Palmer-Jones 03 - Murder in Paradise (6 page)

Sandy and Agnes had been married just a few years before and were very happy and lighthearted. They had made her feel welcome and wanted. They had been great friends, the four of them. Later she and Agnes had become pregnant at the same time, and when she lost the baby Agnes had been the person who had given the most comfort. It pleased her to know that life continued, and her sister-in-law’s swelling belly was a sign of hope that she, too, could carry a baby again. But although there were other pregnancies none of the babies survived and as Agnes’ family grew, Melissa became bitter and distant.

She knew that she needed help. But who on Kinness could give it? There was an elderly nurse, a spinster, who played the organ in the church and taught the children in Sunday school. Could she go to her and say:

“Help me. I can’t bear my husband to touch me”?

The nurse had never been touched, seemed to know nothing of frustration or desire.

In England there would be places to go, people to see—sympathetic doctors, marriage guidance counsellors. Once, a long time ago, she had suggested to James that she should go south to seek advice, but he had been hurt.

“I can look after you,” he had said. “I can care for you. You don’t need other people.”

Now he would be glad for her to go, but it was too late. She was frightened to go to the south of the island where most of the houses were gathered. How could she get on an aeroplane and go to England?

I’m ill, she thought. I live too much in the past.

She heard the door of the storm porch banging. She hoped that it was the wind but she knew it was James.

He was still holding the powerful torch he had been using to search for Mary. She blinked and covered her eyes with her hands.

“What are you doing, sitting here in the dark?” he said. As usual irritation and concern were mixed. “The engine’s still on, you could have put the light on. Besides, it’s very late. You should be in bed.”

“Yes. I didn’t notice the time.”

She’s getting worse, he thought, I must do something, get a specialist from the mainland maybe. But the last doctor from the mainland had given her tranquillizers and she had not taken them.

She stood up. She was wearing a dressing gown and as she stood up it fell open, so that he could see her neck and the top of her breast. Her skin looked very white in the light of the torch.

She saw him looking at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’m off out again,” he said. “ I’ve just come in to get changed into warmer clothes. Mary is missing. I doubt if she’s strayed this far up the island, but I said I’d look on the mountain. Don’t wait up or me. It’ll take a while.”

But he was still looking at her.

“I love you,” he said.

As he walked out of the door, and the chill air hit him, he thought: it’s not love I feel for her. It’s lust. Then he thought: there are worse sins than lust, and he went out onto the island.

When Sarah woke the bedroom was bright with sunshine. She had a hangover. At the instant of waking she thought that she was still in Cornwall. The clarity of the light was the same. Then she felt the headache and remembered where she was. She stretched. She supposed that there was no hurry to get up but she wanted to explore the island. She wondered if Jim had made any tea. There was no noise in the kitchen. She got out of bed and put on a thick jersey on top of her nightdress. The lino felt cold on her feet. There was no one in the kitchen. She plugged in the electric kettle to make tea but there was no electricity. The fire in the range was out and the grate had not been cleaned. How thoughtless of Jim to go out so early without showing her how to light the fire. She tried to remember if he had said anything, the night before, about intending to go out, but at first she could only recall the images of the party. She remembered Agnes sobbing, and the men deciding to search the island. Then it all came back to her. She had walked back with Maggie and the boys, and she had gone to bed alone. She went into the bedroom. There was no sign of Jim’s suit or his smart shoes. He had not been home. For a moment the image of Jim taking Elspeth in his arms to dance returned, and there was a sickening moment of suspicion. Then she told herself that she was being foolish and that there must be some other explanation for his absence.

She heard the noise of the generator. It must be ten o’clock. Maggie had told her that they had the generator on for two hours every morning for the freezers and so that the women could use vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Sarah boiled a kettle to make a cup of instant coffee. She used the rest of the hot water for washing, then dressed.

She went outside. There was a cold wind from the north. She walked across the patched tarmac lane to Buness where Alec and Maggie lived. The boys were playing outside with a go-cart. It was Saturday. Parties on Kinness were always held on Friday nights. If they were held on Saturdays, they would have to stop at midnight. Dancing wasn’t allowed on a Sunday. She knocked on the front door of the white house. No one answered and she went round to the back. The back door was open and Maggie was in the kitchen pushing children’s clothes into a spin dryer.

