Blood Will Out

by Jill Downie

  The wounded self, she thought. Freud’s phrase for the hidden persona of the neglected, abused child.

  At some point in the narrative, he pulled a piece of cord out of his pocket to illustrate his story, putting down his glass to do so, still holding on to the knife.

  “The preferred method of garrotting by the Foreign Legion, my father said. La loupe, a double loop. The victim pulls on one, only to tighten the other. Once thought of running away from home to join them in the desert. Marche ou crève, that’s what they had tattooed on their feet. Couldn’t have been any worse than boarding school.”

  Slowly, carefully, she thought. But at some point, one of us must make a move. “I asked you ‘why,’ and you said it was a good question. Why, Jim? What is the answer?”

  Jim Landers face glowed. “Because this one acquisition is my chance at deliverance from penury, and I had to make sure no one stood in the way. This chap, for instance.” Deadpan, he tugged at his sodden sleeve. “Came into the shop one day, rattling on about some secret Rory’s bimbo has told him. No idea what it was, but couldn’t risk it, not so close to the financial freedom I’d always wanted.”

  “Why Hugo, Jim?”

  “Apart from being a pompous clot, you mean? Ginnie suggested it.”

  “Ginnie?”

  “Yes, she was there when the aforementioned clot held forth about vampires, and evil existing at the first meeting about the new play. He said something about curses and witches and books, and I knew he was on the same track. A man like that would be. Ginnie saw I was upset.”

  “Upset?”

  The understatement was chilling.

  “Yes. Ginnie adores me, you see, so I told her about my quest. ‘Why don’t we hoist him on his own petard!’ she said.”

  “So, the whole vampire thing, the biting and so on, was a red herring?”

  Jim Landers giggled, a grotesque little sound. “Very funny, Elodie, very funny.” He was instantly serious again. “Bit of a challenge for me, when I tried it. Not as easy as you might think. But Ginnie was a chum, the only person I trusted with my story, and she had her own reasons for being interested in the Pleinmont hermit.” Jim Landers’s blood-smeared face now radiated delight. “Luck, for once, was on my side. You see, I had already been setting free some of the books. No way they should be owned by a down-and-out in a hovel. Then I read about this rare book in Alberta, that there was possibly another copy somewhere, and Hugo started dropping hints. I had an advantage over him, because I knew where it was likely to be!”

  “One book, Jim? One book could change your life? What one book could do that?”

  Jim Landers looked impatient. “A book worth millions, of course. Ginnie was thrilled when I found it. Thought we’d be walking off into the sunset together. One day the troglodyte saw me, and so did the old bag who hung around his place. I told Ginnie, and Ginnie helped, so I was happy to go along with her vampire idea, and Hugo had to go, just in case. What the hell she was looking for in that dump, I don’t know. Not my business.” Landers leaned towards Elodie, lowering his voice theatrically. “Only I’ll have to hold on to it for a while till the heat dies down.”

  “How can you bear to sell something about which you feel such passion?”

  Jim Landers looked disapproving. “It is a disgusting book, and I don’t want it near my Jane Austens. Like the piece of filth I offered this chap.” Another tug at his sleeve.

  Inconsequential thoughts began to flit through Elodie’s mind.

  That lovely fresh sea bass in the fridge. Should I offer him dinner, and is he mad enough to accept? Difficult, while eating, to hold on to any weapon other than cutlery. I’ll have to get rid of that chair, but I wasn’t that sure about it in the first place. Ginnie, dear God, Ginnie.

  Suddenly, Elodie began to feel very angry. She was getting tired of waiting to die, and she’d decided that she had to try to break through that prissy, prudish façade.

  “Ginnie had other motives, Jim, you’re right. You weren’t supposed to be a chum, you’re supposed to be her stud, mate with her and give her a son as heir to the Gastineau throne. She didn’t adore you, she adored your prick.”

  “You dirty-minded bitch!” His voice rose.

  “And you didn’t kill Hugo, did you? You failed even at that, didn’t you? What would Daddy have to say about that?”

