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

by VICTORIA DOWD

  I’d stayed awake and watched more of the witch lights prickle the dawn sky. Everyone else had settled back to their floor spaces. I could tell Spear was still awake. He’d occasionally glanced over and I’d wished he’d just fall asleep. I had prayed that he wouldn’t come and start asking more about his wife. I’d told him everything. What more could I do? It wasn’t as if I was hiding anything from him. I’d definitely not seen who pushed her under or even if it was actually his wife. I was beginning to doubt that I’d really seen anything at all. But whatever I said about my recollections didn’t seem good enough, at least not for Spear.

  Dad’s shadow had lingered unseen by everyone else in the corner in those early hours. I wanted to sit and talk it through with him. But finally, exhaustion had dragged me under again. I’d drifted fitfully in dream-soaked sleep for at least a couple of hours after the skull discovery, when we’d finally all managed to resettle. I’d dreamed of cupboards full of skulls pouring out over me and the rocking horse trampling across it all. The strange clunking noise had stopped but my mind still drifted to that room.

  So I had no real idea of what time it was or even where I was when Bridget first started shouting and calling out for Mr Bojingles to ‘stop licking the dead man’. We all stumbled up the stairs to find Angel’s body still in his bed, rigid and contorted with death, his eyes turned up into his head as if he had to take one last look at his thoughts. Perhaps he knew his killer. Perhaps he tried to look away. Whatever reason it was, his face had already started to take on the gaunt, empty look of the skulls in the cupboard next door, his mouth stretched taut into a rictus death-grin. People are very quick to lose the look of life when they die. They don’t just look like they’re sleeping. They don’t look the same. They look dead.

  His skin was already anaemic, smooth and eggshell-dull. The life had stopped in his veins. Exhausted, the blood had finally given up trying to move anymore. It couldn’t have happened that long ago, we’d all been up here at dawn. We’d been right next to his room when we were looking at all the skulls. Was he dying then or was it later while we slept? Had he been alone?

  Something sudden and desperate had torn a frantic path through his limbs until he couldn’t cling to life any longer. Finally, he’d just let the life evaporate from him as if it was no more than that one last breath of air.

  But before that, he’d struggled, that was for sure. Battled. He’d grappled to hold on to those last seconds, rising and falling. A hand hung limp over the side of the bed and I could see the faint white crescent moons in the palm where he’d gripped his hands so tight that he’d left the imprint of his fingernails. All this suffering when we could have been standing right outside his door.

  ‘Poison,’ Bridget pronounced, as if she was a judge deciding on the form his execution should take.

  ‘Aye, Sibyl,’ Bottlenose said gravely.

  ‘Her name is Bridget. The dog’s the one with the ridiculous name.’

  ‘No, Aunt Charlotte, I believe what he was referring to was that Sibyl is a witch, a wise woman—’

  ‘Well, that’s definitely not Bridget then, is it?’ Mirabelle sniffed.

  We had all clustered at the small doorway to the bedroom, our faces wedged round. If Angel could have looked back at us out of that room now, we would have looked just like a painting in a frame, a cluster of shocked and disbelieving faces.

  Aunt Charlotte was the first to step forward, but Mother blocked her with her arm. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Mother frowned. ‘He could have died of anything.’

  ‘I need to take his pulse.’

  ‘But you said you didn’t know how to?’

  ‘Well, I won’t learn unless I try.’

  Mother paused. ‘Can I suggest learning on living people first, not the dead, who don’t have a pulse?’

  Aunt Charlotte looked bemused for a moment, then pulled her mouth down and nodded as if the idea was somehow novel.

  Bottlenose was taking none of this. He pushed away Mother’s arm and walked towards Angel. He stood over the body as if he was studying it, then laid his hand flat on Angel’s face.

  ‘He’s not stiff yet,’ Bottlenose said.

  We frowned but no one spoke.

  ‘If he don’t stiffen up, there’ll be another death in the family before the end of the year.’ He nodded to himself, his fingers still splayed out on Angel’s face.

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t know his family. Perhaps Mr Spear might be able to help with that,’ Mother said with aggressive expectation.

