by Jessica Mann
“What had she said, Freya?”
“Nothing I could understand. Something about a boat that was overdue. I suppose they are on their way, they never stay very long. She was telling Nonie to go to bed and keep quiet. Like that poem, ‘Watch the wall my darling and let the gentlemen go by.’ Not that this was at all poetical, she sounded too fierce. And when she saw me sitting there, ‘Who’s this?’ she said, as though I had no right in the place, and then she dragged poor Nonie out into the passage and I heard her asking all about me and saying she had told Nonie there were to be no visitors. Nonie kept saying that I live all alone and wouldn’t tell anyone anything even if I knew what to tell, which I don’t.”
“And haven’t you any idea what it was she wanted you not to tell?”
“It would be something to do with the Irish boy, of course. He’s bewitched the girl, in the same way that he bewitched poor Nonie. Men like that … of course, Nonie’s been sheltering these Irish criminals at The Castle for years. They hide out there till the heat’s off them. It’s all revenge. She’s getting her own back.”
“Does everyone know she shelters criminals?” Tamara could not help sounding surprised.
“I don’t suppose so. There’s no secret that she has Irish visitors at The Castle. There won’t be many people who remember that old story of her cousin.”
“Haven’t you ever felt you should—well, tell somebody?”
“We believe in living and letting live on Forway. They don’t do any harm.”
“Who blew up the Coastguard Station?”
“Not them. Why should they care for Forway’s independence?”
“Do you know who did, Freya?”
“Just a naughty boy. It was only a prank. Selwyn is making too much fuss altogether, in my view.”
“Some prank.”
“I’m just not sure who would have known how to do it. I don’t suppose explosions are as easy to perpetrate as all that. Of course, Pedro would have known what to do …”
Freya sounded almost … what was it? Wistful? Envious? As though she would have liked to take some dramatic action herself? “I expect Ian could have managed it,” she added.
“Probably,” Tamara murmured drily; she was thinking that she could have managed it herself too and wondered whether she would ever have occasion to use that part of her versatile training.
Freya’s eyes had fallen closed, and her breathing slowed, but she snored once loudly and woke herself up with the noise. She said, “I was thinking of Ian. I have to remind myself he’s dead. I never have to do that with Pedro.”
“Ian was away so much of the time, that’s probably why.”
“Yes. Away but alive. And now he’s dead … but still not here. I want to give you his things, Tamara.” She rose and went to her desk. “Here. His cuff-links and his emerald ring.”
“I never saw that.”
“It’s a bit flamboyant to wear nowadays. It belonged to my grandfather. I should have liked you to have his watch, and the monogrammed pencil he always used, the one George V gave Pedro’s father when they served on the Bacchus together. But as you know, nothing survived the crash.”
“I remember the pencil. Gold, with B on it. Was it B for Bacchus?”
“B for Barnes. Pedro’s father performed some service for the king—prince, as he was at the time. I never heard what; it was probably something highly disreputable, or the monogram would have been a royal G, I expect. Here.” Tamara took the sad little relics. The ring, a cameo-cut emerald, fitted on her third finger, and she put it on her left hand. Freya said, “You go ahead. Selwyn is calling for me so we can go to the meeting together. I thought I might go fishing afterwards. Mackerel for supper.”
Tamara knew that Freya had always used her boat as an escape route and that she might be feeling in need of her favourite therapy today. But she could not help worrying at the thought of Freya alone in her small cruiser. Who had the right or the duty to prevent her going? Should she be kept out of danger? For if her mind wandered when she was far out at sea, goodness knows what could happen.
But then, Tamara thought brutally, even if Freya did kill herself, it might be better for her than dying slowly with diminishing faculties. Please God, she prayed, safe in praying because she knew she would not be heard, don’t let me live to be old. She felt a horror for the frailty of human understanding. The physical decline was bearable, one could watch Freya lean on a stick, one could count her wrinkles with the dispassion that Tamara so far felt about her own incipient blemishes, but to notice a memory, a mind, a determination, being dissipated into oblivion … far be it from me, Tamara had thought early that morning, to stop Freya from doing something dangerous or even fatal.
