Dark Sky Island Read online

  They hauled themselves out. The rocks were hot and they burned the soles of their feet, hopping from one to the other as they spread their towels across a huge, flat boulder and then lay on them, soaking up the warmth from beneath.

  Meg took her top off, lay with her breasts shining like moons they were so white. She envied Meg’s confidence but not her figure. Meg was one of those willowy blondes who looked good in magazines with the right make-up and lighting, but in real life she was all angles in slightly the wrong places.

  She threw a towel at Meg. ‘Cover up—you’ll send someone blind if they see you!’

  ‘No one’s coming,’ Meg said. ‘This place is dead. Take yours off—go on, you big sissy.’ Meg propped herself up on her elbow and searched through her pile of clothes, finding the cigarettes in the pocket of her shorts. She lit one and blew smoke towards her. ‘Go on. Don’t be shy,’ she said, her voice lowered and breathy, batting her eyelashes like Marilyn Monroe.

  She laughed. Unhooked the clasp at the back of her bikini. Her father would have died on the spot if he’d seen it, two little triangles of fabric tied at the neck in a bow. Hers was a figure that featured in the sort of magazines she’d seen discarded at the bus shelter at the back of the housing estate near school. She’d attracted whistles and catcalls since she was fourteen, no doubt the reason her father insisted she dress like a nun. He seemed to think it was her fault men shouted obscenities at her, despite the fact that the stiff white shirt, over-the-knee navy skirt and red tights of her school uniform were hardly provocative.

  She lay back, enjoying the warmth on her nearly naked body, and she felt as though she had shed more than clothing, that she was lighter, freer than she’d ever been before. She reached for her T-shirt, used it to cover her eyes and drifted into sun-drenched sleep.

  The sound of voices roused her. It took her a second to remember where she was, before she sat up, still drowsy, then scrambled around like a lunatic, pulling her T-shirt on just as an elderly couple appeared, heads bobbing up and down as they climbed over the rocks towards them, before unpacking a picnic and offering the girls a custard cream.

  They were still laughing about it as they cycled back to the guesthouse for a bath before tea. She was in front, out of breath after the walk over the bridge from Little Sark. (Even Meg, always the first one to break the rules, had peered over the sheer drop on either side and admitted the ‘No cycling’ warning should probably be adhered to.) It was downhill nearly all the way from here, though, and she let gravity do its thing. As she gathered speed, she played a game, counting in her head, challenging herself not to use the brakes until she reached twenty, then thirty, then fifty.

  Eyes streaming, hair flying, she laughed, turned back to Meg. ‘Come on, slowcoach!’

  The road flattened and she slowed, but not enough to take the corner safely, and she pulled on the brakes, the back wheel skidding out to the centre of the path, the front one only feet away from an awkwardly parked tractor. She swerved, lost control, had no time to stop for the man pushing the wheelbarrow.

  Her whole body jarred with the impact, the clanging of metal against metal rang through her ears, and she flew over the handlebars, landing against the relative softness of the hedge. Winded but embarrassed, she laughed, ignoring the pain she felt in her wrist as she brushed the hair out of her eyes, saw his hand, outstretched.

  He was handsome, in a rugged, country sort of way, a way she was familiar with, having grown up in a village not much bigger than this place, but unlike the boys she knew from home, he was tanned and had something of the sea in him—his eyes sparkled as he helped her up, like light on water. His hair, thick and sun-bleached, fell in waves to his shoulders. Her father wouldn’t have liked that. Anything below the ears was too long on a man according to him.

  ‘You all right? Jesus, woman, you’re lucky that wasn’t a tractor—just because there’s no cars, you can’t ride around like a bloody maniac!’

  He was shaken, she realised. And there was a dent in his wheelbarrow.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was going too fast. I’ll pay for the damage.’ She had no idea how.

  ‘Don’t worry about that.’ He seemed to calm down. To look at her properly. She stopped herself from tugging at the bottom of her shorts as his gaze flickered over her body and back up to her eyes. He reached out. Gently brushed a knuckle against her lip. He held it up, showed her a lick of crimson. ‘You’ve damaged your face too.’

