David hadn't moved from where they had plopped him the night before. The whole walk from Steve's place they had taken turns propping him up and assuring him that everything was alright. Emma was tired of resenting him and felt guilty for being ashamed. She always knew she didn't want to be one of those people on the television taking care of a chronically ill child or a parent with dementia. She knew what people meant when they said “so courageous” with those flinching eyes. She hated the thoughts that forced their way into her mind when she let her guard down. And her guard was dropping more often than usual.
One of the memories she wished she could purge from her brain was the man in the hotel bar in Derby. She didn’t even know his name. Nothing happened between them, but at the time she wished it had. That was the part that made her sick. That moron switching between Stella and cheap vodka was the unknown. Something, anything else. It was disgusting to think that this was all it took to tempt her. A fresh start anywhere, even a hotel bar in Derby.
There is no such thing as a clean slate.
Emma sat back down on the bed and closed her eyes. She was exhausted. She was tired of wanting it to be over with, and tired of hating herself every time she thought about what it would be like on her own, working a case without distraction.
An urgent knock interrupted her thoughts. She tried to ignore it, but it grew louder with each bang. Emma fumbled for the door knob. It gave her a moment’s pleasure to imagine locking the door and never dealing with Jessie or anyone else again.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Cambourne, PC Cambourne. Ma'am.”
“Jessie?”
“It's me, Jessie.”
“Yes, what is it?”
“It's very important, can I come in?”
“Can it wait? I'll be down later.”
Jessie shouted at breakneck speed into the door. “Well, I don't think it can, Mrs. PC, ma'am. It's Gregory Browne's wife Lily, see. She went to the station early this morning, and Evan didn't answer, which on its own is pretty normal because he's usually dead to the world this time of morning...”
Emma opened the door. The younger woman was shouting into the keyhole as if the whole door wasn't made of saw dust and good intentions.
“Jessie, if it's important could you just say it?”
“Evan's dead, Ma'am. At the station.”
Emma only noticed she had lost track of time when Jessie started talking again.
“…or should I not?”
Emma tried to shake her head clear. “What? How did he die?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Who?” Her skin felt alternately hot and cold.
“Lily, Constable. I said, she-”
“Lily? Is she there now? Who’s up there?”
“I don't know. She ran here and told me to get you and then ran off again.”
“Jesus, there's an unattended body up on the hill?” The shock parted and revealed a burning fight or flight response. “I'm on my way. Find the Governor General and tell him to meet me at the station immediately.”
The day wind was picking up speed when Emma ran out into the street and up the hill. She felt it at her back, pushing her up the hill to the station.
Emma used her only latex glove and a delicate grip to turn the handle of the front door. A man was on the other side, helping himself to a cup of tea. Evan's body was slumped forward in a chair surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. Two people took turns poking Evan in the stomach. Several men and women wandered around the room looking bored.
Emma shouted over the heads of the small crowd. “What in the blazing Christ is going on here? Get the hell out, all of you! Wait. Who found the body?”
Lily Browne raised her hand. To do so she had to put down a bulky television set.
“You stay. Everyone else, get out, and for fuck's sake, don't touch anything.”
On their way out, the people covered their own tracks with fresh muddy prints, which in turn obscured any indication of who had stomped around the station last night. Emma took in the body in the chair. Evan had died from a single gunshot wound to the right temple, with a small pistol on the ground below his right hand.
“Mrs. Browne, is this how you found Mr. Finch? No one has moved anything, as far as you know?”
“No, Constable. It was just like this. Do you think he was murdered?”
“One thing at a time.” She knelt to look at his right hand. “Blood spatter. Possible gunpowder residue. It's consistent with a suicide, but we'll need to send the body and the weapon to the mainland to be sure. You wouldn't happen to know when the next boat is scheduled to arrive, would you?”
“Well normally we'd have to wait for Beatrice, but there's a charter coming tomorrow, I think. Zoe's supposed to be on it.”
“Let's hope they have an extra refrigerator.”
“Yes, Constable?”
“What?”
“You said something about a refrigerator.”
“It's nothing. Why isn't the Governor General here?”
“Yes, Constable.”
Emma stared at the woman's blank half-smile.
“Are you alright, Mrs. Browne?”
“Yes, considering. It's been a long night.”
Night. Last night.
“I was told Mr. Browne might have paid a visit to the station last night. I'll need to talk to him immediately.”
“You're welcome to, if you know where he is.”
“You're kidding.”
“Didn't come home last night. I came up here, thinking the two of them would be passed out in front of our good telly. You can imagine my surprise when I get here and find it's not even warm.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Browne. You can go now but be ready to talk to me again soon.”
Once the station was emptied of voyeurs and she was convinced the evidence had only been mostly destroyed, Emma took a deep breath. It was impossible to think with so many eyes watching and hands scuttling over everything. Now that she was alone, she could turn her mind to the task at hand. She looked into Evan’s half-closed eyes. Basically alone, anyway.
