Dark Sky Island Page 3

  He passed the bank and some guesthouses. They were all covered in wisteria and advertised lobster rolls and afternoon tea and Prosecco in the garden on chalkboards outside. Fifteen pounds for a sandwich and a glass of wine. He shook his head, felt the sweat under his collar. It was like the desert sometimes. All the yellow roads and the sand and the dust and the shimmer of the heat up ahead. He would have liked to have seen a desert. The Sahara, perhaps. It froze there, sometimes, at night. Not many people knew that.

  He set down his trolley and rested against the hedge, avoiding a patch of cow parsley, which on a day like today, with the sun blazing, would blister the skin if brushed against. The grass was cool. He closed his eyes for a moment, listened to the grasshoppers and the birds and felt like he could just drift off, right there.

  The rumble of another tractor. It came into view and he stood and squinted at it. Ah, this one he knew. It was Malcolm Perré’s boy. He had forgotten his name. Malcolm’s boy raised a hand in greeting and he nodded his head in reply. He had never liked Malcolm, but the boy had been friends with Luke and was always polite, and he’d stayed here, to run a farm, which said something, he supposed, about the boy’s character. He coughed as the dust churned up by the tractor hit the back of his throat.

  The tractor stopped.

  ‘Everything OK, Mr Carré?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Just enjoying the sunshine.’ He took hold of the trolley, made to continue on his way.

  ‘Have you heard about the body?’

  ‘What’s that?’ It seemed as if Malcolm’s boy was looking at him very intently and he felt a frisson of fear.

  ‘Well, not a body. Bones. Down on Derrible. The police are there now.’

  The heat on his face was no longer from the sun but from the blood that rushed from his body and his limbs and surged into his head. His legs felt hollow and he did not trust them to hold his weight. He leaned back against the hedge again.

  ‘Nothing to worry about, I’m sure. Probably washed up from somewhere else. Do you need a lift home?’

  He shook his head. Waved a hand. ‘I’m fine.’ Benjamin. That was Malcolm’s boy’s name. ‘Thank you, Benjamin.’

  ‘OK, Mr Carré. Take care now.’ The tractor rumbled away.

  He stood up. Pulled his trolley, head down, one foot in front of the other. He needed to get home. To sit down in the cool darkness of the cottage.

  Head still pounding. Legs still weak. The trolley felt heavy all of a sudden, a weight trailing behind him he could no longer bear.

  Just get home.

  But his vision blurred and the path began to resemble not earth but water, and he stumbled as the surface undulated, his feet continuing to travel through what his eyes believed was solid ground. He stopped. Searched his pockets for a handkerchief.

  A rustle. The crushing of dry grass.

  It was close now. He could feel it. Closer than it had ever been. The air thickened; the heat pressed down on him, hampered his breathing. He recalled the feeling of being buried on the beach, a game played as a child, sand shovelled on top of him, heavy as rocks piled on his chest.

  And then he saw it. A dark flicker. In the field beside him.

  He steadied himself. Swallowed down a gulp of the warm, heavy air. Turned. Let go of the trolley, which fell to the ground with a clatter.

  It stood motionless, save for its tongue, which lolled out of its open, spittle-flecked jaws, rippling as it panted in the heat. Its coat was so black, so sleek, it shone almost blue in the sunlight, muscles quivering beneath it. Its eyes were fixed on him, flaming from within.

  He felt sure if he moved, it would come for him. Even the flicker of an eyelash. The twitch of a hand. So he stood, tensing every aching muscle, holding every brittle bone in place. Still. So still. Until the breeze whispered through the undergrowth, sent leaves scuttling across the path and lifted his hair. It was enough. The beast stiffened. Crouched. Growled, long and low, and he could smell its breath, laden with dank and decay, like the soil in a graveyard. He had seen the Tchico. His time had come. It turned. Padded silently across the field and into the woods beyond.

  He allowed himself to breathe. Felt the tension leave his body, only the old and familiar aches remaining in his bones. Not now, then. Not right now. But soon. He’d known all along that it would come to this. It wasn’t children following him. It was fate. He’d always imagined when it caught up with him that he would scream and run, that he would fight against inevitability.

