A Grave Waiting (11 page)

Maybe that was what he heard in her voice. Frustration. “I'm on my way to see Gwen Ferbrache, just to say hello. Sandra Goldstein is there and wants to speak to me. Phone me if anything comes up.”

Back at police headquarters in Hospital Lane, Liz Falla put down her mobile and stared again in disbelief at the copy of the
Guernsey Press
that had been delivered to her attention at the station. Across the front page ran a headline, the inch-high letters standing out in stark relief against the white background.

E
x-
F
olies
S
tar,
J
ust
D
eserts, and
M
urder

Beneath, in smaller print, the “Special correspondent to the
Press
” trumpeted:

Inside sources at Hospital Lane confirm the presence of glamorous Coralie Fellowes on the marina at midnight when multi-millionaire Bernard Masterson was murdered on his yacht. Staff at the Landsend Restaurant on Albert Marina revealed that her visit to the fashionable watering hole is of great interest to the police. Detective Inspector Ed Moretti is leading the investigation, assisted by Detective Sergeant Liz Falla. For further details, see page 10.

Liz Falla turned to page ten. Apart from some details about an earlier murder case of Moretti's there was little of substance, but the
Press
's special correspondent had spun quite a yarn out of very little. He did not name his inside sources, but it was clear who they were.

They were DS Liz Falla.

“I'm on duty,” was all she had said, but he'd seen her leave the restaurant and taken it from there.

The special correspondent of the
Guernsey Press
was, of course, Denny Bras-de-Fer.

T
here
was no sign of a bicycle outside the Clos du Laurier, so Sandra Goldstein must have come by taxi, or walked down the lane and taken the bus. Moretti parked the Triumph inside the gate and walked up to the house. As he reached the front step, Gwen Ferbrache opened the door. She gave him a welcoming smile, but her face was grim.

“This is good of you, Edward. Come in.”

Books, books, books, that was one of his earliest childhood memories of this house. Books in bookcases, on tables, lying open on chairs. Her tiny hallway was lined with books, and there were a couple lying on the side of the stairs.

“Miss Goldstein is in the sitting room. Go on through. I'm making tea.”

Sandra Goldstein was sitting in a chair near the French window overlooking Gwen's garden. She was rubbing her hair with a towel and she was very wet. A pair of trainers stood by the window, and her brown nail-polished feet were bare. There were patches of damp on the knees of her grey sweatpants. She looked up as Moretti came in and smiled apologetically.

“I'm sorry about this, but it was my only chance.”

“Why didn't you use the number I gave you?”

“I didn't want to leave a message on a machine. Besides, Julia doesn't know I'm doing this. I'm supposed to be at the store, picking up groceries.”

“Can I ask why you decided to do — whatever this is?”

“Because you are a bright guy, and I didn't want you making enquiries and jumping to the wrong conclusions.”

“Would a bright guy do that?” Moretti sat down opposite her.

She laughed and gave her hair a final rub before putting the towel down on her knees. “Touché. I guess I decided we needed someone else in the know. I've told Miss Ferbrache, and she told me she had already spoken to you.”

“About the gun, you mean.”

Moretti watched her face carefully.

“The gun.” Sandra Goldstein leaned back in the chair, closed her eyes, and laughed again, but this time there was no humour in it. “It's a replica, a fake. A good one, but no more use to us if things got ugly than a stage prop.”

“How did you get something like that through customs?”

“I didn't. I picked it up at the tattoo parlour in town — The Art o' Torture. I know places like that sometimes carry this kind of merchandise.”

At this point, Gwen came into the room carrying a tea tray. Making a mental note to check out the tattoo parlour, Moretti got up to take it from her.

“Thank you, Edward. Put it down there.” Gwen indicated a table near the wing chair in which she usually sat. “I'll pour the tea and let Miss Goldstein tell her story.”

“It's really Julia's story,” said Sandra Goldstein. “I imagine you've already guessed it's about Ellie's father.”

“Guessed, yes, but I'm going to drink my tea and listen.”

Moretti took the flowered china teacup from Gwen, and one of her cupcakes. They were another childhood memory, his memory-madeleine, his mother and Gwen sitting together, laughing together in this room.

