The Devil's Claw

by Lara Dearman

‘It’s not funny, Elliot.’

  ‘Sorry. Call it gallows humour. But nothing you told me seemed connected to here. None of the bodies were found here. So why are we?’

  ‘Let’s call it a hunch.’

  ‘Really? You call me at the crack of dawn, drag me to the end of the island in a hurricane, and now you’re telling me we’re working on a hunch?’ He looked amused.

  ‘You were away from the island for too long, Elliot. This is a brisk breeze, not a hurricane.’ She grinned and strode ahead.

  They walked along barren cliffs, looking out over the churning sea. The bottom of Jenny’s coat flapped violently about her knees and Elliot’s thick, choppy hair blew in every direction. He seemed to be struggling to see as he held it back out of his eyes and gingerly walked down the uneven steps, which led directly to the bay. Jenny followed, sure-footed, but she held on to the iron railing hammered into the steps and the cliff face, steadying herself. She could feel water on her face from here, still yards from the beach itself, the force of the waves and the wind carrying the sea spray to land. Hard to imagine the turquoise millpond it could be on a calm, summer’s day, when boats would gently bob in the bay and children would swim across it. Even then, beneath the calm surface, way, way down, it was always like this really. Mighty. Unforgiving. It could take you. Turn on you when you were least expecting it.

  * * *

  It had been early morning when she’d got the call. Too early to be anything good, even before she’d heard Margaret’s voice, breathy and wavering. Charlie had been missing all night, she’d said. He’d taken the boat out the previous evening, had been due back for a late dinner. The weather had been fine, there was a chance that he’d run into engine trouble and was just drifting. There was a chance the radio had failed too. It was too soon to think the worst, but Jenny was booked on to the last flight home within minutes of hanging up.

  By the time she had landed at Guernsey airport the lifeboat had found his boat, drifting. The engine and the radio were fine, but there was no sign of Charlie Dorey. It would be another week before they found him.

  In that week, when he’d been neither alive nor dead, when the faint hope of seeing him again was almost but not entirely overwhelmed by the rational thought that, in all likelihood, he was lost to them for ever, Jenny had revisited some of the places they had spent time together.

  She had come here. To Moulin Huet, where they had so often climbed the slippery black rocks on to the smooth, wet sand and waded out to the rock pools, catching caboos and putting them in a large black bucket. Charlie had been a fisherman his whole life, but she was better at catching the tiny fish, their mottled silver brown bodies almost impossible to spot amongst the rocks and the seaweed until they darted out into open water and into her waiting hands.

  * * *

  She felt an overwhelming longing to be back there now, ankle deep in a warm rock pool, her dad’s shadow playing on the water’s sunlit surface.

  ‘Wish I’d packed a picnic.’ Elliot had to yell now to be heard over the storm. They found the graffiti. Someone had spray-painted the rocks leading down to the sand. It would be gone by springtime. The storms and the sea would slowly strip away the paint, returning the rocks to their unsullied state. She wasn’t interested in paint-spattered rocks. What interested her was higher up.

  Elliot yelped and cursed as he narrowly avoided falling backwards on to a sharp-edged rock, instead landing on a damp patch of sand. Jenny picked her way across the pebbles and helped him up.

  ‘We need to get up there.’ She pointed to the cliffs above.

  ‘Of course we do.’ He brushed the sand off of the back of his coat and rubbed his hands together. ‘Come on then, what are you waiting for?’ He set off ahead of her. She scrambled behind him, over large, smooth rocks first, until they were on the cliff-face proper. Here the surface was jagged, the footholds smaller, the drop steeper.

  ‘It’s up here,’ she called out, and pointed to a plateau above them. Elliot got to it first and held out his hand to her, pulling her up and towards him, too quickly, so she stumbled forward.

  He put his arm around her to stop her falling. ‘Easy! You’ll get us both killed.’ He pulled her in towards him, let his arm linger around her waist just a moment too long and she found herself breathing in his scent, fresh and clean, soap and damp fabric, the coffee they had drunk in the car on the way here. One arm still around her waist, he brushed his hand across her forehead, sweeping her hair out of her eyes, and she wanted him to kiss her, to crush his lips against hers; she wanted to taste the coffee on his breath and have him hold her steady against the driving wind. All she needed to do was lean in. But she couldn’t. That barrier she had built around herself, stopping anyone from getting too close, was in the way. She took a step back. Saw his hand trail back to his side.

