The Devil's Claw Read online

  ‘Glad you could fit me into your busy schedule. Won’t EastEnders be missing you?’

  ‘You leave me alone, Jennifer Dorey,’ Margaret sniffed. ‘You know I like fireworks. And I know you’re right, I do need to start getting out a bit more. As do you. I’m old; I’ve got an excuse. And, anyway, it’s Saturday. EastEnders isn’t on.’

  They sat on a raised stone ledge near the entrance and ate hot dogs. A fiddler and a flautist played nearby, collecting coins in an open violin case.

  ‘Do you remember when dad did fireworks in the back garden?’ Margaret asked.

  ‘Yes. No fire safety then, was there? Lucky we didn’t all get our heads blown off.’

  ‘It was the Catherine wheels that worried me. He never nailed them in right. You never knew which direction they were going to fly off in. And the bonfires! They were always completely out of control, sparks flying all over the place. I was terrified the house would burn down.’

  ‘I used to hide in the shed while he lit the rockets.’ Jenny added. ‘I’d look out of the window until I saw that he was safely out of the way and then run out just in time to see them light up the sky. It was brilliant.’ She rested her head on her mother’s shoulder.

  Deputy Ferbrache, one of the parish’s elected representatives, portly and bristling with self-importance, pushed his way through the crowd. Jenny had spoken to him recently about a beach clean-up initiative but he had spent most of the time talking about his recruitment company. Most of the island’s deputies had a day job which they tried to fit their government duties around. It explained a lot about the way things worked on Guernsey, which was, as a rule, haphazardly or not at all. Deputy Ferbrache was followed by a small girl, beaming with pride, the winner of the best-dressed guy competition, and her mother, who was carrying the child’s creation. It was a shocking pink froth of string, straw and ribbons with tumbling black hair. Jenny had interviewed them all for her report.

  Deputy Ferbrache welcomed everyone. Congratulations to little Lily for her fabulous guy, wasn’t it fantastic? They all clapped and cheered as Lily was presented with a gift voucher for Machon’s Toy Store. Time to light the fire! More cheering as the deputy took the guy and climbed the wooden ladder at the side of the pyre, throwing it on top. Loud applause and then suddenly, with a bang, flames licked the wood. A gentle shifting and cracking as the fire took hold. Within minutes it blazed, bathing the onlookers in its warmth and its flickering light. Wisps of smoke wove through the crowd, carrying with them the sweet smell of cedar and pine.

  The guy was the last to catch, the nylon and straw concoction burning easier and brighter than the wood below, an angel on a Christmas tree, dry flesh twisting and melting to the cheers of the audience. With the bonfire at full strength, the fireworks began. Standing nearby, a small boy wrapped up in a duffle coat, hat and scarf began to cry. Jenny started towards him, but a fat, jolly-looking woman wearing a premature Christmas jumper suddenly scooped him up.

  ‘Can you hear that?’ Margaret said.

  ‘Hear what?

  ‘Somebody’s screaming.’

  ‘Everybody’s screaming.’

  But Margaret had turned her back on the crowd. ‘Not here.’

  Jenny told her mother to stay put. It was much darker outside of the castle walls. She took her torch from her bag and switched it on. It was small but powerful. She kept it with her but rarely used it, preferring to avoid situations where she might need it.

  The next scream came from the beach. Jenny’s chest tightened. She was scared, but not as scared as whoever was down there. She ignored the paved pathway which meandered down to the road, running instead straight down the grass-covered hill, ploughing through thick gorse bushes, thorns tearing at her jeans, but at least they slowed her descent enough that she avoided falling off of the steep bank at the bottom of the hill and on to the road.

  More screaming. Definitely a woman. Less urgent, Jenny thought. But still terrified. She ran across the main road, pushing her way through the dense row of pine trees on the other side, on to a sandy path edged with large, granite boulders. She could follow this path round to the slipway, but quicker to go straight over. She pulled herself up on to a boulder, struggling to hold on to her torch as she tried to find a footing on the smooth rock. She slid down the other side and stumbled as she landed on soft, dry sand.