  She tried to look confident, but shivered inside, shaken by the accident, and something else.

  ‘Oh my God, are you OK?’ Meg came squealing to a stop.

  ‘I’m fine.’ She winced as she picked up her bike. ‘This man helped me. Thank you.’

  ‘Reg,’ he said. He smiled.

  She smiled back.

  ‘You got a name?’

  ‘Rachel.’

  Meg gave her a sideways glance, made a noise, like she was about to say something, but Rachel flashed her a look and she stopped.

  ‘Well, Rachel. Suppose you could buy me a drink. For the damage. And nearly giving me a heart attack.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll be at the Mermaid later. Along with half the island.’

  She was flustered but didn’t show it.

  ‘Absolutely. We’ll see you there.’

  They could hardly say no. Not after he’d been so nice.

  In the pub, the air was thick with smoke and heavy with beer and laughter. The accent here was funny. Long vowels, but not like hers, not ‘grarse’ and ‘barth’; here, they were harsh and jarring—‘graaas’ and ‘baaath’. There were words she didn’t understand at all and she felt sure that some of the men (and it was mostly men) were talking about her and Meg. Maybe because they were overdressed, both in short skirts and blouses, everyone else in work gear, scruffy trousers and dirty T-shirts.

  She drank three beers, which was two too many. She had no tolerance for alcohol. She was trying to impress him. He had changed his clothes since this morning, was wearing a button-up shirt and trousers, holes in the knees but clean at least. He was much older than her, thirty maybe, which was good. He’d know what he was doing.

  He asked her questions. She lied. Just a little. Added a couple of years to her age, failed to mention that she had told her father she was on a trip organised by the Young Christian Association, that there was not a chance in hell she would have got away with this if he hadn’t been still grieving her mother’s death, only a year ago. He’d thrown himself into his work at the church, and the Christian Pregnancy Advice Centre, where he prayed with expectant single mothers, helping them follow the Lord’s path. He had taken Rachel there a few times—she presumed in lieu of sex education. Most of the girls were her age, younger even, sad and desperate.

  It got late and Meg wanted to go. But Reg asked if she’d like to take a walk. Meg hadn’t had much luck: she’d been stuck next to a boy not much older than them who had barely said a word all evening. She told Meg to go back and she’d be home soon.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Meg whispered, eyebrow raised, looking at him as he drained his pint.

  ‘Very.’ She winked, hoping that the display of bravado was more convincing to others than herself. Her stomach churned. The bar seemed to have got even noisier, full of chat and people shouting across the room to each other and then groans as the landlord called ‘time’ and rang the bell.

  He held his hand out and helped her down from the stool. She straightened her skirt, told him she had to pop to the loo.

  ‘I’ll wait right here,’ he said, before lighting a cigarette. He looked handsome and confident, smoke curling around him, and if she hadn’t been sure before, she was now.

  She sat on the toilet and peed for what felt like an age, heart pounding. Her ears rang in the quiet, and she couldn’t get a line from a song her granny used to croon out of her head: ‘Sweet sixteen and never been kissed . . .’

  She had been kissed. She’d done more than that, after the last dance she’d been to, surprising her
date, who had been mercilessly teased by his friends that he wasn’t getting anywhere with the vicar’s daughter. Which was why she’d let him touch her, even though she hadn’t particularly liked him. Just to prove his toffee-nosed friends wrong. It occurred to her that what she was about to do was no different, not really. The school motto was ‘Seize the day.’ Presumably losing your virginity to spite your father was not what Kent Country Girls had in mind when it had those words carved over the entrance two hundred-odd years ago. But where better, she thought, to seize the day than here?

  She pulled up her things. She’d put on her nicest undies. Matching, white cotton, little daisies embroidered round the edges. She checked her reflection in the mirror. Ran her finger over the split in her bottom lip. Pushed her bra up, pulled her top down and popped a mint in her mouth.

  Meg had gone by the time she got back, and the bar was nearly empty. He stubbed his cigarette out and took her hand. His was large and rough. She liked the feel of it. He wasn’t a tall man, but she was short, only coming up to his shoulder. As they left the lights of the bar behind them, he put his arm around her, pulled her close to him. He smelled of smoke and beer and salt.