  ‘What’s happening here?’ Spear’s dreary, broken voice was behind us. He still seemed drugged with sleep, his weary eyes barely able to open. A dried brown smear of blood was still visible on the side of his face, the cut even more livid and bruised.

  ‘We were just commenting on who his family was—’

  ‘Was? Whose family?’ Spear was suddenly awake, his eyes darting between us.

  ‘The dead man.’

  ‘The dead man?’ He eased his way to the front and peered into the room. ‘He’s dead!’

  ‘That’s why we’re calling him “the dead man”,’ Aunt Charlotte said.

  He frowned at her. ‘He’s dead,’ he said in disbelief. He almost seemed too shocked.

  ‘It’s Angel, the man you were fighting with, remember?’ Jess had appeared from the bedroom to the left of us — the bird room. She spoke in an empty voice. ‘He’s dead now. Someone killed him.’

  ‘What?’ Spear stared in confusion at the broken body on the bed. ‘I . . . I barely touched him. He can’t . . .’ He held out his hands as if to show they were clean, and I watched as his face twisted with a bitter look. He turned to Jess and there was a new ripple of anger in his voice. ‘Hang on, you were the one who pulled a knife on him though, weren’t you? Over a pair of boots, wasn’t it?’ He leaned his head to the side in mock curiosity.

  ‘Oh, I see. I see you.’ She had a sharp, vicious smile now as if something in her was waking up. ‘Let’s fling some blame around so it doesn’t land on you. I saw how you looked at him. We all saw your arguments, heard what he said about your wife. We all know what had been going on there. You know what, he showed me his love potions, his little charm. It was remarkably similar to the one your wife was wearing, wasn’t it? Didn’t he say he’d given it to her?’

  ‘And where exactly is yours?’

  She paused. ‘I threw it away.’

  No one said anything for a moment.

  ‘You threw it away?’ Spear repeated. ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember.’

  Spear drew his head back and looked up at the ceiling as if he was trying to gather his patience. ‘We’ve got a dead man. We need to act.’

  Bridget and the dog shuffled in front of Spear and both of them looked up into his face. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Spear, although you look ridiculously guilty, this man did not die from your violent fists or indeed your arguments about your philandering wife.

  ‘Wait a minute.’

  Bridget placed a hand on Spear’s shoulder which was a surprisingly awkward moment for all of us. ‘This was some form of poison, Mr Spear. The dead man—’ She pointed towards him as if we were in any doubt as to who she was talking about — ‘This dead Angel, he ingested something.’

  ‘Oh now, hang on, we don’t know that. It could be natural causes,’ Mirabelle said. ‘This could very easily be a heart attack or some other—’

  ‘No, it couldn’t,’ Bridget continued. ‘Look at his mouth. Look at the discolouration and the contours of the body. He was gripped by something so potent that nothing could have saved him even if we’d heard his wretched, pathetic attempts to get help.’

  We waited in stunned silence.

  ‘What?’ Mother stared at her. ‘You heard him?’

  ‘They just never listen, do they, Mr Bojingles? I said “if we’d heard”. I’m just trying to set the scene, dear. Bring a little drama to it.’

  ‘Bring a little drama to it?
’ Spear stared at her. ‘The man’s dead, what more drama do you want?’

  ‘Well, in fairness, I think if he had been screaming for help it might have been more dramatic.’ Aunt Charlotte looked round for agreement. ‘I’m just saying, he’s just a . . . a dead body, really.’

  ‘Charlotte, we’ve spoken about this before.’ Mother sighed. ‘Thoughts and speech. Two entirely different things.’

  The self-satisfied smile spread across Bridget’s lips. ‘You never change, do you. Coming on this trip with you this time—’

  ‘Woah, woah—’ Mother held up her hands — ‘Who said you’d come with us? You’re just here.’

  Bridget’s tight smile didn’t shift. ‘After our last little expedition to the Slaughter House, I became very interested in poisons and their effects. It’s a wonderful world! Do you know he may well have died within minutes? How fabulous is that?’

  We listened in appalled silence.

