Palmer-Jones 03 - Murder in Paradise (7 page)

Robert looked at the daughter, hoping for more reaction from her. Her face was white, but her eyes were blank as if she were remembering something painful, and she, too, was silent.

“She was lying at the bottom of Ellie’s Head,” Robert said, exacting as much drama as he could from the situation. “I found her. She will have fallen.”

“From Ellie’s Head?” The daughter looked up sharply, then she said: “ The poor child. How horrible.”

Robert thought that she was a strange girl, and wondered what had really brought her back to the island. Kenneth and Annie said that she had left her husband, but Robert thought it more likely that he had left her. She would be a difficult woman to live with.

“Do you know what they’re doing with the body? I suppose that they’ll telephone the police.”

Dance was mourning the introduction of the new automatic telephone system. Just a few years ago he would have known the direction of all the calls.

Robert did not have the opportunity to answer. Annie appeared in the shadow of the door which led from the post office into their kitchen.

“Did you say that the child has been found?” she asked.

Elspeth did not give Robert the chance to tell his story. “At the bottom of Ellie’s Head,” she said quickly, and again he thought how strange she was. “ Isn’t it a coincidence? At this time of the year. You don’t think she meant …”

“No,” said her mother firmly. “It will have been an accident. Poor Agnes. I will go to Sandwick later and see if there’s anything I can do. She was so fond of the girl.”

She disappeared back in to the shadow and into the kitchen.

Reluctantly Robert left the post office. He stood for a moment out in the road, not quite sure what he should do next. He would have liked to go to watch the Stennet men fetch the body up the cliff but he did not think that they would like it. A sudden gust of wind caught his cap and blew it from his head. He limped after it, swearing. She’s right, he thought. It was this time of year. And it was a day like this. He could not remember exactly how many years ago it was. Sixty maybe. Perhaps more than that. He had only been a boy. That started with a gusty little wind from the north, then in the afternoon it started to blow.

He decided that he did not want to watch the men on Ellie’s Head. He was an old man now. He would go and sit in front of his fire, and later perhaps he would have a dram.

In the afternoon the wind increased, so that there were doubts about whether the plane from Baltasay, chartered by the police, would be able to get in. After Sarah’s arrival at Sandwick, George Palmer-Jones returned to the school house. He walked up the island against the blustery north wind, and enjoyed the vigorous mindless movement. Jim had asked him if he would come up to the airstrip to meet the police, but he had refused.

“It won’t be a pleasant walk in this weather,” he had said, “ and I don’t want to put Alec to any trouble by asking for a lift. I’ll be in the school house if they want to see me.”

After the first exhilaration of walking, he began to think again about the accident. He tried to reconstruct it so that all the details would be clear in his mind and he would be able to communicate to the police precisely what had happened. When he started, he was quite sure that it was an accident. Mary must have run out of the hall sometime before the interval. He remembered her, as he had seen her the day before, running up the island with pigtails flying behind her. He supposed that some game of her own took her up to Ellie’s Head, or perhaps it was a desire to frighten the adults and draw attention to herself.

But what about the secret? he wondered. She was so eager to tell him her secret. It was not like her to forget a thing like that, but she was so unpredictable that perhaps her new game was more important to her. So, she was on Ellie’s Head and she must have slipped. He tried to guess how she must have fallen. It was a clear night and there was a moon. He had seen her before clambering about the rocks and down the steep gulleys or “geos” as the local people called them. She was as surefooted as a feral cat. Her deafness seemed not to have affected her sense of balance, and she knew every inch of the place. So how did she fall? Perhaps she had been drinking from the Cup, he thought. That would impair anyone’s judgement. If the police thought that it was necessary, they would order a post mortem and that would show whether she had been drinking. In the meantime Jim would know. But where was the green silk scarf? It had been tied tightly round her neck all day. He knew that it had not been left in the hall because he had asked, and it had not been near Mary on the rocks where she fell. He considered the problem all the way back to the school house, but he could think of no satisfactory explanation for the scarfs disappearance. Well then, he thought, perhaps she’s been murdered. He did not take this conclusion seriously—it was simply an absurd extension of his argument—but the idea was lodged in his mind and began to bother him.