Chapter 21
Freya’s boat was fatal to her that day. Tamara and I watched from the lighthouse hill as one of the boys who always hang around the boats rowed her out to the small cabin cruiser. We saw her hand the boy something.
“Does she pay them?” Tamara asked.
“Sweets. Or probably some cigarettes,” I told her, having earned them myself in my time.
Binoculars trained, we both saw her put a cigarette in her mouth. We watched her strike several matches.
“She’ll have to go below to light it,” I said idly.
“She must smoke forty a day,” Tamara said.
Freya opened the low door and let herself down into the cabin, a small cramped space with hardly room for a fat woman beside the engine housing and the equipment of a primitive galley.
There was a smell of gas, young Humphrey Lisle said later, weeping. He had noticed it when he pulled the dinghy alongside. “I told her to look out,” he cried. “I know the smell of bottled gas when I smell it. Freya couldn’t smell things any more, we all know that.” We all knew that. Old age and smoking had completely destroyed Freya Barnes’s sense of smell.
Out of the wind, in the shelter of the cabin, she must have struck another match; and inside the cabin, hermetically sealed until she opened its door, gas must have been leaking to fill up the atmosphere. The little boat was called The Pedro and Freya. It exploded like a petrol bomb.
For some reason that I did not understand until much later—for I did not know the circumstances of his death then—Tamara, beside me, was saying, “Ian, Ian, Ian,” over and over again.
This narrative would not make legal evidence. It is mostly hearsay; at first hand, of what Tamara eventually told me; at second hand, of what others had said to her; at third hand, of what those others had heard and passed on.
But our view of Freya’s death was immediate. Although Tamara had been thinking of it with equanimity, she was not calm at the sight. And that, deplorable though such a reaction was at the time, was a relief to me. For I did not relish being inferior to a girl, even this girl, in all the manly virtues. Equality is easier to write propaganda for than to experience. Even a properly reconstructed male like myself found it hard to be weaker and less able to cope with emergencies than this smallish girl. Is that my excuse for the sour tone with which I speak of Tamara Hoyland’s blatant superiority to Magnus Paull, of the superiority of the girl I adore to me? My excuse for the satisfaction with which I realized that I could face what she could not—that is, going down to The Town and helping to pick up the pieces?
Not that there were many pieces. A lot of people were trying to pick them up. It was simply a question of rescuing other property, dousing flames, and dunking cinders. Freya could not have survived that first blast for an instant. Most of us could do nothing but watch.
We agreed that it was obviously an accident; that Freya knew, as all boat owners know, the danger of leaks from the bottled-gas cylinders; that the disaster was a coincidence, unconnected with The Visit due the next day. My father said that nothing need change, nobody is indispensable, none of us is immortal. Others agreed that Freya would have wished things to carry on without her.
One hovered, helplessly.
After a while I went to offer to do
something, for the second time. But the necessary work was better done without a townee landlubber.
Viewed in ignorance, the scene could have seemed as pretty as a boating lake in an amusement park, a pretty coloured picture with gaudy boats bright in the sun, and people moving about with the rapidity of a comically speeded-up film. But only a small shift in perception, and it became one of those all too familiar pictures of a disaster area, where human activity seems as frantic and hurried as that in a disturbed ants’ nest. Only one other boat had caught completely on fire, and jets of water were dousing its flames. All the others had been moved away in time so that there was a bare cordon of empty water around the patch where oil was still burning, speckled with pieces of plastic and painted metal.
The older men were still working purposefully, but the resilient young already, or perhaps always, unaffected by tragedy, whizzed around in their boats as though emergency had loosened inhibitions. I watched one of the Aragon boys leaning out of the dinghy as his brother paddled through a channel of debris. He picked something out of the water, which he then pushed furtively under his sweater.
