A Grave Waiting. Jill Downie
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He was a good-looking, fair-haired six footer with a deceptively slim build and strongly muscled upper torso. “A piece of cake, Inspector. The yacht has a satellite-linked positioning system, an electronic chart program, and a laptop computer connected to an autopilot. It could almost run itself.”
“Yet he hired you both. Was that something you specified as a condition?”
“No. I was pleased, naturally, but he told both of us to bring some decent clothes, since he might need us to talk to some of his guests.”
“Who were those guests? Were they German?”
Moretti asked the same question of both men, and with both of them he was aware of evasive action of some kind being taken.
“Not all. Some. Businessmen, some petty bureaucrats — no, I don’t remember the names — some pretty ladies who were probably high-class call girls, that kind of thing.”
“Mr. Rossignol mentioned sheiks.”
“Did he? There were some guests who may have looked like sheiks to Jean-Louis, but he knows more about shellfish than he does about sheiks.”
“So there were none to your knowledge.”
“None, but we hadn’t been on board that long.”
Werner Baumgarten was shorter, darker, and less sunny than Hans Ulbricht, but his answers were as pat and vague as his friend’s. It seemed clear to Moretti they had agreed on what they would tell the police, and each corroborated the other. They had eaten with Martin Smith at the hotel, got some amusement out of insulting him in German to his face, then had gone for a walk in the town. They were vague about where they had walked, but this could have had as much to do with not knowing St. Peter Port as a deliberate covering of tracks.
What was really interesting was why they felt the need to be evasive at all.
“That Ulbricht’s a hunk,” observed Liz Falla as she scooped a sizeable portion of halibut into her mouth. “Almost too good to be true.”
For such a slender person she can pack it away, Moretti thought, not for the first time. They had eaten fish and chips here together before, while working on another case, another murder. He liked the place, with its stunning brass fittings — the horses’ heads around the bar, and the lamps along the windows that looked on to St. George’s Esplanade, with Belle Greve Bay and the Little Russel shipping channel in the distance and, beyond, the islands of Herm and Jethou. There were a few locals in the public bar, who greeted Liz Falla as she came in and nodded at Moretti, but the lounge bar was quiet. They took a table near the window, away from a darts-playing middle-aged couple.
“An evasive hunk. Both of them were — evasive, that is. Why, I wonder.”
“Could be they just don’t want to be involved.”
“Could be.” Moretti drank some coffee and thought of the cigarette lighter in his pocket, and the packets of cigarettes on sale in the public bar. He ate a piece of fish instead. “I’d say from the exchange of glances between De Putron and the boss lady that he has been known to leave his post. I think we can rule him out as an alibi for the crew at the hotel, don’t you? When we’re done here, I want you to go to the harbour master’s office and check into Masterson’s arrival, how and when he cleared customs, whether they remember anything about him, or the rest of the crew. Then phone the station and give them details of the gun Martin Smith described.”
“Right.” Liz Falla pulled out her notebook. “Do you think he was killed with his own gun?”
“Possibly. What strikes me about that gun is that, if the little shit is correct, much of it is plastic, and it takes to pieces. Could be helpful getting it through customs. I’ll have to find that out.”
“But you’d think they’d pick that up on the X-ray machines, wouldn’t you.”
“Right. This weapon somehow skipped a customs inspection is my guess. And something else — did the CCTV cameras in the area pick up anything of interest last night? Let PC Brouard check the gun, Falla. You check the CCTV stuff.”
Liz Falla put her notebook away and picked up her coffee cup. Her spiky, short haircut gave her an urchin, almost boyish appearance, particularly when she gave him her wide, now familiar, grin, showing the tiny space between her two front teeth.
“Let me guess, Guv. I’m looking for whoever might have left her lipstick on a champagne glass in the wee small hours.”
“Right. And if she’s not there, we have two other possibilities. That she came by boat, or she was already on board. You can drop me off at Hospital Lane, and I can take my own car from there.”
“You’re going back to the yacht?”
“No. It’ll take the SOC people some time to get through there, so I’ll stay out of their way.”
Liz Falla smiled, thinking of her partner’s rocky relationship with SOCO’s head officer, Jimmy Le Poidevin.
“A bit of background on what Madame Letourneau called ‘a facilitator’ would be useful. Tomorrow morning I’m going to see someone who knows about guns, wheeler dealers, and million-dollar deals.”
Chapter Three
Day Two
The parish of St. Martin, where Moretti was heading, is in the southeast corner of Guernsey, and contains some of the most spectacular coves and bays on the island. The coastline here is rugged and precipitous, the cliff faces sheer expanses of lichen-covered granite exposed to the elements, dotted in places with trees and undergrowth clinging precariously to an inhospitable terrain.
In 1940 an abortive attempt at a landing had been made by a group of Commandos at Petit Port, one of the little bays. In fact, that was all they had managed, to land and then strand three men who were not strong enough swimmers to get back to the destroyer that had delivered them.
Why there, of all places? And who planned such a cock-up? It was the kind of thing Moretti enjoyed mulling over with the man he was going to see.
Shape-shifter.
Dr. Ludovic Ross, classical scholar, fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, guest lecturer at Harvard and Yale, had taken for himself the name given by Homer to Odysseus the wanderer, the cunning No Man who could change his appearance and outwit the enemy, whether it be Lord of the Earthquake, or a man-eating Cyclops. Much of Ross’s career remained classified, but from what Moretti could discover, the undercover work in which Ludo Ross had been involved had presented him with adversaries as dangerous and devious as any encountered by Homer’s wandering hero.
Ross was not a Guernseyman. He had no true roots, he once told Moretti, because he was a colonial, and still thought of the country of his birth as his own. That country had now ejected foreign rulers from its soil, and he was persona non grata in a place no longer called by the same name. When he retired from academic life he settled in Guernsey, where his income would be taxed at a more modest rate.
“I’ve given enough to my country and I’m damned if I’m going to give back what I earned with the sweat of my brow and the perspiration of utter terror.”
“You admit to fear?”
“Best way to deal with it.”
It was Gwen Ferbrache who first introduced Moretti to Ludo Ross. She had run into him on Lihou Island, a small islet joined to Guernsey by a causeway at low tide. The priory that had been on the island had been the scene of a murder in the sixteenth century, but its appeal for Gwen was that it was on the migration route for countless birds on the wing to Western Europe. The three of them had a drink together one evening at the Imperial Hotel, and then one night Ross turned up at the Grand Saracen Club. He and Moretti talked about Charlie Parker and Billie Holliday, Oscar Peterson and other shared passions, and from time to time Ludo Ross phoned Moretti and invited him over.
Normally he would not go uninvited and unexpected.
“Always