"I argued to bring Eric into the secret. That he would keep quiet about it once he knew the truth, but only when he knew the truth. Wendy argued something different. Didn't you dear?"
I watch Principal Sharpe, her long, narrow chest heaving in and out.
"Eric was weak. He wouldn't have kept quiet. He couldn't have."
“You don’t know that dear. You wouldn’t give him the chance."
The two of them stare at each other. And then I notice something. In the darkness of Mrs. Jacobs's lounge there's a movement. A subtle, careful movement. I glance at Sharpe and Jacob’s eyes, but they haven’t seen it. They’re too busy glaring at each other. So I look back, and try and make it out. And now I see it properly, and my breath catches in my throat. It’s a figure, somehow familiar. A person, moving, with their back to the wall, sliding slowly and cautiously towards the door. And then the figure reaches the door. The light catches on purple hair.
It’s Amber.
She stops. Her eyes meet mine and she raises a finger to her lips. I have to work hard not to stare. I look around her, hoping to see other figures, the police maybe, but there’s no one. She’s alone. Amber flicks her eyes to Principal Sharpe and back, warning me not to give her away.
"We agreed that Wendy should be the one to explain it to him,” Mrs Jacobs continues, oblivious to what I’ve just seen. “So she took him for a walk, just at the bottom of the garden here, along the clifftop. Perhaps you'd like to explain what you did next, dear? What you did to your little brother?"
Principal Sharpe doesn't say anything. And after a few moments, Mrs. Jacobs continues.
“I don’t know why she’s gone coy about it. She was cool as a cucumber afterwards. Ever so matter of fact.” She smiles tightly at me. “We have a boathouse, just around the corner, so we were able to tow his body out into the sound and weigh it down. And then pretend it was all a great tragedy, that poor Eric had been unhappy for some time, though that part was true enough…”
"He was like Dad,” Principal Sharpe says suddenly. “Eric would have turned out like Dad."
"And you turned out rather like me." Mrs. Jacobs cuts her off.
I look from one of them to the other. They're not looking at me, so I glance again at Amber, to see what she's doing. I see now she's holding the poker from a fire set in one hand. I suppose she's planning to use it to smash the gun from Principal Sharpe's hand. I nod, trying to give her the message that I understand.
"What are you doing?" At once I snatch my eyes back to Principal Sharpe. She must have been watching me after all. She turns around, and Amber's there, in full sight. She's not close enough to swing the poker. Amber freezes, caught.
"Drop it!" Principal Sharpe says. "Drop it on the ground."
For a second Amber doesn't, and I feel my breath thicken. I know what Amber’s thinking, about rushing forward, to try and take on Sharpe, and I'm desperate for her not too, because I know what guns can do. She’ll get one step and then she’ll die, right in front of me.
"Drop it!"
Amber does what she says. There’s a clang as the metal poker falls to the ground.
“Get over there with the boy."
All of Principal Sharpe's attention is on Amber now. And I realize that maybe I could do something. But what? If I try to rush her, then she'll shoot Amber, or swing the gun and shoot me. And there's no weapons I can get. Nothing near to where I'm standing. And then the moment is gone, and Amber is next to me, her hands raised in the air. I hear her breathing, short and fearful.
"You will not win, either of you. I told you to stay away from my family and you ignored me but you will not win. You might think it’ll be hard to explain your disappearance, but we'll find a way, won't we mother? That's what we do in this family."
She turns to Mrs. Jacobs now, and I realize that we've all taken our eyes off the old woman. Because now everything's changed. At some point Mrs. Jacobs must have picked up the shovel, and readied herself to swing it like an axe. Because at that moment that’s exactly what she does.
It flashes in the light, as it cuts through the air.
Seventy-Four
The blade of the shovel is turned sideways, so that it knifes through the air. It lands with a thud in the back of Principal Sharpe’s head. Her snarl slackens and then droops away, and then something white passes behind her eyes. Then her knees buckle, and she flops to the ground. Through her hair a black-red line fills up and leaks blood onto the floor. It puddles out around her.
I think Amber screams, or it might be me. I’m not sure. But the next thing I know is Mrs. Jacobs has reached down for the the gun. She feels the weight of it, like she's selecting vegetables at the supermarket.
"Well that was easier than I thought," Mrs. Jacobs says. Her voice is calm, almost happy. “I’m sorry you had to see that, but I'm afraid Wendy's had it coming for a very long time." She steps forward and, slowly, she bends down to feel for a pulse at Principal Sharpe's neck.
"Where did you come from?" I ask Amber.
"I was following Sharpe," she says. "I was doing a stake-out outside her house. She drove here so fast I could hardly keep up with her. Then I saw your message."
"Did you call the police?"
Amber hesitates, but then she shakes her head. I screw my eyes shut.
The next moment there’s an explosion of noise. My eyes open just in time to see Principal Sharpe's body jerk on the floor, and then the gun jump in Mrs. Jacobs hands. The noise of the shot bounces back off the house. Then she turns to us.
"Just making sure," she says.