  “I should put a stop to that mouth of yours.”

  Jim Landers stood up, the garotte in his hand. As he lunged towards her, there was an ear-splitting crash from behind Elodie, as her back door smashed to the floor. The guitar-playing policeman raced past her and had the rope out of Jim Landers’s hands with a high kick worthy of a Rockette, then she was in Ed Moretti’s arms.

  Through the blur of shock she could hear his voice. “Great lock on the front door and a lousy one on the back. Thankfully, I forgot to remind you,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  There were four of them in the roundhouse: Moretti, Liz Falla, Al Brown and Aaron Gaskell.

  Or Lucas Dorey, as he was now calling himself.

  Just before they put on the protective gloves and masks they would need, Liz asked Moretti, “How do you know?”

  He smiled at her.

  “The Lady’s Not For Burning. After our last meeting, I went back to Hospital Lane and got Gus Dorey’s copy out of storage.” Moretti turned to Lucas Dorey. “Your father liked to underline or highlight passages that meant something to him, and all of them were about the love he had for your mother. Two from the play were not about love. One was ‘hidden in a cloud of crimson Catherine-wheels,’ and the other was ‘nest in my flax.’ The second is about love if the whole phrase is underlined, and the ‘nest in my flax’ has been underlined twice. Your father was very deliberate in his highlighting, as Al will tell you.”

  Al was pulling on the thick gloves as he replied. “‘Nest in my flax’ is said by the young hero, who falls hopelessly in love with the heroine who is promised to someone else.”

  Lucas Dorey was looking around him as he spoke.

  “Tell me what it is. So I can feel him in here with me.”

  Al looked at Moretti.

  “You’ll remember it best,” he said, and Moretti turned to Gus Dorey’s son.

  “’Oh God, God, God, God, God. I can see such trouble. Is life sending a flame to nest in my flax?’”

  Moretti wondered if they were all thinking the same thing.

  What must it be to feel such a love.

  “Let’s get started.”

  They put on the masks and gloves, got up on the sets of steps they had brought with them, and started to cut into Gus Dorey’s pink ceiling and, fittingly enough, it was Lucas who found what Gus Dorey had kept hidden from envious eyes. He pulled the papers out from their hiding place, and the late afternoon sun flooded the little space, turning the pink batts into crimson Catherine-wheels.

  They stayed with Lucas as he read his father’s will, leaving everything to his long-lost son, and looked through the marriage lines that would make any male offspring of his the Gastineau heir. Sitting in his father’s chair, he told them what he knew of his past and his quest to discover Gus Dorey. His mother died young, he always thought his name was Gaskell, and he was raised by a distant relative in the Gastineau family whose surname was not Gastineau.

  “My mother also called herself Gaskell, but when I started digging, I found she had changed it by deed poll before I was born, and the shortened birth certificate that came in after 1947 made it easier to hide illegitimacy, which made my search more difficult. So I investigated my adoptive father’s family, and that is how I came across the Gastineau name. I got my bank to transfer me to Guernsey, but was getting nowhere.” He smiled at Moretti. “Then you found him for me.”

  “Didn’t you think of confronting the Gastineaus?” Al asked, and Lucas laughed.

  “They had hidden my mother’s past with such care, I knew I would get nowhere. I had to find my father, and I had to find out if they we
re, in fact, married. I work in finance, and I know the power of money. I was sure this was about money.

  “I decided that it would be a good idea to hide myself from them too while I was looking. So, I changed my first name to Aaron. Lucas-Lucy. Too alike.”

  Lucas Gastineau-Dorey raised his face to catch the last rays of the setting sun.

  “But they both mean ‘Bringer of Light,’” he said. “Illumination.”

  “So, the murder of Roddy Bull was just a case of a madman taking precautions,” Al said, as he and Moretti and Falla walked back to their cars in a glorious sunset at the end of a beautiful day.

  “From what Elodie was told by Jim Landers, yes,” replied Falla. “That right, Guv? That’s what Elodie told you?” She was giving Moretti one of her unfathomable looks, except he could guess what she was trying to fathom, and that made two of them.