  As it was, he picked up his trolley, put his head down. Kept on walking.

  4

  Michael

  The boat flew over each wave, bouncing back onto the surface and showering them all with sea spray before taking off again. There were four of them in the RIB, a high-speed rigid inflatable boat, plus the captain. The pair from forensics—Cathy, a pretty woman in her mid-thirties, and Rob, a dependable, if slow-moving chap who had worked for them for years—were sat on one side of the boat taking in the scenery. They laughed as they wiped the water from their eyes. Opposite them, Detective Constable Stephen Marquis, who had been fiddling with his phone, hastily dried it on his trouser leg before prodding furiously at the screen, a panicked look on his face. Always texting someone, that boy was. It was bloody irritating.

  Next to Marquis, DCI Michael Gilbert gripped the edge of his seat and wished that he’d eaten something before he’d left home. He was not prone to seasickness, but an empty stomach and a choppy patch taken at speed were not a good combination and he felt faintly nauseous. This was adding to his already bad mood, the result of the phone ringing late last night, just as he’d drifted off in front of Hang ’Em High (the last of the Clint Eastwood special DVD collection his ex-wife had sent him for Christmas). The constable in Sark had received an anonymous tip that bones had been found on Derrible Bay and would they send a team over to investigate?

  There were no police on Sark—as part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, it came under the jurisdiction of Guernsey Police, who hadn’t had a full-time presence there for years. Time was, they’d send officers over on a two-week rotation during the summer, but it hadn’t been cost-effective, because, quite frankly, nothing ever bloody happened there, and as Michael knew only too well, the officers tended to spend their two weeks propping up a bar and gossiping with the locals. So now they just had the constable, a voluntary position, who had responsibility for ensuring law and order among the island’s population of approximately four hundred and fifty. An easy enough job. Until something like this happened.

  Michael rubbed his forehead. Anonymous tips often came to nothing—bored kids making mischief, or disgruntled members of the public trying to get one over on the police. So best-case scenario, this whole thing was a wind-up. Which would be frustrating. But better than the worst-case scenario. And because his expectation of what a worst-case scenario might involve had been adjusted upwards several levels after last year, he had pulled out all the stops this morning. Police boat, forensics, the lot. All of this on top of the fact that he was already neck-deep in the investigation into this new drug flooding Guernsey. Black Pearls the kids were calling them, due to their colour and the little skull and crossbones printed on each one. Horrible things had already landed one kid in hospital, and they were no closer to finding out where the stuff was coming from. But Michael couldn’t afford to miss a beat. Not on the drug investigation, and definitely not on whatever was going on in Sark.

  Because the entire Guernsey Police Force was under review. Everything they did, everything they’d ever done was being scrutinised by a team of special investigators from Scotland Yard. That’s how monumentally they’d fucked up last year—Scotland Yard were taking an interest in Guernsey, a sleepy little backwater.

  So Michael was feeling jittery. Under pressure. Unable to relax on the short boat journey, because he was dreading dealing with whatever awaited him. Human bones or animal bones or no bones at all, he was still in for a difficult day.

  The cool breeze that ru
ffled his hair as they sped over the water would be absent on Sark. It would be hotter than hell there today, he thought. He shook slightly. Felt a tingling in his back, like the beginnings of the flu. It was probably just the late night and the early morning and the three cups of coffee he’d drunk before 6 a.m. He needed a lie-in. And an end to the paperwork, and the weight of responsibility this job seemed to burden him with these days. The alternative was worse, though. Retirement. All that time to think. To dwell. He shrugged. He’d have to do it eventually. He’d adjust, he supposed. Many years ago, he’d never imagined life without his wife and daughter. And now look at him. Sheila had been married to her second husband for longer than she’d been married to Michael. And Ellen had been dead and buried for as many years as she’d walked the earth.

