Palmer-Jones 03 - Murder in Paradise (13 page)

“Are you sure,” George said, “that Mary’s death was an accident?”

“She would never have killed herself.” Sandy spoke quietly so that Agnes would not hear him, but he was quite firm.

“I’m not suggesting that she did.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I believe that there is a possibility that she was murdered.”

“No.” This time he could not control his voice, and he spoke so loudly that he shocked them. Agnes came in to see if he was ready for his food.

“Sandy,” she said, “are you ill?”

“No,” he said again, though not in response to her question. He looked at George again. “If you’re right,” he said, “it will be that Dance.”

“George,” Agnes said. “ What is this about?”

“I don’t think that Mary’s death was an accident,” he said.

“No,” she said. “ I’ve been thinking that too. I don’t see how it could have been.” It was the last response they could have expected. She seemed so unworldly, almost simple. “ But we will accuse nobody, Sandy, until we are certain.”

“What made you believe that Mary was pushed?” George asked Agnes.

“She had never fallen in her life. And then there was something else. She liked to eat. Especially cakes and biscuits. If she had meant to run away to make a fuss, she would have waited until after the interval.”

“You said nothing to me,” Sandy said.

“It meant nothing. What could I prove? You would have said I was foolish.”

“I was worried about the scarf,” George said. “ It should have been on her body. It was found in the old croft by Kell, on Monday morning. Someone was in there on Monday morning when I came down to see the boat off. Did you notice anything when you walked past, Sandy?”

Sandy shook his head.

“Did you tell the police about this?”

“I tried to, but they were convinced it was an accident. They had no reason to think otherwise.”

“What will you do now?”

“What would you like me to do?”

“Find out.”

“It won’t be easy,” George said. “There will be awkward questions. People won’t like it.”

“All the same,” Sandy said, “ we will find out.”

“I may be mistaken.”

“At least we will know.”

“Have you made a will?”

Sarah was as surprised by the last question as Sandy was. At first she thought he would refuse to answer. She expected him to tell George that it was none of his business.

“Yes,” Sandy said. “ I’ve made a will.”

“Could you tell me what provisions were contained in it?”

“I left Sandwick to Mary,” Sandy said slowly, “ the house and the croft would both belong to her. It seemed the best way to be sure that she was taken care of.”

“So that if either of your sons wished to farm Sandwick and live in this house, they would have to take responsibility for Mary.”

“Yes. Sandwick is her home. We didn’t want her moved out to an institution as soon as we died.”

“What was to happen if you were to retire?”

“The same thing. The boys knew that if they wanted to farm Sandwick they would have to take care of Mary.”

“Who will inherit Sandwick now?”

“Alec. He is the eldest son.” He was trying to answer the questions reasonably, but he was beginning to become angry. “ Mr. Palmer-Jones,” he said, “none of my family would murder a child for a house.”

George ignored the anger.

“I spoke to Mary at the harbour on Friday and she talked about a secret. Do you know what that secret might have been?”

“It will just have been child’s talk,” Sandy said impatiently.

“There’s nothing, no matter how trivial, which might have interested her, that I don’t want to know about. She seemed very excited when she spoke to me.”

He was appealing to Sandy and to Agnes. Sarah thought that Sandy was going to speak, but Agnes looked at her husband carefully, seemed to warn him.

“No,” he said. “ There’s nothing.”

They prepared to go.

“There’s just one thing,” George said. “Why do think it was Dance?”

Sandy said nothing, and it was Agnes who answered.

“Superstition,” she said, “ and a lack of Christian charity.”

When Sarah and George left Sandwick, they went to Tain, but the house was empty. George was surprised because Robert’s dog was tethered to a line outside and usually it went everywhere with the old man.

She planned a special meal for Jim that night. When he came in, he did not ask her why she was not home at lunchtime. He presumed that Agnes had asked her to stay at Sandwick. She was excited because of the conversation with Sandy and Agnes. It did not occur to her that he might be upset to hear that his sister had been murdered. She could not take it seriously. It was still a game to her.

