A Grave Waiting

by Jill Downie

  “I was beautiful.” The pink-shaded lamps that lit the room softened the lines on Coralie Fellowes’s face. “But just as important, I played my cards right. Not all of them did, you know.”

  Lady Fellowes arranged herself à la Bernhardt on the chaise, and Moretti and Falla sat opposite her on matching gilt chairs. Like an audience.

  “I’m sure,” Falla responded.

  Moretti added, “Not all of them would have been clever enough.”

  This time Coralie Fellowes directed her response toward Liz Falla. “Ah, to tell a beautiful woman she is intelligent! So irresistible.”

  “Right.”

  Falla smiled and pulled out her notebook in what she hoped was a non-threatening manner, and pressed on. “We are making enquiries, Lady Fellowes, into an incident last night on a yacht in Victoria Marina. The owner, a Mr. Bernard Masterson, was killed some time during the night. We are checking on anyone who was in the area at the time.”

  “Killed? Murder? Men fought over me, you know. But that was long ago. Why would a dead man on a yacht be of any interest to me? I live a quiet life, here in my little hideaway.”

  Her voice trailed off into a whisper and she turned her face away from them, her long red nails digging into the brocade-covered arm of the chaise.

  “But last night, Lady Fellowes, you went to St. Peter Port, and you were at the harbour, late at night.”

  “Who told you this?” She seemed shaken, as much as angry, leaning toward Liz Falla as she spoke.

  “There is a closed-circuit television camera in the area and you are on it. There is no mistaking you.”

  “There wouldn’t be, would there?” Suddenly, she was all vivacity, smiling widely, showing a mouth of yellowed teeth.

  “Why were you there?”

  “What was I wearing?”

  Prevarication? Or is it? thought Moretti. Leaning close to Falla, she seemed eager to hear the answer.

  “A long dress, looked like chiffon to me,” Liz Falla replied. “And a wrap — marabou, was it?”

  “You are right. My Poiret, I remember now. I gave myself a night on the town. No crime, I think. So, I was on camera?” Coralie Chancho seemed delighted to hear of her CCTV appearance.

  “Yes. Where did you spend the evening?”

  “At the boîte at the end of the pier. I have been there before.”

  “The Landsend Restaurant.”

  “My husband used to take me.”

  Coralie Fellowes put her hand over the edge of the chaise and picked up a photograph from the table alongside it. A good-looking middle-aged man smiled back at her. Even in the photograph the eyes were warm, loving. She put a finger to her lips, kissed it, and then put it on his face.

  “I went for old times’ sake.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “By taxi.”

  “And you were not picked up at the restaurant?”

  “The camera does not lie, they say.”

  She’s playing games, Liz Falla thought. “No, it doesn’t,” she agreed. “In that case, what did you throw into the water?”

  Coralie Fellowes’ hostility returned. “I had a cigarette and I threw an empty packet into the water.”

  “You are not smoking on the camera, Lady Fellowes,” Moretti interjected.

  A shrug of the shoulders, a little moue of the mouth. “My memory is not what it was. Why — what did it look like?”

  The kohl-rimmed eyes challenged Moretti, all seduction gone from them. Physically frail she may be, but she’s tough as old boots, he told himself.

  “A gun, Lady Fellowes.”

  She did not flinch, or avoid his gaze, and he was reminded of Masterson’s housekeeper.

  “I think not, Inspector,” she said.

  “We have divers searching the area. You wouldn’t like to reconsider your reply?”

  “I would not.” A fringe of heavily mascaraed eyelashes now hid her eyes from Moretti. “If a gun killed this man, then you may find one, n’est-ce pas? Proves nothing, does it? Mon dieu, que vous êtes beau.”

  The sudden switch was as disconcerting as she intended it to be. Moretti recoiled as if she had touched him physically. Liz Falla blinked, looked at Moretti, and hastily back at her notebook. Coralie Fellowes laughed.

  “Handsome is as handsome does, say you English, and I always preferred the handsome ones doing it, Inspector.”

  She laughed again, raucously. Scratch the surface and there she was, the streetwise chorine, the tough little girl who had survived and prospered to become a tough old woman, capable of killing. No doubt about that. But why?

