Mother has cultivated a starved look over many years which makes her look so ravenous that she might eat you at any moment. She hasn’t, however, eaten a full meal since she was twelve, a fact she reminded me of repeatedly after Dad died and I tried my best to look after my one remaining parent. Mother didn’t settle well to grief. I often had to prepare a quick breakfast for her before I went to school that would soak up excess alcohol but would also be easy to clean up from the carpet and bedclothes.
The airport terminal bore a remarkable resemblance to a 1980s TV set. Mother adopted her appalled look, the one she uses when faced with someone wearing jogging bottoms. I’ve explained numerous times that I find them comfortable, but she still sees them as an insult.
‘I’m not eating that.’ She was using her Harrods voice to remind everyone she was better than this.
Mirabelle, of course, joined in immediately. ‘Me neither. Whose idea was all this?’
‘Darling, it’s a nightmare. Whose idea do you think it was?’
They both looked at me as if I was something they might regret stepping on. But it didn’t stop them.
‘Another needy attempt to draw attention to herself. I know how hard it is for you, Pandora.’ Mirabelle moved closer towards Mother and shook her head.
‘Stornoway? Where the hell is that anyway, Ursula? Isn’t it somewhere there have been, you know, troubles?’ Mother mouthed it in a way that suggested incontinence. She leaned in but strangely raised her voice at the same time. Mother doesn’t do quiet, unfortunately. ‘Terrorists!’
Stornoway airport paused to acknowledge the unmistakably shrill use of the unforgivable word in a room the size of a small church. The middle-aged woman serving coffee to no one stared as if someone had just announced Shetland was being cancelled.
‘No, Mother, you are referring to Stormont in Ireland. There are no political upheavals occurring in the Hebrides currently so you can come down from amber alert. According to the guidebook, Stornoway boasts black pudding and Donald Trump’s mother as its output. Even if those two things ever did converge it would not pose any form of risk to you.’
‘How can you be so sure of that?’ Aunt Charlotte said with that intense, serious look she calls her Paxman face.
‘I don’t believe you.’ Mother held out her hand. ‘Let me see that guidebook.’
‘I forgot to pack it.’
‘What? The guidebook?’
Now they were all staring.
‘Yes, the guidebook!’ I reached for an excuse. ‘I was reading it in bed last night.’ I looked between them. ‘I must have left it on the bedside table.’
‘So, what you’re saying is that you have no idea where we’re going, as usual.’ Mirabelle sat back victoriously.
‘Yes, Mirabelle, of course I have! Anyway, did anyone else think to bring one?’
They all looked away. Except for Mother, with her resting disappointed face. ‘Christ.’
* * *
We left the airport under a lingering cloud of irritation and annoyance, a familiar state of affairs for my family. No one spoke as we boarded the small, antique bus.
The journey across Lewis and down into Harris towards Leverburgh was like sinking through time. As we left Stornoway we could see the shadow of the mainland, its high peaks clear against the dull granite sky. The driver, who was possibly as old as the mountains himself, told us there were signs bad weather was imminent. We would learn very quickly that everything on Harris was a sign. There were signs everywhere, even in the smallest thing. With hindsight, perhaps we should have paid more attention to them.
I stared out the window at the stark tranquillity. The bus rattled on through Stornoway as if it was the only remaining escape route. The small, clean houses were lined in neat candy colours, perfectly reflected in the pewter waters of the harbour.
‘Looks like bloody Balamory,’ Mother announced.
‘Where?’ Sometimes it’s just easier to ignore Aunt Charlotte.
We hurried past an armada of fishing boats crouched against the harbour walls as if they were readied for the next brutal onslaught of the sea. So far, our experience of the airport and the suburbs of Stornoway had been of a land that was constantly braced for severe times. It had a stoic nature that made our bewildered faces look even more incongruous.
‘This cold, I swear it’s like needles all over my face.’ Mother huddled into her cashmere scarf.
‘Should be familiar, then.’
‘Leave her alone!’ Mirabelle always does this. ‘Your mother can’t help her dysmorphia.’
‘My what?’ Mother looked genuinely confused.