  She shook her head knowingly. ‘Did you know that if major governments could harness the real power of the planet’s most poisonous substances rather than messing around with perfume bottles and umbrellas to dispense it, we’d have no need for all these silly nuclear weapons? These substances could wipe out millions if they were properly used.’ She turned and began to trot off with her little dog just as if she was on her way to church. ‘Now, Mr Bojingles, do we think cyanide? No, not again. Something new, I think. Very odd that Ursula didn’t hear anything when she was creeping around in that cupboard, don’t you think?’

  ‘She’s talking to the dog, isn’t she?’ Aunt Charlotte said quietly. ‘Imagine if they harnessed the poison of those two.’

  We watched in fascination as they disappeared into the bedroom.

  ‘We need to get everyone away from this room,’ Spear said firmly. ‘We actually don’t know what killed him yet and it could still be active in there or on him.’

  ‘That’s right, move us away from the murder scene.’ I had no idea why Jess had taken so badly against Spear, but she wasn’t letting it go. There was so much animosity between these two now. Spear didn’t respond.

  ‘Right, everyone downstairs.’ Mirabelle put her arm round Mother’s shoulder. ‘Come on, Pandora, you don’t need this at your stage in recovery.’

  Mother has been in “recovery” ever since I can remember. She’d have to be the dead one to need this much recovery. She and Mirabelle started to move away slowly, heads bowed, as if we were already leaving his funeral.

  ‘Come on, Ursula, dear.’ Aunt Charlotte guided me away from the room. ‘I know how much you like looking at dead bodies, but let’s call it a day here, OK?’

  I frowned. ‘I don’t like looking at dead bodies. I just happen to have been around a lot of them.’

  ‘You all have,’ Jess murmured. She kept her eyes locked on me. Her expression was no longer simply that of the grieving widow. There was a new suspicion in her eyes. I looked at her neck. She’d said she’d thrown the silver phial away that he’d given her. Angel had been wearing one just the same as Spear’s wife when we met her on the boat. Azogue, he’d called it, part of his Espiritismo, to ward off the Evil Eye or bring love. It brought him neither and it certainly couldn’t have saved him from this. By the look of his tortured body, nothing on Earth could have done that.

  ‘Come on, Ursula.’ Pandora was edging down the stairs with the others.

  ‘I’ll be there in a minute, Mother.’

  She watched me closely.

  ‘Mother, I’m fine. I’m a big girl now. I don’t need a chaperone.’

  ‘Your mother’s just worried, like I am, that you’re looking at the body too long, dear.’ Aunt Charlotte looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘No, Aunt Charlotte,’ I sighed. ‘That’s not what Mother’s worried about.’

  Mother tutted then turned away.

  They wandered down the stairs and Jess shut herself back in the bedroom where the birds had been.

  Spear was leaning back into the corner beside the chest of drawers with the photograph of the two women on it, near to the skull cupboard. He’d come from nowhere when I’d been in there. The landing had been empty before I went in, I was sure of it. He was half in shadow now and I couldn’t really make out the look on his face. His eyes shone beetle-black in the half-light and I could tell he was watching me. I suddenly didn’t feel very comfortable, standing in that hallway with a man who’d just been accused of murder and the body lying a few feet away.

  ‘Can I trust you?’ I said.

  He took a deep breath. ‘Why?’

  I shrugged. ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe because I’m stranded on an island with three dead men and a possible murderer among the rest of us.’

  ‘Why do you always make a joke of death?’

  ‘You’ve known me less than forty-eight hours. You don’t know anything about me and death or what I always do.’

  He took a step closer and again, without thinking, I took a step back.

  He stopped. ‘OK—’ He held up his hands as if he was showing me that he wasn’t armed, or perhaps he thought I was the dangerous one — ‘look, we’ve got to try and work together if we’re going to get out of here. That’s all I’m saying.’

  I looked over at what was left of Angel, an empty bundle of clothes, just bones and skin. His face was marbled grey and wrought with so much pain that it had twisted into shapes it had never known in life. The charms and symbols hung worthlessly round his neck. Love potions, a good luck talisman, a crucifix, an Egyptian ankh — all reduced to nothing more than pointless trinkets now that they hung from a dead man’s neck. The silver phial dangled across his partially bare chest.

