Wind and Dark Water Read online

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Exclusive Excerpt

  More from J.S. Cook

  About the Author

  By J.S. Cook

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  Wind and Dark Water

  By J.S. Cook

  A Guernsey Mystery

  Disgraced detective Deiniol “Danny” Quirke returns to Guernsey, the Newfoundland fishing village of his youth, to bury his abusive grandfather and dispose of the old man’s empty house. Devastated by the recent death of his beloved wife and mired in an internal police investigation that will likely spell the end of his career, he’s in no mood to reminisce about Auld Lang Syne with the people who made his childhood a living hell.

  Secrets Danny thought were buried forever rise violently to the surface when the bones of local boy Llewellyn Single, drowned thirty years before, wash up on the beach. Only two people truly know what happened: Danny Quirke and his former best friend—now bitter enemy—millionaire Tadhg Heaney.

  Two things matter to Tadhg: money and his teenage daughter Lily, who is dying of advanced neuroblastoma. When Lily’s estranged mother returns to claim her, the only person Tadhg can turn to is Danny. And when Danny is accused of Llewellyn’s murder, he must ally with Tadhg, whom he cannot help but desire, because those who believe he is responsible are looking for revenge.

  To my sister Jen, who reads everything I write.

  Acknowledgements

  THANKS AS always to Elizabeth North for saying yes to this book, and to my editors, Andi Byassee and Nicole Dowd, who made sense of my confusion. Heartfelt appreciation to L.C. Chase for an absolutely gorgeous cover, and to everyone at Dreamspinner who made sure this novel saw print. I am forever in your debt.

  Chapter One

  TWICE NOW Deiniol Quirke had pulled off the highway, intending to turn around and head back to the city. Twice he had talked himself out of it. At Whitbourne he’d stopped to get gas before the turnoff, arguing with himself while he filled the tank. The wind was straight out of the northwest, and it poured cold down on him like water. Why was he always having to deal with things like this? And it wasn’t like his sister, Sandra, was going to get up off her arse. She’d always had a knack for avoiding anything unpleasant to do with family, and he was usually the one left holding whatever bag the unpleasantness happened to be in. “Are you sure you’re not coming?” he’d asked her for what felt like the thousandth time. “He was our grandfather, Sandra.”

  “I know what he was,” she told him. “Believe me, Danny. I know what he was. Better than anybody.”

  He’d been lulled almost into insensibility by the endless road when he saw the turnoff for the small Newfoundland town of Guernsey late that October afternoon. The place hadn’t changed a great deal, but it never did, and he suspected it never would. He could come back here in a thousand years’ time, and it would be exactly the same: the same long sweep of hills coming into and going out of the village, the thin ribbon of road leading down to the sea, the post office, the little shop. It was a place caught deep in the onward course of time. He’d driven from town in a record hour and a half, ignoring the posted speed limits, overtaking every other vehicle on the road. Why the hurry? It wasn’t pleasant anticipation that drove him, but a clear and present sense of dread, knowing this was something he had to take care of, but not liking the idea one little bit. “Needs must,” as Nan would say, “when the devil drives.”

  He slowed his car by the white house that marked the beginning of his grandfather’s lane, but turned in the other direction, away from it, and followed the patchy strip of asphalt towards the sea. It was early still; he’d awakened at four thirty that morning, dragged out of sleep by another of those godforsaken dreams. Maybe it would stop, in time. At least that’s what they’d told him. He didn’t believe a word out of their mouths, any of them. What the hell did any of them know about it? It hadn’t happened to them. It had happened to him, and he would never be able to successfully scrub it from his memory. It would follow him to his grave.

  At the end of the road, he saw the familiar shape of a white saltbox house, its bland face turned towards the ocean. The winds today were brutal, dashing enormous waves against the rocks, and the tide was high. There would be a full moon that night. He pulled his rented car onto the gravel drive, as close as possible to the house. The cliffs in the area had been unstable as long as he could remember, and he didn’t trust the peaty, saturated ground to hold. The house was just about hanging off the cliff. Some stormy night during a November gale it would tip over the edge, give itself up to the icy North Atlantic. Good riddance to it. There were no good memories for him here.