The tip of the gun is still spewing smoke, like water flowing from a pipe, only rising instead of falling. I stare at it, transfixed. Then she points it at us, somewhere in the middle of where we're both standing, and I wonder which one of us she'll shoot first. And which one I want her to shoot first. It's weird how you think about things like that. How that matters. But then, awkwardly, she lets the barrel fall down and turns the gun handle first towards us.
"Well?” She says a second later. “Which one of you is going to take it?" She steps forward, holding out the gun in front of her.
"I've called the police," Amber stammers.
"I should hope so. This is definitely a police matter." Mrs. Jacobs smiles. Then she makes a decision. She hands the gun to Amber and then she steps back and looks at the body of her daughter, and at the hole where her husband lays buried.
“Would anyone like some more iced tea while we wait?"
Amber calls the police while she fetches it.
Epilogue (1)
We played Scrabble while we waited for the police. I was winning too, and I had a really good word lined up when they finally got there with all their guns and the shouting and everything. So I never got to put it down.
I found out later on that they never stopped investigating Mrs. Jacobs. Even after they dug up the gym and didn’t find anything, they still believed she’d killed him because there were no records of him in Maui or anywhere else. They probably would have gotten around to arresting her even if she hadn’t murdered Principal Sharpe. But that certainly sped things up.
It’s amazing how quickly things move on in schools though. Everyone was really excited for a few days, but even just a week after it all happened, most people were more interested with who was going out with who, and where the next party is going to happen.
But by then I’d already moved on anyway. I was back looking at the whale watching business with Dad. And soon we got past the stage of just planning it, and went to the next stage. Dad rang all the banks on the island, and finally one of them agreed to discuss a loan. They want to actually do a meeting though, so we can lay out exactly what we need the money for, and how we’re going to pay it back. I wanted to come along to show them, only Dad said it would be better if he went to the meeting without me, on account of me being just a kid and it looking a bit strange if I went through all the figures. So that’s why I’m waiting outside the bank now. In Dad’
s pick up, with the bullet holes still in the sides. And hopefully when he comes out we’ll be all set. It’s pretty exciting.
“So? How did it go?” I can tell right away that Dad’s trying to prank me, because he looked really unhappy walking out the bank, with his shoulders slumped down, and his new suit looking all uncomfortable.
“They didn’t go for it.” He gets in beside me.
“Don’t wind me up. They must have.” I can’t stop smiling
“No Billy, they really didn’t.”
I can tell from his eyes. He’s really not joking after all. “But, we can pay it back, it says so on the spreadsheet!”
Dad closes the truck door, then just sits there, not moving. Eventually he speaks.
“They’re not prepared to lend the amount we asked for. They will give us less, but it’s not enough. It doesn’t buy us the boat.” He stares out through the windshield, then he turns to look at me.
“I’m sorry kid…”
“But why?”
“Because we’re… Because we’re not their kind of people. I did tell you Billy. I got no financial history. No influential backers. No contacts. I did warn you this might happen.” He puts his hands on the wheel, grips it hard.
“Well how much are we short?”
“Enough. Enough that it ain’t gonna happen.” Still he doesn’t start the engine.
“But what if we spend less on the marketing? All that insurance stuff you added, maybe we don’t need that? Maybe we can…”
“They liked the idea.” Dad cuts me off. “Generally, they liked it. They said the business plan was solid. Well thought-out. But they don’t make the decisions any more. They just go with what the computer says. And with my credit history. There’s a limit. And it just ain’t high enough.” He turns to look at me.
“Look, we can try again, in a year or two, when I’ve put some cash away.”
“But what about the Blue Lady? Someone else’ll buy her. We won’t be able to do it in a year.”
Dad shakes his head. “I’m sorry kid, I really am.”
“I can get it. I can get five thousand dollars.”
“Billy, where the hell are you gonna get…”
“Is it enough? Is five thousand enough?”
Dad hesitates. In the end he shrugs. “If you really could, it would make a start.”
Then he fires the engine. And without another word he drives me back to school.
I don’t go to my lesson though. I’ve got much more important things to do. I go straight up to the library, and get on the nearest computer. But then I don’t know what to search for. It’s not exactly a common problem, is it? Trying to work out who Mrs. Jacobs’ five thousand dollar check actually belongs to. I mean, first of all, she’s just committed first degree murder in front of two witnesses, and admitted to another murder, so I don’t know if the police will seize all her money. And then even if that doesn’t happen, we were never quite a legal detective agency when she gave it to us in the first place - we never had a license to operate. And then even if that doesn’t matter, then half of the money is Amber’s. It’s super-complicated. But in a funny old way, I’m quite good at super-complicated things.
Epilogue (2)
Amber comes round early. She’s really excited about everything, and she’s picked up Steven from the vets for me, because she’s got a car and I haven’t. His wing is healed, and the vet didn’t charge anything, which was really nice of them, because vets are really expensive.
“They said they don’t want to see or hear from you ever again.”
“You’re joking aren’t you?”
“No. They said you cost them a fortune, never leave them alone, and your bird is the messiest most vicious animal they’ve ever worked on. I think they meant it.”
