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Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Wing ePress
ISBN-10: 1613098901
Type: Fiction
Pages: 366
Copyright: 2012
ISBN-13: 9781613091135
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
“Cherchez la femme!” — words Ambler will come to wish he’d never heard.
AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK ON CREATESPACE.
To escape a floundering relationship and writer’s block, Ambler leaves London for La Rochelle, where he stumbles into a tangle of corruption and revenge with a grisly murder at its centre: a crime which could cost Ambler his freedom — and his sanity
Following a brief but decisive stay at Île de Ré, Ambler travels through France in pursuit of the elusive stunner and academic star Lisette. His journey intersects with those of four other characters: the fame-hungry Lisette, the bent law-enforcers Lefèvre and Christophe, and the charismatic PI Pyke, set on Ambler’s trail by a rueful ex-girlfriend. These strands converge in a multi-twist dénouement set in Orléans.
AUTHOR'S RECORDING FROM LA JOIE DE VIVRE
ADDITIONAL EXTRACTS
PLEASE VISIT MY WINGS e-PRESS PAGE HERE.
Excerpt
Ambler was through the door, across the square and down a wooden, shrub-tangled stairway like a cat after a rat. Too much like a cat after a rat as it turned out because he fell down a number of the top steps, where he wasted a full ten minutes nursing a twisted ankle before venturing down the rest and onto the soft sand which was no medium for a wrenched joint. Progress was slow.
A full moon stared down on him between a thousand stars. The kind of sky he’d never seen through the street lights of Hackney. Total silence too, apart from the lapping of the water along the shoreline. Ambler didn’t know what seabirds did at night but assumed they slept like everybody else. Not that he could have cared less about birds or the beauty of the night. All Ambler cared about was finding Lisette and holding her close. Who else could have used that “so it’s you” line? Somehow she must have followed him across the sea to Loix. Not the chimera after all; a flesh and blood woman who’d had second thoughts.
When he found her, the night would indeed become beautiful--magicked into beauty by her presence in it. A stroll along the beach--well, more of a limp for Ambler. No sex. Just a moonlit limp-stroll holding hands like lovers, kicking at the waves and laughing, singing songs and talking, working the wonders. Planning another future, another life...a third way.
Ambler hugged himself as he gazed along the empty beach and stumbled towards the underside of the pier where he expected to find her waiting for him. Dressed in one of those A Man and a Woman white macks with the collar turned up while strains of La Mer played in the background. Ambler liked the old films.
“Lisette?” he called, wrapping an arm around the first of the pier’s stansions for balance. “It’s me.”
Silence. Some cawing from a disturbed gull, otherwise nothing except the occasional hiss of the chill breeze amongst the reeds. Creaks and groans from the effects of the water on the wooden pillars plus something that sounded like one of them being slapped. A kind of splat. Every few minutes when the breeze blew a little harder. Maybe she’d got tired of waiting and taken a walk along the sand. Ambler reckoned Lisette to be an impatient person and he had been delayed by the fall. It must now be at least half an hour since the phone call.
Please God, don’t let her walk off into the night. Please show me the way to her.
But no evidence of any God on duty. Possibly preoccupied with more pressing issues. Or, even more possibly...just not.
He kicked off his right trainer, eased off the left one, cursed the swelling, and gazed down along the shore. One way and then the other. Staring for any sign of movement, any human shape in the inhuman seascape.
“Lisette?” he called again, louder this time. “It’s me-eee.”
But his voice was carried away along the wind. A cloud skittered across the moon and for a moment it was full night. Ambler could track left or right along the sand that stretched for unknowable distances to unknowable destinations in both directions. The decision was beyond him. Either route could take him to her or away from her. He hopped up and down and scraped the fingers of his right hand across his stubbly head.
“Please.”
Back somewhere further down the jetty, closer to the water he thought, the splatting started up again. Every time the wind changed direction a little.