“Agnes thinks that Mary was murdered,” she said.

“Poor mother,” Jim said, “I thought she was taking it very calmly. She must be hysterical.”

“No,” Sarah said. “ George thinks that she’s probably right. It’s something to do with the green scarf Mary was wearing not being found on the body.”

“He shouldn’t encourage Mother,” Jim said. “He’ll make her ill.”

He was not upset to think that Mary had been murdered. Quite simply he did not believe it. He began talking about the rabbits and the damage that they had done on the island. Mary was not mentioned again.

“Perhaps I’ll go out with a gun later,” he said.

“It’ll soon be dark,” she said. Then, because she wanted to finish the preparation for the meal and to get changed: “ Go now then, before it’s too late and I can finish the supper.”

When he came back it was nearly dark, but she had not switched on the electric light. She had put a tablecloth—a wedding present—on the kitchen table, and a candle in the middle of it. He stood just inside the door and she was afraid that he would laugh at the effort she had made. But he did not laugh. He went into the bedroom and fetched a bottle of wine, brought from the mainland. She lit the candle and he opened the wine.

“I met Robert today,” she said. “ He gave me tea. He’s very interesting.”

“He’s a simple-minded fool. What was he telling you?”

“He was talking about the big storm.”

“Was he?”

“Why hadn’t you told me about it?”

“It didn’t come up. Perhaps I thought that you wouldn’t understand.”

“I don’t think I would have done, away from Kinness. Did you know that Elspeth was named after Ellie, who went mad and drowned herself?”

“Of course. I was brought up with it.”

They were sitting at the table, drinking the wine. It seemed to Sarah that the conversation was important to Jim. When he came into the house after shooting the rabbits, he had seemed different, as if he had made up his mind about something. It was quite dark outside now. She stared out of the window. There were a couple of lights on the horizon—boats, she supposed—but otherwise there was a dense, deep darkness. It’s never this dark on the mainland, she thought. There’s always a light somewhere, even if it’s the reflected glow of a town miles away, or car headlights.

“I was brought up with it,” Jim repeated. “We all were. The story of Ellie. The fact that very few Dances survived. Perhaps that was what attracted me to Elspeth. I thought that we would get married and that the island would be brought together again.”

She waited for him to tell her more about Elspeth, but he said nothing.

“Robert thinks the feud has nothing to do with the storm now,” she said. “ He says it’s all about freight charges and shop prices.”

“Perhaps he’s not so simple-minded after all.”

There was another silence.

“I want to tell you about Elspeth.”

“Robert told me you were going to be married. Were you engaged?

“No. It was nothing like that. Nothing formal. We were both very young.”

He poured himself more wine.

“She’s a year older than me, so she went out to school in Baltasay before I did. I never got to know her at school. She was living in the hostel and by that time I had lodgings with one of Maggie’s aunts. It was one summer. I was the same age as Will is now and we were both here on Kinness. She was lively, fun, and I suddenly realized how pretty she was. She’d applied to go to drama school in Glasgow, though she hadn’t heard then whether or not she’d got in … It was a lovely summer. Hot for here. And in early summer it’s light nearly all night. I can’t remember helping much on the croft. Every day I was out with Elspeth. We swam and walked, and talked for hours and hours. She read me bits of plays. I didn’t understand them, but I loved to hear her do all the voices. She was older than me. She was an only child, and I suppose the Dances had more money to spend on her. She used to go and stay in Glasgow with friends Kenneth had made there, and once she spent a month in France learning the language. She seemed stylish and sophisticated.

“I started making plans for the future. I’d always wanted to go to agricultural college, but I thought that if I worked hard and got my exams I might get to university in Glasgow, too. I could study agriculture there. I imagined being sophisticated, too.

“Then, well before the end of the holiday, she went. She didn’t tell me that she was going. A plane came in very early and she went out with it. There was no letter, nothing.