‘It’s OK, Pandora. Some of us are sympathetic to your . . . your needs.’
‘My needs?’
‘Last bus to Grosebay,’ the driver called down the bus when we were well past the outskirts of town and Stornoway had trailed into dark clouds behind us.
‘Grosebay?’ I said. ‘We’re heading to Leverburgh.’
‘Apparently not.’ Mother turned away.
‘I thought you knew exactly where we were going,’ Mirabelle sneered.
‘I’ll sort it out.’ I swayed down the bus towards the driver, looking out the windows either side as if I might recognize something. Lines of condensation rolled down the fogged-up glass, leaving a dampness lingering in the air. Outside, the leaden sky was heavy with great dark clouds that threatened to break at any moment.
We were beyond the main port, past the edges of town, where derelict houses looked out to sea as if they were searching for their owners. But they’d long been abandoned. Grey remnants of curtains fluttered like ghosts at the windows, their thin, gauzy fingers reaching out through the broken glass as we drove by.
I explained to the driver our misunderstanding and he entirely misunderstood. He just continued driving and whistling some unrecognizable sea shanty through his wide teeth. The landscape rolled out in moss-coloured swathes. There were no stops and no other passengers. I finally persuaded the bus driver to take us on to Leverburgh. He seemed quite ambivalent about where he was going and shrugged as if it was all the same to him.
We travelled on through the harsh wilderness. It was a desolate land, barren with wear from long winters and the sea’s constant rough wind. I watched redundantly as this new world rolled by. It was relentlessly bleak but there was something captivating about it all. Part derelict, part timeless, it was as if it had been paused in its last moments. It was all just waiting for something to return. There was that unmistakable sadness of somewhere that had been left to fall into decay.
We passed an old van that had been turned into a mobile shop. It didn’t look like it had moved in decades. The back was open, revealing a sparsely stocked array of basic supplies and some tattered posters for digestives, Ovaltine and PG Tips. One old man was sitting in the driver’s seat smoking a cigarette, his eyes closed. Utterly unmoving, the only sign he was still alive was the end of the stub intermittently glowing amber.
We drove on past other abandoned vehicles. The carcasses of decaying cars and the occasional tractor littered the landscape, some so old that they had become part of the scenery, with shrubs and weeds winding through their broken windows and empty engines. Solitary tin huts were rust-red against the evening light. The bus driver had called this the Golden Road, but we were looking at a tarnished wasteland. We passed an abandoned phone box with a bird’s nest on the receiver. There were no houses anywhere near. And no more people.
But perhaps it wasn’t neglect I was looking at. Perhaps this place was just as the brochure had said: “untouched”. Wars and famines had raged through the rest of the world — some had even flared momentarily on these islands — but they stood unchanged, a hard, grey stone world.
We didn’t see anyone else until we surfaced on the other side of Harris. If there were any people living out there, they were so much a part of the landscape that they had become indistinguishable from it.
The light trailed away across the charcoal
sky. Our bus was the only movement in those dwindling remains of dusk. Mists began to settle into the valleys and out towards the water we watched the shells of broken boats swaying on the tide. Only small apricot streaks of sunlight lined the grim horizon now.
We followed the road, a long black ribbon pulling into the land. There was an overwhelming feeling that the island was somehow watching us, its new intruders. We fell silent. We seemed so exposed out here. Countless pin-holes of light began to appear in the black sky like spy holes through from another world.
When we finally surfaced in Leverburgh, it was an empty place, stark with only a smattering of buildings. The driver pointed to an underwhelming Portakabin before leaving us standing in the cold road. It was a lightless place and there wasn’t much more than the dark silhouette of a large shed cut from the surrounding hills. The building’s flimsy walls didn’t look like they could withstand this landscape.
A lone night porter greeted us and informed us we’d arrived too late for introductions or any food. There was something morbid about this man who showed us to our rooms. The dirty brown carpet tiles curled at the edges and the floor seemed to move a little as we followed him down the long dark corridor. When we arrived at the battered door to our room, I couldn’t shake the overriding impression that it had been hurriedly cleared of the previous occupants — dead or otherwise.
