Blood Will Out (10 page)

Then the silver fox walked into the office, unannounced.

Reginald Hamelin was a senior member of one of the most prestigious law firms on the island. His nickname referred to his magnificent and carefully maintained head of hair, his cunning in his chosen fields of law — property and matrimony — and his unpleasant behaviour when cornered. More or less retired for some time, he was brought out of mothballs for certain clients. He was still a powerful man, because he knew everyone who was anyone and, more significantly, what was hidden behind closed doors, in the back of family closets and, if there were bodies, where they were buried.

“Ah, it's the very attractive Detective Constable Falla.”

An elegantly manicured hand was extended across Moretti's desk.

“Detective Sergeant. Good morning, advocate Hamelin.” Liz Falla took the proffered hand briefly and indicated the chair on the other side of the desk. “How can I help you?”

Reginald Hamelin surveyed the seat offered as though it might need sterilizing, then sat down, slowly. He gave Liz the warm, charming smile she had seen in court just before he skewered a witness on the stand, or challenged opposing counsel.

“You have been elevated, Detective Sergeant. Felicitations. Well-deserved, I am sure. I am not sure
you
can help me, but I happened to be in town on other business and, after seeing the news of Dorey's death in this morning's paper, I thought I'd drop in. Where is your superior officer?”

Well, well, well, as her superior officer liked to say.

“Not available at the moment, sir — or did you mean Chief Officer Hanley?” Liz made as if to pick up the phone, and out came the well-tended hand, swiftly.

It was an open secret that Hamelin and Hanley disliked each other. The chief officer had unexpectedly resisted an attempt by Hamelin to get rid of an inexperienced young constable, still on probation, who had misguidedly given the silver fox a traffic ticket, and then added insult to injury by declaring that he did not care who Hamelin was, he had mounted the pavement with excessive speed, and was driving dangerously.

“Moretti. Detective Inspector Moretti.” Hamelin bared his teeth, straining for charm, and failing. “But you will have to do.”

Liz Falla bared her own teeth in response, and waited.

“T
he
war again?” said Liz.

Al Brown looked at Liz Falla and raised his eyebrows.

“The war again?” he echoed.

Liz was sitting next to Moretti on the other side of the table at Emidio's. It was eleven o'clock at night, and Deb had opened the doors to them and produced lasagna, and red wine, along with a large loaf of crusty bread. At this hour of the night, with the place to themselves, the feeling was of the tumultuous past of the building, rather than its mundane present. Beyond the huge plate-glass window installed in the opening to the harbour, where the privateers had hauled up their casks of brandy from the sailing ships below, the foghorn wailed softly, persistently, guiding present-day buccaneers through the mists and fog of a September night.

“I'll leave you to it. You know where the dishwasher is. And the till. Clean up and lock up,” she told Moretti.

She turned off most of the lights, leaving their booth in its own pool of light, and disappeared into the kitchen. A moment later they heard the heavy back door bang shut behind her. Moretti pulled out his mobile and turned it off, and Liz and Al followed suit.

“Not the war, this time,” said Moretti.

Back at the office, he and Falla had to wait for Al to spring himself free from the enthusiastic clutches of Chief Officer Hanley, who was anxious to hear how he would be applying his Met training to the case. It gave them both a chance to compare notes about the wartime offences of Gus Dorey, Senior, and share the information with Al Brown on the way to the restaurant. Al confined himself to comments about Moretti's Triumph, the model, the year, its four seats as compared to other Triumphs, but his comparative silence spoke volumes.

Moretti topped up Al Brown's glass.

“You look like you need this,” he said. “What Falla means is the occupation of the island in the last war, and what was said about the hermit's father. But this time I don't think so.”

“That's what advocate Hamelin wants us to believe,” said Liz. “All he basically said was to let sleeping dogs lie, to leave well alone, because the father is long gone, and why sully the son's memory?”

“Since when did Hamelin ever care about sullying?” Briefly, Moretti explained the silver fox for Al's benefit, and then told Al and Falla what he and Bernie Mauger had found at the Priaulx. “Besides, nothing was said about the suicide in the report.”

“Hamelin still has an ear to the ground, Guv, and I doubt Gord Martel has kept quiet,” Liz reminded Moretti. “I'm sure all kinds of people know by now the hermit hanged himself.”

“Come on, Falla. The silver fox doesn't slink in to Hospital Lane just because a poor old man takes his own life. I hoped a lawyer might come forward with information, but this is something else. No one risked helping Gus Dorey to hang himself because of what his father did in the war.”

“Not revenge?” Liz took another helping of lasagna and tore off a chunk of bread. “You once said that war casts long shadows.”

“True, but Gus Dorey had been in his hideaway many years, and no one had touched him. It doesn't make sense. Something more recent triggered this. Did you find anything helpful, or unusual, Al?”