“It turned out that there was a man in Glasgow, and that she was pregnant, though I didn’t know that then. The baby wasn’t mine. There was nothing between us but passionate kisses in the moonlight and the occasional grope in the barn. Later she got married. It was a quiet wedding and I wasn’t invited.

“After she left I went a bit wild. There didn’t seem any point in working for exams anymore. I was still staying with Maggie’s auntie on Baltasay for my last year of school, but I got in with a different crowd—lads who’d already left school. I went out drinking with them. Then I got thrown out of the lodging. There was some trouble with the police. I made a fool of myself.

“All the time I was writing to her, trying to find out what had happened. Kenneth and Annie wouldn’t say anything. I even went down to Glasgow once.

“Then she wrote to me and told me what had happened. I remember the letter coming. I was home for the Christmas holidays. She explained about the baby. It was a peculiar letter, but she said that she was happy. It was full of all the things she was doing at college—parties, rehearsals. She carried on there although she must have been quite pregnant by then. She didn’t tell me anything about the baby’s father.

“They let me stay on at school but I didn’t do very well in the exams.”

All the time he was talking he was staring out of the window. He turned to face his wife.

“I was obsessed by the fact that she must have been pretending for the whole of that summer.”

She stretched out and took his hand.

“I’m glad you told me about her.”

“I should have told you before. I didn’t know that she’d be here.”

“I realized that. What happened to her husband?”

“They’re divorced. There’s just her and the child.”

He had never talked to her so intimately before. She felt very close to him. With the same ridiculous, romantic impulse which had made her dream of Kinness as paradise, she was certain that now everything would be happy between them.

George waited in the school house until Jonathan had finished teaching. That day the island had seemed full of frenzied activity, as the men chased the geese in Alec’s battered car. He supposed that Robert must be with them. He did not want to approach them to find out, so he decided that he would talk to Jonathan. If Sylvia was hiding something, her husband must suspect it. When the school bell rang to send the children home, he made a pot of tea, and waited in the kitchen for the teacher to come in.

Jonathan looked tired.

“Maggie Stennet was waiting for me again,” he said. “She’s been trying to find out how long Sylvia will be away.”

“How long
will
Sylvia be on Baltasay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has she phoned?”

“Yes.”

“Why did she leave the island so suddenly?”

“I don’t know.”

“You must have some idea.”

Drysdale remained silent.

“Was it my talk of secrets?”

“It’s none of your business!” For a moment he lost control.

George spoke quietly and calmly. “ I explained my concern about the disappearance of Mary’s scarf. It was found on Monday. I think Sylvia was talking to the person who dropped it before she got on to the boat. If you know anything you must tell me.”

“Really. I don’t know anything.”

“Did you walk some of the way with Sylvia on Monday morning?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She said not to bother. We’d arranged for Alec to pick up her luggage.”

“What happened to make you both so unhappy?”

“I told you. She’s bored here.”

“Why does Maggie Stennet dislike Sylvia so much?”

It was a stab in the dark, a wild guess, but at last he provoked a reaction.

“Because Maggie’s a venomous bitch. It’s not Sylvia’s fault that Alec Stennet chases every woman under forty on the island.”

“Was Sylvia having an affair with. Alec?”

“No!” He was shouting. “She flirted with him. I’ve told you. She was bored. She flirted with every man on Kinness.”

He stood up, said that he was going for a walk, and went out.

In Kell, Melissa waited for James. She did not mind that he had been out all day. She knew that he enjoyed the companionship of the other men. She was not much company now. He was a good shot, too, and always came back with more birds than the others. But she knew that she was spending more and more time alone, and knew that it did her no good. I must make the effort, she thought, or I’ll go mad like poor Ellie Dance, and start howling at the moon like a dog.

Ben had been late home from school again, very late, and Elspeth had begun to panic.

“He shouldn’t go running about the island by himself. Look what happened to Mary Stennet. It’s dangerous, especially with the men firing like wild things at anything that moves.”

“You should have gone to collect him,” Annie said.

“I know, but he does hate it. He says that only the babies are collected by their mothers. And it’s only up the road.”