  The roar of the engine faded to a growl as they reached the bay. Michael had never approached Derrible by sea before, only from the footpath, which wound steeply down the cliff from the headland, landing at a rocky plateau, the only place to sit at high tide. The path afforded a gentler introduction to this scenery, slowly enveloping the visitor in their surroundings, the scale of which Michael only really appreciated now. The cliffs appeared sinister and looming, black shadows in the early morning light, the cave openings gaping mouths. The beach was less than half exposed, a thin crescent of shingle and stones, the sand hidden by the retreating tide.

  The captain, a taciturn chap called James Després, whose reticence had earned him the nickname ‘Gobby Jim’, took them as close to the shore as he could, turning towards a flat boulder and buffering the front of the boat against it. Michael stared distastefully at the two or so feet of water beneath them. It was an odd thing about Sark that no matter how warm the air, the water was always ice-cold. He took off his shoes and socks, and rolled up his trousers. He’d not had much time outdoors this summer and his legs were plucked-chicken pale. He let out a yelp as he slid off the side of the boat and plunged his feet into the water. He swayed from side to side, struggling to get a footing on the smooth pebbles of the seabed before finding his balance and striding to shore, the salt stinging his dry skin. When he reached the sand, he wiggled his toes, which looked to have entirely drained of blood, while he waited for Marquis, who was a good few inches shorter than Michael and had made a poor job of rolling up his trousers. They unfurled a little further with each step he took and were soaked through up to the knee before he reached dry land.

  ‘Right.’ Michael pulled his socks and shoes back onto still-wet feet. ‘Where are these bloody things?’ He raised his hand to shield his eyes against the sun, which had fully risen over Hogsback Cliffs in front of them.

  ‘Would they not have been washed away by the tide since last night, sir?’ Marquis scanned the small area of dry beach and seaweed not touched by the sea.

  ‘According to our tipster, the bones are in a cave.’ He pointed to a ledge protruding from the cliffs fifteen feet above the sand with a round opening about five feet across above it. ‘That just about matches the description we were given.’

  Michael went first, clambering up a series of wide, flat rocks before reaching the ledge. He hauled himself onto it and then sat for a moment to catch his breath. He stood at the mouth of the cave and shone the torch inside. It was larger than it looked from the outside, full head height, room for two people so long as they didn’t want to move about too much. The floor was rock and shingle. No footprints. No bones. Wrong cave, maybe. Or crap information more like. He swept the light around one more time. Lingered on a pile of lighter-coloured stones in the corner. They looked out of place. One or two lay on the floor of the cave, as though they’d fallen from the stack.

  ‘See anything, sir?’

  ‘Hold this, will you? Shine it over here.’ Michael poked at one of the stones. It was loose. He removed it, placed it behind him. Then took another. And another. Until an opening was revealed. A second, small cavern, a couple of feet high, perhaps three feet wide at most. Michael peered in. The shapes within were confusing, the light from behind bouncing off pale curves, absorbed into dark hollows.

  ‘What’s that, sir? Another cave?’ Marquis squeezed himself next to Michael and shone the torch beam right into it. Edges sharpened.

  Michael winced, stepped back.

  ‘It’s not a cave, Marquis. It’s a tomb.’

  5

  Jenny

  The Venture was a small, cheerful-looking ferry with a bright blue hull, white cabin and red roof. There was plenty of indoor seating, and a coffee bar on the lower deck, but Jenny headed straight for the benches that lined the upper level. She found a seat right at the back, which offered the best views of Guernsey behind them. When she was little, she had sat in the same place on Charlie’s boat, the Jenny Wren, waving goodbye to Guernsey as it first expanded into a panorama, stretched out before them, from the cliffs of St Martin’s in the south to the chimneys of the power station in the north, and then shrank, slowly retreating into the distance, a green-grey dot on the horizon.

  Two women came and sat next to Jenny. They were in their sixties, dressed for walking, both wearing sturdy boots, long socks and wide-brimmed sun hats with strings tied under their chins. One of them pulled out a map and started making suggestions as to a possible route round the island.

  ‘Do you know Sark?’ The lady next to Jenny turned to her.

  Jenny nodded. ‘Yes. A little.’ Better than most, she thought.

  ‘We’ve never been. We go away every year together.’ She pointed to her friend, who smiled and nodded in agreement. ‘Girls’ break.’