“All kinds of stuff that was unusual, perhaps. For instance, he liked writing out passages from books, sometimes just quotations, and putting them back in one of the books.” Al Brown took a mouthful of wine, and closed his eyes. “Nothing like chianti with lasagna in my opinion, and this is a nice one.” He picked up the bottle and looked at the label as he spoke. “And he did a lot of underlining. I'm trying to put his jottings in some sort of order, see if there's any pattern.”

“Pattern?”

“I haven't shared this with the chief officer yet, but I'm not a big fan of some modern police methods.”

In his position as superior officer, Moretti resisted smiling, but Falla did not feel the need.

“Still, there was some interesting research about patterns of behaviour in one of my courses that might come in useful. Dorey seems to have been a compulsive note-taker, but only if he cared passionately about something — language, class prejudice, for instance — but what really grabs my attention is that most of his notes have to do with love. Not disappointed love, or love betrayed, which you might expect from a recluse, but love shared, love returned. Sometimes he underlined, not in the valuable books, and sometimes he wrote the same quotation out more than once, and those are the ones I'm most interested in.”

Al Brown smiled across the table at Liz, who smiled back at him.

“For instance?” For some reason Moretti suddenly felt the need of a cigarette. He touched the lighter he always carried in his pocket, his talisman. His pattern.

“There is only one quotation in French, and so far I have found it three times.” Al pulled out his notebook. “My French is pretty rusty, but it translates something like this, ‘A happy memory is perhaps on this earth closer to real happiness than happiness itself.'”

“I think that's from a poem by Alfred de Musset,” Moretti said. “Interesting.”

Liz's thoughts turned to her late-night conversation with Elodie.
Three
primal
elements
, she thought,
not
two
.
Sex
,
death
and
love
.

“So this is more likely to be about love than about revenge?” She was looking unconvinced.

“I don't know, Falla, but someone is anxious to cover up something. Hamelin's visit to Hospital Lane makes me even more curious about the report Bernie Mauger found about the fight between Gus Dorey and General Gastineau's son. Now,
that
is the sort of family for whom Hamelin comes out of the woodwork. He doesn't usually offer himself as an emissary, uninvited.”

Liz put down her glass of wine and pulled out her notebook, riffling back through the pages. “I didn't bring this to your attention, Guv, but perhaps now I should. Remember all that vampire hooey and Marla Maxwell's text messages? Something else has happened, this time at one of their meetings about the play. I took some notes, in case.”

Moretti looked across the table at Al Brown. “You know about this vampire stuff, Al?” Al Brown nodded, smiling at Liz again. “Fill us in, Falla.”

As Liz read the notes she had taken after leaving Elodie's, Moretti tried to concentrate on the content, and not the sound of her voice by his side filling the empty room with its music. In the dim light, Ronnie Bedini's paintings took on a soft sheen, a glow and a subtle vibrancy far removed from their brash and brazen, more brightly-lit selves, and Moretti thought of her looking at the Latvian girl.

“That's it, Guv.”

Bringing himself back to the matter in hand, Moretti asked, “Which member of the group gave you all this?”

Across the table, Al Brown was looking surprised, and Moretti could hear the mild reproach in Falla's voice.

“My godmother, Guv, as I said. Her name is Elodie Ashton,” adding for further clarification, “She's my mother's sister.”

“Sorry. I got distracted by Ronnie's artwork. Maybe I should talk to your aunt, although the place to start should be with the Maxwells. But I don't think we'd learn anything by the direct approach, and Hamelin's visit only confirms that. What are your aunt's working hours? Can you fix this up?”

“Of course. She works from home, but she keeps pretty much to normal working hours — non-members of the police force working hours, that is.”

Moretti and Al laughed, and Liz pulled out her phone and turned it on.

“I might as well text her now. Oh my God …”

“What is it?” Both men spoke in unison.

“Talk of the — it's my aunt, she's been trying to reach me. Something else has happened. The police are at her place.”

Moretti stood up. “Must be more than threatening texts or someone putting out the lights to scare people if uniform is out at this time of night,” he said.

He felt Liz Falla's elbow brushing against him in the narrow space of the booth as she texted back, then she closed her phone, and turned to him. Even in the dim light he could see the shock on her face, which was unusual. One of his partner's best qualities was that she kept calm in most circumstances, her emotions under control.

“It is, Guv. Much more. Someone has tried to kill Hugo Shawcross.”

Moretti parked the Triumph as close as possible to the cottage. Falla had directed him, but the flashing lights of the ambulance and the police car had marked out their destination like beacons in the dark long before they turned into the lane.

As he jumped out from the back seat of the Triumph, Al Brown asked, “Did they live together, the playwright and your aunt? Is this her house?”

