BODY ON THE ISLAND a gripping murder mystery packed with twists (Smart Woman's Mystery Book 2)

by VICTORIA DOWD

  ‘Oh thank God!’ I breathed, my mouth grainy and throat raw.

  We all hurried to the kitchen. I didn’t wait for cups or mugs but just hung my open mouth under the tap. The water was clean and cool on my tongue, the relief shocking.

  When we finally all stood clutching full mugs of water, we had a chance to look at the kitchen more closely.

  ‘There’s a little tea and coffee left over from someone. Nothing else.’ Spear said.

  ‘What the hell is this place?’ Mother looked at him sharply. She used that clipped voice she has when I know she’s afraid. ‘And what is that little Voodoo doll there?’ She pointed towards the wall to our left, opposite the stairs.

  ‘It’s not Voodoo.’ He looked around distractedly, as though something was bothering him.

  We all looked at where Mother was pointing to the little tattered poppet strung from a nail by the door. The doll’s chequered dress was ripped and the hair braids pulled and uneven. It watched us with its solitary eye.

  ‘Looks like one of yours.’ Mirabelle smirked at me.

  ‘Oh, you mean the one I stick pins in when I’m thinking about you, Godmother.’ We stared at each other.

  Spear shook his head. ‘Can you not stop jibing at one another for one second?’ He walked purposefully into the hallway, looking around as if scoping enemy territory. He was clearly agitated and this in itself was disturbing, quite apart from the fact that there was a hanged doll above us.

  ‘We’re sorry, OK, Spear.’ He looked at me. ‘I mean . . . what I mean is, there’s human hair over the front door and this dead poppet here. I’m . . . we’re just scared. OK? That’s all. We just tend to do this when we’re scared.’

  His eyes settled on me and studied me for a moment, with a look that seemed to be trying to work out if I was actually mad or just sad. I’m well acquainted with that look.

  Mother decided to break the tension. ‘What sort of people lived here?’

  ‘Lonely ones—’ Spear turned away distractedly and looked up the dark stairs — ‘I should imagine.’

  ‘I’m sure they were, but—’

  ‘It’s all from a long time ago. Let’s not great freaked out, OK? There’s nothing here to be scared of.’ He glanced over at me. ‘OK? They were just two old sisters and they didn’t go out much. One was a little . . . childish for her age.’

  Mother and Aunt Charlotte eyed each other as if that was familiar.

  ‘You seem to know a lot about it all of a sudden.’ Mirabelle stood with her hands on her hips.

  ‘I don’t know that much about it. Bottlenose said it was Orlon. I’ve not been here before, but the locals talk about it. We pick up info about various islands when we’re gathering ideas for trips. This one didn’t sound too great. I’m not into all these old folk tales.’ He tested the banister carefully with his hand. ‘Ask Bottlenose when he arrives. He’s a local. I’m not. It’s just nonsense.’ Spear started to walk up the bare boards of the stairs. Each step he took sent weak groans up from the wood.

  Mother looked at him curiously. ‘Why didn’t you mention this place? Why have we spent a whole night freezing—’

  Tap.

  He stopped, his foot hovering over the step.

  Tap.

  It was above us.

  ‘It’s nothing. This is an old house,’ he said unconvincingly, ‘there’s a lot of broken windows and the wind will howl through here.’

  He carried on and walked carefully to the top of the stairs.

  ‘I don’t think you should go up there.’

  He turned and looked at me. ‘It’s fine. You people are so jumpy.’ He shook his head and started looking around him.

  ‘Wait!’ Aunt Charlotte said. ‘There’s something up there.’

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’

  Aunt Charlotte turned to Mother. ‘Why must you always say things like that? All you do is criticize. I just . . .’

  Mother and Aunt Charlotte’s arguing faded into the background as I watched Spear disappear through a door on the left at the top of the stairs.

  Tap.

  We fell silent. A smooth blade of cold air travelled across the back of my neck. There was still that strange, discordant tune in the distance, beneath the sound of the wind. But the outside world seemed very far away now.

  ‘It’ll be a cupboard or a window banging in the wind,’ Mother said.

