Cover

ALSO BY KYRIL BONFIGLIOLI

Don’t Point That Thing at Me
After You With the Pistol

Et Amicorum

Because I do not expect to survive to write another novel about Jersey, I must ask, in alphabetical order, Alan, Angela, Barry, Betty, Bobbie, Dick, Gordon, Heather, Hugh, Jean, Joan, John, Mary, Nick, Olive, Paul, Peter, Rosemary, Stanley, Terry, Topper, Vera – and a hundred other kindly Jersey folk to accept this as a trifling repayment for all their kindness and tolerance. I hope, too, that they will not mind if I add the names of a black Labrador named Pompey and a canary called Bert.

The epigraphs are all by Swinburne, except one which is a palpable forgery.

None of the people in this novel bears any intentional resemblance to any real person: real people are far too improbable for use in fiction.

The Honorary Police of Jersey are used to being teased: all those whom I have had the pleasure of meeting are just, honourable, intelligent and can take a joke.

I must not thank by name all the kindly Jersey folk who have answered my countless questions – that would be a poor recompense for their patience.

The fictional narrator is a nasty, waspish man: pray do not confuse him with the author, who is gentle and kind.

The Swinburne forgery is, in a way, signed.

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Till the slow sea rise and the sheer cliff crumble,

Till terrace and meadow the deep gulfs drink,

Till the strength of the waves of the high tides humble

The fields that lessen, the rocks that shrink,

Here now in his triumph where all things falter,

Stretched out on the spoils that his own hand spread,

As a god self-slain on his own strange altar,

Death lies dead.

A Forsaken Garden

The Islands

Seven thousand years ago – give or take a few months – a great deal of water left the North Sea for good reasons of its own, which I cannot recall off-hand, and poured over the lower parts of North-West Europe, forming the English Channel and effectively separating England from France, to the mutual gratification of both parties (for if it had not happened, you see, we English would have been foreigners and the French would have had to eat bread sauce).