  “That’s how Landers saw it, but from what Ginnie said to you, she may well have egged Jim on to do it, while she took care of Tanya. What would be the point of killing only Tanya if she had told Roddy Bull about the search in Bristol for evidence of the marriage?”

  “Jim Landers thought he was the leader, but he may have been the follower, you think?” Al asked. “Certainly it fits the pattern of his personality, always in someone’s shadow, hiding behind his books.”

  “An easily persuaded follower. Ginnie needed them both out of the way, and at some point she found out that the husband of Lucy Gastineau was probably Gus Dorey. Probably learned that from Rory. Those Gastineaus stick together when there’s a threat to the family. We now know that Rory had discovered that much from tracing a Bristol connection.”

  “But Lucas is a Dorey, descended from a female Gastineau, isn’t he?” Al asked. “Couldn’t Ginnie have challenged it?”

  “Lucas is older than Rory, and she knows the terms of the Gastineau inheritance better than we do, and more than anything else, she wanted to dethrone Marla. Remember, Falla, what she said to you, how she hated both mother and daughter.”

  Liz thought back to the hour she had spent with Ginnie Purvis, listening to the hatred of all things bright and beautiful spewing from her. “Remember what I said to you, Guv, after we interviewed her? About babes?”

  “I remember.”

  Moretti thought of another quotation underlined in the play that had changed the lives of two young people, and the son they had left behind.

  … whenever my thoughts are cold, and I lay them

  Against Richard’s name, they seem to rest

  On the warm ground where summer sits

  As golden as a humblebee,

  So I did very little but think of you.

  Gus Dorey had altered the name “Richard” in the words he must have heard Lucy Gastineau say, when she played Alizon, opposite his Richard, and he fell in love with her. He had written in her name, three times.

  Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.

  Curtain Call

  Curlew. I like the name.”

  They had lowered the sails as they approached the coastline, well out from the rocks by Les Sommeilleuses, and dropped anchor where the curve of the land protected them from the wind. Liz had lowered the anchor from the bow, making sure the chain ran freely, sinking into the sandy sea floor.

  “Glad you like it. Who knew you were a sailor, Falla.”

  Seemed strange to call her “Falla” out here, but asking her to crew for him had been enough of a step, and one forced upon him because Don was otherwise occupied — and who could blame him.

  “Haven’t been one for years. Used to crew for my Uncle Vern.”

  “The uncle who cries at weddings?”

  “Mr. Histrionic, yes. He’s a fan of yours.”

  The Curlew bobbed gently in the light breeze on an amazing autumn day that Moretti had described as a gift from the gods. But the birds were not fooled by this return to summer and, overhead, the skies teemed with plovers, waders, birds Moretti didn’t recognize, passing over the island on their way south.

  “I wanted the name of a bird for the boat, and chose Curlew because they stay with us. And I like their cry — can hardly call it a song. Too lonely for that.”

  Liz looked up at the cliffs that towered above them, the honeycomb of caves where they touched the water.

  “There’s a cave that sings along here. That’s a lonely sound, also.”

  Moretti took out a foil-wrapped baguette, sliced, stuffed with cheese, olives and prosciutto, and waved it at Falla.

  “From Deb. She’s cheerful again, now she’s convinced Ronnie Marika is a no-go.”

  “I think Lonnie did that for her.” They both laughed. “Pass me a chunk.”

  Moretti did so.

  “By the way, Elodie has given Lucas the push.”

  “Really.” Moretti’s face was buried in a large slice of baguette, his voice muffled.

  “She says she’s not interested in being the mother of his children, just to put Gastineau noses out of joint.”

  “Ah.”

  “Tanya lost her baby.”

  “Yes. And I think Rory will lose Tanya.”

  “She’ll leave him, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a moment’s silence between them, and Moretti listened to the waves slapping gently against the side of the Curlew. The sound made him think of Dwight playing drums as Falla sang “What’s It All About, Alfie?” and that made him think of Aloisio Brown. It was a pity the Fénions were going to lose his talent.