“Hello,” Sarah said. “I was wondering if you knew where Jim was. Did they find Mary?”

She felt young and shy in front of this competent woman engrossed with her domesticity.

Maggie looked up.

“They hadn’t done last night, when I went to bed. Alec and Jim came here later, not long after we came back. They came to get some warmer clothes. Jim said that he hadn’t unpacked, and borrowed Alec’s. They’d looked in all the obvious places then, but she hadn’t been found.”

“You haven’t heard anything this morning?”

Maggie shook her head. “But then I’d be the last person to hear. You’ll get used to that.”

She straightened her back and switched off the machine.

“I’m going to make a cup of tea,” she said. “ Come on in and have one.”

Sarah hesitated.

“I was going to find Jim. I thought I might be able to help.”

“They’ll let you know if you can be any use. Come on in.”

Awkwardly Sarah went.

Robert found Mary and he wasn’t really looking for her. After looking in the empty buildings and Mary’s usual hiding places, the men had stopped at Sandwick. Robert had followed them at first, after the dancing had finished, limping after them, afraid of missing anything. But he wasn’t invited back to Sandwick and he went home and slept.

He woke early and went looking for wood. Wood was precious on Kinness, and had been more so when he was a boy and imports were unheard of. All the furniture on the island had been made of driftwood. Robert still hoarded driftwood. He did not use it so much himself now, but it pleased him when one of the younger men came begging for a plank to mend a fence or build a new gate.

He scrambled down a rabbit track, sliding on his bottom with his stiff leg out before him, to the rock and shingle at the base of the cliffs, and began to walk along the tide line. His dog was with him as it always was. The fresh wind of the day before promised well. He found some small pieces of wood and began to make a pile above the tide line. He would mark the pile with his own sign—a circle of pebbles—so that anyone else scavenging would know that it was his. He would take it home later, a little at a time.

He found the girl below Ellie’s Head, crushed like a doll on the rocks. She had landed above the line of the tide, and her clothes were hardly wet. He felt a moment of pity, but accidental death was not so unusual there. He went back to Sandwick to tell Agnes and Sandy, but before he did so he marked his pile of driftwood with a circle of pebbles.

They asked George to go with them when they went to fetch the body. There had been other accidents around the island—a climber had fallen once from the cliff and someone had drowned after falling from a fishing yawl—and they knew that it meant official questions. If George went with them, he could answer the questions. He was an Englishman and had been a civil servant. He would know how to handle them. George took his camera and insisted on photographing the body before they moved it. They stood awkwardly while he did that, as if embarrassed by his lack of propriety, then lifted her on to a makeshift wooden sledge and pulled her along the shingle and up the rabbit track. He made a note in a small book of the clothes she was wearing. She was wearing the party dress of the night before, and a warm jacket, but not the silk scarf.

He was surprised at how calmly they took the news of her death. Perhaps they had been preparing themselves for it when they had not found her the night before.

“She must have fallen from Ellie’s Head,” Sandy said.

“She must have run up there for some game. She probably thought that we’d notice sooner that she was gone and chase after her. Then she must have lost her footing and fallen. I should have noticed that she wasn’t there.”

He turned to George:

“Do you think that’s how it was?”

But George did not answer him directly.

“You mustn’t blame yourself,” George said. “I actually noticed that she wasn’t there. I’d promised to dance with her and I went to find her. I thought that she was hiding somewhere. When did you last see her?”

He spoke to all the men who were struggling to pull the sledge over the sharp rocks: Mary’s brothers Alec, Jim, and Will, her uncle James, and her father. They stopped to catch their breath, but they could give him no satisfactory answer. They wanted to get it sorted out with him so that he could act as their intermediary with the officials from Baltasay, but they could not remember.

“I saw her dancing with Robert,” James said. “But that was a while before the interval. I don’t remember seeing her after that.”

