A Grave Waiting

Remembering Frances Hanna

The grave's a fine and private place

But none, I think, do there embrace.

— “To His Coy Mistress,” Andrew Marvell

Stating the Theme

Day One

D
eath
had come tidily to the body on the bed. There was very little mess, apart from a neat hole in the middle of the forehead, and a trickle of dried blood from the mouth, which gaped open as if the end had come as a surprise. The victim appeared to have been shot at some distance, which suggested a marksman, or maybe just lady luck — for the shooter, if not the target.

The setting cast an illusory patina of glamour over the grisly reality of violent death, as faux as the furry leopard coverlet on the circular bed with the gilt-edged mirror over it, the silk flowers on the desk — although the mahogany of the desk seemed real enough, as did that of the built-in entertainment console. Through an open door, Detective Sergeant Liz Falla could see a sybaritically equipped bathroom, gleaming with gold-flecked marble.

“Floating palace, eh, DS Falla?” Police Constable Mauger handed her a pair of latex gloves.

“A frigging marine mansion,” Falla replied. “When did you get here?”

“About fifteen minutes ago. Chief Officer Hanley sent me straight over and told me to get hold of you.”

As Falla bent down, the movement of the sleek Italian-designed yacht shifted the body on the bed abruptly. From the low rumbling outside it sounded as if the Condor Ferry was coming in to Guernsey from the south coast of England, cutting its engines as it came closer to its moorings, but still sending out a powerful wake of water.

Reflected in the mirror above the bed, the dead eyes seem to come briefly to life as the man's head shifted with the movement.

“Jesus! That made me — I mean, I thought —” Police Constable Mauger grasped the end of the bed with a latex-gloved hand.

“He's going nowhere. Who found him?”

“The cook. He's in the galley having conniptions. I've only had a brief word.”

“Go sit with him, PC Mauger, hold his hand. I've got a phone call to make.”

With a last, fascinated look at the body on the bed, PC Mauger reluctantly obeyed orders.

Liz Falla tried Detective Inspector Ed Moretti's mobile. She had already done so twice since the report came in, but no luck. Of course his mobile was off; he was on holiday. But this time she got a response. Third time lucky. Just as well, because this looked like a nasty combination of money, guns, and murder.

The thirty-foot tides of spring left even the lower shoreline exposed. The pungent tang of dulse, furbelows, and carragheen in the coral-weed rock pools assailed Detective Inspector Ed Moretti's nostrils as he approached Rosière Steps, overnight bag in hand. The first boat from Guernsey to the tiny island of Herm was arriving, a catamaran full of families and young lovers clutching cameras and baskets and bags and each other. After the car-less, crowd-less quiet of a couple of days spent on the island, which measures about a mile and a half across, the babble of human voices en masse — or comparatively en masse — seemed deafening.

The Massey Ferguson tractor, one of the few motorized vehicles allowed on Herm, was waiting at the dock to carry luggage up to the White House Hotel, so some of the visitors must be staying to swell the regular population of around fifty souls. From now on the crowds would build up until the end of August, but most would be day trippers from Guernsey, only three miles away to the west. Yet even in the height of summer you could walk with only the gulls for company between hedges of purple Hebe and New Zealand flax, buzzing with bumblebees and tortoiseshell butterflies, looking up at elderflower bushes as tall as trees.

“Back to reality,” he said to his companion.

“Some reality!” Retired Commander Peter Walker grinned at Ed Moretti. “Little wonder you came back to the islands of the blest. What a rest it is for the old eyes not to look up at billboards and posters on every available space advertising every useless product under the sun. I like pretty women, God knows, but Christ I'm fed up with twenty-foot-tall semi-naked females trying to persuade me to buy mobile phones or motor cars or mascara.”

“You can save your mascara-free eyes for sightings of rainbow bladderweed or butterfish.”

“From Scotland Yard to the seashore. You're surprised.”

The deceptively placid blue eyes examined the world from beneath a thatch of thick white hair, but the sixty-year-old who now spent most of his spare time studying the flora and fauna of the marine world seemed little different from the man who had changed the direction of Moretti's life.

