Kiss Heaven Goodbye (10 page)

Miles strode after him and grabbed his arm. ‘Stop.’

Alex whirled around, challenging him. ‘Why?’

‘I can’t afford to get mixed up in something I had nothing to do with. Can you?’

‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ said Alex with more bluster than he felt.

‘And you want to take a chance on the police believing that?’ Miles didn’t flinch, holding Alex’s gaze, his eyes boring into him.

He turned to Grace. ‘You know Father has important clients coming to Angel tomorrow. How is it going to look if there’s a police investigation going on? Especially when his son and daughter are right in the middle of it.’

For a few moments no one spoke as the cold chill of Miles’ words sank in.

When he spoke again, his voice had an eerie calmness. ‘OK, it’s five fifteen. Let’s get back to the house as quietly as possible. Some of the staff should be getting up any time. Let one of them find the body. They can tell my father and he can sort this out. Agreed?’

He looked at them one by one and slowly, reluctantly, one by one they all nodded.

‘Bradley’s dead,’ said Miles as they began to walk away from the body. ‘We can’t help him. But we can help ourselves.’

10

It had started to rain as soon as she had got back to her bedroom. Fat, sweet-smelling, tropical rain that lashed against the window and seemed to make the whole house shake. Grace glanced at her watch again; it had been barely an hour since they had been at the beach, but time seemed to be passing horribly slowly.

Down at the beach, Miles’ selfish ‘let’s help ourselves’ speech had had a certain perverse logic, but now she’d had time to think, letting someone else find the body seemed wrong on every level. Not that any of them had anything to do with that poor man’s death, of course, but to just leave him there ... It was immoral, heartless, corrupt.

Should I go to see Alex?
she wondered. He had been the only one who seemed to have a problem with leaving the body. But his room was next to Miles’ and the last thing she wanted to do was alert her brother to what she was thinking of doing. No, Grace knew she had to do this alone. The downpour started to ease. Steeling herself, she slipped on her flip-flops and was just heading for the door when she heard a gentle, almost inaudible knock.

It was Alex, his face grim. ‘Can I come in?’

She nodded, glancing up and down the corridor before she closed the door gently behind him.

‘We can’t just leave that guy on the beach,’ he said with quiet urgency. ‘I think we should tell your father.’

Grace shook her head. ‘I have another idea. Nelson.’

Alex immediately grasped Grace’s scheme. Nelson was known as a loyal, efficient man who, while he worked for Robert Ashford, was not afraid to voice an opinion. ‘I’ll come.’

Outside, the air smelt damp and floral, as if it had been freshly laundered. They walked quickly down the stairs and outside, following the path around the house and past the tennis court, beyond which they could see a weathered but well-kept clapboard house.

‘Nelson lived here as caretaker before my father bought the island,’ said Grace. ‘I’ve actually always felt it was more his island than ours.’

There was a light on in the top left window, so Grace tapped on the door while Alex hovered nervously behind her. Nelson Ford looked surprised when he answered the door; no wonder, it was just after six. He rubbed his dark, lined forehead as if he were still tired.

‘Grace. What can I do for you?’

Grace glanced at Alex, then took a deep breath. ‘We thought we saw something down at the beach. I wanted you to come and take a look.’

‘What is it?’

Alex hesitated before speaking. ‘A body maybe.’

‘A body
maybe
?’ asked Nelson cautiously.

‘We didn’t want to get too close,’ offered Alex, not meeting Nelson’s gaze.

The older man looked at them for a long moment, then turned around and glanced back into the darkness of the house. ‘Come on then. Let’s go take a look.’

They walked down to the beach in silence, Alex and Grace going at such a brisk pace that even Nelson’s long legs struggled to keep up with them.

Getting closer to the beach, Grace felt another stab of uncertainty.
Maybe Miles was right: why should we get mixed up in this when it’s nothing to do with us?
The police would be only too happy to pin this on the rich Europeans; there was little love for the flash incomers buying up their own corner of paradise from the native islanders.

At least Nelson was on their side. Or was he? It was hard to get anything straight in her head. Already they had begun lying:
maybe we saw a body.
There was nothing maybe about it.

