The Devil's Claw

by Lara Dearman

  He was driving home when he spied her again. She was sitting on a bench at the bus stop. She looked like she’d been crying. He was ready. He’d been ready for weeks. He slowed and rolled down the window.

  ‘Are you OK? It’s Mary, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ She leant forward and squinted at him. ‘Oh. Hello.’ She rubbed at her eyes. ‘I’m fine. ’Sno problem. ’Sjust Derick. We had a fight. He can be a bit of an arsehole.’ She slurred and couldn’t sit up straight.

  ‘Can I offer you a lift home? It’s getting late and there won’t be a bus for ages.’

  ‘You’re sweet.’ She seemed to be thinking about it. Then shrugged. ‘Sure. Why not?’ She got into the car. She smiled and turned towards him, fixed him with those beautiful blue eyes before closing them and resting her head back. ‘I don’t really have anywhere to go though. I’m sort of homeless.’

  He smiled back. ‘I’m sure we can think of somewhere.’

  * * *

  It was almost too easy. Almost. She was drunk. She had nowhere to go. He took her to Portelet, a secluded bay on the south coast, surrounded by tall trees and lush vegetation. It was dark and deserted, the only light coming from the stars and the rhythmical flashing of Les Hanois lighthouse. She laughed as he led her down to the beach. She hadn’t expected this, she said.

  It was too cold really. There was sharp chill in the air. Summer would have been better. She faltered a little, as she took off her clothes. ‘It’s cold…’ She shivered as she said it, but he could be very persuasive. He took off his jacket and shirt. ‘Come on, you’re not scared, are you?’ he teased. ‘Not scared, just fucking freezing!’ She screeched a little then and he shushed her – people were sleeping, he said, they didn’t want to get into trouble, did they? No, she whispered, she’d had enough trouble to last a lifetime, thank you very much.

  Naked, her breasts and hips were heavier than he thought they would be and he wondered if he should feel disappointed, but he forced himself to concentrate on her slim waist and her skin. Her skin was perfect. White, like moonlight. He thought how wonderful they must look together, two beautiful people, happy and free, and how important this was, that he saved her. From the filth and the alcohol and the little people and the loathsome, repellent men, whose hands would never touch her again. She ran to the water. He followed. Their bodies clothed in darkness, their footsteps silent on the soft sand, their splashing obscured by the breaking of the waves, he pulled her towards him. Stroked her arms, from her wrists, over smooth skin, soft hairs tickling his fingers, to her elbows, which were bony and rough, and then up to her shoulders. She shook. Laughed. He pushed her under. She was smiling as her head dipped beneath the water, her hair fanning out on the surface, spun gold, like in a fairy tale, rippling and flowing, a life of its own. She didn’t struggle, not at first. It took her a moment, he supposed, to understand. And then he felt her, bucking and thrashing, her screams silent, carried away with the tide. Gently, but firmly, he held on. And then she was still. So, so still. He held her limp body against his in the water. Absorbed the heat as it left her. Stayed there for as long as he could, until he was sure he had taken as much of her warmth as he possibly could. Only when his shivering became uncontrollable did he make the move towards the shore.

  Out of the water, she was heavy. He knew she would be. He remembered the sheep, lugging its dead weight on to his shoulders, throwing it into the wheelbarrow. He remembered that heaviness against the lightness of the feeling he held inside. That was nothing compared to this. He stared at her, wet and glistening, not quite able to believe that the scene he had imagined so many times before was a reality. He had to finish. If he didn’t move now he might stay here for ever.