Sandra Goldstein put her cup and saucer on her lap, and began. “Julia and I have known each other since we were children. We had started collaborating on the books well before Julia met and married Sam Meraldo. I never liked him, but Julia was crazy about him. From the beginning he tried to isolate her, put distance between her and family and friends. He disparaged her talent, jeered at our friendship, said I was a lesbian and jealous of him. Then Ellie was born, and things went from bad to worse. He started hitting her, threatened to take Ellie away from her, even kill them both. You cannot imagine some of the things that happened, but I'll cut to the chase.” Sandra Goldstein's voice shook. “Julia got a court order, came to me, and stayed with me through the divorce. Ellie was only a few months old when Julia got away from him, and the three of us had to go into hiding. That was when things got
really
scary.”

“Things got worse?” Moretti took another cupcake, remembering his missed lunch.

“Yes. We moved, no one knew where we were, except our editor and our lawyer.” Sandra Goldstein leaned forward in her chair, her long damp hair swinging around her face. “But he always found us. Always, always. We moved again, and he found us — oh, not in the flesh, but he kept sending us these
things
. Dolls with ropes around their necks, X-rated videos and DVDs, articles cut out of newspapers and magazines about violent death or torture with the worst details highlighted, that kind of thing. The persecution went on and we could never understand how he found us — heck, we even started suspecting our own families, and at one point Julia even started suspecting me. It was our lawyer who finally said what we didn't want to hear: that in this cyber age he could always find us. Or hire someone to find us. We were vulnerable to anyone who had access to our name and social security number, we were exposed any time we used a cellphone or a bank card, any time we made an appointment with a dentist or a manicurist we were vulnerable.”

“Did you think of changing your names?” Moretti asked.

“A long process to do it legally, which would have meant exposing ourselves again and therefore would have been pointless in the end.”

Sandra Goldstein put down her cup, got up, and walked over to the window. “But the real problem was the books.” When she turned back to look at Moretti she was smiling. “No woodchucks out there, right? We're miles away from woodchucks, but they keep us here. Financially, I mean. Warren and Wilma keep us very comfortably, Julia and me. In the States, Goldstein and King are as well-known as, oh, A.A. Milne. And Sam Meraldo knows that. He has said as much.
I'll follow the woodchuck trail
.” The American woman sang the line quietly to the theme from
The Wizard of Oz
. “He'd sing that to us over the phone. It was — chilling.”

“So you came here.” Gwen took Sandra Goldstein's cup from her and refilled it.

“After the photographs.”

“Photographs?”

“They started arriving, every week, sometimes every day — Julia at the doctor's office, me at the grocery store, Ellie and Julia and me at the park. And every time they arrived the phone would ring and there'd be no one there. Call untraceable. He knew where we were every hour of the day.
That's
why we're here.”

“Why Guernsey?” Moretti asked.

“Some of what we told you was true. We'd seen a video owned by an American friend with Guernsey roots a few years ago, before Julia met Sam, so we felt he'd not be able to work out where we are. I had to keep my name, because I've always been Goldstein, but Julia had kept some of her accounts and so on in her maiden name, so she went back to King. The only reason she changed her professional name was to appease Sam.”

Moretti felt a wave of depression sweep him up and deposit him in an unpleasant trough of sadness and disgust. “What a bastard,” he said. “Sorry, Gwen. What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing. In fact, that's why I am here, to beg you to do nothing. No enquiries, no checking up on Sam Meraldo, nothing that might lead some pursuer in cyberspace to us. See how paranoid we are?”

Sandra Goldstein stood up. “I must go. I still have to get the groceries. I'm so grateful to you, Miss Ferbrache, for —” She stopped.

“Tea and sympathy?” Gwen spoke briskly. Having suppressed her own feelings of loss for half a century, she was not partial to emotional breakdowns of any kind, and for a moment it seemed as if the American woman was about to lose control. She had no desire to revisit distant anguish, and the unsuppressed pain of others often did that to her.

“Come on, Edward, take Miss Goldstein to do her shopping.”

“I'm just fine — you don't have to —”

“It's not a problem,” said Moretti. There had been no phone call from the station, so he presumed there was no emergency — apart from investigating a murder, that is. “Where were you planning on doing your shopping?”

“If you're heading into town, that'd be fine. Julia is in the midst of a new painting, and she's feeling pretty good today.”

As Sandra Goldstein started to put on her trainers, Moretti picked up the tea tray and carried it through to the kitchen, followed by Gwen.

“Edward,” she said, closing the kitchen door, “they have no phone, and Miss Goldstein won't get what she calls a cellphone, because she's afraid it can be traced.”

“I'll see to it,” Moretti said. “DS Falla or I can buy one in our name, and Miss Goldstein can reimburse us.”

“Unbelievable,” said Gwen as she started to take things off the tray.

“I wish it were,” said Moretti, “I only wish it were.”