The others shook their heads. There had been too many drams, they said. It had all been a terrible muddle. They could not remember. They lifted the wooden stretcher again and began the climb up the steep grassy slope. George saw that Will was crying.

They took Mary home to Sandwick, and at Agnes’ insistence they took her into her small bedroom and laid her on the bed.

They sat around the big table in the kitchen and Agnes made them breakfast. It was as if she had wasted all her grief in her hysterics of the night before. Now she was calm, numb, and made breakfast as she always did at this time when the men came in from the croft or from fishing.

“Someone should phone to Baltasay,” George said tentatively. “Do you want me …?”

“No,” Jim said. “It should be one of us. I’ll go.”

He went into the living room to the telephone. Agnes laid the table, put plates of food in front of them, and the men began to eat. She sat in the straight-backed driftwood chair by the range. Absentmindedly she took up her knitting and strapped the horsehair belt around her waist. Island women always used the belt for knitting. It held one of the needles firm. The other began to move quickly as mindlessly she counted stitches and changed coloured wools.

Jim came back into the kitchen.

“It’s all sorted,” he said. “ Because of the way she died there’ll have to be formalities. They’ll be coming in on the plane, this afternoon.”

“Who will?” Alec asked.

“The police. It’s routine, they said. They’ll be taking the body away with them.”

Agnes looked up sharply.

“No,” she said. “She’s to stay here. She’s to be buried here.”

“She can be. They said that we could make our own arrangements for the funeral, once the … formalities are over.”

They were still sitting around the breakfast table when Sarah knocked at the door. Maggie had been friendly. They had drunk tea and talked about the children, Sarah’s honeymoon, general plans for the future.

“Do you think that you’ll like it here?” Maggie asked at the end, just as Sarah was preparing to go.

“Of course I will. It’s Jim’s home.”

“But you. Will you like it?”

Sarah hesitated. Yesterday she would have been certain, she would have answered immediately: “ Of course. Of course I’ll like it.”

But today she hesitated.

“It’ll take some getting used to,” she said. “But I want to make a go of it. I’m quite determined.”

As she walked up the road to Sandwick the wind blew against her, and she was hot and breathless when she reached the gate. It was an ugly house, big by Kinness standards, square and functional. The yard was ankle deep in mud and two mongrels barked at her as she approached the door. The effort of the walk, the remnant of the hangover and the dogs’ muddy footprints on her coat made her angry. It seemed inexcusable to her that Jim had left her alone on her first morning on the island.

The men sitting at the dining table heard the knock on the door but they continued drinking tea and it was Agnes who opened it. Sarah saw that she had been crying, and the anger disappeared. She did not know what to say.

“Come in,” Agnes said. “You’ll be wondering what happened to Jim. I’m so sorry.”

She led Sarah into the room, where the men were still sitting.

“I didn’t want to intrude,” Sarah said. “Is there any news?”

When she had first seen Agnes, she thought that there must have been a terrible accident, but now, seeing the men carmly at the table, the debris of the breakfast, she thought that she must have been mistaken.

“She’s dead,” Jim said. “She fell from Ellie’s Head. She must have slipped.”

Sarah began to cry. She wished that she was alone in the room, and they would all stop staring at her. Agnes took her into her arms as if she were the child.

“That’s right,” she said. “ You cry. It’s good to have someone shed some tears for her.”

Robert went straight from Sandwick to the post office, the untidy brown dog still at his heels. In the post office Kenneth Dance was serving an old woman. Robert was glad that there were enough people there to give him an audience.

“Mary Stennet’s dead,” he announced as soon as he got in through the door. There was a satisfying response from the old woman, but Kenneth Dance was harder to rouse to interest. He had left the island when he was a teenager, after telling everyone that he was off south to make his fortune. He had been a postman in Glasgow. Occasionally a touch of Glaswegian still appeared in his speech. He had returned to Kinness when Annie, a distant cousin, had inherited the post office. They had married soon after. He still liked to pretend that he was sophisticated, worldly, wise. He looked up from the postal order he was stamping, but he said nothing.