  He dressed her again. It was difficult. Her limbs were heavy and hard to manipulate and the fabric stuck to her damp skin. He tried to be gentle, as if she were sleeping and he didn’t want to wake her, but by the time he was finished he was sweating. He carried her back into the sea for a good soaking. It was a shame, to weigh her down with garments but a naked body would raise suspicion. He laid her carefully back on the damp sand, treading carefully as he arranged her as naturally as he could. She looked beautiful. But there was something missing. He had thought very carefully about how he could make her death truly his. He had made preparations. His trousers were sticking where he had pulled them on to his wet skin and he had to fumble around in his pocket. First the leaves – just a few, not enough to be noticed, certainly not by the Guernsey police. He scattered them over her. Then the knife. He lifted her top, exposed her belly, flat, but soft and pliable. He marked her with the lightest of touches. It was perfect. She’d be written off. A troubled teenager. A lost soul. Nothing to live for.

  22

  Jenny

  Tuesday, 18 November

  Brian had spoken to her only briefly when she’d got back to the office last night. He’d been calm, businesslike, and suggested she talk to the news editor, pick up a few stories that needed covering. Charlie had always said that the best way to get Jenny to do something was to tell her to do the opposite. Headstrong, he’d always called her. That might be, but Brian’s insistence that she abandon this story was starting to look like more than just professional incompetence. Something was very wrong. Something to do with Amanda. She couldn’t escape the fact, however, that apart from a few strange cuts on Amanda’s arm and the ravings of a possibly disturbed teenager, there was nothing suspicious about her death. Nothing that any sane person would listen to anyway. She needed more. To link the other girls’ deaths with Amanda’s, to show that, at best, all these young women had been failed somehow. And at worst? At worst was a fucking nightmare. Either way, she was going to start at the beginning. With Elizabeth Mahy and the police officer who had worked her case, fifty years ago.

  Roger Wilson had come a long way since then. He had risen through the ranks of the Guernsey police from a cadet to chief officer, retired for several years now, but still a special advisor to the force. He served on several charitable boards, was a member of the Rotary Club and was a keen sailor and fisherman according to a bio Jenny had found on the website of the local lifestyle magazine, Guernsey View. They had photographed him standing in front of his house, which she was now desperately trying to locate.

  Torteval was the smallest and most rural of Guernsey’s ten parishes. The name came from the Guernsey French for ‘twisting valley’ and it was obvious why. She drove at a snail’s pace through the narrow Ruette Tranquilles, the fifteen-mile-per-hour speed limit entirely unnecessary as it was impossible to go any faster through the single track lanes with their steep, grassy banks and hedgerows on either side. Road signs were non-existent and she had long given up trying to locate where she was on the Perry’s Guide map she kept in her glove compartment for the frequent occasions the satnav failed on this bloody island. She was now following the tried-and-tested method of taking alternate left and right, right and left turns until she eventually found what she was looking for; it always happened at some point, each route leading back to a main road from where you could start again until you’d covered the whole network of lanes in any given area. It was just a matter of how long it would take to find the right one.

  After fifteen minutes, tall hedges gave way to a low wall. A wooden sign attached to gateposts topped with stone eagles announced she had arrived at her destination. ‘Beauregarde’. Even from the road you could see the sea as you looked past the house. A livid blue, nestled between the trees, it glistened even on this sunless November morning. She turned into the wide, gravelled driveway and parked in front of an imposing stone house.

  Roger Wilson had sounded friendly when she spoke to him that morning, asking if she could stop by and get his take on the Amanda Guille case. Slightly perplexed, but friendly nonetheless. She felt nervous as she approached the front door. She was going to start with Amanda and then refer back to Elizabeth Mahy’s case. Depending how that went she would decide whether or not to run the rest of it pa
st him, try to get a couple of decent quotes about the historic cases.

  The wooden door had blackened iron hinges and a heavy circular knocker made of the same material. She struggled to lift it before noticing the modern doorbell fitted into the doorframe. She pressed and a cheerful tune rang out from inside the house. She waited. Nothing. She checked the time. Eleven thirty. She’d said she would be here around twelve. Perhaps he was out. The gravel driveway narrowed to a path leading around the side of the house presumably to the back garden. The view from there would be spectacular. And anyway, the house was vast; she should try the back door.

  The back lawn was untended. Clover and thistles grew amongst the grass, which rolled down a gentle slope towards open fields, which seemed to meet the sea in the distance. A small barn stood in the neighbouring field, the wide doors fastened shut with a plank of wood.

