Dark Sky Island

by Lara Dearman

  Also available by Lara Dearman

  The Devil’s Claw

  Dark Sky Island

  A Jennifer Dorey Mystery

  Lara Dearman

  NEW YORK

  This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Lara Dearman

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.

  ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-68331-752-4

  ISBN (ePub): 978-1-68331-753-1

  ISBN (ePDF): 978-1-68331-754-8

  Cover design by Blacksheep/Orion Books

  www.crookedlanebooks.com

  Crooked Lane Books

  34 West 27th St., 10th Floor

  New York, NY 10001

  First Edition: September 2018

  To Andrew, Lily, Charlie and Lena—I love you more.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1: Michael

  2: Jenny

  3: Reg

  4: Michael

  5: Jenny

  6: Michael

  7: Jenny

  8: Rachel

  9: Michael

  10: Jenny

  11: Michael

  12: Rachel

  13: Jenny

  14: Michael

  15: Jenny

  16: Rachel

  17: Michael

  18: Jenny

  19: Michael

  20: Rachel

  21: Jenny

  22: Michael

  23: Rachel

  24: Jenny

  25: Rachel

  26: Michael

  27: Jenny

  28: Michael

  29: Fallaize

  30: Jenny

  31: Michael

  32: Jenny

  33: Michael

  34: Jenny

  35: Michael

  36: Jenny

  37: Michael

  38: Michael

  39: Rachel

  40: Jenny

  41: Michael

  42: Michael

  43: Jenny

  Author’s Note

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  The door to the cottage was ajar. The darkness from within seemed to spill out into the sunshine. But that was silly, because the dark didn’t do that—it didn’t travel, not like the light did. It was a shadow from the magnolia tree, that was all. Here and there, bright pink petals had fallen onto the path and were wilting in the sun, edges curled and brown. He picked one up.

  He tiptoed up the steps, placed his hand on the door. The glossy red surface was warm. He ran his finger along a crack, felt the threat of a splinter, picked off a flake of paint. He held his breath. Listened. Something was wrong. The air sat heavy in his ears, like water. It seemed to have swallowed all sound. He felt a pain in his tummy, the one he always had when he was worried. It was the silence. The rage and the shouting and the smashing of plates he didn’t mind so much, he could hide from it, hands over his head, curled under his bed or crouched behind a tree in the garden. It was the silence afterwards he feared. It settled over the house like fog, seeped into corners, lingered over him as he tried to sleep.

  He rubbed the petal between his fingers nervously, rolling it back and forth into a tube until it disintegrated, leaving his fingers damp and perfumed. He held them to his nose. Sweet. Comforting. From somewhere in the distance, a lawnmower started up, cutting through the quiet and breaking its spell over him. The birds sang. The grass rustled. A dog barked. He pushed open the door.

  The cool inside air settled on his sweaty face and bare arms, and he shivered. He blinked as his pupils dilated, adjusting to the dimness of the interior. He scanned the room, eye level first. Mugs on the breakfast bar; a newspaper, spread open; a glint, sunlight on metal—a teaspoon; dust swirling; the armchair, not where it should be, shifted, facing the wrong way.

  And there, on the floor.

  He’d seen it as soon as he’d walked in, but some instinct had forced him not to look, and now that he did, his brain was trying to process what he saw into something acceptable. A pile of clothes. But it had arms and legs and hair. A mannequin, then, like in a shop, with limbs so stiff and pale. Around its head was a dark shape. It was moving, very slowly. It was creeping towards him. He reached out and touched it.

  Sticky. Warm.

  He held his hand up to the light from the open door.

  Red.

  A shifting. A rustling of fabric. He was not alone. In that moment, he longed for the silence again. Because he knew that what had happened in this room was terrible. And someone was here, and they would see him, and now he was part of it. He glanced down at his hand. Worse. They would think it was his fault. He took a step back. Towards the door and the warmth and the barking dog, which he strained to hear above the racket his own heart was making as it pounded at such a rate he felt sure it would explode.

  A moan. Somebody was crying. Muffled sobs. Behind the kitchen counter. He faltered. His teacher at school always said you should help people in need. He swallowed. Tried to push the fear back down to the bottom of his stomach. Tried to be brave. Walked towards the sound. One step. Softly. Slowly. Two steps. Remembered the time he found the cat with the bleeding leg. It had lashed out at him when he’d reached towards it, not knowing that he just wanted to help. He should let the person know he was here, so as not to startle them.

  ‘Hello.’ It came out as a whisper.

  The sobbing continued. He tried again. Cleared his throat.

  ‘Hello.’

  A sharp intake of breath.

  And he knew, from that single sound, that his help was not wanted.

  That it was not welcome.

  That he should run.

  1

  Michael

  To the uninformed passer-by, the small, barrel-roofed building next to the visitor centre might look more like a public toilet than a prison. It was about the right size, and its door was painted the same shade of park-bench green as the conveniences opposite the church. A closer look, however, would reveal a heavy, iron padlock swinging from the door, and bars at the windows, which were small and set too high to see out of.