She gave the room a careful sweep. Along one wall banks of antique communications equipment beeped and blinked. On another wall the station's one window had been shoved into a square hole cut in the metal shell. You could feel the draft slipping between the window and the frame from clear across the room. A counter held the necessities of thankless late-night shifts: an electric kettle, a microwave, a small refrigerator underneath, and a liquor cabinet. The cabinet was locked, its contents of half a bottle of Irish whiskey secure behind glass. The fridge was not so lucky. It hung open, mostly empty. Having watched Darren walk out the door with an armful of Australian beer moments before, Emma did not consider this much of a mystery. Everything was in its place, and nothing had been moved since she visited the station the day before.
One difference stood out to her. On the counter there were three glasses, in a row. Two were empty, with a thin smell of whiskey and a slight brown ring on the counter to show that they were used recently. The third glass was full and undisturbed. Holding them up to the light with the end of her sleeve, she could not see any evidence of fingerprints, but she made a note to submit them to a lab on the mainland as soon as possible. Emma paced the room until she had lost track of time but could find nothing else that stood out. There was no sign of struggle. If there had been foul play, there would be a motive. There would be a mistake. Somewhere, in this room, there would be a mistake.
But there was nothing.
Emma turned her eyes back to Evan. She followed the line of blood down his face, where it dripped onto his lap, and from there onto his shoes. She made a mental note to stop at the Post to pick up a few pairs of men's socks. She pulled out her phone, now no more than a camera and a note pad, and started taking pictures of the body.
She couldn't count on David, the station was empty, and the one legal authority on the island was nowhere to be found. There would be no backup.
There was no evidence of a killer on the loose on South Alderney, but something had to be behind Ned and Evan. Reason told her that suicides don't need to be connected. There were eighteen suicides a day in Britain, many of them young men like Evan. So why did she feel like she was walking through a murder scene when she took photographs of the station? She briefly considered Gregory as a culprit, but it didn't add up. Staged suicides are usually obvious, and no one on this island struck her as a criminal mastermind. Still, he may have been the last person to see Evan alive, and now he was gone. If she could find him, she had to believe there would be answers.
It took several attempts to secure a large enough cooler until Lisa from the Post reluctantly admitted she had an Esky that might fit a person and had three working wheels. She arrived dragging the large plastic box behind her with a face like Abraham bringing Isaac to the mountain.
“It’s done good by me for a lot of years. We used this old thing when we went deep water fishing and couldn’t get back for a day because of the weather.”
“Yes, it’s lovely. Can you put it here?”
“What, next to the… remains?”
“That’s the idea.”
Lisa dragged the cooler as slowly as humanly possible.
“It’s got a valve, you know. Keeps the beer cool longer.”
Emma scowled. “My favorite part is that it will hold a dead body.
The hurt on Lisa’s face drained the fight out of her.
“I’m sorry. It’s very good of you to help us out like this.”
“Us?”
“Me. You’re helping me get Evan here to the lab without too much… deterioration.”
Lisa hooked an arm under each of Evan’s armpits while Emma lifted from the ankles. The result was that Evan slid down the chair until his hips were hanging inches above the floor. Emma tried to swing the body into the cooler, but it was too low and smacked ass-first into the side. She stopped to shake away the sensation that traveled up her arm of meat slapping plastic.
“A little higher, Lisa.”
They pulled up and out, raising Evan’s torso higher from the floor until he was over the cooler. They lowered him in with a muffled thud. His feet and arms hung out, and his head rolled along the edge of one plastic wall. The movement had wafted the smell around the room. A few hours dead, Evan still smelled like Evan. Less mildewing cadaver and more Lynx body spray and cheap booze.
Lisa kept her head turned so that she could only see what she was doing in her peripheral vision. “What are they going to do with him in Perth?”
Emma didn’t have a good answer. But that was never an excuse when it came to police work.
“Check for biological residue, gunpowder or blood spatter, anything that might indicate foul play.”
“Do you think they’ll find anything?” Lisa looked sideways at the body in the box.
“Maybe.” Probably not.
It was a polite fiction to send the body to a lab when it couldn’t be kept free from contamination. Emma told herself it was possible that some evidence might have escaped her, but it wasn’t very convincing. After a short delay, someone in Perth would confirm suicide as the cause of death.
The lab couldn’t give her an answer. Not one that would satisfy her. Technicians hunched over a centrifuge were not equipped to suss out who was to blame. And murderers didn’t disappear simply because there was no murder. The dispassionate, almost bored look on Lily’s face and the others in the station bothered her. In a village like this everyone ought to know everyone else’s business, but nobody seemed to know anything useful. There was something hiding from her. A fact, somewhere. There had to be.
“Help me get his legs in.”
They tucked Evan’s knees into his chest and pushed his feet inside the edge of the cooler. Then his arms were snugly folded into the space on either side of his torso. It took three tries to get his head into a position that allowed them to close the lid.