  ‘You could skip down to Rocquaine from here, couldn’t you?’ Jenny startled and turned. A tall man with a shock of white hair and thick white eyebrows perched over intelligent eyes stood next to her. He held a basket of logs under one arm and extended the other towards her.

  ‘I’m sorry, I made you jump. Roger Wilson. You must be Jenny?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t mean to snoop around. There was no answer at the front so I was going to try the back door but I stopped to admire the view.’

  ‘Of course. I was just getting ready for this storm the weatherman’s been going on about. No central heating in the old place, so I need to get the fire stacked up. Don’t want to be running out for logs in the middle of the night. Come on in and we’ll have some tea. It’s going to pour down any minute.’

  The kitchen was warm and bright. A fire burnt in the stone hearth and the table was covered in a checked yellow-and-white oilcloth, a jug of white daisies placed in the centre. Roger Wilson pulled out a chair for Jenny and placed the kettle on the hob before excusing himself to wash and change quickly. ‘Make yourself at home, I’ll only be five minutes.’

  She wandered over to the sideboard to study a neat row of photographs. A young couple outside the church on their wedding day: him, handsome in bell-bottom trousers, her, short and slim, long hair, elegant in a lace gown. Next, the same man, deeply tanned and muscular, one foot on the prow of a rowing boat, white sand next to an impossibly blue sea. Greece, maybe? In the next picture he was in a policeman’s uniform, smart, smiling, holding some sort of certificate. Then the woman again, close up and middle-aged, sitting on a bench, looking out to sea. Guernsey this time, Vazon Bay. Finally, the man in uniform, older, the white hair shorter and neater than it had been this morning, thumbs up, next to a set of golf clubs.

  A huge map of Guernsey hung on the wall next to the sideboard, with numerous points circled in pink, yellow or green, a legend at the side.

  ‘Tea?’

  She turned, walked back to the table. ‘Sorry, I’m being nosey.’

  He had changed into a checked shirt and chinos and smoothed his hair.

  ‘You’re a reporter, aren’t you? I expect you need to be nosey to get the job done. And I’m exactly the same. Or I was, anyway. Not so much now. You get to a point where you feel like there’s nothing left to learn about people. Or at least, nothing left that you want to know. Although I gather from our conversation this morning that you are not at that point just yet.’

  ‘I’m not in the habit of commenting on active police investigations you know, but I have to admit your call was intriguing. From what I understand Amanda Guille’s death was a tragic accident, so I’m wondering what it is you want to ask me about?’

  ‘Actually, it wasn’t really Amanda I wanted to ask you about. At least, I’d be interested in your thoughts about the case, but I really wanted to talk to you about another girl who drowned back in 1966. Elizabeth Mahy.’ She hesitated. ‘Your name was given in the News as the person to contact with any information about her death.’

  ‘It was.’ He nodded. ‘Although, if you don’t mind my saying, you’re a little slow off the mark. Why the sudden interest in a girl who died nearly fifty years ago?’

  ‘I’ve been doing some research into death by drowning on the island. Focusing on those deaths deemed accidental or suicide or perhaps where an open verdict was recorded. I started with Amanda and it led me to Elizabeth and a few others over the years too. It struck me that there were some similarities between a handful of these cases. You were on the force during all of the investigations except the present one.’ She pulled out her notes. ‘It’s probably easier if you look at this and ask me questions afterwards.’

  * * *

  ‘I remember it like it was yesterday.’

  He had read everything carefully, laid the pictures of the six women out next to each other, looked at each in turn, asked a few questions and then returned everything to the folder. Everything apart from the newspaper report about Elizabeth.

  ‘It was just awful. I was so young and I’d never seen a dead body before. I had nightmares for weeks afterwards. Not that I told anybody at the time. It was all stiff upper lip back then.’ He shook his head.