Despite the weather the plane did land. The two policemen, when they climbed out of the small eight-seater aircraft, were shaking, ill. The pilot was English and it seemed at first that he treated the difficult landing into the gusting wind as a game. Throughout the manoeuvre he shouted flippancies to the terrified men behind him. Later, when they were safely back on Baltasay, he was to say to them:

“Sorry about that, but I had to have a go, you see. One needs to practise in difficult conditions. It might have been a hospital flight, a matter of life and death.”

Alec met them in his car, a battered Escort eaten away by rust. It had no road tax, but the policemen did not notice. They were pleasant, sympathetic men, frightened of intruding on recent grief, and after they had talked together with gentle, northern voices, Agnes did not mind entrusting the body of her daughter to them.

The policemen called to see George on their way back to the airstrip. They were in a hurry because the light was falling and it was still windy. The last thing that they wanted was to stay overnight on Kinness.

George explained in detail the circumstances surrounding Mary’s disappearance, the search for her, the discovery of the body. The policemen congratulated him on his attention to detail.

“It all seems very straightforward then,” one of them said. “An unfortunate accident.”

“There is one thing,” George said. “She was wearing a scarf at the dance. A silk scarf. It wasn’t on her when she died.”

“I expect it came off when she fell.” The younger man was looking at his watch. He was wondering if he could be home for his son’s bedtime. He liked to be back to read the boy a bedtime story. “Then the tide will have taken it.”

“It was tied with a knot round her neck. Quite tightly.”

“She must have taken it off then at some time before she fell. There’s not another explanation.”

There is, George thought, but you’re too young, and too trusting and too innocent to consider it. But he said nothing and let them rush off to their plane.

When the police had gone, George sat alone in the living room. Jonathan Drysdale had gone out to walk to the north end of the island, to a pool where there were sometimes wild swans. He was planning a trip to catch them and ring them, and he wanted to check that they were there before making the arrangements. He had gone out straight after lunch. Sylvia was in the school room. She was working on some of the craft work she had done with the children. So George could sit there, in the gloom in front of a dying fire, and go through every detail of the thing again, and still it seemed unlikely to him that Mary would have left the hall without telling him about her secret and claiming her dance, and still he could find no explanation for the disappearance of the scarf. So that the thought which had come to him as a ridiculous result of abstract thinking, of isolated reasoning, that the girl might have been murdered, grew more solid. It can’t be true, he thought. I’m a meddling old man. But he would not allow himself to escape the facts.

Then Sylvia came in and switched on the light, and threw a couple of logs on to the fire.

“You were asleep,” Sylvia said. “ You were late last night, and then they got you out so early this morning.”

“No,” he said. “ Not asleep. I was just thinking.”

“About Mary?”

He nodded.

“She used to come to see me sometimes,” she said. “You know that her parents had asked special permission for her to stay on at school here, because of her handicap. Otherwise she would have started at the big school on Baltasay this term. Sometimes she said that she wished that they would let her go and that it would be fun to live in the hostel with all the others, and at other times she was desperate to stay. I don’t know which would have been best for her.…

“She used to love to read my magazines, especially the fashion articles. Once I caught her in my bedroom, putting on the make-up which was lying around on the dressing table. I suppose that she was just a normal twelve-year-old and she never had a chance to do that sort of thing at home. Agnes must have been forty when she had Mary so there was quite a generation gap between them. She still treated her as a very young child, and Mary reacted accordingly—tantrums and all.”

George had an idea.

“That scarf that she was wearing all day yesterday,” he said. “Do you know where she got it?”

“Oh yes,” Sylvia said. “It was mine. I gave it to her.”

Sarah stayed with Jim at Sandwick in the afternoon while they prepared to receive the police. Alec was there, too, until eventually he went home to tell Maggie what was happening and to collect his car. Will was out all afternoon. No one knew where he had gone.

“I’d better go home,” she said when they heard the plane coming low over the house. “They won’t want to talk to me.”

“No, I don’t suppose that they will.”