  ‘It didn’t sound like a window or a cupboard to me.’

  ‘And you can tell from down here, can you, Charlotte?’

  ‘Oh, always got to have a little dig, haven’t you?’ Aunt Charlotte turned to face her. ‘Is now really the time?’

  Spear cried out.

  A sharp thud.

  Then there was silence. We waited, unable to speak or move.

  It was followed by a flurry of noise from the room above. Heavy boots running and then falling, chaotic banging and scratching in some great explosion above us.

  There was no time to think if it was a good time to run up the stairs. I was first, Mother a couple of steps behind. Mirabelle and Aunt Charlotte jostled with each other to make sure they weren’t last. Although my chest was surging with fear, it seemed to move me faster. We raced up the stairs. The door was closed. Spear wasn’t making any sound. All we could hear were the taps we’d heard earlier interspersed with dull thuds.

  ‘Spear?’ I tried the door. ‘Spear, it’s jammed.’

  ‘Mr Spear?’ Mother shouted. She likes to be formal in a crisis. ‘Can you hear me?’

  There was a loud rushing as if the room was suddenly flooding with water.

  Thud.

  Thud.

  Thud.

  A trickle of noise slipped under the rough door, a whimpering sound, keening like a child. A very frightened child. I thought of the doll downstairs, strung up in its rotting clothes. This was no place for a child — it was no place for the living. I looked around at the dark landing. Yellowing wallpaper hung from the walls, its flowers wilted and dying onto the bare boards as they peeled away. An animal’s head was strung up above one door.

  ‘Spear, can you hear me?’ I pushed the door again but it didn’t move.

  Mother’s face was rigid and intent. ‘Force the door. Come on, Charlotte get your weight behind it.’

  ‘Why can you never be nice, Pandora?’

  ‘Now is not the time for nice. Just get the bloody door open. Mirabelle, come on, you always help.’

  She doesn’t. Mirabelle just likes to give Mother that impression and Mother loves all forms of flattery.

  ‘Come on!’ Mother is actually quite good at rallying people. Mostly because no one dares do otherwise.

  We all leaned our shoulders hard against the door, although I suspected Mirabelle wasn’t pushing at all. It did nothing.

  We stood back for a moment. Aunt Charlotte leaned over me and turned the handle. This time it opened. She looked at me and smiled. ‘Little trick I learned.’ She winked.

  ‘Oh, Ursula, why didn’t you try the handle for God’s sake?’ There was always time for Mother to be disappointed, even in an emergency.

  The door buffered against something. The fringing of a rug was just visible through the crack. It had rucked up into folds behind the door. We shoved again. The fast pattering and the thudding paused, as if something was now aware of us and it paused to watch the door.

  Another groan came from the room.

  ‘Spear, we’re nearly in,’ I called. ‘Hang on.’

  We pushed again and made enough room for me to squeeze round. As I edged slowly through the small gap, I could see the long dark gouges in the wood, cracks and scratches of age. I ran my fingers down the seam of the long scars embedded in the grain. It was almost as if something had tried to get in, or out.

  Spear was lying on the floor, his head next to an empty fire grate. A single berry of blood formed on his temple and slipped in a thin line across his face to the floor, where it pooled on the black hearth tiles.

  I closed
my eyes and felt the familiar quick beat of panic swill through my chest. I’ve never been good with blood. I screwed my fingernails deep into the palms of my hands: the cold, wet skin gave easily as if there was no substance to it at all, as though I could drill the nails right through the skin if I just pushed a little harder.

  There was a sudden flurry and scratching that sounded as if it was coming from the corner by the open window. I opened my eyes, but in that moment there was a frantic smattering of noise and the air was alive. I held my arms over my head. I was panting for breath. The room was moving all around me. I squeezed my eyes shut and my head filled with flashing light. A strange, high-pitched whistling rang in my ears as if it was inside my head. It began to form into a tune that was fading away. I was falling.

  I felt a hand gripping my arm so tight it sparked with pain. ‘Ursula,’ Mother’s voice rose above all the other noise. ‘Ursula, can you hear me?’