  ‘I’m not sure what you want me to say, Jenny. I was a very junior officer at the time. It was my bad luck really that I was first on the scene. They made me the point person for potential witnesses, anyone who had information. You’d need to speak to the more senior officers who worked the case to get anything of use, and I know for a fact they’re both dead.’

  ‘But you were there. You must have had a sense of how the case was managed. Do you think Elizabeth’s death was thoroughly investigated? There’s no doubt in your mind it was an accident? There were reports she had a boyfriend, that she may have been with someone when she drowned. How was this person ruled out of the inquiry?’

  Roger smiled. ‘You’re obviously a very bright young woman, Jennifer, and I can see how you think you’re on to something, but I assure you, Elizabeth’s death was properly investigated. We can’t know anything for sure, but there was nothing to make us think this was anything other than a tragic accident. It was the same for all of these cases.’

  He told her what he remembered, that they had suspected someone went to the bathing pools with Elizabeth that night. They’d spoken to a barman at the Yacht Hotel, who had remembered seeing her with a man. They’d not managed to get a decent description – the barman, unsurprisingly, remembering more details about Elizabeth and her skimpy outfit than the man she was with. Regardless, there was nothing that pointed towards foul play. They appealed for witnesses, of course, but none had been forthcoming. They knew, from the barman, that Elizabeth had had several drinks that evening. She was drunk, she went swimming, she drowned. What reason was there to suspect anything else?

  Jenny had asked several people about Roger Wilson. Everybody who knew him was of the same opinion. He had been a good policeman. Well-liked and missed following his retirement ten years ago. But surely even a good policeman might be unwilling to see something that might reflect badly on him. What would it say about him if, during his forty years on the police force, he had missed something of this magnitude?

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ He put the report back into the folder and slid it over to Jenny. ‘You’re thinking I wouldn’t want to admit it even if I did think there was something to all of this.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘And perhaps you are right. But I was a good detective and, despite what you might think, I was not the only one. We might have spent some of our time investigating stolen bicycles and sabotaged greenhouses, but there’s a darker side to this island, Jenny. I’ve led plenty of investigations into complex cases. Drug smuggling, domestic abuse, paedophilia … I’ve seen some serious stuff. Not as much as someone in my position in a big city might see, but enough. If something needed investigating, either me or one of my colleagues would have investigated it.’

  ‘Of course.’ She sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that you wouldn’t have. It’s just, with the time between the deaths, it woul
d be perfectly understandable if a connection had been missed.’

  ‘Have you taken this to the police?’

  ‘I have. Michael Gilbert has all of my research.’

  ‘Ah. DCI Gilbert. A very good detective. Very…’ He paused for a moment. ‘Thorough. He’s very thorough. If there’s anything to investigate, I’m sure he’ll get to the bottom of it.’

  He shook her hand as she left. So lovely to meet her, he said. He told her to keep in touch and to ask if she needed anything. He had a lot of contacts in the police force, he’d make a few enquiries himself, would likely be called in if there was anything to look into, he’d keep her in the loop.

  ‘You’ll not be printing any of this, of course? I presume even the Guernsey News requires some form of corroborative evidence before they run with something like this?’ Jenny had the distinct impression that he was offering advice rather than asking a question. He held her car door open for her.

  ‘Certainly not right now, no. I need to take it to my editor for a start. See if he thinks I’m stark raving mad.’

  ‘Oh I don’t think you’re mad, Jenny. Takes a certain kind of person to see things others might miss. You need a bit of gumption, a bit of imagination. You obviously have both. Maybe a little too much of the latter, eh? We’ll speak again, Jenny.’ He stood in the gateway and waved as she drove out.

  Jenny glanced at the folder she’d thrown on the passenger seat. Roger Wilson was sure the investigation into Elizabeth’s death had been thorough. She believed that he believed that. But there were five more dead girls’ pictures in there. Five more investigations that might have missed something. She was going to find out what. Because Jenny was done with running from the past, however ugly and frightening it might be. Someone had to fight for these girls. Someone had to tell their stories.