The Devil's Claw Read online

  THE DEVIL’S CLAW

  A JENNIFER DOREY MYSTERY

  Lara Dearman

  For Andrew, Lily, Charlie and Lena

  P’tit a p’tit l’ouaise fait sen nic

  Little by little the bird builds her nest

  Edgar Macculloch, Guernsey Folk Lore

  Prologue

  She is looking forward to going out. It has been so long since there has been anything to look forward to. Her new top is black and made of a satiny material. It feels cool against her skin and it has short sleeves and a low neckline. It is a cold night but she will take a jacket. When she gets to the bar, she will take it off and let her friends see.

  It is time to let them see.

  The scars run from the inside of her elbow down to her wrist. She traces her finger along one. It is palest pink now, almost silver, and very, very fine. Because she never cut deep … just often.

  Her hair is long and curly and needs a wash but she brushes and braids it. The braid hangs over her shoulder. It looks cute: a little girl’s hairstyle. Boys like that sort of thing. She remembers reading it in a magazine. You have to be young enough to pull it off, though. And thin. And pretty. Lucky for her she is all three.

  It is getting late. Mum offers to drive her but she says no. It is just an excuse to check up on her. She’d rather walk, she says, but when she gets outside it is colder than she’d thought. After walking for five minutes she decides to turn back. She will put on a jumper and tell Mum she’d like a lift. But then the car pulls alongside her. The window slides down. She doesn’t need her mum after all.

  * * *

  A rush of cold air brings her round. She can’t see properly. Her head is throbbing. She is in the car but it is not moving. She blinks, tries to clear her vision. She remembers. He had a gun. He had a gun and he hit her with it. He hit her so hard she blacked out and now there is blood in her eyes and in her mouth and she tries to open it, to scream but she can’t. It’s stuck fast and before she can figure out how to unstick it, he is there.

  He is opening the door.

  Her wrists are bound with silver tape. It shines in the moonlight. She was scared, before he hit her, before she blacked out. She was scared, but too polite to try to get out of the car.

  He is pulling her out.

  She is terrified. He is going to rape and kill her. She is going to die because she was too polite.

  He is standing in front of her. He is smiling. And he is making noises.

  He is humming.

  She screams with her mouth shut, screams until her throat burns, pushing the sound through her nose and flailing her arms, uselessly, and he pushes her against the car and squeezes her throat until the pathetic noise she was making is silenced, replaced by a soundless trail of snot and blood.

  He is stroking her hair. Fingering the pretty braid, the one she thought the boys would like. She whimpers. He leans in, puts his cheek next to hers. She feels his breath, damp and warm on her skin.

  He is whispering.

  Hush. Hush now. I’m going to help you.

  He leads her through the night and she stumbles and she cries and then he pushes her.

  Down.

  Into the darkness.

  1

  Jenny

  Thursday, 6 November

  It was the same motorbike. She knew before she even saw it. There was something tinny about the sound of it, a high-pitched whine underneath the regular thrum and growl of the engine. She checked the rear-view mirror as he rounded the corner and came into view. Neon orange bike, rider dressed all in black, dark helmet, reflective visor pulled down. Definitely the same one. He followed her until they reached Grande Rue. Like he’d done every morning that week. As she stopped at the yellow line indicating to turn right, towards town, he undertook her and peeled off to the left, towards L’Ancresse.

  It was like that on Guernsey. You ran into the same people all the time. There was a joke about it: something about sixty thousand people clinging to a rock. At twenty-four square miles it wasn’t quite a rock, but it was not far off. There was something unsettling, though, about this bike. Something threatening. She followed it.

  She kept her distance until she reached the crossroads at L’Ancresse. To the left the road ran wide and straight to St Sampsons. Ahead a narrow track led to the rubbish dump at Mont Cuet. To the right were the common and the sea. The rider looked over his shoulder as she drew up behind him at the yellow line and although she could only see the reflection of her own car in his visor, Jenny felt sure that he was smiling at her. Goading her. He revved the bike’s engine. Fumes poured out of the exhaust. He turned back to face the road and then released his brake, swerving dangerously as he headed towards the sea, tires screeching, one last glance in her direction before he disappeared from view.