  ‘Look at the stars.’ He stopped. She looked up. She’d never seen so many.

  ‘Beautiful.’ She didn’t know what else to say. She wanted it to happen, but she wanted it to be over with. Wanted him to kiss her, to put his tongue in her mouth, to put his hand up her skirt, to touch her breasts—she could tell that he wanted to, the way he’d been looking at them all night, but she wanted to be home too, back at the guesthouse with Meg, telling her all about it, the stress and tension and excitement done with already.

  ‘You can see even better from here.’ He led her off the main track, down a grass-covered path. They passed a small cottage, all in darkness, and came out into open fields.

  ‘Sit down.’ The grass was warm and dry and soft. In front of them, the land stopped, and from below, the sound of waves breaking against the cliffs, and next to her, the sound of him, breathing, then his hands on her, pulling at her clothes, and all at once she froze. She pressed her lips tightly together. She wanted this. She’d told him, with her eyes and her laughter and her hand on his leg.

  He carried on, tugging and grabbing and breathing, and she couldn’t help herself—she started to struggle against him, she tried to get up, but he took her hand, the injured one, and pinned it to the ground. She gave a gasp of pain.

  That was when he kissed her. Pressed his mouth so tightly on hers that she could make no sound, and he kept it there, one hand heavy on her sore wrist, one fumbling with his trousers, and then he was on top of her and all the breath was squeezed out of her and she pushed the fear and the panic away and stared at the stars above her.

  Afterwards, he walked her back to the guesthouse. He kissed her again. She let him.

  ‘How about dinner tomorrow? I can come and meet you here after work?’ He tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

  She nodded. Yes. Dinner. Of course.

  As he walked away, she felt a wave of emotion washing over and over her, leaving remorse and shame in its wake.

  9

  Michael

  ‘His throat’s been slit.’

  ‘I can see that.’ You’d have to be blind not to, Michael thought, as he forced himself to look at the gaping wound that had loosened Reg Carré’s head from his neck.

  The body was lying in the kitchen, if it could even be called that. The cottage had just the one main room, an area to the left of the front door with a sofa and an armchair, to the right a small kitchenette and breakfast bar, a table with three chairs set to the side. The whole room was very dark, three small windows letting in three shafts of dust-filled light, the naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling doing little to alleviate the dingy atmosphere.

  ‘I’d guess he was facing the kitchen wall when it happened. Artery’s been severed, hence the blood splatters—autopsy will confirm.’ Cathy from forensics was kneeling next to the body and talking into a minuscule voice recorder. ‘Making some tea maybe, attacked from behind?’ She looked up at Michael and pointed at the kettle, which rested on the sideboard, immediately below the bloodstained wall. ‘Then he staggered backwards, collapsed, fell forwards and bled out on the floor.’

  ‘It’s a theory,’ Michael agreed. He was feeling a little queasy. He might be imagining it but the smell that had hit him when he’d walked into the tiny cottage, what seemed like hours ago, was even more intense now that the body had been turned over and the day’s heat had finally started to permeate the stone walls. He forced himself to look at Reg’s face. It was ghastly. Drained of blood, blue-lipped, that gash exposing God knows what bits of a man’s throat to a daylight they should never see. Michael put his hand to his mouth briefly before rubbing his chin.

  ‘If you and Rob have it covered, Cath, I’ll go and take the constable’s statement.’

  He walked out into the sunshine. He had radioed down to Derrible for back-up as soon as he’d established that Constable Langlais was not raving mad, and three uniformed officers were waiting at the end of the overgrown garden path, still panting after the jog over.

  ‘Came as soon as we could, sir. The rest of the lads are still wrapping up at the beach. Where do you want us?’

  Michael held his hand up to shield his eyes as he surveyed the area. He pointed to the common, then the fields in front of the cottage, then the path to the main road.

  ‘One of you in each direction for now. Gloves on, eyes peeled for anything unusual.’

  ‘Like what, sir?’ A young PC, not long out of training.

  ‘It’s Bachelet, isn’t it?’

