Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave (6 page)

And yet … Joseph Archer to kill the kind old lady who had befriended him as a boy? Batter her to death? That was what the murderer had done … As he strode along, so tall in the moonlight, Joseph was suddenly a complete and thus menacing enigma to Jemima.

They had reached the promontory, had scrambled up the rocks and had got as far as the first terrace when all the lights in the house went out. It was as though a switch had been thrown. Only the cold eerie glow of the moon over the sea behind them remained to illuminate the bushes, once trimmed, now wildly overgrown, and the sagging balustrades.

But Joseph did not check. He strode on, tugging at
Jemima where necessary, helping her up the flights of stone steps, some of them deeply cracked and uneven. In the darkness, Jemima could just discern that the windows of the drawing-room were still open. There had to be someone in there, someone lurking perhaps behind the ragged red brocade curtains which had once been stained by Miss Izzy’s blood.

Joseph, still holding Jemima’s hand, pulled her through the centre window.

There was a short cry like a suppressed scream and then a low sound as if someone was laughing at them there in the dark. An instant later, all the lights were snapped on at once.

It was Tina Archer standing before them at the door, her hand on the switch. She wore a white bandage which covered the back of her head like a turban. And she was not laughing, she was sobbing.

“Oh, it’s you, Jo-seph and Miss Je-mi-ma Shore.” For the first time Jemima was aware of the sing-song Bo’lander note in Tina’s voice. “I was so fright-ened.”

“Are you all right, Tina?” asked Jemima hastily, to cover the fact that she had been quite severely frightened herself. The atmosphere of angry tension between the two people in the room, so different in looks, yet both of them, as it happened, called Archer, was almost palpable. She felt she was in honour bound to try and relieve it. “Are you all alone?” she asked.

“The police said I could come.” Tina ignored the question. “They have finished with everything here. And besides—” Her terrified sobs had vanished. There was something deliberately provocative about Tina as she moved towards them. “Why ever not?” To neither of them did she need to elaborate: the words “since it’s all mine” hung in the air.

Joseph spoke for the first time since they had entered the room. “I want to look at the house,” he said harshly.

“Jo-seph Archer, you get out of here. Back where you came from, back to your off-ice and that’s not a great fine house.” There was something almost viperish about Tina as she flung the words at him. Then she addressed Jemima placatingly, in something more like her usual sweet manner. “I’m sorry, but you see, we’ve not been friends since way back. And besides you gave me such a shock.”

“We were once: friends.” Joseph swung on his heel. “I’ll see you at the funeral, Miss Tina Archer.” He managed to make the words sound extraordinarily threatening. For a moment Jemima wondered: whose funeral?

That night it seemed to Jemima Shore that she hardly slept, although the fact that the threads of broken, half-remembered dreams disturbed her and made her yet more restless indicated that she must actually have fallen into some kind of doze in the hour before dawn. The light was still grey when she looked out of her shutters. The tops of the tall palms were bending: there was quite a wind.

Back on her bed, Jemima tried to recall just what she had been dreaming. There had been some pattern to it all: she knew there had. She wished rather angrily that light would suddenly break through into her sleepy mind as the sun was shortly due to break through the eastern fringe of palms on the hotel estate. No gentle, slow-developing, rosy-fingered dawn for the Caribbean: one brilliant low ray was a herald of what was to come, and then almost immediately hot relentless sunshine for the rest of the day. She needed that kind of instant clarity herself.

Hostility: that was part of it all, the nature of hostility. The hostility for example between Joseph and Tina Archer
the night before, so virulent and public—with herself as the public—that it might almost have been managed for effect.

Then the management of things: Tina Archer, always managing, always a schemer as Coralie Harrison had said (and Joseph Archer too). That brought her to the other couple in this odd four-pointed drama: the Harrisons, brother and sister, or rather
half
-brother and sister: a point made by Tina to correct Miss Izzy.

More hostility: Greg who had once loved Tina and now loathed her. Joseph who had once also (perhaps) loved Tina. Coralie who had once perhaps (very much perhaps, this one) loved Joseph and certainly loathed Tina. Cute and clever little Tina Archer, the Archer Tomb, the carved figures of Sir Valentine and his wife, the inscription, “his only wife Isabella, daughter of …” She was beginning to float back again into sleep, as the four figures, all Bo’landers, all sharing some kind of common past, began to dance in her imagination to a calypso whose wording too was confused:

An extraordinarily loud noise on the corrugated metal roof above her head recalled her, trembling, to her senses. The racket had been quite immense: almost as if there had been an explosion or at least a missile fired at the chalet. The thought of a missile made her realize that it had in fact been a missile: it must have been a coconut which had fallen in such a startling fashion on the corrugated roof. Guests were officially warned by the hotel against sitting too close under the palm trees, whose innocuous-looking
fronds could suddenly dispense their heavily lethal nuts. “
COCONUTS CAN CAUSE INJURY
” ran the printed notice.

“That kind of blow on my head would certainly have caused injury,” thought Jemima, “if not death.”

Injury, if not death. And the Archer Tomb: my only wife.

At that moment, straight on cue, the sun struck low through the bending fronds to the east and on to her shutters. And Jemima Shore realized not only why it had been done but how it had been done. Who of them all had been responsible for consigning Miss Izzy Archer to the graveyard in the sun.

The scene by the Archer Tomb a few hours later had that same strange mixture of English tradition and Bo’lander exoticism which had intrigued Jemima on her first visit to it. Only this time she had another deeper, sadder purpose than sheer tourism. Traditional English hymns were sung at the service but outside a steel band was playing: at Miss Izzy’s request. She had asked for a proper Bo’lander funeral as one who had been born—and now died—on the island.