  She was gripping the steering wheel so tightly her fingers hurt and her hands were sweating. She was being ridiculous. He was probably just some kid showing off. There was no reason for anyone to be following her. Not here. She wiped her hands on her jeans, opened a window to let in a rush of cool air, swung the car around and headed to work.

  The drive into town took her south along the coast. The beaches on this side of the island were rocky, swathes of smooth, black pebbles in place of sand, the odd larger rocks protruding from amongst them, their peaks stained green and white with seaweed and dried bird shit. Buoys marking crab and lobster pots dotted the sea, their bright red surfaces faded to a milky pink by years of sunlight. Closer to shore, small fishing boats bobbed about, clanking and creaking against their dock lines; The Lady Katherine, Margot’s Dream, grand names at odds with the humble appearance of the weather-battered vessels, hulls peeling and streaked with rust. Across the Channel the sky was cloudless, weak rays of early November sunshine promising a fine day ahead. A brisk breeze whipped at the sea’s surface, sending spray over the wall and on to the windscreen of her car.

  As she approached St Sampsons, the traffic became heavier, the rural lanes of the Vale, her home parish, giving way to the car-clogged roads of the town. She drove, stop-start, one eye on the clock, towards Bulwer Avenue and St Peter Port, past a mismatched strip of offices and apartment blocks. New crimes against architecture stood next to the faded remains of grand hotels, now empty and waiting to be converted into more offices and apartment blocks, or as the developer’s hoarding crowed:

  LUXURY CONDOMINIUMS WITH SWEEPING VIEWS OF THE ENGLISH CHANNEL AND THE ISLANDS OF HERM AND SARK.

  Nice if you could afford it, which she couldn’t. She’d thought London was expensive until she’d moved back and found out the best she could get here was a pokey bedsit in a dilapidated house on one of the least salubrious streets in town. Which was why, eighteen months after she’d returned, and at the grand old age of nearly thirty, she was back in her old bedroom, living with her mum.

  The traffic slowed to a crawl beyond a low wall. It was high tide, and from here it looked as though she could just reach out and touch the sea. When she was little, it had held endless wonder. Home to mermaids and hidden cities, smugglers and treasure and the giant squid that her dad said he often glimpsed but never caught. She loved his stories. She would sit on his knee while he played euchre with his friends and listen to the gruff fishermen talk about their boats and the latest fishing regulations or some amateur who had got into trouble on rough seas and needed rescuing. If she were lucky, one of them would tell her a proper story, about a pirate, maybe, whose ghost sailed on the winds around the harbour. Then her mum would come along, shaking her head, telling them all to stop filling the poor girl’s head with silly stories and didn’t they know they were going to give her nightmares? But they didn’t give her nightmares. On the contrary, they filled her thoughts with colour and light an
d she dreamt of heroes rescuing drowning men, of pale ghosts on phantom ships, tall black masts on glittering oceans.

  It was different, now. Now there were no mermaids or pirates or ghosts. Now it was just water, black and uninviting and hemming her in.

  It occurred to her she should get out, see if there was anything worth reporting up ahead. Even a minor accident might make page three on a slow news day.

  And on Guernsey, most days were slow.

  Instead, she checked her reflection in the sun-visor mirror. Summer’s tan was fading. She looked pale, and her eyebrows, unruly at the best of times, were currently threatening a complete rebellion. Her hair, damp from her morning swim, was thick and blonde. She wore it loose around her shoulders, but it was too short. She was growing it. She ran her hands through it, pulling at the ends, as if doing so would encourage it back to where it had been. Before … She tucked it behind her ears, fingers brushing against the small scar at the nape of her neck. It had healed badly, leaving an itchy, raised welt. It would fade, the doctor had said kindly, given time. She’d known he had been referring to more than just the scar.

  The car in front slowly rolled forwards. They gathered pace and she rounded the corner into town just in time to see a skittish-looking heifer being led down Vale Road by a welly-clad handler and a laughing policeman, to good-natured toots and waves.