* * *
After that first sleepless night in our bunks and only Mother’s out-of-date tea and Sir Nigel Havers’s plums for sustenance, we found ourselves standing among the cold remains of breakfast time. And we were confronted with a new horror.
‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t my little old book club.’ Bridget Gutteridge, the only other survivor of the Slaughter House — unfortunately.
‘Old?’ Mother was clearly in no mood for reminiscing this morning.
‘Oh, it all makes more sense now!’ Aunt Charlotte smiled. ‘Bridget was a member of the book club. I had wondered why she was with us in the Slaughter House.’
Bridget looked at her, dumbfounded.
Yap. A tiny dog quivered intensely at Bridget’s feet as its beady eyes zeroed in on Aunt Charlotte.
‘Oh, Jesus.’
‘No, he’s called Mr Bojingles.’ Bridget lifted her chin haughtily.
‘Bojangles,’ I corrected.
‘Bojingles.’
‘It’s Mr Bojangles. I distinctly remember that part of the Slaughter House.’
‘Mr Bojangles is dead.’
We paused.
Aunt Charlotte leaned forward, conspiratorially. ‘Murdered?’
Bridget and the dog stared, maliciously, I’d say. For a moment it even crossed my mind that Mr Bojingles might have had more than a hand or paw in the demise of the previous occupant of that tartan dog coat.
Mirabelle sighed. ‘Why are you here, Bridget?’
‘Other than to annoy the hell out of everyone.’ Mother was beginning to sound quite frustrated now. She doesn’t like surprises, not since Dad bought her a Segway for her fiftieth instead of a Steinway. She doesn’t play the piano but an interior designer friend had said they were that season’s must-have photo shelf. Mother doesn’t have any photos either and didn’t warm to my suggestion that she could maybe take a few shots while she was touring around on her Segway.
Bridget gave us her battle-line smile. One thing I will say for Bridget is that she has the kind of face that clearly sets out from the very beginning just how much she dislikes you. ‘I’m still on the book club WhatsApp group.’
‘Is she?’ I looked around at the others, who all shrugged.
‘It’s my duty to be here. You can’t have a book club holiday without its key member.’
I frowned. ‘Key member? Really?’
‘You’re not even a member at all of the book club.’ Bridget stared at me.
‘This is not a book club holiday. There is no book club.’
‘Don’t say that!’ She looked genuinely distressed. ‘This holiday was clearly on the group chat.’
‘Who put that on there?’ I looked around them all. My eyes finally landed on Aunt Charlotte who was shifting her feet uneasily. ‘Are you still using that group?’
Aunt Charlotte took a deep breath. ‘I like to put little things on there. It’s just a bit of nostalgia, really.’
‘For a book club that ended with five deaths?’
‘Well, now you put it like that . . .’ Aunt Charlotte looked at the floor.
‘Dear, dear, did you not read your in–for–ma–tion booklets?’ Bridget dragged out each syllable of the word until I could feel myself twitch. ‘This is a survival course. So of course I should be here. Remember, survival? Something I ensured for all of you. Yet you repaid me with abandonment and silence.’ Her sour little smile remained in place.
‘I don’t remember you being the architect of my survival or indeed anyone else’s.’ Mother turned away.
When Bridget Gutteridge laughed, it was steely, unnerving and invariably accompanied by dead, staring eyes, so that she was remarkably reminiscent of an end-of-the-pier clown. I watched her rocking to and fro with her murderous little dog. Bob the Therapist says it’s these kind of ideas that might lead people, and by people he means Mother, to the conclusion that I need help. That’s why I mostly keep my imaginings to myself these days.
‘Oh, Pandora.’ There it was again, Bridget’s sideshow laugh. ‘Contrary to your little newspaper articles and television interviews, I seem to remember that it was me who solved the murders at the Slaughter House after you were purposefully leading us up blind alleys and throwing in red herrings.’
‘Oh no, no, no, no!’ Aunt Charlotte wagged her finger in Bridget’s face. ‘We’re not doing all the herrings and fish thing again. Not this time. No.’