  ‘I remember that climb being a lot easier when I was a kid.’ She turned her attention to the rocks, hoping that her cheeks were not as red as they felt and that he would think her hands were shaking from the force of the wind. He looked as if he was going to say something but then changed his mind. He took a step towards her. Shrugged.

  ‘I’m sure you never did it in this weather as a kid. What are we looking for anyway?’

  She soon found it. The rock was nearly completely covered with moss and lichen but still obvious, its pale colour out of place amongst the slabs of indigo blue and steel-grey. She scraped at the lichen until she revealed the print. It was the only story that had ever truly frightened her.

  * * *

  ‘Look at this, Jenny,’ Charlie had put down the bucket full of winkles and limpets they had collected for Saturday tea. She’d caught up, out of breath, her skinny, seven-year-old legs struggling to keep up as they clambered over the rocks and up the cliffs. He had been rubbing the surface of a large, white rock with the sleeve of his jumper.

  ‘What is it, Daddy?’ She’d peered at the rock. It was smooth and pale with thin streaks of silver running through it. It had been cool to the touch, unlike the surrounding granite, which absorbed the heat and became warm and uncomfortable to sit on by the end of the day.

  ‘There.’ He had wiped away the dirt and moss to expose a series of black slashes in the white rock. ‘That there,’ he pointed at the marks, ‘is the Devil’s claw mark.’

  ‘From a story, Daddy?’ She had reached up and put her hand in his.

  ‘Well, yes. But people believed it was true for a long time. They said it was the mark the Devil made when he landed on the island, hundreds of years ago. He’d been in France, see, trying to trick the young Duke of Normandy. He lured the duke into a rowing boat and bought him here to Guernsey. But he stumbled, trying to get over the cliffs, and that mark there, that’s where he clawed at the rocks as he flew over, carrying the duke in his arms.’

  She had looked at the mark doubtfully but held his hand a little tighter. It did look like a claw mark. But more like a tiger might make, she thought.

  ‘In Granny’s Bible the Devil has hooves, not claws.’

  The Bible’s nonsense, Charlie had said. Just a big book of fairy tales, and not very good ones at that. He’d given her a sideways glance and a smile.

  ‘Don’t tell your mother I said that,’ he’d said. ‘Or your Granny. I’ll have half the Methodists in St Sampsons after me.’

  Jenny had wondered, often, if there were things her dad should not be telling her. It was exciting, though. Nobody else’s dad said things like hers did.

  ‘Where did he go then?’ She’d asked as they walked back to the car.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Devil. Where did he go after he climbed over the rocks with the duke?’

  ‘Ah. Well, he dropped the duke from a great height but the duke was a strong man and survived the fall. He settled in Guernsey, married a Guernsey girl, and had a happy life so the story goes.’

  ‘But the Devil, Daddy. Where did he go?’

  Charlie had given her a sideways look, opened his eyes wide
. ‘Who knows, Jenny,’ he’d said, ‘maybe he’s still here.’ He must have caught the look on her face, seen the flash of fear, because he had laughed then, told her not to worry, he was only joking. It was just a silly story, he said, and when they’d got home he’d taken a heavy book from the shelf and turned the pages, so thin they were like tissue paper, until he’d found the right chapter. There were hundreds like it, he said. Just stories. She could read them if she liked.

  That night Jenny had woken up sweating and screaming, red eyes all around her, watching her, lurking in the shadows and under the bed. Charlie said it must have been a bad limpet. But he’d taken the book from beside her bed and put it away. And he hadn’t told her any more stories for a long time.

  * * *

  She took some pictures of the rock and then, unable to resist, placed her hand over the claw mark. Even now, all these years later, she felt a chill, a cold ripple in her stomach.

  She pulled her coat tighter around herself and turned back to face the sea. So angry. So beautiful. Whoever had killed those girls knew this place. He had stood here with the wind whipping around his face, tasted the sea spray, touched the rock, felt this strength in nature, its might and its beauty. He knew this place. Like she did.