“Not really. You've been peering into deep pools most of your adult life, Peter.”

“And these are a bloody sight more pleasant, as you know.”

“There's some pretty vicious infighting from what you tell me.”

“I'll still take limpet and dog whelk over the scum I used to deal with.”

“Fair enough. Phone me when you've had enough of marine life and feel like playing pick-up with us,” said Moretti. “I won't ask for help with the villains, but you might like to sit in with the layabouts.”

“That's what Fénions means? Good name for a bunch of musicians. That's a talented lot you're with, piano man — gifted sax player, and they're not easy to find.”

“Garth Machin? Yes, he's good, but he chose money over music. He's a banker.”

“Security over creativity. Like yourself.”

“That's right.”

Peter Walker looked at Moretti, sensing his withdrawal. Nothing new in that. They had first met in London, years ago, in a Soho jazz club where Walker played guitar when off-duty. He thought back to the first night Ed Moretti walked into the club, a small, dimly lit ground-floor space between a betting shop and an off-licence. One of the regulars had shouted out, “Where's the piano player?” and Walker had shouted back, “Gone AWOL, again. Is there a piano player in the house?”

“Yes.”

A very young, very lanky man near the doorway walked forward. The scarf around his neck marked him out as a London University student, and Walker cursed to himself. What the hell had possessed him, asking such a question? There were few things he loathed more than half-cut women who thought they could sing like Lena Horne or Peggy Lee, and the untalented fringe of the student body who thought they could play jazz piano. It was usually piano, because they didn't arrive with an instrument.

“Ed Moretti,” said the young man. Then, without further ado, he sat down and played Gus Kahn's “My Baby Just Cares for Me.”

This student could play. It was to be the first of many sessions and the beginning of a friendship that saw Ed Moretti change his career path to police work.

“Why?” Peter Walker once asked him.

“Because I never wanted to be a lawyer, but I couldn't think of anything else I wanted to do except play piano. Plainclothes policeman instead of lawyer is less of a disaster in my father's eyes than piano player, believe me.”

“Shouldn't you be following your dream, not your father's?”

Moretti had shaken his head and said, “You don't understand, Peter.”

He hadn't offered to explain, and Walker had not asked him to do so.

The catamaran eased away from Rosière Steps, and Moretti gave a last wave as Peter Walker's sturdy figure receded into the distance. It was a glitteringly clear day, and a sapphire sea creamed into a white froth around the islets of Crevichon and Grand Fauconnière, and the countless rocks that made sailing treacherous in these parts, unless you knew what you were doing. On Guernsey also, besides St. Peter Port Harbour, St. Sampson's, and Beaucette Marina, there were many anchorages around the island, but they all required knowledge of such things as low-lying rocks and neap tides, when the water was at its lowest point.

To the left of the catamaran, five hundred yards away, loomed the two-hundred- sixty-foot hump of the island of Jethou. For some reason it always appeared ominous to Moretti, forbidding in any light or any season. And yet Fairy Wood on the north side would be carpeted with bluebells and daffodils at this time of the year, and the island's past history was not as shady as that of others in this islet-dotted sea. On another, even smaller, island, a multimillionaire had for years run his business empire, thumbing his nose at the taxman. And on the island of Sark, a mini paradise, ruled until very recently by a feudal seigneur, many of its supposed residents were merely telephones with redirect facilities to wherever in the world the various businesses they served were to be found. A mini paradise indeed, for arms dealers, money launderers, and distributors of pornography, none of whom had ever set foot in the cathedral-like caves of the Creux Terrible, or gazed into the pellucid depths of the Pool of Adonis.

They were now out into the open, narrow channel that lay between the islands of Herm and Guernsey, passing Mouette and Percée and Gate Rock, heading for the harbour of St. Peter Port, the capital of Moretti's home island. Here, the wind strengthened and blew salt against Moretti's mouth. A small boat heading for Herm came alongside briefly, the man and woman on board waving at the children on the catamaran. They looked happy, carefree. Windblown. “I must get another boat,” Moretti resolved.

