Prologue

      Death of a Hermit

      No horizon today. The mist gathered close to the land, touching the headland to the west of Rocquaine Bay and hiding the long sandy sweep of the western coastline from view. Certainly from his view. Of all the lost properties of youth, the one he most regretted was his marvellous vision. Cataracts, he supposed. Fixable, he knew that, but it would mean contact. He would think about it when the game became worth the candle and he could no longer read.

      The tide was on the rise, but there was still an expanse of bare silver-grey sand, jotted with the red, brown and green of lichen-covered rocks, trails of seaweed, the vraic he had gathered with his father in the dim, distant past, when the world was young, at the first new moon after Candlemas, and then again in midsummer. He could still remember the sharpness of its smell in his nostrils, burning in the hearth, the ashes rich with potash to feed the soil.

      He scrambled back from the beach over the rocks at the end of the high wall that protected the road against the high spring tides, something that became increasingly difficult with every passing day. Then he made his way past the Imperial Hotel and along the headland over Portelet Harbour, stopping briefly at the Table des Pions to pay his respects. A fairy ring long before it was used as a resting place by the soldiers of the local seigneurs on their chevauchées around the island parishes, it was a good place for him also to draw breath and courage before the hardest part of his climb, up towards Pleinmont Naval Observation Tower. Built by the Germans during the occupation of the island, deserted for years, it was now reconstructed for the tourists and, thankfully, open only two afternoons a week to disturb the quiet of the headland. Like the fairy ring, it too was haunted, and some of the presences were familiar to him.

      After that, it was an easy walk across the Common, to the home he had built for himself. He was not the first solitary to have lived there, and he wondered if he would be the last. Probably so. Well-meaning and not so well-meaning individuals were constantly threatening his solitude and his peace of mind.

      Home. He had built it like an Iron-Age roundhouse, and thatched the roof low over the only window. The walls had not been a problem, because he had learned about bricklaying from his father, who had built houses and worked in the granite quarries at St. Sampson. The roof had been a challenge, but he was determined not to use modern tiles. Finally, he had used a combination of turf and thatch, and compromised by lining the interior with batts of pink fibreglass insulation, covered in thick plastic as a moisture barrier. It gave a pleasant rosy glow to the place he called home, particularly in the light of his oil lamp, when the storms blew in across the Hanways and the Hanois Lighthouse wailed. Unlike the Iron-Age denizens of such a structure, he had not made a hole in the centre of the roof for the smoke to escape, but had added a chimney for his fireplace, keeping the thatch and turf well away from it.

      He walked around to the door he had installed on the inland-facing wall, the one most protected from the prevailing wind. He never locked it, because less damage was done if the curious and the tearaways could get inside. Nothing of interest for the average thief, anyway: no stereos or televisions, no modern appliances. An intruder once made off with his camp stove, but had abandoned it in some bushes a few feet away. Not worth the effort, presumably. He raised the latch and let himself in.

      This time, someone was waiting for him.

      “I wondered when you would come,” he said. “I knew you would come, eventually.”

      He felt a strange sense of relief, like a burden lifted. The other shoe finally dropping.

      Part One

      The Opening

      Chapter One

      Elodie Ashton bent down to pick up the secateurs she had dropped when she opened the door into the garden, and felt a twinge. The damp of approaching autumn was getting to her, and she had forgotten to put the nutmeg in the pocket of her gardening trousers.

      Damn. She was far too young for this, she thought, both sore hips and superstitions. But better a nutmeg in her pocket than a needle in her trochanter, as had been suggested by Doctor Clarke.

      “Too much sitting in front of a computer,” he said.

      “Is that your expert medical diagnosis?”

      “Actually, yes. You’re getting to an age where it’s going to catch up with you, and you’ll get fat.”

      “Don’t beat around the bush, will you?”

      The elderberry bush near the back door of the cottage was loaded with berries, and Elodie was determined to get to them before the wood pigeons and the blackbirds this year. The year before she had been on the mainland at a conference, and had missed the height of the season. As she reached up to cut a particularly luscious branch, she heard the sound of a car turning into her driveway.

      Damn again. A voice calling out. Not damn. This voice was always welcome. Her goddaughter, Liz.

      “I’m in the garden — come around!”

      Detective Sergeant Liz Falla was off duty, wearing comfortable jeans and a black leather jacket. Her open-toed sandals revealed scarlet nails, and she was wearing large golden hoops in her ears. When she smiled, her resemblance to her father was striking, Elodie had often thought, but that was about all Liz had in common with her father — that, and a physical resemblance to those ancient Norman roots.

      If, that is, the name Falla was indeed Norman, but it probably was. The theory that some poor Spanish wretch washed up in Guernsey when the Armada was blown off course in stormy waters, and stayed to reproduce, was unlikely, and the romantic possibility of being descended from fifteenth-century Jewish nobility fleeing Spain to escape persecution difficult to prove.

      The rest of Liz was pure Ashton. She had her mother’s singing voice, and the Ashton combination of an analytical mind and an intuitive grasp of circumstance and situation. Who knew what that big sister of hers could have done with her life, Elodie had often wondered, if she had not fallen in love with Dan Falla and had Liz when she was just out of her teens. But Joan Falla seemed a happy woman, and had achieved what her little sister had not. Love and marriage. More precisely, a marriage that worked.

      Elodie. Such a fancy name, an unlikely choice for her commonsense mother.

      “Why?” she had asked.

      “Your father’s choice. Joan was my choice for your sister,” was her mother’s reply. And there the matter had rested.

      “What are you doing around here?” Elodie asked, putting down the basket and hugging Liz.

      “I’m on my way to work out at Beau Sejour Recreation Centre, and I left a little early so I could drop in and see you. Easy to do, now that I finally have wheels. Come out and let me show them off to you.”

      One of the unexpected bonuses of the last case Liz had worked on had been the gift of some vintage French couture. After checking with Chief Officer Hanley that accepting it was in order, about which he had been satisfactorily vague, she