  She should have got out. A quick snap might have made front page.

  * * *

  The Guernsey News’s office was part of the Admiral Park development, on the outskirts of the main town of St Peter Port. Surrounded by a soulless collection of glass-fronted office blocks and on a busy main road carrying traffic to the brand-new Waitrose around the corner, the News’s office had only two things going for it location wise: ample parking and, beyond the steady stream of cars outside, sea views. Inside, however, it had many advantages. Open plan, bright and airy, a huge atrium filled the place with light on even the dullest of days. Floor-to-ceiling windows lined the sea-facing wall and on the opposite side of the room, glass-walled offices reflected the light from outside on to the office floor. On bright days, at high tide, ripples played on every surface.

  At the back of the office, in a separate room, also walled with glass, were the printing presses. Anyone in the office by 6 a.m. could feel the floor vibrate and hum as the day’s paper rolled off the press before being stacked and tied into bundles ready for delivery to newsagents and supermarkets across the island. Jenny loved the smell of a freshly printed newspaper: the ink, sharp and metallic on the soft paper, the scent fading, like the news, as the day wore on.

  She had missed the morning meeting so went straight to her desk. Covered in piles of crumpled papers and tooth-edged pages torn from notebooks, it looked like chaos, but she had a system and could find what she was looking for in a matter of moments. In the corner, next to her screen, was a picture of her dad, Charlie. Taken nearly ten years ago, he was standing next to his fishing boat, the Jenny Wren, just after she’d had a new coat of paint. He was smiling, his hat pulled down over his eyes to shield the glare from the sun. Later that day he’d taken them to Herm, a tiny island three miles off the east coast of Guernsey, and they’d had a picnic lunch on Shell Beach – tinned salmon sandwiches and a flask of lemon tea with milk – and they’d all got sunburnt. It felt like a lifetime ago.

  She checked her emails. One from Sarah, asking if they were ever going to meet up for a drink – it was a rare occasion that Jenny’s friend managed to ditch the kids and make the fifteen-minute journey into town for a glass of wine. Jenny replied confirming she would love a drink and a catch-up if she could ever make it out of the office before 9 p.m., what with Sarah usually being collapsed on a sofa half asleep by that time of night.

  Her police source (a second cousin, an affable Detective Constable called Stephen who relished meeting her for a coffee and giving her titbits of information) had sent her some photos of ‘strange’ graffiti at Moulin Huet. She was about to open it when another message caught her eye. It was the address. Unfamiliar. Could be spam. But she knew before she clicked on it.

  BITCH

  She closed it quickly, not wanting anyone else to walk past and see it. Because it felt shameful, somehow, to be called names. People might think she deserved it. She knew who it was from. Or at least, she knew what it was for. To remind her. That they were watching. She didn’t know how closely. The biker, for example. She told herself she was being paranoid. But was he a message too? She wouldn’t have thought she was worth that much effort. She moved the email into a folder she’d called Fairfield Road and stopped herself from pulling at her hair again, turned her attention to a Post-it someone had stuck on her phone.

  SEE BRIAN.

  Perfect. She screwed it up and put it in the bin.

  Elliot, the new reporter, was pacing around on his phone. He was talking to someone about the Save The Islander campaign, an anti-immigration movement protesting the recent influx of foreign workers. It was a story Jenny had wanted, but it had been given to Elliot as some sort of initiation into the world of small-island politics. He was about Jenny’s age, she guessed, late twenties, maybe thirty, local, but had grown up in the UK due to some complicated family background she hadn’t figured out yet, and had only recently returned to the island. He was friendly. And good-looking in a wholesome, Boy Scout way; square-jawed and clean-shaven, neatly dressed, slim-cut shirt tucked into jeans, sleeves rolled up over toned arms. She wasn’t the only one who had noticed. The two interns were always blushing when he talked to them and she’d caught Marjorie, the semi-retired filing and photocopying lady, giggling at one of his bad jokes and then making him a coffee, bringing it to his desk like it was the nineteen-bloody-fifties. It was hard to hold it against him, though. He was annoyingly likeable.