‘Aunt Charlotte, it’s just a figure of—’
‘Leave it, Ursula. Just shut up, Charlotte.’ Someone once suggested that if we invented a drinking game where we had to drink every time Mother said ‘shut up’, we’d spend most of our time semi-inebriated. We don’t need a game for that. It was definitely a tempting thought right then, though.
Mother stepped closer and looked down at Bridget. ‘You can remember whatever you like from that house.’
Bridget shook her head slowly, her smile growing wider as if she was remembering it all with such fondness. ‘Ah, nothing changes. I see you and your dear family are still the emotionally disturbed, seething little rat’s nest you always were. I suppose I should be grateful you ruthlessly cut me out of your lives.’
‘I’m sorry, Bridget—’ I looked at her with fake confusion — ‘help me out here, but when were you ever in our lives?’
She watched me through her small, thick glasses, her eyes strangely wide as if she were looking through a magnifying glass analyzing a new specimen for her collection. ‘Oh, so you’ve grown a little braver, have you? What happened to Mummy’s little mouse?’
‘What is it with the rodent theme?’ Aunt Charlotte looked irritated. ‘Fish? Rats? Mice?’
‘Right, you crazy dogs!’ a voice called. The door swung open. ‘Who’s ready to get extreme?’
‘Dogs as well now! I’m so confused.’
‘Shut up, Charlotte.’ I imagined taking a drink. Mother had an increasingly disturbed look about her now. But then no one wants to go on holiday and discover there’s an ex-member of their book club there, especially not one who had been so ruthlessly cut off. Mother leaned over to me and whispered through pursed lips, ‘You will pay for this, Ursula.’ Somehow, I had a feeling she was right.
CHAPTER 5: THE LESSONS WE DIDN’T LEARN
We’d only just settled into the front row seats of the conference room when the man at the door suddenly shouted, ‘Alexa, play Brown Winner playlist!’ He had a melodic Scottish accent that seemed to lift each word up at the end like a smile. Sadly, that would not last.
Loud music filled the room. The theme tune to Game of Thrones accompanied the procession of this man to the front of
the room. He was in full combat gear, which did seem a little unnecessary for a Portakabin. I resolutely stared ahead, careful not to catch anyone else’s eye, especially Mother’s.
The conference room was a small section of the Portakabin that swayed with the insistent wind. It had been set out with a mismatched selection of broken chairs: the carpet a sort of mid-brown that had soaked up every stain and smell for the past twenty years. It looked out on an unforgiving landscape. The silent hills were still netted with a mist that hadn’t lifted since we’d arrived. A flat belt of grey sea lay beyond the small port, surrounded by grassland. Even though there was only a small scattering of houses, the constant rush of the wind seemed to drown out any idea that this could be a calm world.
‘Look fear in the face,’ the man shouted over the raucous music. It seemed to take him a lot less time than he’d anticipated to stride to the front. It was a small room with only five rows of chairs and, besides our group, only six other people. Undeterred, he continued. ‘Take time to embrace.’ He held his arms around the large dome of his belly, making great gaps appear between the straining buttons of his shirt. Then he leaned towards us and whispered, ‘Leave no trace.’ He stared round the room, his eyes set wide. The soft sound of the last word lingered in the air.
Game of Thrones continued to rise and fall in great waves of emotion as the man’s eyes remained round and unblinking. He stood with his legs just a little too far apart to look comfortable. I could clearly see a hint of charcoal eyeliner round his eyes and some form of camouflage make-up smeared across his head as if he’d used it to fill the gaps in his sparse hair. He looked remarkably similar to how a Playmobil figure of Ross Kemp might look, if Playmobil ever decided to diversify their range into a ‘Dangerous Gangs’ set.
He waited in silence until it was obvious there’d been some miscalculation about when the music would end. At last, it quietened and trailed away. But just as he began to relax, another song started. He frowned as the unmistakable sound of Justin Timberlake’s Sexy Back flooded the Portakabin. His shoulders fell and he closed his eyes before holding up his hands. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he murmured. ‘Workout playlist.’
BODY ON THE ISLAND a gripping murder mystery packed with twists (Smart Woman's Mystery Book 2) Page 3