  Inside, there were two cells, both around six feet square and containing a slatted bed frame topped with a thin, plastic mattress. The walls were whitewashed, the floors concrete. A narrow corridor ran the width of the building, and from here the prison guard, one of the many roles performed by Sark’s volunteer police constable, could check in on detainees through the grille in each cell door. Locals called it the ‘drunk tank’ because it was mostly used to accommodate tourists who’d had a few too many and missed the last boat home. Only once, in all his years on the police force, had Michael had to come over and officially arrest someone held here—a man whose drunken night out had ended with him smashing a bottle over somebody’s head.

  All in all, then, Sark Prison was more frequently deployed as the butt of an islander’s jokes than as a place of incarceration. Only, now, as Michael lay shivering on the floor, bound and gagged, the wrong side of the locked cell door, it didn’t seem very funny.

  It felt as if the blood flowing through his brain were on fire. If he moved his head even an inch, the pain became overwhelming, flashes of light punctured his vision, and a deafening ringing he knew only he could
hear filled his ears.

  Then there was his side. He was still losing blood. Several times in the last hour, or two, or three, however long he’d been in here, he had passed into a horrifying semi-conscious state in which he had lost his grip on reality, imagined himself on a boat, the floor swaying beneath him, or caught up in an explosion, about to be ricocheted clean off the earth and thrown into the sea. He had forced his eyes to open and his brain to focus. The shifting floor was a product of his dizziness, the noise his exhausted brain’s exaggeration of the thunder outside. But that in itself was enough to cause more panic.

  Because the storm had arrived, and Jenny was on a boat, fleeing, from him, from his betrayal, from this godforsaken island. He hoped and prayed that she’d got home hours ago. Before the weather turned. Before the clouds that had been gathering for days, suffocating them all with this stale, unrelenting heat, finally split, unleashing their torrent of rain and thunder and lightning, whipping the waves into an unnavigable nightmare and drowning his stifled screams in their fury.

  2

  Jenny

  Three days earlier . . .

  Jenny picked her crumpled jeans and T-shirt off the floor and pulled them on.

  ‘What time is it?’ Elliot, his voice muffled, his face half covered by the duvet.

  ‘Six fifteen. I’ve got to go home and get changed before work.’ She put on her watch and picked up her phone.

  ‘See you at the office?’ He lifted his head, one eye closed against the early sunlight streaming through the thin curtains.

  She nodded. He kept looking at her and she felt like he expected something more, that she should bring him a coffee and give him a lingering kiss goodbye, or whatever proper couples did when one of them left the bed in which they had both spent the night. She smiled instead.

  ‘See you there.’

  Elliot’s flat was what an estate agent might call ‘bijou’. A kitchen-cum-living room, a bedroom and a bathroom. But it was neat and cosy, and from the kitchen she could see out over the rooftops of St Peter Port to the sea, glittering in the distance. She turned on the tap. The pipes creaked and shuddered behind the walls, and after a few seconds, tepid water sputtered out. She waited until it flowed smoothly before she rinsed a cup from the sink and filled it. Last night’s wine glasses were drying on the side, a half-drunk bottle of wine next to them; another, she knew, lay empty in the recycling bin under the sink.

  They’d fallen into a pattern. A couple of drinks after work, a couple more back at his place. Bed. The first morning-after had been awkward, both acting like nothing had changed, laughing it off, neither of them expressing regret, neither of them suggesting it was anything more than a bit of fun. They had, she thought, crossed a line now. It had become routine. They hadn’t discussed it. She wasn’t seeing anyone else, but he hadn’t asked her not to. He still flirted regularly with other women. She hadn’t asked him not to.

  She leaned against the breakfast bar. She should get her own place. Her mum, Margaret, had offered to lend her some money for a deposit. Even then she’d struggle to pay a mortgage on a flat like this on her reporter’s salary. She needed a pay rise. Or a new job.

  Elliot’s alarm clock beeped from behind the bedroom door and she heard the bed shift and creak as he rose. She rinsed her cup, stood it on the draining board and left.

  The flat was on the top floor of a terraced house halfway down Mount Durand, a steep, hill of a street. Next door, a broken front window and empty beer bottles still told of Saturday’s party, which Elliot said had been broken up by the police in the early hours of yesterday morning. At the bottom of the road, the paved surface gave way to cobbles. Tiny alleyways led to flights of uneven steps and hidden rows of houses, washing lines strung between them, wheelie bins blocking the paths.

  A few wisps of cirrus cloud streaked an otherwise clear sky. June had been warm and dry, and there was no sign of a change in store for July. The first week had seen record temperatures, thirty-two degrees yesterday; Channel News had ended on a clip of its weatherman attempting to fry an egg on the pavement outside the studio. The tourists on their summer holidays were loving it. So were the ice-cream vans and the shops selling beach supplies. But for the rest of the population, Jenny thought, a break in the heat would be welcome.