  Moretti got to his feet. “That will do for now, Lady Fellowes, but we shall have to ask you to come to the station, and I suggest you get in touch with your lawyer first. If you think of anything else, here is the number to call.” He took out one of his cards and handed it to her.

  “Long time since a man gave me his number. But I never phoned them, you know. They always phoned me.” She peered at the card, her eyes disappearing from view between heavy black fringes. “Moretti, I think? Not an island name.”

  “No.”

  “The dress —” Liz Falla put her notebook away “— you said the one on camera was a Poiret. What about the one you are wearing now?”

  “Ah, my coat of many colours.” Coralie Chancho’s voice took on a crooning sound as she stroked the fabric. “Sonia Delaunay. Delicious.” The crooning sound became a quavering, faltering singing, and the song was “La Vie en Rose.”

  Quand il me prend dans ses bras, qu’il me parle tout bas, je vois la vie en rose.

  In the pink-lit museum of her past life, Coralie Chancho was back performing on some long-gone stage. Gently, quietly, Liz Falla started to sing with her.

  Il me dit des mots d’amour, des mots de tous les jours, et ça me fait quelque chose.

  It was the first time Moretti had heard his partner sing. It was surreal. The setting and the song blended, and the liquid flow of Liz Falla’s voice against the cracked-bell sound of Coralie Chancho’s smoke-shattered vocal chords shivered through his veins and the length of his spine.

  “Pretty, isn’t it? Look at that engraving on the barrel, all those leaves and scrolls and whatever. Never thought you could say that about a gun, but this one’s like an ornament, right?”

  Liz Falla shivered and pulled her raincoat collar up around her neck.

  A chilly wind blew across the marina, and a light rain had started to fall. A small group consisting of Moretti, Falla, the harbour master, two divers, and a constable from the uniformed branch were gathered around the tiny object on a tarpaulin spread on the ground. Nearby stood a melancholy group of seagulls, hoping for a chance at any leftovers that might remain. The diver who had brought up the gun touched the handle, which still gleamed through the sludge from the bottom of the harbour.

  “Looks like mother-of-pearl. My granny had some cutlery with this stuff on it.”

  “It is,” said Moretti. “And the trigger’s gold-plated from the look of it. It’s a Browning Baby — lady pistol, pocket pistol, various names. Some versions of it became the American Saturday-Night Special.”

  Moretti looked down at the constable, who was still crouched over the small pistol. “Le Marchant, I’m leaving this with you. Get it to the SOC lab.”

  Le Marchant eased the tiny object into a plastic bag.

  “So that’s the murder weapon,” said the harbour master, who’d come along for the ride, murder not being a common occurrence in his fiefdom.

  “No,” said Moretti. “That’s not what killed him. There’s no way that gun shot the bullet that was in Masterson’s head. No way.”

  “You mean there are two guns?”

  The diver stood up and swore, unzipping the front of his wetsuit. “Shit! I thought we’d got the weapon sewn up with this baby. If you don’t mind me saying, Ed, isn’t that unlikely? With the yacht moored right here, and the fact we don’t get that many guns laying around — hell, this isn’t
New York.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Moretti stood up, thrusting his hands deep into his jacket pocket, encountering his lighter talisman as he did so, “I didn’t say it has nothing to do with Masterson’s murder. I said it was not the gun that killed him.”

  “Holy shit,” said both divers in unison

  “My feelings exactly,” said Moretti.

  Sometimes he had a glass or two of wine at the Grand Saracen, but mostly he didn’t, unless there was someone like Ludo Ross in the club. “Not a chance,” he’d said to Ludo, and now he regretted it. After he’d written his reports for Chief Officer Hanley he didn’t feel like returning home, so he’d eaten in town, and then shown up at the club.

  The Grand Saracen was named for a legendary Guernsey pirate and operated out of one of the great vaulted cellars of an eighteenth-century house that faced the harbour. Above it was the restaurant once owned by his father, and named after him: Emidio’s. Moretti still retained a part interest in both businesses, but the restaurant was run by a distant relation of his mother’s, and the club by a tough and efficient local woman, Deb Duchemin.

