by Ann Cleeves
“I don’t quite understand,” Molly said, “what happened this afternoon, and where Nick came into it.”
“After Pam’s murder,” George said, “Savage was convinced that Nick had murdered her and Charlie, because of the way in which the Todds had treated his mother. To be fair, by the time I went to see Savage he had already concluded that he had probably been mistaken. He was prepared to accept my version of events as a working hypothesis, but naturally he didn’t want to make another arrest without adequate proof. So we asked Nick for his help.”
“So when Nick said that he was a vital witness in the police’s case, you were hoping that she would try to kill him,” Mark said.
“Yes, though I didn’t expect her to be so successful. She took the bait, as we had hoped. She believed that Nick did have some information which might convict her. Perhaps she felt that she had nothing to lose when she tried to kill him. Prison will not be so different for her, from her concrete flat on the sea front. Soon she will be so disabled that she would not be able to get to the island to use the observatory. The development would not make any difference to her.”
“But she did stop it all, didn’t she?” Elizabeth said. “ The fun fairs and the hamburger stalls. She saved my home. I feel somehow that I share her guilt.”
“She helped me,” Nick said, “to exorcize mine.”
There was a silence. George wondered if he were talking about the days in prison or the minutes in the water. Through which experience did he feel that he had paid for his desire for vengeance? It was not the time to find out.
“I expect you’ve guessed that Savage and his officers came over very early this morning and installed themselves in the Wendy House. Connibear came in the inflatable while we were at lunch. I thought that she would see the cannon net as a weapon. She had talked about its danger, the possibility of an accident. Savage was in a position to watch it all day, but she didn’t go near it. She knew that Nicholas was to fire it. It would have been easy for her to turn the projectiles so that they faced him, and not the birds. But she didn’t. Of course it was too obvious. She was too intelligent. I had started to think that I was wrong, that I had mishandled the whole thing. We would never, then, have been able to convict her. But in the end, as she said, her instinct for survival was too strong. Perhaps she cared too much for the island, and not enough for the people who come here. When everyone was distracted by the cannons, by the spectacle of the net being fired, even Savage and I, she pushed Nick over the cliff. It was so simple. It could have been another accident. I didn’t even see her do it. I was watching Nick. I had seen that she had positioned herself next to him, under the wall, then I lost my concentration briefly, when he fired the cannons. When I looked back he had gone, and she had walked around the wall and was following the doctor to join the rest of you at the net. It was dreadful. For a moment I didn’t realize what she had done to him. It was as if she had made him disappear. Then I understood. One of the policemen fired a flare. It was to have been a signal to the men waiting in the inflatable that reinforcements were needed. We were just lucky that they were there. No,” he added fairly. “It was not luck. Savage is a good policeman. He had made sure that they were there.”
The party which had started that lunch-time continued. They fetched the gramophone from the Wendy House. They were, though, less frenetic, more reflective. There was not a lot of talk, but no one seemed inclined to go to bed.
Molly and George walked out on to the island. It was well after midnight. The gullies around the island were beginning to fill once more. A dog barked on the mainland, and the air was so still that they could hear it quite clearly. The light of the Seldom Seen Buoy flashed. There was a smell of bracken and of salt. Both were imagining a different island, man-made, with metalled causeway, neon lights, a pier of an island, with all trace of natural elements covered by litter and junk, the cries of the seabirds drowned by the shouts of salesmen.
“I can understand,” Molly said, “ why she did it.”
“So can I.”
“Did it never occur to you that the case should stay unsolved? That once Nicholas Mardle was released that was enough?”
“No. That never occurred to me.”
They walked together back to the observatory, but they avoided the party and went straight to bed.
Copyright
First published in 1987 by Century
This edition published 2013 by Bello
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Copyright © Ann Cleeves, 1987
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