  A woman stood sobbing halfway down the beach, where the sand firmed up before giving way to the pebbly seabed. Bathed in the amber glow from the power station behind them, she was dressed in running clothes, a body warmer zipped over a long-sleeved top and tight leggings, a woollen bobble hat on her head, the pompom glowing white, a tail on a frightened rabbit.

  ‘I just fell over her. Just fell right over her. Didn’t see her,’ she whispered, and stared down at a shape at her feet. Jenny shone her torch on it, flooding it in bright white light.

  It was a woman. Twenty, maybe younger. She was beautiful and soaking wet – and dead.

  4

  Michael

  Detective Chief Inspector Michael Gilbert was not one for tears. He’d cried in the hospital when his baby daughter Ellen had been handed to him, wrapped in a yellow blanket, her face scrunched and red, her tiny arms struggling against the swaddling. He’d wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand before Sheila or the midwife could see. Eighteen years later he’d cried at her death. Only a little. And not when he’d first heard the news. Then he’d been cold and dry. Numb, he supposed was the right word, although it had taken him years to realise this, to accept he’d been suffering from shock, not a lack of emotion. It was surprising, then, that he was shedding big, fat tears at the death of a stranger. He didn’t bother to wipe them away this time. It was dark and there was nobody watching.

  He managed to articulate a couple of gruff instructions, clearing all the gawpers who had gathered on the headland, waving their phones in the air as they tried to get footage of whatever was going on below them. They should have been moved straight away, Michael thought. Last thing they needed was pictures of a dead girl floating around the Internet. He told the flapping detective constable who had been first on the scene, and was in the process of trampling over any evidence, to get some police tape up and secure the area. And then he looked at her properly.

  She was beautiful. Not more than twenty, by his reckoning. So pale. White skin. Blue lips. She was wearing short sleeves. There were lines on the inside of her right arm. He crouched down next to her. Scratches. No, deeper. Cuts. Definitely deliberately done. They looked fresh. He took out his phone, snapped a picture close up. He felt around in his pocket for a pen, used it to gently move several strands of hair from her face. He took a few more pictures. Then he stepped back and looked around for a coat of some sort. It was far too cold for her to have been out without one. As if on cue, a chilly breeze lifted the bottom of his jacket and blew a handful of dried leaves across his shoe. She looked so cold. And so uncomfortable, the pebbles beneath her so hard. He wanted to wrap her up in a soft, yellow blanket and take her home to her mother.

  * * *

  There were two witnesses. One of them was hysterical, a late-night runner in all the latest gear. She garbled out a statement before nearly fainting and was carted off in an ambulance with an aluminium sheet wrapped around her as if she’d just finished a marathon. The other one was much more interesting. An angular-featured woman, attractive, although not pretty exactly. Striking, was probably the word, tallish and blonde, thick, sun-streaked hair pulled back in a ponytail, sharp, intelligent eyes. She gave a short but detailed statement. Jennifer Dorey. The journalist. Charlie Dorey’s daughter, if he wasn’t mistaken. He didn’t mention it. She’d had enough to deal with for one night.

  * * *

  With the tent up and Forensics inside, Michael took a walk down to the shoreline. The tide was creeping in. They would have to work quickly.

  He looked out at the boats moored in the harbour, black shadows on the water, edges defined by weak moonlight. The g
irl could have been out on one, he supposed, fallen in, drunk maybe, and then washed up on the shore. Teenagers sometimes used empty boats for hook-ups. They’d had many a boat owner call in with reports of empty beer cans and used condoms found on deck on a Sunday morning. That was in town, though, where you could just jump over the marina gates and walk on to a boat. Here you’d have to drag one in. And there were plenty of secluded spots around the castle for a quickie – why go to the bother? Perhaps she’d been on a boat elsewhere and gone overboard. A possibility. Late-night fishing trip, perhaps, although she definitely wasn’t dressed for it. And someone would have called it in, there’d have been a search and rescue underway, and he certainly hadn’t heard about one.

  Unless she had been alone. And there were only a few reasons a young woman would be anywhere near the sea, all alone, on a cold night like this.