I hardly listen, I’m too busy feeding sprats to Steven. His soft brown eyes are almost totally yellow now. He does look quite frightening these days.
“I’m just making sandwiches, do you want to finish off for me?”
“Where’s your Dad?”
“He’s finalizing things at the bank. He’s going to meet us there.”
“Well let’s go then.”
Amber parks on the edge of the harbor, midway across two spaces, and only moves the car when I point this out to her. Then she takes the cool box from the trunk, and I take Steven, and we walk over to the gate that leads out onto the pontoon. I see the security guard hurrying over, and I know what he's going to say, but he doesn't get a chance because Amber asks if he wouldn't mind holding the gate so she can get the cool box through. Then he just watches us walk down the pontoon like he doesn’t know what to say. And even if he had tried something, the next thing is Dad turns up.
It wasn’t that hard in the end. I found this website which was all about what happens to prisoner’s money when they go to jail. Apparently it’s only in some financial crimes like fraud where the police can seize your assets. So even though Mrs. Jacobs did murder Henry Jacobs, because the money they had came from her family, it’s still her money. It was a bit more difficult to unravel the problem of the detective agency not being exactly legal. It meant that the terms and conditions we had on the website weren’t 100% legal either, which in the end was handy, because there were still a couple of mistakes that we hadn’t noticed, and I had to contact Mrs. Jacobs, in a prison on the mainland where she’s on remand, to get her to say whether we had to give the money back, but then she said…
“So where’s this boat I’ve invested all my money in?” Amber interrupts me, as we walk down the pontoon.
Mrs. Jacobs insisted that we’d done exactly what she’d paid us for, and that the five thousand was only ever an upfront payment. So she wrote a second check and insisted that Amber should have it. And then Amber said…
“Wow - that’s beautiful. Didn’t I tell you an island detective agency needs to have a boat as well as a car?”
Well, it turned out 5000 dollars wasn’t quite enough for the bank after all, we needed almost double that. But you can probably figure out what Amber said.
It's a really lovely day for it. There's not much wind, and it's really bright sunshine. And Amber and me carry the cool box into the galley area, and we put all the food and drink into the fridge, which Dad gets himself used to the controls. Then, when we're ready, he starts the engine, and tells Amber and me how to untie the ropes. It's pretty fun, clambering on the deck and on the pontoon, following Dad's orders, and feeling how the boat dips under our weight as we clamber around. And smelling the tang of diesel in the air and feeling how the boat is humming, like it's just as excited as I am.
"Cast off bow line," Dad shouts to me, and I let go of one end of the rope. I pull it, so that it runs through the ring on the pontoon, and the front of the boat is untied then. Dad shouts to Amber at the stern, and she does the same, and then I get a tingle inside me as the engine note deepens, and there's a rush of bubbles coming out behind us, and then we start moving. I kind of miss the first bit because Dad gets me to bring all the fenders in and stow them away, in case it gets wavy out to sea, but I kind of see the rock breakwater pass by as Dad steers us out of the harbor and out into the actual sea.
"Billy, Go and grab a beer from the fridge will you?"
I do what Dad says. Down below she's really stable. And there's this comforting throbbing sound from the motor, but you can still hear the sound of water splashing down the sides of the boat. And you can see it too, strikingly blue through the porthole windows. I take a beer and a couple of cans of soda from the fridge, then I take it back outside. I climb the ladder, to where Dad is sitting steering, with Amber beside him. I open the drinks and pass them around. Then Dad takes a sip.
"So Billy," he says to me, as we clear the last bit of the breakwater. "Where do we find these whales of yours?"
The End
A short message from the author
Thank you for reading The Lornea Island Detective Club. I really hope you enjoyed it!
I never intended to write this book. When I published The Things you find in Rockpools in February 2018 it was a standalone mystery thriller. But it quickly became my most popular book, selling 50,000 copies in just one year. It was also my favourite book, and this is mostly down to the character of Billy. I think this more than anything encouraged me to wonder what might happen next if I went back into his world.
However, it was also one of the more difficult books I’ve written. Most protagonists in fictional mystery series are cast as actual detectives, making it (reasonably) plausible that they keep stumbling upon exciting and dangerous mysteries to solve. It’s literally their job. It’s rather less plausible that the same should happen to an eleven year boy. So before I even began I needed some way of making it (reasonably) believable for a whole new mystery to come and find Billy, and hence the Lornea Island Detective Agency was born.
But I also realised that fresh-faced Billy’s had an advantage over all those battle-scared alcoholic-divorcee detectives out there solving mysteries in other books. Billy was just 11 in Rockpools, but since a new story must logically take place after the first, he would therefore be older. And that gave me the opportunity to explore how Billy might have changed as he grows from a boy into a young teenager.
And as soon as I realised that, I also realised I could take this even further. How would Billy look at sixteen? At eighteen? I genuinely wanted to know, which is always helpful when you have to sit down for hour upon hour typing out a story.
Therefore I’m really pleased to announce that the third book in the Rockpools series (probably called The Appearance of Mystery) is already well under way, and will be published in early(ish) 2020.
The Lornea Island Detective Club Page 28