  Tonight he saw no one he knew well, so the pleas-ure was in the playing. The audience was small, but they were in the pocket tonight — he and Lonnie Dwyer, Garth Machin, and Dwight Ellis on drums. Garth was his usual scatological self, peppering his remarks with oaths, insults, and cuss words, but his playing was bittersweet — the one not unconnected with the other, in Moretti’s opinion.

  In the immortal words of Charlie Parker, if you don’t live it, it won’t come out of the horn. Garth would never give up his Fort George mansion for a garret in town. But the angst produced by his poor-little-rich-boy lifestyle enhanced the sound of his alto-saxophone. Behind Moretti’s own playing lay the echo of Falla and Coralie Fellowes’s voices and, from time to time, he found himself “going out,” leaving the music’s harmony and rhythm behind, returning to meet the others again. Playing Bud Powell’s “Tempus Fugit,” the smooth sound of Miles Davis’s trumpet in his head blending with Garth’s sax, remembering Coralie Fellowes’s final words, directed at Falla.

  Jeune fille en fleur. Young girl in bloom.

  A scattering of applause as the set ended, and Moretti automatically reached up to find his unfinished cigarette waiting for him. But there was no welcoming curl of smoke against the dim light and he groaned out loud.

  “Want one?”

  Dwight Ellis took a pack out of his shirt pocket and shook it in Moretti’s direction. Above his drums, Dwight’s skin gleamed like lovingly burnished cherrywood, hand rubbed by a hundred willing handmaidens — which, given Dwight’s success with women, probably had been. There was something about Dwight’s cheery insouciance and tender smile that awoke a maternal response in females. That, and the raw energy of his playing, often led to the bedroom.

  “Get thee behind me, Dwight.”

  “Okay, man. Chill out.”

  Dwight grinned, shrugged his shoulders, and shook loose a cigarette for himself.

  Moretti turned away. Beyond the lights he could hear a familiar bray of a laugh, a savage bray, teetering on the edges of intoxication. Nichol Watt was in the audience.

  He was sitting near the front, and he was not alone. Nichol was rarely alone. Slumped against him was a young woman of about twenty, who looked not unlike Liz Falla, so presumably this was the idiot cousin. She had his partner’s dark hair, and a similarly shaped face, but there the resemblance ended. Her hair was worn in some exceedingly untidy style Moretti vaguely recognized as currently chic, and a ghoulishly dark lipstick on her full lips. As far as Moretti could see above the level of the table, she appeared to be wearing virtually nothing, but given club rules he presumed this was not the case.

  “Ed! Over here!”

  Reluctantly, Moretti left the tiny platform and went over to the table. The girl smiled up at him, dreamily, drunkenly.

  “You know Toni?”

  Nichol Watt was a middle-aged man whose success with women had more to do with his income and veneer of well-travelled worldliness than any other obvious qualities. He was rangily built and seemed loosely put together, as if his limbs might detach at any time. His puffy eyelids and reddened skin showed the ravages of too much booze and too many babes, and he was fast acquiring jowls beneath a fleshy chin. He was, however, intelligent and highly experienced in his field, and Moretti never made the mistake of underestimating him.

  “No. Hello.”

  “You’re Liz’s boss.”

  “Partner.”

  “Liz was right.”

  The girl stood up, leaning against the table, and Moretti saw she was just about clothed in a white tube top and a minuscule black leather skirt.

  Moretti did not particularly want to hear what Falla was right about, and fortunately neither did Nichol Watt, who required the undivided attention of any member of his harem.

  “Come on, Toni. Let’s get you out of here while you’re still ambulatory.” Nicol stood up, steadying himself by grasping the girl under the armpits, his fingers sliding inside her top.

  “Amatory, you mean.” The girl giggled. “I’m always amatory.” She looked up adoringly at Nichol.

  The girl’s profile reminded Moretti of Falla.

  “You’re not driving, are you, Nichol?”

  “Once a policeman, always a policeman, eh, Ed?”

  “Are you?”

  Jeune fille en fleur. How in the name of all that’s precious and lovely and ephemeral could this particular young girl in bloom waste her sweetness on the likes of Nichol Watt?

  “No, officer. We’ll mosey along to my little watercraft.”

  As they started to move away, the girl called out. “That’s what Liz said — she said, ‘always a policeman,’ she said. ‘Always a policeman.’”

