a local assigned to transport the Ensors. Before Sydney could make any response, Gilbert surfaced from a fitful doze for his usual grumble.
“Getting up at this hour is insanity. If they weren’t paying me big bucks I wouldn’t be doing this, and the way I feel I will never repeat the experience.”
“The way you feel now has nothing to do with the hour. It’s the booze, honey.”
“Bullshit. My body and my inspiration purr along beatifically when they’re well-oiled with Guinness and Glenfiddich. They grind to a sickening halt when confronted with the fucking light of dawn.”
Impassively, Tom Dorey negotiated the sharp bend that preceded the gates of the manor. He had by now got used to his passenger’s tongue, and could restrain the audible intake of breath that had been his original reaction.
“You don’t have to do this too often, do you?” observed Sydney. “You only have to be in early today because Monty Lord asked for a script meeting.”
“Jesus wept — or he would have done if he was the writer on this movie. It’s not as if I were responsible for most of the script — Monty put his Hollywood hotshots onto that — but now he’s farting about with the bloody plot line.”
“Well, they do that, movie people, don’t they? What is he changing?”
“Don’t know the details yet, but it seems he wants to add another strand to the story, which’ll completely alter the balance of the plot — and Bianchi’s going along with it. He’s building up one of the minor characters — the countess.”
“Is the actress who’s playing the countess his mistress?”
“Now that I could understand. But no. Word is he’s got the hots for the Marchesa Vannoni herself. Shoots high, our Monty.”
“My, my,” marvelled Sydney. “She must be all of — what, fifty, fifty-five?”
“She’s in good nick — built like a brick olive press. Still, she’s not your typical Hollywood producer bait, I grant you. Ah, at bloody last.”
They had arrived at the main entrance to the manor, which stood open. On each of the lofty stone pillars that supported the gate stood the heraldic beast that had once been part of the crest of the old island family who had lived in the house — a greyhound-like creature with impossibly long legs. To the right, a short distance away from the gate, was what looked like the gatekeeper’s lodge — a two-storey building of unusual construction, with a pointed roof and an upper storey jutting out over the lower. The car continued up the drive toward the manor, which hove into view, giving the first-time visitor a shock — of plea
sure, amusement, or aesthetic anguish, depending on the arrival’s sensibilities.
The original structure of the Manoir Ste. Madeleine dated from the seventeenth century, to which had been added an elegant Georgian extension. The crowning eccentricity was the new entrance hall, built around the middle of the eighteenth century by a seigneur who had obviously paid a visit to the châteaux of the Loire valley and come back enamoured of towers and turrets. On each side of the central doorway the turrets hung out over the main walls like stone torpedoes, with a slender tower just visible behind the pointed roof. It was surrounded by well-maintained parkland, presently covered with the trailers of the film people, with a coach house close to the main building.
“Thank God we’re here. I’ve got to take a leak.”
They had come to a halt in the courtyard behind the manor alongside a vintage Mercedes, a Bugatti, and a handful of army vehicles of various kinds dating from the 1940s.
“Where is everyone?” wondered Sydney, as she got out of the car. “It’s like the Marie Celeste.”
The usually busy courtyard was deserted. There was a complete absence of drivers, film people of every stripe, even the security guards who generally milled and shouted around the area, which was not being used for the film.
“Shut up, woman,” enjoined her superstitious husband, hustling for one of the portable toilets set up in a discreet corner of the yard. “They’re probably all on the other side of the building. You go on — I’m making a pit stop.”
Sydney made her way around the side of the manor house. To one side of her she could just see the grass-covered hump near the ornamental lake that concealed the entrance to the command bunker. One of the senior German officers had lived in the manor during the occupation, and it was on his orders that work had started on what was intended to be an elaborate complex of underground rooms and tunnels. The only sound was the squawking of the ducks that lived on the lake and the crowing of a rooster somewhere. There was still no sign of life, and the sensation of separation from reality she had experienced since their arrival hit her so powerfully that she felt vertiginous.