He'd have time. It had been a quiet winter, with only the usual annoyances of civilized society: break-ins, burglary, car accidents. Domestic disputes.

Behind him Herm receded into the distance, and the curve of Guernsey's eastern coastline grew nearer. In the centre the houses climbed the terraced cliffs of St. Peter Port, behind one of the most beautiful harbours in the world, guarded by Castle Cornet, as it had been since the thirteenth century.

Old mortality, the ruins of forgotten times
.

The fragment dislodged and drifted up from a buried repository of poems learned and texts committed to memory during his years at Elizabeth College, the private boarding school on the island. From mediaeval fortress to Hafenschloss for the occupying forces during the Second World War, Castle Cornet had survived the distinction of being the only castle on British soil bombed by the RAF, to become the keeper of the ruins of forgotten times. In the summer there would be open-air theatre and living history re-enactments. Seventeenth-century pikemen and eighteenth-century militiamen walked along Prisoners' Walk and past Gunners' Tower for the amusement of school children and tourists. And every day a soldier in Victorian uniform fired the noonday gun, the sound echoing across the harbour and the town.

The catamaran pulled into the moorings used at low tide at White Rock Pier, and its passengers marshalled themselves and their belongings. Moretti waited until everyone had disembarked and started to move toward the exit to the gangway. He'd drop into police headquarters on Hospital Lane before heading off home, see if his partner, Detective Sergeant Liz Falla, had got back from her gig on Jersey.

Not jazz for Liz Falla. Folk music. Acoustic guitar and a voice once described by a past lover of his as a cross between Enya and Marianne Faithfull. Was such a hybrid possible? Or even desirable? He had yet to hear her sing.

Something seemed to be going on over toward Albert Pier. Moretti could hear sirens, see the flashing of lights.

“What's up? Do you know?” he asked the catamaran skipper, a swarthy, bearded individual whom Moretti recognized as a not-infrequent patron of police hospitality after too many beers in local watering holes.

“Nope. But they were there when I left an hour ago.”

Moretti took his mobile phone from the depths of his bag and turned it on. It rang almost immediately.

“Falla?”

“Guv?” His partner's voice was deep for a woman, with a singer's resonance.

“What's the problem down at the harbour?”

“I've been trying to reach you. Did you just come in on that catamaran?”

“You saw that? I only just turned my mobile on. Where are you?”

“Victoria Marina. There's been a shooting on a yacht.”

“Where are the rest of the crew?”

“On land, apparently. The cook was scheduled to be first back this morning.”

Liz Falla watched Moretti walk around the circular bed, examine the exact turn-back of the bed cover beneath the dead man, the position of his hands, the angle of his head on the satin-covered pillows. Ask him a question hours later about some tiny detail in the cabin and, snap, his photographic memory would provide the answer.

About a year ago she had not dared ask Chief Officer Hanley, but she
had
asked the fates, various colleagues, and sundry family members why she had been assigned to this laconic, introverted individual who had no small talk, and even less awareness of her as a member of the opposite sex of above-average attractiveness. Or so she had been given to believe by more forthcoming males with less in the way of looks and intelligence than Moretti. But she had got used to walking into his office, or picking him up in the police car, and having no comment made about a new hairstyle, or a new suit. The only acknowledgement he ever made of her femaleness was when asking for fresh insights or opinions her sex might give her. What she had first seen as a slight she now valued as commendation.

“This is when I wish we had a coroner on Guernsey. I assume the scene-of-the-crime people are on their way.”

“Plus the pathologist on duty at Princess Elizabeth Hospital, Guv. We got here first. PC Mauger is sitting with the cook in the galley. He found the deceased. I've only had a quick word.”

“Give us a chance to look at the victim before everyone gets here. You okay with this, Falla?”

His partner gave Moretti a long look from beneath a pair of straight, dark eyebrows. Old-fashioned, his mother would have called it. It was a look he was getting used to. And, after the first murder case they had worked on together, his question was ridiculous. Falla was no fragile flower.

“After some I've seen that have been in the sea a few weeks?” She grinned. “I'll manage, Guv.”