“You’ll come back as soon as you can?”

Agnes kissed her before she went and thanked her for being there, and sent her quickly home. She saw Will, standing on the boulder beach below Unsta throwing pebbles into the tide. She almost approached him to offer him comfort, but he seemed absorbed in himself. Perhaps he wanted to be alone, and besides it was very cold.

It was cold in the house too, although there was light. She found paper, sticks and coal in a cupboard in the scullery, but when she tried to light the range it hissed and went out. She had never tried to light a fire before. She felt helpless and incompetent. She had wanted the house to be warm and welcoming for Jim when he came in. She needed to prove to herself that she was a better wife than Elspeth would have been. She wondered if Will was still out on the beach, but when she went outside to call him to help her, he was gone.

When Jim came in the table was laid and the food was ready, but the house was still cold. He showed her how to light the range, but it seemed to her that he was distant and preoccupied.

“I’m so sorry about Mary,” she said.

As a nurse she had comforted grieving relatives, but that had been easier. They had been comforted by the uniform, the image of calm authority. She had not needed to think what to say. Now it was an effort, because she was thinking of Elspeth, wondering if he was thinking about her too. He turned the conversation to other matters, to the croft, the house, and neither Elspeth nor Mary was mentioned.

In the morning they had an argument about going to church.

“But you don’t believe in it,” Jim said. “You said that it was all superstition. You never went at home. We should start as we mean to go on. If we go today, they’ll expect us to go every Sunday.”

“It’s different here. Perhaps we should go every Sunday.”

“Why? Why should we go?”

“It’s the custom. Everyone goes. I don’t want to upset things. I want to belong.”

“This is our home. It’s not a bloody museum. We’ll never be happy here if we start off by pretending.”

“But we should go today. Your mother is so upset. It would hurt her, wouldn’t it, if we didn’t turn up?”

So he agreed that they would go today. They were standing in the kitchen. The wind had blown itself out. Jim had been out and he held a mug of tea to warm his hands. Sarah was proud because she had managed to light the range. She was wearing jeans and one of Jim’s rugby shirts.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“To watch the milking at Buness. It’s all new since I was last here. They did it by hand before. Then I walked around our land. Just to get an idea of what needs to be done. I didn’t get a chance yesterday. It’s been left to run down. The fencing’s in a dreadful state.”

“I’ll help you,” she said. “ You’ll have to tell me what to do, but I’d enjoy it. We can start this afternoon.”

“Not this afternoon,” he said. “ Not on a Sunday.”

“So you do care what they think.”

She thought at first that he was angry, but he laughed and caught her round the waist.

“Do you want breakfast?” she asked.

“No. I had some at Buness.”

They went into the bedroom to change for church. He put on his wedding suit. She was looking for a respectable dress when she stepped on something and bent down to pick it up. It was the pin caught in the square of paper which had been attached to her wedding dress. She looked again at the words. “He should have been mine.” Now they had some meaning. She was quite convinced that the message had been written by Elspeth.

Jim’s back was turned to her. He was facing the mirror, knotting his tie. She quickly screwed the paper into a ball, took it into the kitchen, and threw it on to the fire.

As they walked to the kirk the sun came out and lit up the water in the bay. The kirk was just beyond the hall, built of the same stone, with a steeply sloping roof and a bell above it in a small open turret. The bell was ringing a single, monotonous note. They walked past the hall and nearby, just in a field and surrounded by a drystone wall, was a graveyard. Sarah remembered the night of the dance, sitting by a gravestone, thinking that everyone else was in the hall and hearing the running footsteps.

Jim’s uncle James was the preacher. Sarah had expected primitive religion, Old Testament Christianity, a rigid formality, but there was nothing of that. James spoke sadly and gently about Mary, about the difficulty of maintaining faith in the face of such tragedy. He gave no easy answers. Then the school choir sang a modern children’s hymn accompanied by guitars and recorders. She found it disconcerting. Had she wanted the island to remain a museum, as Jim had said, old-fashioned and predictable, to satisfy her sense of the dramatic? It might perhaps have been easier.