Daggers and Men's Smiles. Jill Downie

      We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

      Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

      J. Kirk Howard, President

      Printed and bound in Canada.

      www.dundurn.com

      To Ros and Frank

      My thanks go to the Guernsey Police, for invaluable help with the structure of the force and the unique administration of laws on the island. Thank you also to Elaine Berry, a former colleague of my mother’s at the Ladies’ College, who gave me books about the island occupation from her personal collection, and shared an afternoon of memories, tea, and roses, and to painter Brian Pinero Terris for his stories of buccaneers and privateers past and present. My heartfelt gratitude goes to my friend from Ladies’ College school days, Ros Hammarskjold, and her husband, Frank, for their warm hospitality. Grateful thanks, as always, to my agents, Frances and Bill Hanna, and to my husband, Ian, for his constant support and encouragement.

      … my dagger muzzled,

      Lest it should bite its master, and so prove,

      As ornaments oft do, too dangerous.

      — William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

      September 15th

      Un rocher perdu dans la mer. A rock lost in the sea.

      Viewed from above, the island of Guernsey reminded Moretti of Victor Hugo’s description of the place when he was exiled there. Once upon a time, on a fine day, you were blinded by the glare of the sun shining off the greenhouses that covered the island, but many of those were now gone. Once, it was horticulture and tourists that brought in the money. Now, it was money that brought in the money, huge sums of it, most of it perfectly legitimate. Over fifty billion pounds of it. Drawn by low taxes — and no taxes on foreign-source income held by non-residents — the money continued to pour in.

      The ATR turboprop was bringing them in across the harbour. First, Castle Cornet at the end of its long pier, looking from above like the eighteenth-century print he had on his sitting-room wall. He could see the projecting stones at the top of the Gunners’ Tower, like the points of a giant granite starfish, the pale green and dusky rose of the castle gardens that cascaded down the cliff face. From the air the tidal swimming pools at La Valette looked like line drawings on a map. Hidden in the thickly wooded slopes beyond, just before the sweep of Val des Terres, the main road leading to the south, was a huge subterranean U-boat refuelling bunker, now refurbished as La Valette Underground Museum.

      Not visible from above. Even from the ground, its entrance was well concealed. Beneath the rock of the island existed another world of passages, tunnels, command centres, a hideous granite honeycomb built by human misery. When he was a child, before the reconstruction of Fortress Guernsey for the tourist, no one talked much about that hidden world. They were anxious to move on, to forget starvation, deprivation, fear. Collaboration. Betrayal.

      Love affairs.

      “They came to Mr. Boutillier, asked him to dig seventeen graves — an explosion, they said. I was terrified. Numb. I only cried when I saw you the next day, alive.”

      His mother, talking to his father, late at night, the two of them reliving the agony. His father had been there, underground, digging, dragging trucks of rock in a harness, like a beast, with the Russians, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Czechs, the French. All of them at the mercy of Hitler’s Organisation Todt. Hidden from view, once. Now, reconstructed, open to the public. The giant blood-red oil tanks for diesel, the glass display cases of knives, stilettos, the steel-lined rubber truncheon, the whip with its leather strips.

      From the air the Fort George enclave for the wealthy seemed no more remote than it did from the ground. There were two entrances to it: one through Fermain Road off Val des Terres, the other through the gate, all that was left of the old fort. He could see the mansions overlooking Soldiers’ Bay from the Clarence Battery, glimpse the far reaches of forbidden ground from the cliff path that ran past them. Once, on a cliff walk, Moretti had heard loud cackling from one of the properties, saw a flock of geese running toward him beyond a fence, protecting their Capitol. “No, no,” someone was saying.

      No, no indeed. No parking on the roads, no vans allowed on driveways, no children playing on the pavements, not a sign of life. Inescapable, really, in a world of haves and have-nots. The rich needed to be as protective of their homes as they were secretive in their businesses, closed away in the Crédit Suisse buildings on the Esplanade or behind the elegant facades around the Plaiderie, near the law courts and the lawyers’ offices, with the CCTV cameras trained on every entrance.

      The one-storey airport building came into view, beyond it a couple of smaller buildings, one of them the club for the owners of the private planes that were now as common as gulls on the island. The ATR landed with a gentle bump, taxied to a halt near a couple of Trilanders, the three-engine airplanes

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