  He stopped as he walked past – he did that a lot – and perched at the end of her desk. She could see a small patch of stubble, missed in the morning shave, just below his left ear, and she imagined running a finger along his jaw, feeling rough stubble and then smooth skin. She felt herself blushing. She was as bad as the interns. Worse, even. At least they had the excuse of adolescence.

  ‘You should watch out,’ he said, ‘Brian’s on the warpath.’

  ‘What’s he moaning about now?’

  ‘Not enough decent stories coming in. I swear Mark left the meeting with tears in his eyes.’

  Nothing new there. Nobody could understand how the mild-mannered Mark had made it as news editor, but one could only assume it was because he was such a pushover. It left Brian free reign to run the paper his way.

  ‘He wants to see you.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Brian. He wants to see you. I left you a note. As soon as you get in he said.’ He winked as he left.

  A wink, Jenny thought, could be either cheesy or lecherous. Elliot somehow managed to make it charming.

  * * *

  Brian Ozanne looked up from his laptop and gave a thin-lipped smile. As editor of the island’s only daily newspaper he fancied himself a minor celebrity. He must have been at least sixty, but looked years younger, with his thick, glossy hair and skin that glowed just the right shade of sun-kissed brown. Jenny strongly suspected Grecian 2000 and a spray tan. A photograph of his wife took pride of place on the desk. Brian organised an annual Cancer Research fundraiser in her memory. Everyone in the office took part in sponsored silences or wearing pyjamas to work or shaving off beards and moustaches. Brian oversaw the whole thing personally, pushing everyone to raise more, to beat last year’s fundraising record, and then he matched whatever was raised. Which was all well and good, except he insisted, every year, on a double-page spread in the News, complete with interview and a picture of him, primped and preened, presenting the cheque to a charity representative. It was nauseating.

  ‘So, Jennifer.’ He leant back in his chair, hands steepled under his chin. ‘How do you think you’re getting on?’

  This was a typical Brian question and
would no doubt lead to a dressing-down of some sort. But Jenny thought she was getting on just fine. So that’s what she told him.

  ‘Very well, thank you, Brian. I’ve made some good contacts, produced some good copy. Mark seems pleased with my work.’

  ‘Of course. Everything you produce is good quality. Nobody is denying that. This is not an issue of quality, no, no, no.’ He shook his head. ‘This is about quantity.’ He paused. ‘Frankly, Jennifer, you’re just not producing enough.’ He raised a hand to stop her interrupting. ‘I know you work hard, you put in the hours. But you’re going to have to work smarter. To increase your output. And, as of this morning, we’re down a features reporter. One of the girls is on sick leave so you can pick up the slack. Starting with the firework display at the castle this weekend. Take a photographer with you, get some nice pictures. Everyone likes fireworks.’ He picked up his BlackBerry and started replying to a message, a sign, Jenny presumed, that the meeting was over.

  It was pointless to argue with Brian. He had been editor of the News for thirty years, as he constantly reminded everyone. He was also a bit of a prick on a power trip and not in the habit of negotiating. If Jenny wanted to keep her job and, right now, though she wasn’t entirely sure she did, she needed to keep him happy. She turned to leave.

  ‘And, Jennifer?’

  ‘Yes, Brian?’

  He was still looking at his phone. ‘I had a call yesterday. Came through on my direct line which is quite unusual, my calls usually go through Rose, as you know.’

  Jenny nodded, wondering if Brian was about to try to pin a switchboard error on her.

  ‘It was someone asking about you. A young man.’

  ‘Who?’ The question caught in Jenny’s throat and Brian looked up, eyes narrowed.

  ‘I’ve no idea. As I told the caller, I’m not your social secretary. Kindly make sure it doesn’t happen again.’

  Jenny barely managed a nod.

  She sat back at her desk and stared at her screen. Opened the folder, Fairfield Road. There were ten emails in there now, including today’s. She scrolled through them.