  He’d said he had a botánica, selling all his snake oil and an armoury of life-affirming, enhancing and preserving tonics and charms. But it had all ended here, with this grotesque death. As I stepped forward, my foot crunched on some of the broken beads and chains that had scattered out from his frantic hands. All those plans and dreams, beliefs and convictions had become meaningless in that last moment, all gone in that one final breath.

  ‘Do you think she was right? Do you think he was poisoned?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I looked into Angel’s drained face, blanched with horror, his eyes cold stones, his jaw rigid with pain. The right arm dangled down, a waterfall of bracelets and beads that ended in a broken pool below. The left hand clutched his chest and chains. I looked closer at the liquid silver azogue charm he’d explained and doled out copies of to various women. It wasn’t silver anymore. It was empty. The lid had been dislodged, perhaps by him as he grasped, and the liquid silver had gone.

  ‘Look at that.’

  Spear frowned.

  ‘The liquid silver charm. The same as the one he gave . . .’ I glanced at Spear.

  ‘It’s OK. I know he did.’

  I looked back at Angel and the poisonous shapes his body had been bent into. Liquid silver.

  My hands were shaking. I started to see the familiar pattern of speckled blue lights behind my eyes. My legs dipped in the middle and a slow droplet of sweat traced down my spine.

  ‘Ursula?’ Spear put a hand under my elbow. ‘Are you OK?’

  I steadied my breathing just how Bob the Therapist had recommended. As with most of his advice, it was utterly useless and achieved nothing. ‘I’m fine. I’m fine.’ I pushed myself away from the room, the nausea building in a sour pool beneath my tongue. ‘I just get a little dizzy sometimes. I . . .’ I stumbled and felt the floor drifting away. Spear held my arm and guided me towards the banister. The doors to Jess’s room and the room with Bridget and Bottlenose were both closed. There was a stillness around us. I suddenly felt very alone on that landing with Spear. Mother was right, I should have gone downstairs.

  ‘OK. Take it easy.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I tried to pull my arm away. ‘Where were you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I was first in the skull cupboard.’

  ‘I don�
��t know, out here, I suppose. What’s the matter with you?’

  I tried to steady myself again. ‘I just faint a bit, that’s all. I get . . . a bit stressed, you know. Bob says it’s anxiety.’

  ‘Bob?’

  ‘It’s not important. I just pass out sometimes.’

  He gave me an overly sincere smile. ‘Well, Ursula, that is a bit inconvenient for you when you find yourself on your own with the killer, isn’t it?’

  I stopped — instantly petrified at the top of the stairs. I felt my breath quicken.

  He leaned close towards me and whispered in my ear. ‘I’m joking, you idiot.’ He pulled back and smiled. ‘Now, lean on me and just take a minute.’

  I could feel the panic rising. I looked at him. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or a murderer. It’s strange how many times that’s happened to me and I still don’t know.

  ‘Liquid silver,’ I whispered. My foot slipped from under me and I felt his grip tighten round my waist.

  ‘Shhh.’ His voice made a sharp sound. ‘Don’t want to disturb anyone. We just need to get you downstairs. Don’t worry, I’m here.’ It didn’t make me feel very safe.

  ‘Liquid silver.’ My voice split.

  ‘You said. Now leave it! Come on.’

  I felt his grip tighten on me again. We were at the top of the stairs.

  ‘I can’t feel my legs,’ I breathed.

  ‘That doesn’t matter. You’re not going to need them now.’ His hand moved to my back. ‘You can lean on me.’

  I could see Mother at the bottom of the stairs frowning up at me. Mirabelle was beside her and Aunt Charlotte was coming out of the sitting room door.

  ‘Mother,’ I breathed. I tried to pull away from Spear but he dragged me back in with his other arm.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said quietly at my ear.

  ‘Ursula?’ Mother was looking exasperated. ‘What on earth are you doing? You, Action Man, what are you doing with my daughter?’