  He’d only packed the one bag, a leather holdall that he’d had forever and a day. It had been all around the world with him, to conferences and seminars where all the great crime-solving minds met to pick each other’s brains, drink and flirt, and screw each other in any number of faceless hotel rooms. Year before last it had been Taiwan. Before that, Australia. This year it would be nowhere at all. He fetched the bag out of the back seat, handling it as carefully as a holy relic. It contained a bottle of his favourite Scotch, twelve years old, single malt, capable of obliterating insomnia and nightmares no matter the strength. Wonderful, peace-giving booze.

  The gravel drive was merely an illusion, as was the narrow strip of grass at the front. He’d forgotten all that. There was more land at the back, tussock and ground juniper, overlaid in places with yellow autumn grass. The wind howled, shuddering the ground, rocking the rental car where it stood, scouring the skin of his face and making his hair stand on end. Good to be home, he thought sourly. But the air was fresh here and smelled of salt and peat—earthy smells, not like the crowded cities of the world. He filled his lungs with it, sucked it down like water. He could almost believe he was out of the world altogether. He’d been gone for a while, seconded overseas to the main Irish police station in Dublin, loaned out to the Garda Síochána because a serial killer had decided to cut a swath through that spring’s latest crop of debutantes. Bloody upper classes. Leave it to the fucking quality to find trouble in the last place anybody would expect. And here he was, home again, but not because he wanted to be; he had no choice, not really. Lucky enough he didn’t have to stay. With his severance pay and the savings he’d put by over the years, he had secured a rental apartment in St. John’s with a good view of the Narrows and the Southside Hills—the standard postcard optics.

  He climbed the front steps—wooden, weathered, far too steep, or maybe that was his advancing age—and dropped his bag on the landing. The agent had messengered the keys to him the week before, and he fumbled in his pockets for them. He got them out and promptly dropped them. His hands were none too steady anymore. There was a time he had the steadiest hands in the world, but not now. Not now and never again. He bent with a muffled curse and picked the keys up, fitted the right one in the door, and pushed it open. Welcome home, Danny my boy. Here’s right where you’ve landed, arse over teakettle.

  He pushed the heavy wooden door closed, sh
utting out the keening wind, and sighed with something like relief as he turned the key in the lock. Bit of bloody foolishness that was. Nobody had cause to lock their doors around here, and no one ever did. These people didn’t worry about some great big fucker with a sawed-off shotgun forcing his way in at some ungodly hour of the morning, or a disheveled smackhead taking up semi-permanent residence in one of the outbuildings. Nothing here to be afraid of, Danny. Don’t be so frigging foolish.

  He could have stayed in Grandar’s house, except it seemed too ghoulish, even for him. The old place had been empty for weeks now, but he felt it would be wrong. Grandar had died in that house. To walk in there now would feel far too much like trespass—and this was close enough, the now-vacant home of a local family who’d pulled up stakes and moved to Alberta. The town, though, was just the same, the place where Danny had spent his formative years getting into fifty kinds of trouble, chasing the local sheep around, and pestering the old people, getting underfoot and in the way. He’d played here, going past the house out to the point of land where it narrowed dangerously to a thin slice of cliff that dropped four hundred feet to the sea below. He was never afraid in those days. There was nothing to be afraid of.

  He could have bought this house if he had the money, and supposing that was what he wanted. The real-estate agent was an old friend, and she quoted him a good price. He could have paid for it in cash, no questions asked—except he knew if he came back to Guernsey permanently, he’d take to drink. He’d crawl inside a bottle and never come out.