  Just as Nichol and the girl were about to go up the stairs leading to the ground level, Moretti saw Garth Machin go up to them and take Nichol by the arm. A few words were exchanged, and from the look on Nichol’s face those few words were not mere pleasantries or idle chatter. The surgeon’s face darkened, and his reply was short and sharp. He jerked his arm away from Garth’s grasp and pulled the girl against him, half-carrying her up the stairs. Moretti could not see Garth’s face immediately, but when he turned back and headed toward the stage, he appeared shaken. His normally pale skin was flushed, and his strong, full-lipped mouth was trembling. He ran one hand over his short-cropped fair hair so that what was left of it stood up on end.

  “I didn’t know you knew Nichol Watt,” Moretti remarked, as his horn player bent down to take the instrument out of its case.

  “In my line of business you need to know anyone who is anyone, Ed, and Nichol Watt is someone. A piece of slime, granted, but nevertheless he’s someone on this blessed bloody plot set in a shitty silver sea.”

  Which really didn’t answer his question, of course. Perhaps it was about the girl, but Garth had never shown the faintest signs of chivalry and, as far as Moretti knew, had a stable and conventional home life. He had met Melissa Machin only once or twice at the few obligatory formal occasions he could not duck out of, and she seemed pleasant, looked pretty, and made all the right noises for the wife of a successful money man.

  The Esplanade was deserted when Moretti left the club. He could see the lights near the yacht, where they were keeping the incident van, a police car, and a watch on the Just Desserts.

  Just deserts, as in revenge taken? Unlikely. More likely to be about silence, the removal of a witness, of someone who knew too much. Hopefully by tomorrow they would have the reports in from the Canadian RCMP, giving them some more background on Bernard Masterson and Adèle Letourneau.

  He thought about what Nichol had said. My little watercraft. That’s right, he’d forgotten that Nichol kept a boat in the marina. He thought about what Ludo had said. He has experience in America, hasn’t he … I’ve always wondered what made him leave.

  Should he throw Nichol into the mix? Had Watt exa
mined the body of the man he had — Christ almighty, he was getting paranoid himself.

  Still. Instead of going straight to his car, Moretti headed south a short distance on the Esplanade. He could see the three decks of lights of the Just Desserts floating like a great white shark, and he was painfully aware of how inadequate their precautions were. The yacht was approachable — easily approachable — from the water, and although the police launch was now making regular trips to ensure the security of the crime scene, it was probably a case of closing the stable door after the horse had bolted.

  Not only getting paranoid, but now misapplying metaphors.

  Nichol Watt’s boat was not as impressive as a Vento Teso, but it was a very nice cabin cruiser, a 2052 Capri LS, with an enclosed forward cabin and all mod cons — well, a portable toilet. Which, given the amount drunk by the two occupants, they would be needing — one way or the other. Moretti knew roughly where it was moored, but he doubted he would see anything useful. Ironic that he’d mused about getting a boat for himself, things being quiet. He needed one now. If he used the police launch he’d be spotted a mile off.

  Pointless. Peering into the darkness, he could just about make out the Capri, beyond a smart new Chaparral and Garth Machin’s cherished 1959 Alan Pape wooden motor yacht.

  Had the killer come by water? Quite possibly. Moretti remembered the damp wetsuit. So possibly not directly by boat. The murder weapon was presumably already on board, and perhaps Masterson’s nemesis could swim like a merman.

  Or mermaid.

  Moretti went back to his Triumph and made for home, heading north on the Esplanade to the Grange, up past the eighteenth-century mansions of the privateers who had made their fortune on the high seas, coming back to build these splendid monuments to their wealth. Guernsey has always been run by money, from those professional pirates, their skills harnessed by the sovereign to fill the nation’s coffers as well as their own, to the present-day financiers with their far-flung fortunes in cyber-coffers, their castles in Marbella, and Monaco, and Miami.

  Ten minutes later he turned into the lane leading to the cottage he had inherited from his parents, driving between the stone gateposts that were all that remained of the great house that had once stood there. He had done little to alter the cottage’s interior, and had now lived there long enough to feel it his own, and not to expect his father to walk in the door.