She stepped on to West Point Beach and immediately sensed something was wrong. In the time between leaving with Miles and Sasha and getting back here with Nelson, the tide had come in, but there was still ten yards of exposed white sand between them and the water’s edge. Her eyes scanned up and down the beach and her heart started pounding.

‘What are we looking for again, kids?’ asked Nelson, slowing his pace to a stop.

The body had gone.

‘It was here,’ she said, looking around wildly. ‘It was.’

Alex had already run further up the shore, looking to see if they had picked the right spot, but Grace was sure of it: this had been the place. She wouldn’t forget it in a hurry.

Nelson looked at her cynically. ‘Well, there’s nothing here now.’

‘Tell him, Alex,’ said Grace desperately, pointing to the spot on the path. ‘There was a dead body right here.’

‘It’s true, sir,’ said Alex, running his hand through his hair. ‘We saw him.’

‘Him?’ asked Nelson. ‘Did you see who it was?’

‘It was that boy Bradley,’ said Alex. ‘I think he’d just started as a deckhand or something.’

‘Him,’ Nelson said disapprovingly. ‘I nearly fired him last night. Someone saw him drinking.’ His brows knitted. ‘Are you sure he wasn’t just asleep or passed out? If he was drinking, that seems the most likely thing to have happened here. He woke up and walked off. You did say you didn’t get that close?’

Grace shook her head vehemently. ‘He wasn’t moving. Or breathing, I’m sure of it,’ she said, feeling tears well behind her eyes.

Alex examined the shoreline, looking for footsteps, but the rain had smoothed the sand. ‘Do you think the tide could have taken the body out?’

Nelson shrugged. ‘The sea can be unpredictable, so I guess it’s possible,’ he said in his thick Bahamian accent. ‘But it’s not quite high tide. It would have had to be one hell of a freak wave to sweep up and snatch a body.’

He looked at Alex through narrowed eyes. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t you doing the drinking?’

Alex looked pale in the thin morning light. ‘No . . . well, yes, but I know what I saw. He was here!’ he said, gesturing at the path. ‘We all saw him, didn’t we, Grace?’

‘You
all
saw him?’ said Nelson.

‘No, no, I mean, we saw him, me and Grace,’ stammered Alex.

‘Just you two?’ said Nelson.

No more lies,
Grace told herself. ‘Miles and Sasha too,’ she said reluctantly.

‘Let’s try Bradley’s room,’ said Nelson finally.

They took the ten-minute walk to the staff cabins and Nelson knocked on the door of the last room. Hearing no movement inside, he pulled a large bunch of keys from his shorts pocket and opened the lock. The cabin was empty, but the bed looked rumpled as if it had been slept in.

‘Well, it looks like someone was in here last night,’ said Nelson. ‘What time did you think you saw him?’

‘Around five,’ said Grace. ‘And we
did
see him.’

‘OK,’ said Nelson sceptically, locking the door and leading Grace down to the staff mess at the end of the block where they were met by the smell of frying bacon. It made Grace feel sick. Inside, a chef and two maids were having breakfast at a long table.

‘Anyone seen Bradley the boat boy this morning?’ Nelson asked them.

One of the maids looked from Nelson to Grace and shook her head.

‘Maybe he’s sleeping in,’ said the chef. ‘Independence Day yesterday an’ all.’

Nelson pulled a face and walked out. ‘Well, wherever he’s got to, we should tell your dad. Whether he’s injured or not, we can’t have a missing boat boy on the island when he’s bringing over those important clients.’

Grace looked over to the house, feeling as if she wanted to be sick.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Nelson with a sympathetic expression. ‘He’ll be understanding.’

Grace snorted.
You don’t know my father very well
, she thought as they walked back along the path.
No, you don’t know him at all
.

11

Alex had run all the way back to the house, ahead of Nelson and Grace, carried by a wave of hope and relief.
Maybe Bradley wasn’t dead after all
, he thought as he sprinted up the path.
Maybe we didn’t leave a dying man out there.
Back on the beach, when he’d bent over the deckhand, he thought he had seen movement in the boy’s face. He wasn’t certain, just a flicker at most, but a possible sign of life, certainly. And now the boy was gone – he
must
have been OK.

But you still left him, didn’t you?
mocked an inner voice.
You still abandoned someone who needed your help.