“Gwen tells me your mother was a Guernsey girl, but your father was Italian. A prisoner of war on the island.”

A teenage slave labourer, his father, dragging trucks of rubble as they dug out the underground hospital.

“Yes, he was. He was a partisan, and was captured toward the end of the war.”

“She saved his life, your mother. That's so romantic.”

“She smuggled food to him, yes. He came back after the war, found her, and married her.” Moretti turned and looked at his passenger. She smelled faintly of rainwater on cotton fleece. “I would have thought life had made you cynical about romance.”

“Crazy, aren't I?” Sandra Goldstein turned and laughed. She had a mole like a beauty spot, he noticed, on her cheek. “May I ask whether you
did
check on us? You understand why.”

“I checked on the sweater you were wearing and your website.”

“Sweater? Oh, my hockey sweater.”

“Florida Panthers. So Connecticut was a fabrication.”

“Yes, sorry. We muddied the waters a tad.”

Moretti turned the Triumph on to the Esplanade and past the Guernsey Brewery with the old dray in the forecourt, painted in the brewery's traditional blue and white. He could barely see Castle Cornet through the mist and rain. As they passed the bus terminal Sandra Goldstein said, “You can drop me here, Edward — can I call you Edward? After all, I'm not a case of yours, am I? I'm Sandy, by the way.”

“I'll call you Sandy if you call me Ed. Only Gwen calls me Edward, which is not actually correct. I was christened Eduardo.”

Moretti pulled in under the trees by the line of bus stops and leaned across to open the door.

“Thanks, Ed. I know you're tied up with a murder case. I appreciate it.”

“You're welcome.” She had hazel eyes, he noticed, like topazes against the pale tan of her skin. “I'm going to arrange a mobile for you — what you call a cellphone. It will not be traceable to you or to Ms. King.”

“You are kind.” Her voice wavered. “If you come to the cottage, just sound your horn as you approach, okay? Then you'll not be greeted by Julia and her fake firearm.”

She touched his arm again, and then let herself out of the car, slamming the door behind her. Moretti watched her run across the road toward the town, her long hair bouncing on her shoulders. She was going to need a towel again. Then his eyes were drawn to a
Guernsey Press
billboard by one of the bus stops

E
x-
F
olies
S
tar,
J
ust
D
eserts, and
M
urder

Even at this distance he could read it quite clearly.

The mobile in his jacket pocket began to ring.

“Inside sources, Falla?”

Liz Falla stood on the other side of Moretti's desk. She was feeling nauseous, sick to her stomach. Not that it showed.

“Le Marchant? Brouard? Who?” Moretti slapped the newspaper down on his desk. “Christ, Falla, we laugh about the grapevine, but this is beyond a joke. This could compromise the investigation, or the safety of a witness, and I tell you — this time I'm out for blood. Who tipped off this creep?”

“I think it was me, sir.”

His partner's face was white. She swallowed hard, her jaw clenched.

“You?”

Moretti stared at her in disbelief. In the months they had been partners, Liz Falla's love life had not been a major topic of conversation, but enough had been said for him to grasp she had an approach his mother's generation would have considered flighty at their most charitable, and “no better than she should be” the more likely verdict. Not that he had given it much thought, but his own evaluation was more along the lines of foot loose and fancy free.

“Don't tell me you've had anything to do with this clown.”

“Not anymore, and I'd rather not discuss it, if you don't mind. Could I stick to what I think happened?” She didn't seem chastened so much as defiant, looking him straight in the eye, chin held high.

“With pleasure. Go ahead.”

“I ran into Denny when I came out of the Landsend. He was hanging about the yacht. He asked for information, and I told him to get lost.”

“That's it?”

“Not quite. I told him I was on duty, and he'd seen me coming out of the restaurant. After I left he went into the Landsend and asked what I'd been doing there, and someone — I think it was probably Gail Collenette — told him I'd asked about Lady Fellowes. I checked with Gord, and he confirms Denny was there, denied saying anything, but said something like ‘You know how he is with the ladies.'”

“You told him nothing?”

“Nothing. Denny could always make a silk purse out of a sodding sow's ear, and that's what he's done.”

“Has Hanley seen this yet? I'll answer that — no, or you and I would be on the proverbial mat.”

“He's in a meeting. Only a matter of time.”

“Then why are we hanging about here?”

Moretti got out of his chair. He still felt angry with his partner, although he wasn't quite sure why. Except she'd been critical enough of her cousin, so why the hell did she herself make such a lousy choice of lover?