  ‘From our husbands,’ her companion stage-whispered.

  ‘Never quite long enough, is it, Irene?’

  They both chuckled and began studying the map again.

  Jenny listened to their chatter about the best places to visit and chipped in with a couple of ideas of her own, suggesting, to great controversy, that the ladies consider hiring bikes. She left them to their good-natured argument and stood, leaning against the railing. It was slick and sticky with salt and grease. Below, a crew member unwound the thick rope from the cleat that tethered them to the dock. A shout and a hand raised to the captain signalled that they were good to go. The noise from the boat’s engines shifted from a hum to a rumble and they moved off, through the harbour and out onto the open sea. She breathed in the salty air and watched the beams of sunlight fragment into rainbows as they bounced off the sea spray.

  After only fifteen minutes, they had reached the south coast of Herm, a tiny island a mile and a half long by half a mile wide, popular with locals and tourists alike for its beaches and winding coastal pathway. The sun’s rays always seemed to seek out Herm, and as they passed it now, the island itself shone—the sand of Shell Beach an iridescent pearly pink, the cliffs golden, topped with lush green and bright purple echiums, known as ‘Towers of Jewels’ due to their tall, beautifully flowered stems.

  As they left Herm behind them, Jenny looked for some of the familiar rock formations Charlie used to point out to her. She spotted two rocks, the larger one appearing to cradle the smaller, known as the Madonna and Child, and Le Chat, its ears poking out of the waves towards Sark, which they were now approaching.

  Too beautiful to describe as ‘looming’, there was still something unsettling about the way the island rose out of the sea. It was ethereal, she thought, rather than sinister, three hundred feet of red-brown cliff towering above them. At the top, a lighthouse nestled among foliage, its parapet stark and white against a clear blue sky. You could almost be approaching an island in the Mediterranean, Mykonos or Santorini, rather than a wind-swept Channel isle.

  The coast was riddled with caves. Charlie had taken her on the RIB, whizzed through the waves and then slowed to a crawl as he’d navigated the narrow openings into their gaping maws. He’d told her stories about pirates and smuggling years ago, and more recently, about a couple of tourists who had ventured off the cliff path down to the caves and been trapped by the tide and rescued, just
in time, by Flying Christine, the marine ambulance. ‘Cost a bloody fortune, those kinds of rescues,’ Charlie had said. She’d had the impression he would have left them to drown.

  The Venture’s engines slowed as the captain manoeuvred round the jagged rocks that spilled off the cliffs and into the sea. Above the jarring screeches of the gulls wheeling around them, Jenny heard the panicked cries of an oystercatcher. It sounded like a child, calling out for its mother.

  They moved slowly through a narrow passage between the cliffs, round into Maseline Harbour. Here, after the rugged north coast, it felt as if the island was opening its rocky arms to them, a welcoming display of wild flowers scattered over the grassy headland. Granite slabs clad the jetty, the only man-made part of the harbour, and rows of tyres lined the concrete posts they chugged towards, buffering the boat as the same crew member who had cast off in Guernsey hopped onto the dock, rope in hand, and tethered them to Sark.

  A man in the Sark Shipping uniform—a navy polo shirt and shorts, which exposed weathered, muscular legs, one heavily tattooed, a dragon twisting round his calf—helped her off the boat with a ‘Watch your step, love’ as he held the crook of her arm and guided her onto the jetty.

  She strung her bag across her shoulder and trod carefully up the damp steps. A lone tractor waited, engine running, to collect the luggage of the few visitors who were staying overnight and deliver it to hotels and guesthouses, while the passengers were left to walk through a tunnel that ran thirty feet under the towering rock face, and naturally separated the harbour from the rest of the island. A ‘Welcome to Sark’ sign hung cheerfully over the tunnel’s mouth. Framed in the opening at the far end, a miniature view of verdant cliffs topped with yellow gorse drew pedestrians out onto Harbour Hill, the road leading to the village.

  ‘The guidebook wasn’t joking about it being steep, was it?’ One of the women from the boat drew up alongside Jenny, quickly followed by the other.