Emma stared down at the ordinary plastic cooler, orange with a white lid, covered in layers of indelible grime. She looked at Lisa’s shoes, hoping the other woman wouldn’t feel the need to say any words. She didn’t.
At least Evan would rot somewhere other than this place. Someplace with sunshine and squirrels. That would be more mercy than most of the people here would get.
Emma saw the future telescoping away from her into infinity. No matter how short her time on the island was supposed to be, there was no guarantee that the rest of her life would offer something better than this, if she even got that far. She imagined the prospect of spending the rest of her days with nothing to keep her company but her own thoughts, and her nerves sizzled in panic.
Lisa bent down to grab one corner of the cooler.
“I’ll push if you pull.”
Without a word Emma took a chain and began to pull the cooler out the station door. Its three functioning wheels squeaked while the fourth dragged along beside.
Emma tried not to think about what it looked like inside the box as they bumped their way down the cobbled street to the Post. The only building on the island that ever contained things that could be called valuable, the Post had a safe the size of a large closet. No one ever explained to her why it smelled the way it did, and she didn’t ask. But it had no openable windows and only one key, so it was the most reasonable place to store the body until a boat arrived.
Emma pulled the chain left and right around missing cobbles. At one point a large cavity in the road forced her to make a detour. She pulled to one side and one of the wheels sank into a hidden rut. The cooler came to an abrupt stop and both Lisa and Evan slammed forward with the same bumping sound, Lisa against the back of the cooler and Evan against the front.
“We need to back up a few inches.” Emma put her hands on the corners of the box and pushed it onto a smoother patch of road. She looked around to plan the safest possible route down the street.
To one side, by the church, was the body of a seagull. It struck her that she hadn’t seen many dead birds around the island. Then a skua landed and started pulling pieces off the corpse, scattering feathers. That explained it.
This one must have been very fresh, then, to be lying there in plain view. The skua flipped it over, exposing a pattern of almost blue-gray speckles down what would have been the seagull’s back.
Lisa pulled her back from her thoughts. “Aren’t we a funny pair of pall bearers?” Emma followed her eyes to the handful of observers who had come out for the promise of seeing a dead body. They didn’t lean and whisper but kept the same discrete distance from one another. Most looked disappointed. Emma wondered what gruesome thing they expected, since one or two had been among those who lately ransacked the station.
Don't stop. Don't slow down. Keep working. Do your job. It can't get you if you don't stop moving. Emma never asked herself what “it” was. It stalked her with purpose, but it moved slowly. She knew she could outrun it. This couldn’t be just the day she dragged a dead body down the street for the amusement of fishermen and sheep farmers. This case would have some kind of answer, whether one presented itself or not.
The Post, like most businesses on the island, was an old house converted to commercial use. It had a large front room that served as the general store. Bulletin boards, art projects of children long grown, and helicopter shots of the island faded blue with age covered every inch of the walls. A poster promoting tourism encroached on the side window. A historic map seemed to show a slightly enlarged version of the island, with entire peninsulas that had since eroded into the sea. One shelf was stuffed with long life milk, spam, and Heinz baked beans. Another featured screwdrivers and plastic packets of underwear. The narrow aisles met at odd angles.
Emma dragged the makeshift coffin through the middle of the room, almost knocking over an ent
ire shelf of laundry soap.
“Thanks again, Lisa.”
“Right. I’ll see you in the morning, then.” She trailed off and stared at her. Lisa suddenly had more hands than she knew what to do with.
“It’s fine Lisa. I can take it from here.”
The woman gave a nervous smile and retreated at full speed.
The building had been cleared before arrival, which meant it was already full of people again. Jessie peaked in the window and around the poster just as Emma got the cooler around the magazines and the cashier counter, to the door of the back room. Two men in overalls watched from the corner by the front window. One man eating a bacon sandwich had to shuffle sideways to make way for her to pass. No one offered to help.
Emma grabbed a clear package of men’s socks off a rack and shoved them into her coat pocket. With one hand she fished a few notes out of another pocket and threw them on the counter.
“Police business.” She challenged the man standing by the door with her eyes, then shut the heavy door behind her.
The back room was a converted kitchen. The fixtures had been sold ages ago, leaving a featureless room with one window, braced and locked in place with enough room for an air conditioning unit and a meager ray of natural light. This, along with the sturdy door between this room and the main store, created some semblance of security. A bank of locked drawers along one wall served as a makeshift system of safety deposit boxes. Larger valuables that arrived by boat like crucial food or medical supplies were stored here, hence the air conditioner, more useful as a dehumidifier than for lowering the temperature. The principal means of refrigeration on South Alderney was waiting, but controlling moisture was critical to preserving perishables, or in this case evidence.
She entered the room and looked up at the small window. Heads squeezed into the square of glass, looking bored and ravenous for something lurid to gawk at. Emma could feel their eyes on her back as she worked. The faint shaft of light from the window felt like a spotlight.
No Stone Tells Where I Lie Page 4