  * * *

  ‘It could be just a coincidence.’

  The car gently rocked in the wind and the trees creaked overhead. Several wet leaves plastered the windscreen, creating an earthy, stained-glass window, tingeing the light with autumnal yellows and browns. Elliot had insisted they run the engine so he could warm his hands in front of the air vents. She had her laptop open and was studying a picture of the mark on Amanda’s arm, comparing it to the picture of the mark on the rock, too intent on the task in hand to feel any trace of the earlier awkwardness between them.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Care to elaborate? And don’t tell me it’s just a hunch, because I’m not following you around this island in a hurricane on a hunch.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to follow me round the island. And it’s not just a hunch. Look at them together. He’s drawn all of the vertical strokes exactly the same way as they are on the rock. The outer strokes are longest, the middle stroke is shorter and the horizontal line is at exactly the right angle and in nearly the same position, left of centre. It’s not a coincidence. It’s the Devil’s Claw.’

  ‘You know it’s not actually the mark of the Devil, don’t you? It’s a mineral deposit in the rock.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that, thank you, Elliot. But I grew up hearing about this stuff. My dad used to read me bedtime stories from his Marie De Garis, for God’s sake.’

  ‘From his what?’

  ‘Folklore of Guernsey by Maris de Garis. That and MacCulloch’s Guernsey Folk Lore. Most-read books in my house as a kid.’

  ‘Really? No Swallows and Amazons? No Roald Dahl?’

  ‘Those too. But mostly folklore and horror stories.’ She caught Elliot’s look. ‘Dad adapted them. So they were kid friendly. Mostly.’

  ‘Jesus. No wonder you’re so…’ He stopped himself.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Interesting. I was going to say interesting.’

  Jenny started the car. ‘Let’s go to my place.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To figure out what the fuck is going on here.’

  32

  November 2014

  He had never intended to be so daring. It was the boat. It tempted him, sitting there in the moonlight, tied to the mooring ring with a simple fisherman’s bend, and all of a sudden he thought, wouldn’t it be beautiful to leave her in front of the castle, so that she would be soft and beautiful when they found her, so they could see her now, as he saw her, rather than in the morning, stiff and cold and empty? It seemed worth the effort. He was strong and she was frail and light. Even with the weight of the water in her clothes and hair, she was easy to move. He put her in first, then untied the boat. It was not yet fully beached, so it was no effort to pull the bow back into the water. He smiled. Nature aided him. Soon the tide would be low. He would have struggled to drag the boat single-handed down the beach. He was strong, but only human.

  It was a short row and the water was calm. He was a confident sailor. It was a gift this island blessed its people. Hard to grow up here with anything other than sea legs, although some managed it. He knew of islanders who had never sailed a boat. They were landlocked, reliant on others to manage their journeys to and from the island. They were, in his opinion, even worse than those few tiny, scared people who had never left this rock, or who had ventured only as far as Jersey, which was different but the same, wrapped in its own thick, cloying blanket of safety and inertia.

  He pulled the oars back and forth deftly. They barely made a splash as they broke the surface, and he relished the burn in his muscles and he felt that he could do this forever, on and on into the night … He would never let her go. She was his last and he wanted to keep her close, because after this, what? What was there to live for? Sweat trickled down his brow and into his eyes, joining the tears of sorrow and regret.

  He rowed. Rhythmically. And his thoughts went back to the beginning. To Elizabeth. To that morning, many years ago, when everything had fallen into place. He refused to believe it was merely good fortune that he had the opportunity to get there first, to enjoy those precious minutes when he had knelt, alone, beside her pale, lifeless body. He had not taken her life, but her beauty in death had given life to him.

  So sad, that it was over. Because it was over. He could not continue his work indefinitely. Over the next few years, if he lived that long, his strength would dissipate, his body would stiffen, and he would finish up like the rest of them, old and crippled and nobody, nobody would know what he had been. The knowledge pained him like nothing else he had ever experienced.