  I was drowning. I was flailing and couldn’t breathe. I felt the sweat prickle down my face, a weight push down on my chest. My legs buckled and the noise grew louder, the air whisking round me. My face was flooded with strange beating. I saw the green eyes again as my knees hit the floorboards.

  ‘Ursula! Ursula!’ Mother shouted above the noise. She bent and held my shoulders. ‘It’s birds. Ursula, it’s birds. Just birds.’

  The desperate air beating against my face and raking through my hair seemed to lessen slightly. I curled myself tight and held Mother’s hand on my shoulder. I kept my eyes almost shut until only a curl of light could come through. The rotten smell of animal mess and feathers circled me and settled over my face and in my mouth. I felt the bile rise under my tongue.

  ‘Ursula, it’s birds coming down the chimney and through that window.’ She was pointing to something I couldn’t make out.

  ‘There’s Spear!’ Aunt Charlotte shouted above the rattling sound of the birds hurtling into the walls, their claws scratching at the bare plaster.

  I let a slit of light through my eyelids and saw the black cloud of birds. Aunt Charlotte ran forward and bent over Spear’s motionless body. She felt his neck in a way that was disturbingly brusque.

  ‘I think he’s alive!’ she called back to us.

  ‘What do you mean, you think he’s alive?’ Mother shouted.

  ‘I don’t know how to find a pulse. I just . . .’

  It hadn’t even occurred to me that he might be dead until that moment.

  ‘What? You’re kidding! For God’s sake, Charlotte! Just get him out.’ Mother said.

  Aunt Charlotte grabbed him under the arms and Mirabelle ran forward, crouching low with the birds swarming above her. It panicked them and their noise rained down on us again, their bodies pattering into the ceiling.

  ‘I’ll get Ursula out,’ Mother shouted. ‘You two focus on Spear.’ I felt her thin, sharp fingers under my armpits and my legs were dragging through the mess and feathers along the rough wooden boards. The light drifted over my eyes and then there was nothing.

  But the green eyes still lingered there in my darkness.

  CHAPTER 16: SOMETHING ELSE LIVES HERE

  The line between the things that live and those that don’t can sometimes blur. It is not always binary. My eyes began to focus and my mind drifted back into the room. I didn’t recognize anything. I glanced around the dark walls. Mother was asleep opposite me by the wall, Aunt Charlotte and Mirabelle either side of her. Spear? I remembered him being dragged, a line of blood down his head. I sat up and looked around. He was there, next to the door. I watched him for a moment. He was breathing. He was alive. His eyes were shut, and he looked as though he might be asleep. Given how much his face was twisting and frowning, he must have been dreaming. Did he see those green eyes again?

  I couldn’t make out much more of the room. There was a small table near me under the window and two rickety chairs. The rest was hidden in shadows. I looked up to the window. There were no curtains. Through the filaments of glass that splintered out from the window frame, I could see mist circling the moon, a blind eye above us in the sky. We were deep into the night. I must have been out for hours.

  Those strange lights were still flickering out there in the desolate fields. Witch lights, Bottlenose had called them. I thought of his tale of the poor, tortured woman with her shod feet and hands: the two sisters who’d lived here. Perhaps there were once witches here. Driven out. As strong or artful as they were, this island could cripple any spirit. How could they endure this? The long, slow nights of cold and days of ragged hunger, everywhere wet with rain and sea spray, a world like that could burden even the most beguiling witch. Women out here, struggling at the edges of survival and all the tales of them bent and twisted so they became the thing to fear. Men who came and told stories about them saw them as the evil, not the sea or the cold or the rabid storms.

  My eyes lingered on those moments of light in the black hills. They were groundless, fleeting in the darkness. Were they witch lights? Were they something to fear? I lay down, my head throbbing and exhausted, my stomach empty and griping. I watched the flickering points in the distance until they finally lulled me, and my world slipped back into stark dreams. Maybe Green Eyes was out there with them now. Or maybe she was here.