Godfrey Lisle was one of the last to come wearily up the steps, mopping his wet face. The horror of the event was compounded by a rare warmth in the air. It should have been a lovely day. Godfrey said what everyone had been saying.
“She must have known. We have all heard it so often. Check for gas leaks. Light a match and—whoomph,” he said dismally.
Anona Aragon’s shrill voice rose at the back of the crowd. “There Freddie, isn’t that what I’m always telling you? What’s that you’ve got there? Give it here. Freddie, give me that immediately. Where did you get …?”
Freddie Aragon had been forced to surrender a watch to his mother.
“That’s Pedro Barnes’s chronometer. The gold one they gave him when he …” Thetis Lisle’s voice faded away. Freddie Aragon hung his head and scuffled his feet, and his mother’s attitude changed from anger to protectiveness. Nobody else but her should accuse her son.
My father’s voice was still weak, but I think everyone heard it. “Looting. Terrorism, and now theft. What next? Anarchy?” For a moment he looked like my idea of a prophet in the Old Testament, his eyes raised to heaven, tragedy in his squared lips. Then he was the old administrator again. He said more loudly, “Our only hope is to abide by the law. We have to be able to guard ourselves from ourselves as well as from outside oppressors. Theft has been unknown on Forway.”
Freddie Aragon was crying quite loudly. “I didn’t mean it,” he wailed.
“What are you talking about, theft?” Anona Aragon shouted. “My Freddie wouldn’t steal anything. Who do you think you are, saying things like that? You’re nothing but an incomer, when all’s said and done. And worse, if what I hear is true.”
Several heads in the group of anxious people were nodding, and glances slid away from my father with a kind of abashed hostility.
“Anyway, this was an accident, wasn’t it?” Rik Gerson said. He had brought his dinghy up to the slip and was climbing out of it. He had collected up a lot of waterborne detritus, as a good ecologist should, little of it connected with the explosion of Freya’s boat. His duck-boards were covered with empty plastic bottles and pieces of polystyrene. There was a large roll of foam draught excluding tape that he was absently wiping off with his sleeve. One could see that the islanders did not much like him, Freya’s relation or no. Anona Aragon turned on him with her arms classically akimbo.
“And so are you,” she shouted. “An incomer. I saw you last night sculling around and spying on us all.” That branch of the Aragons lived in a corrugated, rusty shack on the water’s edge. On the mainland it would never have been permitted to be a human habitation. On the other hand, I had heard Thetis Lisle say that those children were never ill.
My father said, sounding very weak, “I am talking about terrorism because I found this in my letters this morning.” He held up a square of card on which were three black painted letters: F.L.F.
Chapter 22
Far from leaving her companions to cope with the emergency of Freya’s death while she retreated into feminine hysterics, Tamara had hurried across The Hill to Trinder’s Island. A girl who had seen two deaths by explosion could not believe that a third in her presence was accidental; and had not Freya told her that very morning about having overheard some cryptic, perhaps murderous, instructions to Nonie Anholt?
The dogs barked wildly when she approached The Castle, but nobody came out and Tamara went to hammer on the door. She did not know what she was looking for, but a surge of fury had not receded within her, and when her knock was unanswered she turned the handle and went in.
She looked through the ground-floor rooms, finding nobody. The place showed what its owner had made obvious, that she gloried in filth. Stalactites of cobweb dangled like something in a Hammer House of Horror movie, but the dirt was the prosaic, stinking gunge that any much-used, seldom-wiped kitchen would accumulate. Tamara had to go and gulp some fresh air before continuing her exploration. In what had been a dining-room there was an acrid smell, and the smears of oil on some otherwise relatively clean newspaper spread on the table made it look as though someone had been cleaning something there. Guns seemed more likely than shoes.
The stairs were made of imported wood, but the carvings on the banisters were hardly distinguishable from the dust that filled their interstices. The treads were dirty at the sides and smooth in the middle. Tamara went up, fastidiously not touching the greasy handrail.
