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I once worked out that I’ve probably written more than ten million words in my lifetime. I’m surrounded by silence but at the same time I’m drowning in words and it hardly ever leaves me, that sense of disconnection.
Marc changed the subject. ‘I’ve never got the point of smashed avocado,’ he announced, scooping some onto his pitta bread. ‘And I hate that word – smashed. That’s typical bloody Jamie Oliver. Just slice it up with a sharp knife and that’s good enough for me. Preferably with some crispy bacon on the side.’
I like decks of playing cards. I have a lot of them. And I remembered that the double-sized black pip at the centre of the ace is often thought to resemble, even to have been inspired by, the spade used by an undertaker. The Americans deployed it as a weapon in the Vietnam War, dropping it on the bodies of the soldiers they killed in order to frighten the survivors. In Iraq, the ace of spades was the card that identified and targeted Saddam Hussein. Charles le Mesurier thought it was lucky. I knew better. It was the death card.
Without realising it, I had stumbled onto – or into – the third book in our three-book contract. For anyone reading this, I suppose it will have been obvious from the start. I wouldn’t have been writing about Alderney if we’d just gone to the island, answered a few questions about books and flown home again.
‘I’ve made some tea,’ Judith Matheson said. Of course she had. She was the sort of woman who would always make tea no matter what the crisis. Lose your leg in a hideous industrial accident and she’d be there with a nice cup of Earl Grey.
The injuries to her head and to her face were vicious. She was almost unrecognisable. But it was more than that. She had been bored, sullen, sexy, distraught, angry, obstinate. Whoever had killed her had taken all that away and there was nothing left behind.
Consuela was a Spanish name and Alessandro an Italian one. I wondered if Elizabeth would be able to speak to them in their own language. Or did everyone speak the same language when they died, trapped in some sort of eternal Google Translate?