  He was deathly tired… of everything, but especially of questions. He didn’t want to answer any more questions. He wanted somewhere quiet to lay his head and be left the fuck alone. The investigation had sucked the life out of him, hours and days in that goddamn interview room with those two bastards from the internal investigations unit of the Gardaí, asking him the same questions over and over again.

  “Do you recall what you said?”

  “I told him to let the girl go and come down off the wall.”

  “So he shot himself because…?” A cynical question voiced by a cynical senior officer, tall and skinny Joey Doyle, the bastard who knew everything.

  “I don’t know why.”

  “Could you recount the events for us? In your own words, of course.”

  There weren’t any more words he could say. He’d said them all. A particle of memory replayed itself at intervals inside his head: standing in the pouring rain, his clothes plastered to his body, shivering with the awful anticipation that the man with the gun was going to use it… and he did.

  “So he had the gun up to his head, and you said what, exactly?” The interview room was a big glass box, dominated by a shiny conference table with padded chairs set about it at intervals. Besides Danny there were six others—four men and two women, each holding a high rank in the Gardaí, each there to judge and condemn him.

  “I told him to come down off the wall. ‘Come down,’ I said. ‘Come down.’”

  But Eamonn Nolan had no intention of coming down. He had other plans instead.

  Danny shook off the memory and went into the kitchen, where he laid his bag on the floor. The room was the same as always, Enterprise wood-and-oil stove, old wooden table and mismatched chairs, hand-sewn curtains at the window—raggedy lace turned yellow from thirty years of sun, falling into holes now, useless and threadbare. He reached across the sink to open the window even though it was hardly warm outside. He needed to feel the air against his face. He turned on the taps, cupped a hand, and tasted some of the water. It was icy cold, delicious, with a faint tang of salt. “Right out of the rock,” his grandfather used to say. “That’s the best water there is, my son.”

  The place was spotless and smelled of Sunlight soap. He knew that his late grandmother’s best friend Hetty Jamieson had most likely been in the last day or so, scrubbing the place clean. He’d been sure to hire her long before he ever stepped foot inside the house. He didn’t want to smell anything except lemon soap and the blacking Hetty would have used on the old stove. He had no interest in smelling more recent memories, the scent an after-image of happier times.

  He conducted a review of the upstairs, the bedrooms with their too-soft mattresses and iron bedsteads, each one only enough to fit two people—two slender people, probably stacked on top of each other, he amended—a washstand and basin in each room, and old-fashioned chenille bedspreads on the beds. To the right of the upstairs landing was a clothes closet, a small room with racks and shelves for storage. He’d make sure to stack his chinos in there, and his woollen jumpers, the cold-weather uniform he wore almost every day of his life. Danny himself would be the first to admit it: he was a creature of habit who liked his world to be orderly and sane and who was vastly uncomfortable with surprises and the unexpected. Strange to think he’d gone into police work, where everything was surprising, uncomfortable, and violent.

  He chose the bedroom he wanted, the larger of the two at the back of the house, not near the sea. Sleeping with the window open, the roar and chuff of it would keep him awake, and he’d come here to rest. He tossed his holdall onto the bed and started pulling things out of it, using the opportunity to change into baggy jeans, a faded grey sweatshirt with a university logo on the front, and a pair of fluffy wool socks, a leaving present from Arlene Devlin, the Scottish departmental secretary in Dublin. She’d knit them herself out of the softest merino wool, and she’d worked an intricate Fair Isle pattern around the tops. He remembered his grandmother knitting his mother a Fair Isle sweater once, a long time ago. Pale pink it was, with a moss-green pattern worked into the yoke, accented with dark blue and ivory. It was a beautiful sweater. His mother had neglected to store it properly and the moths got at it. The last time he saw it, the poor old thing was a holey ruin, not even fit for a cloth to wash the floor with.