“Yes it is, but, God, no, they didn't! She hardly knew him. He rents the place that backs on to this.”

Liz raced ahead of the two men along the path to the cottage, pushing past the ambulance driver as she did so, and in through the open door.

“Hey, wait, miss!” The driver started to go after her.

“It's all right, she's a police officer and a family friend.” Moretti pulled out his identification, as did Al Brown. “You haven't moved the victim yet?”

“Any minute now, they tell me, sir. Nasty business. There was a lot of bleeding and they had to stabilize him first.”

Moretti hurried ahead of Al up the narrow path Falla had taken, between two old limestone gateposts that must have been the original entry before the driveway was put in at the side of the cottage. He glanced up at the roof as it gleamed in the flashing lights of the police car and ambulance. Terra cotta from the look of it, which must have cost a bundle.

Perhaps Falla's aunt was in the offshore financial business, Moretti thought as he went in through the front door, followed by Al. He knew what that kind of renovation cost, having looked into doing something similar for his own place, and reluctantly rejecting the idea. Some interior walls had been removed when the cottage was renovated, making it more open than it would have been in whatever century it was built, and to his right he could see a kitchen, where two ambulance men were picking up the stretcher from the floor. Moretti recognized Police Constable Le Marchant, who was hauling a heavy kitchen table to one side to clear their path. Moretti and Al Brown hurried to give him a hand, then went over to the stretcher. The playwright was on it, moaning, which was a good sign, a sign of life.

“We're out of here,” one of the stretcher-bearers called out as they ran past them. Moretti got a brief glimpse of a small man with a blood-stained beard, his neck swathed in bandages. As he passed, his eyes met Moretti's and he gurgled something. At least it sounded to Moretti as if he were trying to put together a sentence, sounds with meaning, rather than a vocalization of agony.

“Didn't expect you here, Guv. Nasty business,” said a shaken PC Le Marchant, echoing the driver's words.

“Were you the first on the scene?”

“Yes. Jimmy Le Poidevin and his team are out in the garden. They just arrived.”

“Not smelling the roses, I imagine. Is that where it happened?”

“Looks like it. Not that the victim is saying much, not with his throat cut.”

“Good God. Was it the homeowner who found him?”

“Yes, and he was lucky — well, if you can call getting your throat cut lucky. She has some first aid training, and kept a cool head, what's more. Saved his life, the ambulance blokes say. I've got a statement from her, but just about where she found him and how she found him.”

“She must be in shock,” said Al Brown. “Does she need medical help?”

“The ambulance people have talked to her. They wanted to take her to the hospital, but she says she's okay. That's her through there with DS Falla.”

Through the archway between the kitchen and what presumably was the sitting room, Moretti could see Liz Falla sitting beside a woman on a sofa. She had her arms around her, and all Moretti could see was a mass of titian-red hair falling over the dark blue sleeve of Falla's suit.

Her aunt? He supposed he must at some point have imagined Falla's aunt as a grey-haired middle-aged woman, like Falla's mother, whom he had once met in town with her daughter, because this was a surprise. A flamboyant middle-aged woman, apparently, who kept her hair long and dyed it red.

“Falla?”

Liz Falla and her aunt looked up as he spoke. Behind him he heard Al Brown murmur.

“Va-va-voom.”

“We don't have to do this now. It's late, and you've had a shock.”

Elodie put a hand on Liz's arm, and looked at Moretti. Al Brown had left them and gone to talk to Jimmy le Poidevin and the SOC team outside.

“I'm all right. I know how important it is to do this as soon as possible, and besides, I really don't see myself getting into bed for a good night's sleep.” She gave a shaky laugh.

Sitting next to her niece on the sofa, Elodie Ashton struck Moretti as being completely unlike her niece, and it was not just in colouring. Even seated, Falla was considerably taller than her godmother. Not his type, but Al Brown was right. Va-va-voom indeed.

“Okay. I know you've already spoken to PC Le Marchant, but just start at the beginning, and Falla can take notes. Where were you — in here?”

“Yes. I was reading. I had music on, but very low, background-type music.” At this, Elodie turned and said to her niece, “And in case you're wondering, it was Chopin.”

“Poor Chopin, reduced to mood music,” said Liz. She hugged her aunt and grinned at Moretti, and the atmosphere in the room lightened somewhat. “Go on, El.”

“Then I heard what sounded like a Mudge and Stoker confrontation outside.”

“Sorry?”

This time both Liz and Elodie smiled at Moretti's bewilderment, and Liz said, “I've heard one of those, Guv. Stoker is Hugo Shawcross's cat, and Mudge is his bitter rival. It's a truly god-awful howling.” She turned to her aunt. “But this time, it wasn't.”