  The PC nodded. ‘Well, PC Bachelet, anyone covered in blood or wielding a weapon might want stopping for a start. Failing that, use your brains, eh? And watch where you walk—there’s dog crap everywhere. I’ve already trodden in one lot.’

  Marquis jogged over to him from the edge of the cottage, where he’d been securing police tape to the hedge.

  ‘Another boat is on its way over from Guernsey, sir. Ten officers on board.’

  ‘Good. As soon as they get here, we’ll want a thorough search of the area. When you’re done securing the scene, Marquis, you can help out young Einstein over there.’ He pointed to Bachelet, who was poking around in the hedgerow a few hundred yards away. Made Marquis look like Sherlock Holmes, that one did.

  Michael found Martin Langlais sitting on an upturned flowerpot at the side of the house. Blotchy hives had broken out on his cheeks and over his forehead.

  ‘You don’t look very well, Martin.’

  ‘I’m only a volunteer—you know that. I don’t even get paid,’ he snapped.

  ‘I know, I know. There’s no need to explain. I’m not feeling too good myself. I do need to take a statement, though.’

  ‘Said to my wife yesterday, “I’ve had enough of this,” I said. “I’m not doing this anymore, all for free an’ all.”’

  ‘What happened yesterday?’

  ‘Nothing in particular.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘It’s been building up for months. Used to be a nice job. People would come and make complaints about little things—littering, hedges not being cut back on time, tractors going too fast. You know how it is, stuff I could sort out. But recently there’s been all this trouble with Monroe. Vandalism against his property, then him handing out those leaflets, then the posters.’ He shook his head. ‘Or maybe it was the posters, then the leaflets—I can’t remember. Anyway, I thought that was bad. But this . . .’ He rubbed at his brow. ‘I need a drink.’

  ‘You called in this vandalism, did you?’

  ‘Of course I did! Report anything serious, don’t I? I thought bricks through windows and burned crops might warrant a visit, but clearly you lot disagreed. I’ve been dealing with this all on my own.’

  Michael had heard nothing about it. The report was probably sitting on a desk somewhere in Guernsey Police Station.

  ‘Right. W
ell, we’ll get onto it. But first we need to figure out what the hell has happened here. How did you come to find the body? Did someone call you? Not the kind of place you’re just passing, is it?’

  ‘Shit!’ The constable’s grey face went even greyer. ‘Shit, I’m sorry.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘It was the Le Page kid. Arthur. He can’t be more than six or seven. I caught him running out onto Rue du Fort, stopped him because he should have been at school. Soon as I saw his face, I could see something was wrong.’ He paused. ‘He wouldn’t say anything, though, just ran here and I followed. I saw the front door was open—Reg isn’t the type to leave his door open, so I went to check on him. After I saw . . . with all the stress . . . I panicked. I forgot about the kid. Where did he go?’ He looked around wildly as if the child might magically appear in front of them. ‘Round the back, I think. He’s probably long gone. Shit.’ He stood, wobbled, sat back down again. ‘I think I’m going to throw up.’

  ‘Take some deep breaths. I’ll go and have a look.’

  The back garden was as unkempt as the front. A small concrete area with a couple of dirty folding chairs and a round plastic table with a hole in the middle for a sunshade, covered in empty bottles and an ashtray overflowing with cigar butts. On a patch of scrubby grass, in front of the overgrown hedge that marked the edge of the property was an enclosure made of wood and wire, and a small hut with a ramp that led down to an open run. A chicken coop, Michael thought. He peered in, wrinkled his nose at the sharp, sweet smell of urine and something else, something damp and decaying–rotting wood, perhaps. Guinea pigs, not chickens, munched at the few strands of green grass that peppered the dry earth. They were dull-eyed and mangy-looking. A food bowl in the corner had been tipped over and some sort of grain was spread over the surrounding area. A plastic water container that looked like a baby’s bottle but with a metal spout in place of a rubber teat was attached to the outside of the enclosure. It was empty.

  A rustling noise. The hedge behind the hut shook. A knot of sparrows fluttered into the air. Michael took a few steps backwards. Listened. The blood in the house had been freshly spilled. Whoever had killed Reg Carré was undoubtedly still on the island. He picked up an empty beer bottle from the table, held it at his side.