“For Christ’s sake,” he said but, for want of any better plan, went to check where the irritating noise was coming from. Just in case it was Lisette smacking her palm against the woodwork in her frustration at his taking so long. Probably hadn’t heard him coming because she was busy with her mobile calling the hotel again to check he had left. That would be it. That would very probably be it. That or her clapping her hands together to keep warm, a woollen cloche pulled down over her ears so she wouldn’t have heard him calling. Ambler waited for the next splat and then headed towards it, resting between stansions because of the damaged ankle. An unpleasant odour down here, but he braved it.
“Lisette? J’arrive.”
The odour turned into a stench as he approached; some nameless maritime putrefaction maybe. A lost catch of oysters or mussels--that’s what the Île de Ré was famous for, so the guidebook said. Must happen all the time. Some lazy harvester who’d had better things to do than lug his haul back home. Or maybe an oil tanker spill way out at sea which had murdered wildlife and left their corpses to rot on beaches all along the coast. Ambler had seen the TV pictures of ecological disasters often enough. Or possibly just the ordinary abnormal smells townies like him associated with nature; inured to petrol fumes and pollution, but gagging at the reek of the wild.
Once he finally made his way to the origin of the splatting and the cause of the stench became clear, however, Ambler fell to his knees and didn’t look up again until the bile in his stomach was voided.
And when he did, his watery eyes registered it had indeed been Lisette causing the splatting. Only not in the way he had hoped. It wasn’t an impatient hand slapping against a stansion. It wasn’t his cold lover clapping her hands together for warmth. It was her naked body dangling on a rope from the jetty’s wooden walkway and fish-filleted from sternum to vagina, its blue-green eyes staring at him through the matted veil of its blonde hair and its sliced and exuding entrails responsible for the soggy slaps. Blood, urine, and faeces dripping into a conch and echoing when they hit. That’s what was causing the noise--and the stench.
“Nooooo,” Ambler howled at the silent sky as the retching abated and a visceral anguish took its place. He crawled into the sea and buried his head beneath the water blatting his arms against the gentle waves butterfly-style.
“Nooooooo.”
Lifting his dripping head and shaking a fist at the moon. Screaming like an unappeasable child and beating his head repeatedly into the wet sand. So this was horror. The sane response to an insane world. What humans do when forced to accept the unspeakable. That first unrectifiable moment when the realisation hits that all desired avenues are irrevocably blocked, and life has changed for all time. The wailing, then the stunned silence.
The big moon continued to shine down over this minuscule part of the universe where Ambler’s agony was of no more significance than that of an ant crushed by an unseeing boot. He rolled onto his back and stared up at the silent blanket of the night sky.
“No-oooooooo,” he shrieked at it.
More splats from the dangling corpse. Lisette’s last contribution to this world.
But when his screams abated, they were replaced with flashes of crazed hope filtering through his ground-zero brain.
Maybe this wasn’t her body at all. It could be the remains of some other woman. Any woman with blonde hair and blue-green eyes. Okay, so sorry for her but Ambler could live with the guilt of unconcern if only Lisette had been spared. The woman at the end of the rope with her feet dangling inches from the sand was out of it, her pain all over. No necessity for Ambler’s pity. Looked just like Lisette...only not Lisette? Marie-Christine, perhaps, the hellcat twin.
Which one was Ambler in love with anyway? How could he know the difference?
He levered himself back upright, gagged again, and hobbled over to the body at the end of the rope. Never in his life had he seen such a thing, but there’s a first time for everything.
Maybe not Lisette. Maybe Marie-Christine. Lisette? Marie-Christine...
“Maybe some other woman altogether,” he mumbled, his eyes wide and his stomach knotted.
“Lisette?” he cooed at the corpse leaking all her bodily fluids into the conch. Looking like meat on a butcher’s hook.
“Is that you?”
Her mouth open as if in answer. Everything exposed, inside and out.
“LIS-E-E-ETTE?”
And it was. The hair and the eyes could have been any woman’s, but then there were the snakes tattooed across the breasts, which, as a result of the slicing, were hanging at obtuse angles like breasts in some Surrealist painting. Last night’s breasts. Lisette’s? Marie-Christine’s?
He fell backwards, then rolled over into a foetal ball and chewed sand.
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