  Her car was parked outside the Cove, a notoriously rowdy bar. A group of teenagers had stared at her, swigging from bottles of Breda, as she’d left it there the night before, one of them saying, ‘Nice car,’ and another muttering, ‘Nice tits more like,’ before they’d all sniggered like the schoolboys they probably were. She wouldn’t have put it past them to have keyed her car for a laugh. She checked for damage before she got in. Other than the reek of piss and stale beer, all seemed well.

  The inside of the car smelled of her damp swimming gear, left in a rucksack on the back seat. She’d been to the bathing pools last night, right before Elliot had called. She glanced at her watch. Only six thirty. Time for a quick swim before she went home to change.

  Her phone pinged. Early for a message. It was from Stephen.

  Bones found on Derrible. Poss. human remains. We are going over now. Will keep you updated.

  The twist of excitement Jenny felt in her stomach every time she got wind of a new story was tempered with a sense of dread. Human remains. It had been only months since Amanda Guille’s body had been found on the beach at Bordeaux Bay. But that case was closed. The killer was dead. The bullet wound in Jenny’s shoulder had healed.

  She read the message again. Derrible Bay was on Sark, a tiny island three miles long by a mile wide. It lay nine miles east of Guernsey, about an hour’s journey on the boat. It had no airport and no cars either. The only way of getting around was on foot or bicycle or an overpriced horse-and-carriage ride. Jenny had spent weeks there every summer as a child, her parents’ love of the peace and quiet combined with their dislike of travelling further than a few miles from home (and nowhere on an aeroplane if they could avoid it) making it the perfect family holiday destination.

  The ‘we’ Stephen referred to undoubtedly included his colleague in the Guernsey Police Force DCI Michael Gilbert, the detective Jenny had worked closely with when investigating Amanda Guille’s death. Since then, Michael had become a friend, and a frequent visitor at the house Jenny shared with her mother, first checking in on Jenny’s recovery and afterwards, when she was well, dropping in for a cup of tea or, more often than not these days, for dinner. His visits were still under the auspices of making sure Jenny was all right, but both she and Michael knew he was far more interested in talking to her mother. Michael would help Margaret in the kitchen, the two of them chatting and laughing, the sound of the radio and the whoosh of the kettle coming to the boil muffling their words. Jenny wondered if they talked about their relationship. If once you were in your fifties, you could cut through the bullshit and have an honest conversation about where you were headed.

  She glanced back at her swimming gear. It would have to wait. She was not going to miss an opportunity to cover this story, no matter how uncomfortable it made her feel. This time, she reassured herself, she would not make the news. She would just write it.

  And besides, Jenny had another reason to want to go to Sark.

  Ever since she’d found out that the investigation into her father’s death may have been compromised, she’d wanted to retrace his steps, to talk to the people who saw him last. According to the police report, Charlie Dorey had died after falling overboard on his way back from Sark. That Charlie had been in Sark that day was indisputable. That his boat had been found floating in Sark waters hours after his disappearance was also fact. It was the falling-overboard bit that Jenny took issue with. Charlie would never have done that.

  She let herself into the house. Margaret was sitting at the kitchen table, book in one hand, piece of toast and Marmite in the other.

  ‘Morning, love.’

  ‘Morning, Mum.’ She kissed her mother on the cheek and helped herself to a c
up of tea from the pot.

  ‘How’s Elliot?’ Margaret’s tone was light, but Jenny knew the question was loaded.

  ‘He’s fine, thank you. I’m going to grab a quick shower.’

  ‘Would he not let you leave a few things at his place? Save you some time in the mornings.’ Margaret turned a page nonchalantly.

  ‘You trying to get rid of me?’ Jenny meant it as a joke, but Margaret looked up, hurt.

  ‘Of course not! I love having you here. So long as you’re not staying on my account.’

  ‘I know, Mum. You’re back on your feet. So am I. I’m going to start looking for somewhere. Soon. I don’t want to play gooseberry to you and Michael anymore anyway.’

  ‘It’s not like that, Jenny.’ Margaret’s cheeks coloured. She closed her book and bustled over to the sink, looking for dishes to wash. Finding none, she began to spray the surfaces with bleach, rubbing at stains invisible to Jenny’s eyes.

  ‘Mum, relax. I’m just teasing. Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, though, would it?’ She paused. ‘It’s been more than two years.’

  Margaret was still for a moment, then turned, her eyes shining, too brightly. ‘I just meant you’re not a gooseberry.’ She attempted a smile. ‘Now, don’t you have a job to go to?’

  Before she left for work, Jenny went into Charlie’s office. He’d spent hours in this room, writing letters to the Guernsey News, or doing his accounts on a bulky calculator that printed out receipts like a till in a shop. She had loved the whirring noise it made as it spat out reams of thin, shiny paper, the sort the chip shops used to wrap the fish and chips, only this was a long, narrow ribbon, wound tightly round a plastic tube. Sometimes he’d let her play with it—he’d ‘buy’ one of her teddies and she’d type in whatever price she’d decided was right, carefully tearing his receipt off against the jagged cutting edge. Margaret had packed it away. Stored it in the loft, one of the many of Charlie’s things they were going to ‘sort out later’.