  He padded downstairs and put the kettle on, then opened drawers and cupboards, looking for cups and spoons. Hetty had laid in groceries, too, a quart of milk and a loaf of homemade three-bun bread, tea and sugar and butter, a tin of biscuits the same kind his grandmother used to buy, a tub of molasses. She’d seen that the house was stocked with anything he might need, right down to clean linens in the bedroom and fresh towels in the bathroom. The unexpected kindness touched him. So many things did nowadays, and his emotions were always too close to the surface. He angered easily, shouted like a lunatic, maybe slammed his fist down on the nearest desk, but that was it. The storm was gone as quickly as it had come, and he usually went about apologising for it. He cried as easily, often at insignificant things, embarrassing himself. He would probably end up as one of those foolish, weepy old men, snotting and bawling over the obituaries in the newspaper.

  He made a sandwich while the kettle boiled, and ate it at the ancient kitchen table, paging through a copy of the Register, the only remaining local newspaper. Everything had gone digital, or so people said, and those who wanted their news printed on paper were fewer every year. There was nothing here for young people, who left as soon as they got the chance and didn’t come back, headed for the city and good-paying jobs on the oil rigs. Every year the population counted a few less souls as the old people died off and hordes of “come-from-aways” bought up their empty houses to use as vacation homes. There were strangers in the shops now, people nobody knew, with disparate accents from other places. There were foreigners with cameras every summer, clambering over the hills and barrens, taking pictures of all sorts, chattering excitedly amongst themselves about things that islanders took for granted. They boarded whale-watching tours in their pitifully inadequate clothing, returning off the water bright red and chilled to the bone, wondering why no one had told them. Surely the fact that the locals all wore rubber boots, knitted caps, and mitts and heavy wool jumpers should have alerted them to the fact that maybe this place wasn’t Florida. Still, it was better than the houses sitting empty, rotting away and falling into disrepair. At least the come-from-aways spent money in the local s
hops and paid retired fishermen to take them out iceberg hunting in the spring. It helped to keep the place going.

  The Register featured the usual wedding announcements, with lavish descriptions of the marriage attire, often with unfortunate spelling errors (“the groom wore a bright purple cumberbun”), and obituaries full of weepy poems culled from some ladies’ book of days… “I am not dead, I do not sleep….” Yes, you are, he thought with a shudder that ran the length of his entire body. Yes, you are, and you’ll never be anything but that. His hand crept to his face, wiping quickly, scrubbing it away, that trickle of wetness. It was always so surprising, death, and so final.

  His grandfather’s obituary was there, halfway down the first column on the last page.

  Eleazar Quirke lately of this town, passed peacefully in his sleep, leaves behind one grandson Danny, one granddaughter Sandra. Predeceased by son Gareth and daughter-in-law Lena. In lieu of flowers, donations to the Knights of Columbus.

  That was it. Simple and direct. Danny had written it himself. The old fellow had passed peacefully in his sleep while Danny was on his way across the Atlantic, a late flight out of Dublin with a strong headwind that kept him in the air for nearly six and a half hours. There was no formal reading of the will; the little that Grandar owned was disbursed by a lawyer in Clarke’s Beach, an old friend of the family. He’d filed the necessary paperwork and took care of the rest of it, sending cheques as small tokens of gratitude to those who’d been kind to Grandar during his final weeks and months. God love them. The kindness of the ignorant.

  He finished the sandwich and dumped the crusts in the bin, boiled the kettle for a second cup of tea. The daylight this time of year was short, the opposite of midsummer nights where a pale blue illumination glowed along the horizon until after ten o’clock. He went about the house, turning on all the lights, then went about again and turned them all off except the single pole lamp above a wingback chair he’d already designated as his reading place. It was opposite a small fireplace of dark mahogany with polished brass accents, a real work of art salvaged from old Simmy Bailey’s house on Southwest Path. Some thoughtful soul—probably Hetty—had left kindling and old newspapers in an antique coal hod on the hearth, and he used these to start a small fire, amazed that he still remembered how to do it. He was a long way and many years beyond such simple, ordinary things, but it gave him comfort, grounded him in a way few things could.