Daggers and Men's Smiles. Jill Downie
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course.”
Who didn’t? Guernsey was agog from the moment it was announced that an international film company would be on the island to shoot the film version of the hit novel, Rastrellamento, by British bad boy author, Gilbert Ensor. They were the biggest movie-world presence on the island since Guernsey had stood in for Nova Scotia for the filming of Adèle H., starring Isabelle Adjani as poet Victor Hugo’s tragic daughter, and they had arrived about two weeks earlier, taking up the space and the facilities and the support staff usually reserved for tourists. On an island that measured about twenty-four square miles, with under sixty thousand inhabitants, they were markedly noticeable and far more exotic than the tourist trade. No buckets and spades and shandies for this lot; the hotels and watering holes had optimistically stockpiled magnums of champagne and crates of caviar. Some of the top hotels held on to their chefs, whose stay on the island was usually a summer’s lease.
“What sort of trouble?”
“Well, it’s all a bit freaky, really. Like they are. Involves a bunch of costumes. And daggers.”
“Daggers?”
“Right. Daggers. Or a dagger, actually. Chief Officer Hanley’s dead keen to get you back because you speak Italian.”
“Italian? Oh, right. The director is, isn’t he?”
“And some of the others. I’ll tell him you’ll be back tomorrow, shall I?”
* * *
“I see,” said Detective Constable Liz Falla, wondering if she did. She looked again.
A group of dressmaker’s dummies stood facing her against one wall, and in front of them lay six costumes on a foldaway table: three women’s suits tailored in a style she’d seen in black and white films, a flowered dress, a man’s suit, and a Second World War German uniform. They, and the dummies, were ripped and slashed to shreds.
It was stuffy and airless in the lodge, which was always called “the lodge,” but which was in fact the ancient seat of the manorial court of the Manoir Ste. Madeleine, on the channel island of Guernsey. Its original function was long gone, and the building was now serving as storage for the international film crew shooting on the island. The freshly whitewashed walls of the long room were hung with costumes on hangers. Racks of costumes crowded the aisles between a series of tables on which lay a variety of headgear, from hats to helmets.
“I see,” she said again. “When did this happen?”
Lack of oxygen — perhaps that was why I feel particularly dozy, thought DC Falla, looking at the very large, very blond, very angry Englishwoman at her side.
“Some time during the night. I don’t know, but they were all right when I left yesterday evening. Whoever it was came in through the window.” The costume designer indicated a broken pane beyond the lineup of dummies.
There was something undeniably gruesome about the ripped costumes, spread out in a row, the gashes in the fabric like open wounds. Like headless corpses, thought Liz Falla. But still — this woman had been as hysterical on the phone as if actual murder had been committed, and in her new role as Chief Officer Hanley’s blue-eyed girl, she had been sent to investigate.
Eagle-eyed, to be accurate. That’s what the Guernsey Press called her, for spotting the old spare tire with a stain near the rim in the boot of a brand new car that had rolled off the Condor ferry from Poole. Inside lay four one-kilogram packages of cannabis, wrapped in yellow foam, street value around thirty-six thousand pounds. A drop in the ocean, but it meant another mule — it was her third trip — put out of business. High-fives all round, and a foolish young girl sentenced in the Royal Court to a four-year jail term.
But this? It looked more like a destructive prank than the dangerous act of a crazy madman, which was how the costume lady, Betty Chesler, had described it on the phone, and why someone from plainclothes had been sent out. Liz Falla wished that her new boss, Detective Inspector Moretti, were with her.
Which was not how she was feeling when she got up that morning. Be careful what you wish for, the Chinese said — didn’t they? — and she’d got it. Out of uniform, assigned to one of the premier investigating officers on the island, but not the one she’d have chosen. He had a reputation for being a maverick, since he played with that jazz group, but also a loner, and certainly not a laugh a minute. No merry chatter in the squad car to while away the hours, not with this one. Unmarried, not too long in the tooth, reasonably good-looking, if you liked your men darkish, thinnish, and sort of brooding. Which she didn’t — she personally preferred the lively ones. Anyway, she wasn’t in the least interested in finding a life mate. She was relieved when he told her he had to take a few days compassionate leave and now here she was, on her own.
“You look very young for this.”
“Sorry?”
“Didn’t they think this important enough for a senior officer, then?”
The costume lady’s voice rose sharply and cracked in indignation at the end of her query.
Film people, stage people, thought DC Falla. All the same, just like her uncle Vern who hung out with the Island Players and tended to weep at the drop of a hat at family celebrations. The artistic temperament, he called it. Histrionics, her father called it.
“Do you know how the damage was caused?”
“Yes I do, because the bastard left it behind.”
Betty Chesler pointed to something that gleamed on the table between a small black beret and a broad-brimmed straw hat.
“Like something out of an Errol Flynn movie. He came through the window, that — butcher — holding a dagger. And did this. With a dagger, for God’s sake, which he had the bloody cheek to leave behind.”
With dramatic theatricality the sun suddenly disappeared beyond the thick glass panes of the windows of the lodge and, just as swiftly, the room darkened. Liz Falla felt the skin on her arms prickle. No lack of oxygen now, but a heightened awareness of something hanging in the air. It’s chilly in here, she told herself, nothing to do with those ancestors of yours, those poor benighted women who took the long, winding walk down from the prison of Beauregard Tower to the gibbet built above the brushwood, at the foot of Fountain Street.
By the pricking of my thumbs, something evil this way comes. The “gift,” her grandmother called it.
“Now, young lady,” said Betty Chesler, her hands planted aggressively on her voluminous hips, “what are you going to do?”
“You’re a bastard, Gil.”
“I know. It’s one of my strong points. It’s why you fell in love with me.”
“Too true,” said Sydney Tremaine wearily. She got up from the rumpled sheets on the floor, pulling her peignoir around her. Her husband lay spreadeagled on the carpet, naked and unashamed, the bird’s head motifs of the Turkoman rug around him pecking at his privates. Or so, vindictively, she fantasized. A man in his condition should be ashamed, she thought. He should be the one covering himself, pulling the bedclothes over his ever-increasing belly. But he knew only too well the power he had over her.
Not love, not even sex anymore. Money. Moolah. The comfortable cushion of life in couture clothes and five-star hotel suites, even if it was a luxury hotel on some Godforsaken minuscule island that she had never heard of before the film shoot. That was why, instead of turning away from him with a yawn, she joined him on the floor, straddling him with her strong dancer’s legs. His renewed desire for her was a sign that the only hold she had over Gilbert Ensor was restored to her.
“Christ, I don’t believe it. The sun’s out. Get me a Scotch, baby, will you?” He grinned as she cringed at his pathetic attempt at her American accent. “I’m going out on the patio.”
“I don’t know why you keep trying to sit out there. It’ll still be soaking from that shower. This isn’t the Riviera, you know.”
“Don’t