  He rowed. His arms began to ache and he slowed. He looked up to the stars and then over the water to the lights twinkling on the Norman coast and all of a sudden a feeling of tremendous wellbeing washed over him. It had all been leading here. He was not the first to row to these shores in this way, with a great task to be completed. More than a thousand years ago, the Devil himself had brought the Duke of Normandy to this island in a rowing boat. The claw mark on the rock, on his rock, had been made on that fateful night and now here he was, following the path that had been so carefully lain for him. It all made sense. It was meant to be this way.

  He looked at Amanda. Her head rolled gently from side to side in harmony with the motion of the waves. He rounded the headland and the castle came into view. It was glowing, ablaze from within. The beach was deserted, the tide ebbing, and he jumped out into the water and pulled the boat to the shore, behind a line of rocks. There was a little light from the power station, enough to allow him to see his way. He carried her up, away from the sea. He stopped before he reached the dry sand, laying her instead on a bed of damp pebbles. He had made the mark on her cheek. He did not want it to be missed this time. He fancied he heard movement, the shifting of sand and stone to his right. He retreated, the way he’d come, scattering the leaves in his wake, his footprints swallowed by the viscous sand.

  As he rowed back out, the fireworks began. He could hear, very faintly, the cheers of the crowd from the castle. Further along the coast, there were more; the crack, crack, crack of gunpowder, bright bursts of red and blue and gold, on and on until the air was laden with sulphur. And if they had looked, any of them, if they had glanced out, they would have seen him. The boatman, resplendent under a canopy of false stars.

  * * *

  He was moving out. As a precaution. Not entirely – just his workshop. He was shifting it from the attic to the bunker, removing all traces of his work from his home. He supposed he should burn it all. Pile it all up in the back garden and set it alight. But he couldn’t. It was precious. It should be preserved. They should know what he had done for them. Just … not yet.

  He took one box at a time. He did not want to pu
ll a muscle doing something so mundane. He trudged through the drizzle. The grass was overgrown and the wet fronds tangled around his boots as he walked. He hummed as he worked. It was soothing, helped to quiet the buzzing in his head that lately had increased from an irritant to something more pervasive, almost maddening. As he hummed, he went over and over each girl in his head. He had left no traces, he was sure of that. At least, if he had, they had never been found and now would never be. The passage of time was his friend. Except, perhaps, when it came to Amanda. He had handled her with only the lightest of touches, apart from when she had struggled. He’d held firm and fast and she hadn’t scratched him: they would not find his flesh under her nails, nor had she pulled his hair, so they would not find it clutched in her hands; and even if they did, they could hardly DNA test the whole island. A wave of panic. He needed to focus. He shook rainwater out of his eyes and took a deep breath.

  He’d had the entrance covered by a round grille of heavy iron, now rusted a deep brown, secured with a padlock. Steep steps took him down to a tunnel and then through to a concrete chamber. There was one other exit, through a similar grille on the far side of the hedge, which separated his two fields.

  He carried the box carefully down the steps and through the tunnel, stooping under the low ceiling, not quite head height, at least not for him, emerging, after twenty feet or so, into the chamber. He used his torch to find the gas lamp, one of the many treasures he had found down here and lovingly restored.

  After he had found this place it had taken him weeks just to clean out the leaves and rotting debris that had gathered in the stairwells and accumulated in the tunnels. He had had the grilles installed, ostensibly as a safety measure, but as the only holder of the keys they also served to keep the place his and his alone. Festung, the historical society who maintained the island’s Nazi fortifications, knew about it. He had allowed them to document and photograph it because he wanted to know everything he could about it. it was a storage bunker, most likely. A large one, of interest to enthusiasts but probably not to the public according to the loud-mouthed pseudo-historian they’d sent over to look at it, along with a bored member of the Culture and Leisure department. They’d have all been more interested, no doubt, in what he moved before they arrived. Helmets and satchels, boots and socks, storage tins, presumably once full of food, the lamp and his prized possession, a Walther P38. Just the one. He suspected it had been left behind accidentally, not stored there. It pleased him to think it had belonged to somebody. Perhaps not just somebody, because it would have made perfect sense, he thought, as he had held the gun for the first time, for this to have been his father’s. It was unlikely, he knew it, but not impossible. That was all that mattered. That it might have been.