  Suicide. There were more than people knew about. Or at least, more than they liked to think about. Up to four or five, some years. Mostly middle-aged men, but they had a fair amount of teenagers too. He thought it might be something to do with the transition: child to adult, young to old. Difficult times. Drowning was a popular way to go. He supposed there was something fitting about it, for an islander to give themselves to the sea. And he imagined it might sit well with a teenage girl’s propensity for the dramatic.

  He pulled his coat around himself. There were far more comfortable ways to go. Warmer ones at least. He’d thought about them. The first body he’d seen after Ellen’s had been swinging in the kitchen door frame of a cottage in St Martins, some bloke whose wife and kids had left him. Bloody fool, Michael had thought, killing himself when his family were only a couple of miles away, when he could have still loved his kids, held them and spoken to them, watched them grow. Michael had raged around the station for days afterwards, not realising, until he’d been ten pints into one of his increasingly regular benders, that what he was feeling was not anger. It was envy.

  He walked back up towards the tent where it was now as light as day under the police lamps. Mostly rough gravelly sand and pebbles, a strip of soft sand at the top, banked up against the grassy headland. Not a tourist spot, this beach. It was small and scrubby and too near the rubbish dump. You could smell it, on a warm day, when the wind was blowing in the right direction, sweet and gassy. He’d come here with Ellen, when she was little and every time they’d had a whiff of it, he’d ask, ‘Was that you?’ and she’d fall about laughing. He smiled. Proper locals’ beach this was. A fisherman’s harbour, nothing fancy. Nothing like the town marinas, next to the shops and the nightlife of St Peter Port, or the Beaucette Yacht Marina, a little further along the coast from here, with its lobster restaurant and champagne bar. But it was pretty, here. Quaint. He caught a glint of green amongst the stones. Sea glass. He bent down to pick it up. It was a good one, the size of a fifty-pence piece, silky and cool to the touch. He rubbed it with his thumb and then slipped it into his pocket.

  Forensics were nearly finished. He could hear them zipping up their bags. He poked his head in.

  ‘How’s it going, lads?’

  ‘Just about done. We’ve bagged up a couple of cigarette butts and we’re going to get her moved if you’re all done here?’

  He looked at her again and was struck by how peaceful she looked. As if she’d just lain down for a rest, with every intention of getting back up again. She certainly hadn’t been in the water for long.

  He thought, for the second time that night, of Charlie Dorey. Of what the sea could do to a person. People thought a body floated, but it didn’t, not right away. It would sink until it hit the ocean floor, only resurfacing after days of decomposition, bloated with gas. By the time it reached the surface, the flesh would be green and peeling, loose around the hands and feet. Degloving, they called it. And those were just the bits that hadn’t been eaten. Nibbled at by the same fish someone might find on their dinner plate later that week.

  He felt almost grateful, then, that this corpse had eyes in its sockets and flesh on its bones.

  5

  July 1959

  The dried cow shit caught him on the side of the face, just above his right eye. It didn’t hurt. He turned. There were more of them than usual, seven – no, eight – the youngest no more than ten years old, the oldest perhaps fifteen. He kept walking. He knew they would follow him.

  A sharp pain at the back of his head, the force enough to make him stumble, fall to his knees. A rock. There were no rocks in the field. They’d come prepared. He could feel the blood running down the back of his neck. He got up and carried on. More rocks, but none of them landing a blow as effective as the first. One to the shoulder, one to the back, he hardly felt them. He walked. He never ran. They were shouting:

  ‘Dirty Jerry! Your mother is a whore. She should have called you Fritz!’

  By the time he got to the gate at the end of the field they were bored. He walked the rest of the way home alone, blood on his collar and piss in his pants.

  * * *

  Mother scrubbed at the shirt half-heartedly. Her hair was in rollers and she’d already done her face. She’d painted her lips a deep, dull red, the same shade as his school jotter. A cigarette hung from them, the lipstick bleeding into its white filter, flakes of ash floating into the sink as she shook her head. It was never going to come out, she said. ‘Nasty little buggers, why are they always picking on you? They’re jealous, that’s what it is, wish they were clever enough to have got a scholarship like you. Poor boy, look at you, never hurt anyone.’ She gave up and ‘left it to soak’.