It was true. What Miles had said out there had frightened him. He had come so far from a mill town terraced house, living a life of luxury on a private island beyond his wildest dreams, and – he was ashamed to admit it – his first thought when he’d seen the body was that it was all going to be taken away.

Alex stopped by the pool and bent over to catch his breath, then powered on to the house, eager to break the news to Miles. Down on the beach he’d hated Miles for somehow trying to implicate him in that stupid fight he’d had with Bradley. But there was no body. And if Bradley was OK, what was the problem?

He was just feet from his bedroom when the door to the room next door creaked open. Miles was standing there in a navy dressing gown, his expression flinty.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he spat, looking up and down the corridor warily.

Alex searched for words but could find none.

‘I
said
where have you been?’ snapped Miles.

He stepped back into his room and Alex followed. Miles closed the door.

‘I went to see Nelson,’ said Alex finally.

Miles turned around and swept an armful of toiletries off the top of a chest of drawers. ‘Fuck,’ he growled. He looked away, his top row of teeth biting into his bottom lip.

‘Miles, someone needed to know,’ said Alex angrily.

‘You cretin,’ he snapped. ‘I thought we had a pact! Let someone else find the body.’

‘The more we lie, the more trouble we might get in to.’

‘What the fuck do you know about troubleshooting?’ replied Miles, his eyes dark in the low light. ‘Did you say we all saw the body?’

‘We didn’t mean to.’

‘We? You and Grace, I assume. Thanks for fucking nothing,’ he sneered.

Alex had seen Miles in this mood before and it frightened him. He held up his hands, trying to calm the situation.

‘Look. Just hold on. When we went down to the beach with Nelson, there was no sign of him.’

‘No sign of the boat boy?’ asked Miles, narrowing his eyes.

‘The beach was empty. Bradley was gone. He must have been all right; fallen down and knocked himself out or passed out pissed, but he’d got up and left by the time we got back there.’

Alex saw a look cross Miles’ face: confusion? Disbelief perhaps? Or was it guilt? Was Miles feeling the same sense of self-loathing he was?

‘He’s all right?’ said Miles, almost to himself. ‘But he was dead, I was sure I ...’

‘We still shouldn’t have left him there, mate,’ said Alex. ‘He’s still probably badly hurt.’

‘Don’t go getting all pious on me now,’ sneered Miles. ‘You were just as happy as the rest of us to leave him for dead, Alex. You wanted to save your own skin.’

‘What? No!’ protested Alex.

Miles shook his head with disgust and turned towards the door. ‘Well, don’t start celebrating just yet,’ he said over his shoulder.

There was a soft knock at the door. Alex opened it and saw Nelson standing there, his face expressionless.

‘Mr Ashford wants to see you in his study. Have you seen Miss Sasha?’

‘We’ll be there in a minute.’

They found Sasha sitting on a sunlounger by the pool. Her hair was wet and she was wrapped in a bathrobe, her arms clasped protectively around her knees. She had sunglasses on and seemed to be staring blankly across the water.

Alex hung back and watched the interchange between his friend and his lover.

‘My father wants to see us,’ said Miles flatly.

‘Let me change.’ Sasha’s voice was vague, despondent.

‘Just come.’

She pulled off her shades and looked at them both. A trail of black eye make-up was smeared down her cheek. In the two years he had known her, Alex had never seen Sasha look anything but supremely self-confident and in control. But her open anguish spoke for all of them.

‘How does he know about it?’ she asked.

‘Thank Alex.’

‘What are we going to say to him?’ she whispered urgently.

‘The truth,’ replied Alex.

Robert Ashford’s study was in a far wing of the house overlooking a sweep of ocean. Daylight had come quickly. Robert was already dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark blue tie when Alex, Miles and Sasha walked in. Grace was sitting sombre-faced in a leather chair facing his desk and Robert motioned to the seats beside her.

‘I prefer to stand,’ said Miles.

His father shook his head slightly and pulled a sour face. ‘As you wish.’

He folded his hands in front of him as if he were about to chair a board meeting.

‘Let’s get right to it, shall we? Would someone like to explain why Alex and Grace told Nelson there was a body on West Point Beach this morning?’

There was a moment’s silence and then they all started speaking at once.