  * * *

  The day was broken before it had even begun. A new frail light stalked the horizon slowly, insistently dripping into my eyes until I opened them fully. I looked up at that window. The vague beginnings of dawn were touching the hilltops. It had been a fitful few hours of sleep. Spear had cried out for his wife more than once. Whether it was deep anguish, loss or guilt, there was no telling. But with each new cry, I had stumbled into my own dreams of those green eyes — sometimes desperate, sometimes strangely cruel, always looking at me as if they could see right through me. I had woken regularly to sounds of Mother and Aunt Charlotte breathing and snoring. It had been steadying among the nightmares.

  There’d been only snatches of sleep, and I’d wished for the night to end, but now that dawn was finally surfacing, the day seemed already exhausted. My teeth and mouth were coated with a sour taste now. I thought of that original kit list we’d been sent. What I wouldn’t give for a toothbrush wrapped in cling film now. I watched the melancholy light, reluctant to break through the mist. The rest of them were still asleep, or pretending to be. Either way, no one was ready for one another yet.

  I lay with my drained-out thoughts, staring into the ceiling. The plaster was damp and stained with a bitter shade of neglect. That’s when I was first aware of him being on the island, standing still in the corner of the room, his head bowed but eyes fixed on me. He held no fear for me. When you lose someone so dear you are no longer afraid of those ghosts and phantoms of the night because you want nothing more than to see them one last time, whatever state they turn up in.

  I knew the figure in the corner was only in the corner of my thoughts. Dad wasn’t real, he never is anymore. But still he watched me with eyes that said, ‘I could be real for a moment if you believe.’ But I don’t. I can’t let myself be tempted. That way, true madness lies, and I can’t go back there again. I used to think I saw him all the time when I was younger but that faded and disappeared. Then after the Slaughter House, he came back clearer than ever before. Bob the Therapist reckons it’s a manifestation of my extreme anxiety. Give that man the Nobel Prize. Whatever it is, I wasn’t about to start analyzing it away right now. I needed any comfort I could cling to.

  That was when I heard it. My dark spectre in the corner heard it too. I knew he did because his ivory eyes travelled along and looked up at the ceiling.

  Clunk. Slare. Clunk.

  Clunk. Slare. Clunk.

  I glanced around the room. They were still in exhausted sleep, their spent minds and bodies totally surrendering to it.

  Clunk. Slare. Clunk.

  I looked back to Dad but he’d gone. He always does. That’s the trouble with ghosts, they’re never there when you need them.

  Clu
nk. Slare. Clunk.

  It was directly above me, a constant, rhythmic sound, beating out the seconds. I sat up. Mother was a few feet away sleeping as usual as if it was her who was dead. I have always thought she must have a very clear conscience to sleep so heavily, that or the build-up of medication over the years has completely stupefied her.

  Mirabelle and Aunt Charlotte hadn’t moved and looked like they were still asleep, although I wouldn’t be surprised if one of them was watching. Like all dragons, they both sleep with one eye open.

  Across the other side of the room, Spear slept fitfully, still muttering names from the dark sea of his dreams. I couldn’t make any words out over the sound of Aunt Charlotte snoring like a drunk at closing-time. A sound I know very well. Aunt Charlotte’s favourite watering hole, The Foot and Glove, have had my number on speed dial ever since they discovered Mother had given them a fake one. Mother’s never any use at that time of night anyway.

  Clunk. Slare. Clunk.

  The noise, although muffled by the floorboards, was insistent and clear but the others seemed to be utterly oblivious to it. I pulled my coat tightly around me. The cold memory of the sea still clung to my clothes. The damp coat made little difference. It was as if the sea had washed through this room in an icy wave while we slept and had pooled once more in our clothes, our skin and hair. It had got a taste for us, had settled deep into our bones. The thought of our drowning remained, an invisible scar.

  Clunk. Slare. Clunk.

  I was on my feet. I walked thief-like through the long shadows. There was little to avoid, except for sleeping bodies. I passed the old dining table, cut deep with the marks of long-forgotten meals. The two wooden chairs sat primly under it. I thought of those two sisters again. Spear had said they were the last to live here. Did they die here or did the island finally drive them out when it was too much for their old bent backs and aching joints? Were they out there in the lights or did part of them linger on here, in these decaying rooms, watching us now, these strange invaders?