Nonie Anholt had fallen, apparently some time before, and lay where she fell on what had once been a fur rug and was now a piece of beige, matted nastiness. Tamara thought that the massacre of the geriatrics had begun, first Freya, now Nonie, but as she moved closer, Nonie Anholt opened her crumpled eyes and said, “It’s you. You’re the girl that came the other day. What’s your name?”
“Tamara Hoyland.”
“I can’t get up.
She was lying awkwardly, her arm at an unnatural angle under her. Tamara knelt down.
“Did you fall?”
“You keep asking such silly questions. Frank pushed me, of course.”
Tamara’s exotic training had included more than rudimentary first aid. She managed to turn and raise Mrs. Anholt, but it was clear that she had injured her leg as well as her wrist.
“You’ll have to wait for me to fetch help.”
“I realize that,” the high voice said. A tough old bird, Tamara thought, and echoing her Mrs. Anholt said, “I am very tough. I dare say I’ll break a hip and die of pneumonia in the accepted way, but not this time.”
“I’ll go and—”
“No, wait. I’ve lasted this long. I heard the explosion. Tell me—”
“There was an … accident. A boat—”
Nonie Anholt’s mouth worked, and she seemed, oddly, to smile. “That’s right. He promised me …” Her voice trailed away. After a while she said, “What I really want is a drink.”
Swallow nothing before an anaesthetic; Tamara knew that. “You mustn’t—”
“Just tea. Something hot.”
“One isn’t supposed to—”
“I did first aid too. Hot sweet tea.”
“But if Thetis has to operate—”
“She can give me an emetic.”
A special breed, the old women of Forway; Tamara wondered whether she would ever be as tough as Freya Barnes or Nonie Anholt. There was plenty of tea in the kitchen, for Irishmen had lived in this house. The milk was powder, though. Tamara stirred a good deal of the fly-spotted sugar into the dingy brew and carried it up. Nonie Anholt drank greedily.
“Make me pee, of course. Thetis Lisle will think I’m incontinent.”
This was not the kind of establishment likely to contain a bedpan. “Do you want me to …?”
“No. Just stay, don’t leave me alone again.” But her lids closed over those startling yellow eyes to show nothing but the mask of a pathetic o
ld woman in need of succour. It took a long time to fetch it, even for a girl who could run all the way without collapsing on arrival at the quay. Selwyn Paull had fainted. Thetis Lisle was supervising his transfer to a stretcher, at the same time as keeping track over the landing of some peculiarly grisly jetsam from The Pedro and Freya. It was necessary to hurry, for the causeway would soon be covered. Thetis commandeered some men and John Yetts’s Landrover, and they hurtled, if that is the word for an inevitably slowish journey, across the slimy stones.
Nonie Anholt recovered enough to act the grande dame. “Thank you all so very much. So kind. I am so very much obliged …” until Thetis gave her a shot of some quick-acting sedative, and the undaunted voice trailed into silence.
As she watched the men manoeuvre the stretcher round the curve of the stairs, Tamara found that she was fiddling with something in her jacket pocket and took out the coiled spring that she had removed from Freya Barnes’s car two days before. It seemed a flimsy thing on which so much could depend. When she examined it closely, she saw scratches on the metal, and a shiny edge where the throttle spring had snapped across. It looked as though it had been filed almost to breaking point, so as to part whenever sudden pressure was exerted on it. Then Tamara also remembered the kinks she had seen in the brake pipe.
So Freya’s death had been second time lucky, for someone—or third time; had not somebody mentioned that the suffering Sergeant Hicks had eaten a meal in Freya’s house? Or fourth time lucky, or fifth? How could one tell what attempts had been made to dispose of Ian’s mother before this last successful murder? It would have been just so easy to loosen the gas taps and fill the cabin with an explosive mixture that the chain-smoking, match-lighting Freya could not smell.