“How the other half live, eh, Guv?”
“Other sixteenth maybe. Let’s go and hear what Monsieur Rossignol has to say.”
“Dear oh dear.”
Gwen Ferbrache unlocked the front door of her house again, retrieved her shopping bag from the chair in the hall, went back outside, and relocked the door. No point in going into town and not picking up a few things while she was there, however pressing the main reason for her trip might be. Her preoccupation was such that it was fortunate she hadn’t locked herself out, and the sooner she cleared her mind the better off she would be. A problem shared, she told herself as she hurried down the gravel driveway, particularly if you plan to share it with the son of your dear childhood friend, Vera Domaille, who happened to be a detective inspector with the Guernsey Police Force. Eduardo, whom she always called Edward.
She and Vera had grown up together on the same street, played together, shared secrets, including Vera’s secret love for the Italian prisoner of war she had seen force-marched through the streets, to labour in one of the many underground structures built during the Nazi occupation of the island. Later, after Emidio Moretti had come back and married Vera, she had danced at their wedding, and mourned at their funerals.
They had not danced at her wedding. Her sweetheart, Ronnie Robilliard, had not been as lucky as Emidio. Enough of that. She had moved on, devoted her life to her teaching career and interests other than home, husband, children of her own. But Edward, with his father’s dark hair and his mother’s fine bone structure, held a special place in her heart. Pity he hadn’t married that girl in England, but she was glad to have him back on the island.
Outside the twin whitewashed gateposts of her limestone cottage with its name, Clos de Laurier, painted in black on the right-hand post, she turned left past her hollybush hedge and descended the hill that led from Pleinmont Village to the coastal road near Rocquaine Bay on the western shore of the island. A quick glance at her watch assured her she was still in good time to catch the number 7A bus that would take her around the coastal road, inland past the airport, through St. Martin’s, past Fermain Bay, and into the island capital. There were fewer buses at this time of year, outside the holiday season.
Gwen was well into her seventies, but she could still keep up a brisk pace, thanks to years of walking the twenty miles of cliff paths on the spectacular south coast of the island, and the trainers she always wore on her feet these days. Not normally a lover of contemporary mores and modern inventions, she had quickly taken to the ubiquitous and practical footwear Americans called running shoes.
The day was clear and warm, and on any other occasion she would have enjoyed the feel of the spring wind blowing off the beach at Rocquaine Bay, sprinkling the surface of her spectacles with flecks of sand. She was briefly diverted by a flock of swallows and martins drifting high in the sky overhead, feeding off a swarm of midges over the tussocks of grass on the roadside. They did not necessarily presage a fine summer, but she was glad to see them. Briefly cheered at the thought of an excursion to see some of the birds who used Lihou Island as a stopover on their way north — flycatchers, wheatears, sedge warblers — she turned the corner past the clipped yew hedges of the Imperial Hotel, and crossed the road to the bus stop.
The sight of the classical frontage of the one-
hundred-year-old hotel brought the purpose of her trip bubbling up again in her mind. Bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble, she thought. They had stayed there. All so harmless, perfect, so it had seemed at the time. They had met at the Water’s Edge Restaurant in the hotel and she had felt no misgivings. Perhaps she was imagining things.
Along the curve of the coastal road, Gwen Ferbrache could see the bus passing Fort Grey, once known as Rocquaine Castle, used as a Nazi observation post during the occupation of the island, now a shipwreck museum, monument to the hundreds of lives lost in these inhospitable, rock-strewn waters. The Cup and Saucer, the locals called it, because of its shape, an inverted white mound above a wider grey concrete foundation. As the bus came nearer, she saw the driver waving and grinning. Lonnie Duggan — spring had arrived.
The reappearance of Lonnie Duggan in the driver’s seat was as sure a harbinger of spring as the arrival of the first cuckoo. How he supported himself during the winter she did not know, but he was also a bass player with the Fénions, Edward’s jazz group. The name meant do-nothings, layabouts and, although that didn’t apply to Edward, it was an apt one for Lonnie, with his habit of semi-hibernation and air of cheerful lethargy. It was difficult to imagine him as a musician, even of an art form she found impenetrable, but Edward told her he was good. “Nimble fingered” was the unlikely adjective used.
“Hey there, Miss Ferbrache! Hop aboard!”
“Good day, Mr. Duggan.”
Stifling mild irritation at being told to hop anywhere, Gwen Ferbrache climbed on board. About twenty minutes later, she and two other passengers were at the southern end of the Esplanade, trundling past the old dray outside the Guernsey Brewery, painted in the brewery colours of red and gold.
The bus terminus was a site, rather than a building, opposite Albert Marina. There was a kiosk for tickets, a public convenience, and a line of bus stops beneath a canopy of trees that included some sixty-foot-high turkey oaks that were under the threat of the chainsaw to make room for more parking, the subject of heated debate.
Picking up her handbag and her shopping bag, Gwen said goodbye to Lonnie, got off the bus, and headed toward the northern end of the town. As she passed the town church she noticed that there were two or three police cars and an ambulance leaving Albert Pier, sirens wailing. An incident on the cross-channel ferry perhaps, she told herself. A fight, someone taken ill, a drug seizure.
How the world had changed in her lifetime, and not always for the better. On Liberation Day, May the ninth, 1945, she had thought nothing could ever be that bad, go that wrong again. She sighed, waited for the light to change at the foot of Market Hill, and continued on her way to the police headquarters on Hospital Lane.
The morning sunlight shone blindingly off the stainless- steel appliances in the galley, lighting up in unflinching detail the bloated face and bloodshot eyes of Jean-Louis Rossignol. Hard to tell how much was caused by past excesses, or the shock of finding his employer’s body. He was seated at a small, marble-topped table opposite Police Constable Mauger, his large hands clasping a mug of tea.
“Are you in charge?” he asked querulously, as Moretti and Falla came through the door. “Where ’ave you been? I sit ’ere and I am shocked, so shocked. Mon dieu, c’est un cauchemar! Did you see —?”
From the gust of liquor-laden breath that reached Moretti, the mug of tea contained something more than Orange Pekoe.
“Yes, I did see, Mr. Rossignol, and that’s why you had to wait. There’s not much space in here so, PC Mauger, could you wait outside?”
Moretti waited until the burly figure of PC Mauger squeezed past the three of them into the passage outside the galley, then turned back to the chef.
“Why don’t you start by telling us how you came to be here, working for Mr. Masterson.”
With a little whimper and a gulp of his toddy, the cook obliged. “I am cooking in Geneva, and I see an — ad, you say? — in April for someone to cook on a luxury yacht for the summer. Time, I think, for a change. So I apply, ’e ’ire me, and off we go, cruising to every port on the Riviera. I like it, always the change, and oh, the people I cook for!”
“Such as?” Moretti interjected.
“Big businessmen from Germany, Italy, France, America. Even sheiks — oh, the parties! And the women! Always pretty women from Mr. Masterson. Then suddenly ’e say we’re going to the Iles Anglo-Normandes.”
“So this was unexpected?”
“Yes.”
“Did he just say ‘Iles Anglo-Normandes,’ or did he specify Guernsey?”
“Let