  As if reading his thoughts, Falla broke the silence.

  “I shall miss Al.”

  “Me too.”

  “So it was Ginnie who turned off the lights at the reading, and Priestley who screamed.”

  “He was terrified of Ginnie, who knew about the school scandal and threatened him with exposure. It involved an underage boy.”

  “Biggest mystery of all, Guv. Why didn’t Lucy fight for Gus Dorey? Bernie says he was a really successful lawyer, specializing in women’s rights et cetera. So why not?”

  Moretti looked at Liz Falla’s cheerful, happy face, lightly smeared with Deb’s homemade mayonnaise. She neatly flicked at a drop before it landed on the Guernsey beneath her open windbreaker, and turned to laugh at him as she licked it off her finger. He felt a million years old.

  “The Dark Ages, Falla. That’s what it was like for women back then. A baby out of wedlock, and you were hidden away until the deed was over. Even girls who were nobodies were sent to another island or to the mainland, and this was a Gastineau.”

  “Of course, it could be, you know, that for her this was just a fling, but for Gus Dorey it was — what’s that French phrase?”

  Liz Falla was wiping her fingers as he answered, but something in his voice made her look up as he replied.

  “Coup de foudre. I think you could be right. I think they married, legitimizing the baby, and then she gave in to family pressure. There’s a possibility it was a shotgun wedding to — as they said in the bad old days — hide her shame. Because of the mess-up at the university, we don’t know if she even finished her degree. Coup de foudre for one and a fling for the other.”

  Lucy, Lucy, Lucy.

  Overhead the seabirds continued their relentless drive to leave the approaching winter behind them.

  Acknowledgements

  The idea for this book was born from a conversation with my brother Richard, about his memories of a childhood friend from one of the great Guernsey families: les messux. Thank you, Richard! My thanks also go to my stepson, Rob, a plainclothes detective, for information about the mentality of killers, their fantasies and patterns of behaviour; and to my grandson, Colin, for sharing his knowledge of vampire lore. The tragic Guernsey goat story was passed on to me by longtime friend, Jan Howieson, and the incident in the Naval Observation Tower is based on something that happened to my brother Christopher, when we were children.

  I am grateful to Mark Waddicor, my contemporary at Bristol University, for checking the e-book versions, and c
atching problems as they become available in the United Kingdom, and to Hilda Michel, for help with the German. My daughter Helena has patiently guided me as I entered another mysterious world, the world of social media, holding my hand as I once held hers. The rare book discovered at the University of Alberta is a fact; the Guernsey edition is a fiction.

  My gratitude goes to my agent, Bill Hanna, the Dundurn team of Diane Young, Editorial Director, Margaret Bryant, Director of Sales and Marketing, designer Laura Boyle, and publicist Jim Hatch, for guiding the Moretti and Falla series through the reefs and shoals of the publishing world. Warm thanks go to my editor, Dominic Farrell, for his attention to detail and his clarity.

  And thank you to Elaine Berry, and my Guernsey Ladies’ College schoolfriend, Ros Hammarskjold, and her husband, Frank, for their hospitality, and the pleasure of their company every time we visit the island. To my husband, Ian, my first reader, with whom I now share this beautiful island, love always.

  Other Moretti and Falla Mysteries

  Daggers and Men’s Smiles

  9781554888689

  $11.99

  On the English Channel Island of Guernsey, Detective Inspector Ed Moretti and his new partner, Liz Falla, investigate vicious attacks on Epicure Films. The international production company is shooting a movie based on British bad-boy author Gilbert Ensor’s bestselling novel about an Italian aristocratic family at the end of the Second World War, using fortifications from the German occupation of Guernsey as locations, and the manor house belonging to the expatriate Vannonis.

  When vandalism escalates into murder, Moretti must resist the attractions of Ensor’s glamorous American wife, Sydney, consolidate his working relationship with Falla, and establish whether the murders on Guernsey go beyond the island.