Chapter One
September 15th
Un rocher perdu dans la mer. A rock lost in the sea.
Viewed from above, the island of Guernsey reminded Moretti of Victor Hugo’s description of the place when he was exiled there. Once upon a time, on a fine day, you were blinded by the glare of the sun shining off the greenhouses that covered the island, but many of those were now gone. Once, it was horticulture and tourists that brought in the money. Now, it was money that brought in the money, huge sums of it, most of it perfectly legitimate. Over fifty billion pounds of it. Drawn by low taxes — and no taxes on foreign-source income held by non-residents — the money continued to pour in.
The ATR turboprop was bringing them in across the harbour. First, Castle Cornet at the end of its long pier, looking from above like the eighteenth-century print he had on his sitting-room wall. He could see the projecting stones at the top of the Gunners’ Tower, like the points of a giant granite starfish, the pale green and dusky rose of the castle gardens that cascaded down the cliff face. From the air the tidal swimming pools at La Valette looked like line drawings on a map. Hidden in the thickly wooded slopes beyond, just before the sweep of Val des Terres, the main road leading to the south, was a huge subterranean U-boat refuelling bunker, now refurbished as La Valette Underground Museum.
Not visible from above. Even from the ground, its entrance was well concealed. Beneath the rock of the island existed another world of passages, tunnels, command centres, a hideous granite honeycomb built by human misery. When he was a child, before the reconstruction of Fortress Guernsey for the tourist, no one talked much about that hidden world. They were anxious to move on, to forget starvation, deprivation, fear. Collaboration. Betrayal.
Love affairs.
“They came to Mr. Boutillier, asked him to dig seventeen graves — an explosion, they said. I was terrified. Numb. I only cried when I saw you the next day, alive.”
His mother, talking to his father, late at night, the two of them reliving the agony. His father had been there, underground, digging, dragging trucks of rock in a harness, like a beast, with the Russians, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Czechs, the French. All of them at the mercy of Hitler’s Organisation Todt. Hidden from view, once. Now, reconstructed, open to the public. The giant blood-red oil tanks for diesel, the glass display cases of knives, stilettos, the steel-lined rubber truncheon, the whip with its leather strips.
From the air the Fort George enclave for the wealthy seemed no more remote than it did from the ground. There were two entrances to it: one through Fermain Road off Val des Terres, the other through the gate, all that was left of the old fort. He could see the mansions overlooking Soldiers’ Bay from the Clarence Battery, glimpse the far reaches of forbidden ground from the cliff path that ran past them. Once, on a cliff walk, Moretti had heard loud cackling from one of the properties, saw a flock of geese running toward him beyond a fence, protecting their Capitol. “No, no,” someone was saying.
No, no indeed. No parking on the roads, no vans allowed on driveways, no children playing on the pavements, not a sign of life. Inescapable, really, in a world of haves and have-nots. The rich needed to be as protective of their homes as they were secretive in their businesses, closed away in the Crédit Suisse buildings on the Esplanade or behind the elegant facades around the Plaiderie, near the law courts and the lawyers’ offices, with the CCTV cameras trained on every entrance.
The one-storey airport building came into view, beyond it a couple of smaller buildings, one of them the club for the owners of the private planes that were now as common as gulls on the island. The ATR landed with a gentle bump, taxied to a halt near a couple of Trilanders, the three-engine airplanes used by international banks and financial companies, their logos writ large on their sides. The one closest to him read, “Royal Bank of Canada.” Up on the open viewing area he caught a glimpse of his new colleague, leaning over the parapet. His feeling of depression deepened.
DC Liz Falla.
What had he done to deserve this? Fate in the guise of Chief Officer Hanley had given him this inexperienced girl-woman as his brand new partner. Even from here he could see the brisk, relentlessly youthful spring in her walk. Twenty-sevenish going on seventeen.
God almighty. He reran the phone conversation he had with her when he was in Italy, attending his godmother’s funeral. The timing couldn’t have been worse, leaving an inexperienced officer behind.
“Anything come up?” he had asked.
“Well, there’s something, Guv. At the moment it doesn’t seem like much. There’s been trouble at that film they’re shooting at Ste. Madeleine Manor. You know the one?”
“Of course.”
Who didn’t? Guernsey was agog from the moment it was announced that an international film company would be on the island to shoot the film version of the hit novel, Rastrellamento, by British bad boy author, Gilbert Ensor. They were the biggest movie-world presence on the island since Guernsey had stood in for Nova Scotia for the filming of Adèle H., starring Isabelle Adjani as poet Victor Hugo’s tragic daughter, and they had arrived about two weeks earlier, taking up the space and the facilities and the support staff usually reserved for tourists. On an island that measured about twenty-four square miles, with under sixty thousand inhabitants, they were markedly noticeable and far more exotic than the tourist trade. No buckets and spades and shandies for this lot; the hotels and watering holes had optimistically stockpiled magnums of champagne and crates of caviar. Some of the top hotels held on to their chefs, whose stay on the island was usually a summer’s lease.
“What sort of trouble?”
“Well, it’s all a bit freaky, really. Like they are. Involves a bunch of costumes. And daggers.”
“Daggers?”
“Right. Daggers. Or a dagger, actually. Chief Officer Hanley’s dead keen to get you back because you speak Italian.”
“Italian? Oh, right. The director is, isn’t he?”
“And some of the others. I’ll tell him you’ll be back tomorrow, shall I?”
“I see,” said Detective Constable Liz Falla, wondering if she did. She looked again.
A group of dressmaker’s dummies stood facing her against one wall, and in front of them lay six costumes on a foldaway table: three women’s suits tailored in a style she’d seen in black and white films, a flowered dress, a man’s suit, and a Second World War German uniform. They, and the dummies, were ripped and slashed to shreds.
It was stuffy and airless in the lodge, which was always called “the lodge,” but which was in fact the ancient seat of the manorial court of the Manoir Ste. Madeleine, on the channel island of Guernsey. Its original function was long gone, and the building was now serving as storage for the international film crew shooting on the island. The freshly whitewashed walls of the long room were hung with costumes on hangers. Racks of costumes crowded the aisles between a series of tables on which lay a variety of headgear, from hats to helmets.
“I see,” she said again. “When did this happen?”
Lack of oxygen — perhaps that was why I feel particularly dozy, thought DC Falla, looking at the very large, very blond, very angry Englishwoman at her side.
“Some time during the night. I don’t know, but they were all right when I left yesterday evening. Whoever it was came in through the window.” The costume designer indicated a broken pane beyond the lineup of dummies.
There was something undeniably gruesome about the ripped costumes, spread out in a row, the gashes in the fabric like open wounds. Like headless corpses, thought Liz Falla. But still — this woman had been as hysterical on the phone as if actual murder had been committed, and in her new role as Chief Officer Hanley’s blue-eyed girl, she had been sent to investigate.
Eagle-eyed, to be accurate. That’s what the Guernsey Press called her, for spotting the old spare