Moretti and Falla Mysteries 3-Book Bundle. Jill Downie
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liberty-taking with his colleague. She seemed more than capable of looking after herself, and he hoped this wasn’t yet another hazard of having a female as his partner. “If it weren’t for the incident at the Manor I’d say it was some idiot teenager messing about out on the cliff path. We could be dealing with a personal problem, whatever his wife says. I had a feeling she nearly told us something else, but changed her mind for some reason.”
“Could be any number of things with that creep.”
“Too true. Let’s go back to the station, Constable. I should put in an appearance to reassure Chief Officer Hanley.”
The green Triumph negotiated its way out of the police station, bypassing the winding streets of the town, making for St. Julian’s Avenue. Climbing the road past the eighteenth-century elegance of Regency architect John Wilson’s St. James Church — now used as a concert and assembly hall — and the same architect’s less felicitous drab Gothic pile, his own alma mater, Elizabeth College, Ed Moretti drove the familiar route, deep in thought.
His education had been like the curate’s egg — good in parts, and one of the good parts had been an extraordinary English teacher, the other a history teacher with a fondness for Aristotelian logic. A quotation from the Nichomachean ethics had been a favourite of the history teacher, and it had stayed with the pupil: Every art and every investigation, and likewise every practical pursuit and undertaking, seems to aim at some good: hence it has been well said that the Good is that at which all things aim.
Between the three of them — the English teacher, the history teacher, and the philosopher — he had become a policeman. Not what his parents had in mind for him when he won the scholarship, but still. And, in becoming a policeman, he found himself dealing with members of the human species whose behaviour threw Aristotle’s logic on the topic of Good out the window.
Shifting gears, Moretti headed up the Grange past Doyle Road, named for an earlier lieutenant-governor. Up here, he was in the Regency and early Victorian suburbs into which St. Peter Port had expanded from its narrow sea-edged site, with spacious homes built from the profits of smuggling and privateering, surrounded by gardens verdant and beflowered with subtropical plants and trees like camellia and palm that flourished in the island’s temperate climate.
Just after passing the Guernsey Academy for Girls, the distaff equivalent of Elizabeth College, the Triumph swung left into a narrow lane between two sizeable houses, finally coming to a halt outside a high stone wall. Moretti slowly negotiated his way between the stone pillars of what had once been a gateway and was now merely a gap in the wall.
Facing him was the cottage left to him by his father — a two-storey dwelling built of rough-hewn granite that had once been the stable and coachman’s quarters for the grand home through whose gateway he had just passed. A solid wooden doorway of faded grey, set in the traditional curved stone archway of the Guernsey cottage, a window on each side and three above, were all of them framed by a deep-pink climbing rose, long ago left to its own devices. On each side of the property, fuchsia, honeysuckle, and ivy covered the old walls with a tapestry of crimson, cream, and dark green that, in the island’s mild climate, lasted most of the year round. What had been the stables to one side of the structure served as his garage. But the manor house was long gone, and all that remained of the fine estate was Ed Moretti’s inheritance.
He loved the place. One of the disadvantages of leaving the island, as he had done earlier in his career, was that the property laws were so strict that inheritance was not always enough to hold on to such a possession. But Moretti had been lucky, because he had returned to the island to work and thus qualified for the house when his father died. It was the source of much ill feeling among expatriate islanders that the rich might buy their way in to avoid supertax, but a poor native might sometimes not be able to return to his, or her, roots.
He had made few changes to the decor and furnishings of the house, and it had taken a while to get over the feeling of waking in the morning and expecting to find his parents downstairs. The most significant addition was the sound system he had installed, to carry the music that was so important to his sense of well-being — a vintage quad system that drove a set of ESL speakers. The large speaker panel gave an incredibly smooth, sweet sound that had not, in Moretti’s opinion, been bettered in over forty years.
He had not had to add a piano. His own love of music came from his mother, and one of his earliest memories was of listening to her playing “Roses of Picardy,” singing the words in her soft, crooning voice. A very early memory. She had been gone a long time.
“Going back to the womb, you are.” That was one of Valerie’s cuts, just before he walked out the door. “Grow up, Ed, and face the music,” she admonished him in one of their final fights. An unfortunate image in the circumstances, since she was of the opinion that it was the musician who was “a bloody Peter Pan,” and the policeman who was the grown-up. Not so simple. Having watched his father dwindle and diminish after his mother’s death, he wondered if he’d ever risk an emotional involvement that brought so much pain.
You’re terrified of commitment, shit-scared of it, aren’t you?
The first thing he did when he went into the cottage was put a disk on the record player. Oscar Peterson.
How did the man do it? The marvellous internal rhythm that could sing without benefit of percussion or bass, creating melody and miracles of harmony, fireworks and lyricism and tenderness. Like the perfect love affair. Only, unlike love affairs, the mood created was constant, the same perfection when played for the umpteenth time. Now, that was commitment. And it was a commitment devoutly to be wished, of which he was not afraid.
Oh lady, be good to me.
The music continued to play in his head, long after he had gone to bed. Finally, sleep came.
It was barely light when Moretti was awakened by the persistent ringing of his bedside phone. It was the desk-sergeant from Hospital Lane.
“Sorry to wake you at this hour sir —”
“What hour is it?” Moretti surfaced groggily through the layers of sleep.
“Six-thirty. But it’s the film people out at Ste. Madeleine Manor and you’re down on my sheet as the one to call. There’s been some sort of accident. Nasty business.”
“Was it a human target this time?”
“Oh yes.” Moretti could hear the surprise in the officer’s voice. “It’s the location manager. Albarosa. Italian.” And, feeling it necessary to make the message even clearer to Moretti’s sleep-addled brain, he added, “He’s dead, Guv.”
Chapter Three
September 16th
The limousine wound its way through the quiet early morning lanes southwest of the capital, St. Peter Port, making its way to the parish of St. Andrew’s. Even before Guernsey was divided into parishes, the island was separated into fiefs, holdovers from the ancient feudal system, in which tenants owed allegiance to the local seigneur. Many of the old customs were long gone, as were the ancient fiefdoms, of which the Manoir Ste. Madeleine had been one.
On an island the size of Guernsey the past and present were often juxtaposed with almost jolting speed. The driver made his way past one of the smaller former fiefdoms, the Manor of Ste. Hélène, now in private hands like the Manoir Ste. Madeleine, and on past St. Andrew’s Church, carefully restored to its twelfth-century self. Hardly past the squat spire and castellations of the old church, then they were crossing the Candie Road, close to the site of the vast German underground hospital.
“The underground hospital’s over in that direction,” said the driver, Tom Dorey, a local assigned to transport the Ensors. Before Sydney could make any response, Gilbert surfaced from a fitful doze for his usual grumble.
“Getting up at this hour is insanity. If they weren’t paying me big bucks I wouldn’t be doing this, and the way I feel I will never repeat the experience.”
“The way you feel now has nothing to do with the hour. It’s