  He would clean it properly and put it to dry when she was gone.

  She knew why they did it. It was nothing to do with the school he went to. She’d had enough of it herself. It was the women who were worst. He’d seen them spitting and sniping as she walked past. There but for the grace of God, that’s what Mother said. They’d all been at it, all of them, sanctimonious cows, she said. He knew that she considered herself unlucky. Stupidity played a larger part than luck where she was concerned. She’d been stupid enough to provide everyone with proof. Proof she was a whore with her little blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jerry-bastard baby.

  She stood in front of him, pulling the rollers out of her hair. It was a new one tonight, she said, and she thought this one had ‘prospects’.

  He doubted it. He couldn’t imagine who would possibly want her. She would never tell him her age – it was rude to ask, she said. But he had found her birth certificate in the box in the bureau. She was old. Nearly forty. Her eyes were going wrinkly and her chin was starting to sag. Just a little, but if he had noticed, so had she. That was probably why she’d seemed a bit depressed recently. It must be bad enough being a slut. Being an old slut must be unbearable.

  She kissed his head before she left. ‘Don’t wait up for Mummy, darling, now will you? I might be a bit late.’ He said nothing, which clearly unsettled her. She was a talker, and was only quiet when she was miserable, so she would take his silence as a sign of unhappiness. ‘Don’t let them upset you, darling, now will you? You’re such a bright boy, so talented, so handsome. They’re just jealous,’ she said. ‘And things are on the up, you know? This one, the one I’m seeing tonight, he has prospects, I said that, didn’t I? It will be a fresh start, for both of us.’

  Lies. All of it. There was no escaping what they were.

  * * *

  He reached under his mattress for his journal. It was a large, leather-bound book grandfather had given him before he’d hanged himself. Everyone said it was the shame of a traitorous daughter that made him do it; it was too much for him to bear.

  It wasn’t. Grandfather had always been strange. He heard voices and spoke to people who weren’t there. It was a blessing when he died, even Mother said.

  He wrote carefully the events of the day, from the moment he woke that morning up until his mother leaving the house. He wrote in detail, describing how the cowpat had hit him, the outfit his mother had worn out, the amount
of blood he estimated he had scrubbed from his collar (two teaspoons). When he had finished he turned to the back of the book where he had started a new project.

  He was creating a profile of all of the attributes he believed came from his father. He’d already listed intelligence, strength, good looks, fair hair and skin, all of the things that made him so different from the stupid, short, dark, island children who taunted him.

  He had moved on from the obvious and had started noting the more subtle things. His fingers, for example, were long and flexible. It must be why he was so good at playing the piano – having tried it first at school he’d persuaded his mother to buy an old one he’d seen for sale at the church hall and he now practised for an hour every day. He’d noted ‘long fingers’ and ‘musical ability’ next to each other. This evening he added ‘accidental urination’.

  He had been thinking a lot about this problem. Why did his strong, fit body let him down so regularly? Perhaps it was a problem his father suffered from. Perhaps he pissed his pants the day he landed on Guernsey, wondering what he would find there, expecting a bloodthirsty army, finding instead his mother’s welcoming cunt.

  He didn’t hate her for it, though. There were many things he hated his mother for, but fucking a Nazi was not one of them.

  6

  Jenny

  Sunday, 9 November

  A knock at the front door; Margaret startled. Who could it be, she wondered, so late on a Sunday? She wiped her hands on the front of her trousers as she walked out of the room. Jenny took the opportunity to scrape the remains of her untouched dinner into the bin. She had hardly eaten since the night before and even Margaret’s lasagne, usually a favourite, had failed to whet her appetite. She managed to finish her wine, though, draining the glass before she put it in the sink. A break from tradition in the Dorey household, wine on a Sunday night, but Margaret had decided this evening that a glass would do them both good. Margaret returned, followed by a man in a crumpled suit. Jenny recognised him from the night before. DCI Gilbert. He was tall and broad, his large frame filling the room, his barrel chest straining against his shirt buttons. Margaret introduced him and offered him a kitchen chair, asked him if he’d like a cup of tea. He nodded, a grateful expression lighting his careworn face.