As for clothes, the Bo’landers, attending in large numbers, were by and large dressed with that extreme formality, dark suits, white shirts, ties, dark dresses, dark straw hats, even white gloves, which Jemima had observed in churchgoers of a Sunday and in the Bo’lander children, all of them neatly uniformed, on their way to school. No Bow Island T-shirts were to be seen, although many of the highly coloured intricate and lavish wreaths used the familiar shape of the island’s logo. The size of the crowd was undoubtedly a genuine mark of respect: whatever the disappointments of the will to their government, to the Bo’landers generally Miss Izzy Archer had been part of their
heritage: the great, great, great … granddaughter of old Sir Valentine (“he be your Daddy and he be mine”).

Tina Archer wore a black scarf wound round her head which almost totally concealed her bandage. Joseph Archer, standing far apart from her and not looking in her direction, looked both elegant and formal in his office clothes, a respectable member of the government. The Harrisons stood together, Coralie with her head mainly bowed; Greg’s defiant aspect, head lifted proudly in the air, was clearly intended to give the lie to any suggestions that he had not been on the best of terms with the dead woman, whose body was even now being lowered into the family tomb.

As the coffin—so small and thus so touching in its reminder of Miss Izzy’s tiny size—finally vanished from view, there was a sigh from the mourners. Miss Izzy Archer was gone. They began to sing again: a hymn, but with the steel band gently, rhythmically echoing the tune in the background.

Jemima Shore moved discreetly in the crowd and stood by the side of the tall man.

“You’ll never be able to trust her,” she said in a low deliberate voice. “She’s managed you before, she’ll manage you again. It’ll be someone else who will be doing the dirty work next time. On you. You’ll never be able to trust her, will you? Once a murderess, always a murderess. You may wish one day you’d finished her off.”

The tall man looked down at her. Then he looked across at Tina Archer with one quick, savagely doubting look. A look towards Tina Archer Harrison, Tina his only wife.

“Why, you—” For a moment Jemima thought that Greg Harrison would actually strike her down, there at the graveside, as he had struck down old Miss Izzy, and—if only on pretence—struck down Tina herself.

“Greg, darling.” It was Coralie Harrison’s pathetic protesting murmur. “What are you saying to him? Explain to me,” she demanded of Jemima in a voice as low as her own. But the explanations—for Coralie Harrison and the rest of Bow Island—the explanations of the conspiracy of Tina Archer and Greg Harrison were only just beginning.

The rest was up to the police who with their patient work of investigation would first amplify, then press and finally conclude the case. In the course of their investigations, the conspirators would fall apart: this time for real. To the police would fall the unpleasant duty of disentangling the new lies of Tina Archer: she would now swear that her memory had just returned, that it had been Greg who had half-killed her that night, that she had absolutely nothing to do with it … And Greg Harrison would denounce Tina in return, this time with genuine ferocity: “Her plan, her plan all along. She managed everything. I should never have listened to her.”

Before she left Bow Island, Jemima Shore went to say goodbye to Joseph Archer, once again formally, in his Bowtown office. She did not think another tryst on the sands, night or day, would be appropriate. There were many casualties of the Archer tragedy beyond Miss Izzy herself. Poor Coralie Harrison for example, genuinely innocent, was one: she had been convinced that her brother, for all the notorious strength of his temper, would never batter down Miss Izzy to benefit his ex-wife, the woman he detested. Coralie, like the rest of Bow Island, was unaware of the whole deep plot by which Greg and Tina would publicly display their hostility, advertise their divorce and all along plan to kill Miss Izzy once the new will was signed. Greg, officially hating his ex-wife (as he had so ostentatiously made clear to Jemima that first morning by the sunny grave), would not be suspected; as for Tina, suffering
such obvious injuries (carefully planned not to be too damaging), she could only arouse sympathy.

Another small casualty, much less important, was the romance which might, just might have developed between Joseph Archer and Jemima Shore. Now in his steamingly hot office with its perpetually moving fan, they talked of quite other things than the new moon and new wishes.

“You must be happy now: you’ll get your museum,” said Jemima.

“But that’s not at all the way I wanted it to happen,” he replied quickly. Then Joseph added, “But you know, Jemima, there has been justice done. Miss Izzy did really want us to have that National Museum, in her heart of hearts. I’d have talked her round to good sense again. If she’d lived.”

“That’s why he—
they
—acted when they did. They didn’t dare wait, given Miss Izzy’s respect for you,” suggested Jemima. “One question, Joseph.” She stopped, but her curiosity got the better of her. There was one thing she had to know before she left.

“Ask me whatever you like.” Joseph smiled: there was a glimmer there of the handsome fisherman who had welcomed her to Bow Island, the cheerful dancing partner.

“The Archer Tomb and all that. Tina being descended from Sir Valentine’s lawful second marriage. That was true?”

“Oh, that. Yes, it’s true. Maybe. But it’s not important to most of us here. You know something, Jemima, I too am descended from that well-known second marriage. Maybe. And a few others. Maybe. Lucie Anne had two children, don’t forget, and Bo’landers have large families. It was important to Tina Archer: not to me. That’s not what I want. That’s all past. Miss Izzy was the last of the Archers so far as I’m concerned. Let her lie in her tomb.”

“What
do
you want—for yourself? Or for Bow Island, if you prefer?”

Joseph smiled again, this time in his most friendly fashion. “Come back to Bow Island one day, Jemima. Make another programme about us, our history and all that, and I’ll tell you then.”

“I might just do that,” said Jemima Shore, Investigator.