The Invitation

by A. M. Castle

  People have long memories, in places like this. And Rachel, before she died, wasn’t shy about confiding her theories. She always loved a grisly story. She’d mentioned it to me before, when she popped round during that ‘gardening leave’ she insisted on telling everyone about. While Gita was at work. But it made a lot more sense once I’d met Penny for myself.

  ‘You know Penny’s mother insisted they swap places?’ Rachel said it slyly, watching for my reaction. ‘After the crash. So Lady T put herself behind the wheel, even though moving basically killed her. All so Penny could drag her stick insect body through life, scot-free.’ Those may not have been her exact words. She was smooth, was Rachel. But that was the gist.

  In my view, the coroner was at fault. The post-mortem on her mother must have showed injuries consistent with her being in the passenger seat, hitting the windscreen. Drivers have a distinctly different pattern of wounds after a crash, coming from contact between the sternum and steering wheel.

  Photos of Penny afterwards show her in a neck brace, but with strapping to the torso too. Broken ribs, I’d diagnose. Typical driver injury. When I googled the accident, the old crime scene pictures came up. Someone in the local force should have been sacked for that alone. The car windscreen showed spiderweb fractures, radiating out from a point of impact. That would have been the first Lady Tregowan’s head, giving her the bleed on the brain that was to finish her off, after swapping places. Her magnanimous gesture, preventing her daughter from taking the rap for dangerous, underage driving, ended up in a lifetime of shame and guilt for Penny.

  ‘Poor Penny, even all those years of nursing didn’t make her feel any better.’ Rachel had shrugged, sitting on our sofa. Of course we talked about other things, Rachel and I, during those few visits. But the Tregowans’ ancient history was on her mind.

  Did Rachel tell Penny she knew the truth, or just let her accidentally overhear all those hints she kept dropping? It must have been torture. Penny was twitchy enough when we arrived. Then the news of the baby would have been enough to get her to the brink.

  I turn to look out of the window. My desk is against it, facing into the room. Behind me is the useless Wi-Fi connector for the whole castle. The mobile signal, patchy at best yesterday, is non-existent today.

  Here, on the ground floor, the water looks even higher than it does in the sitting room above, where the others are waiting. I bet they’re wondering how long it’s going to be, now. Our deliverance. Whether Raf will get through. Or whether the waves will be less dangerous when the second tide eventually comes.

  And the big question, the one that’s on all our minds: whether Penny was really the one.

  And, if she wasn’t, whether we’ll ever get away from this place alive.

  Chapter 49

  Vicky

  Mount Tregowan, 1st November

  Weird, the way Gita bombed out of here, abandoning her girls. You’d have thought she had the devil at her heels. And now she’s slipped back into the room, avoiding my eye completely. Yet she seems relieved about something. What does she know that I don’t?

  Naturally she’s not saying a word; she just gives her girls a reassuring smile and pats Ruby’s knee. I think about it. What could have calmed some of her fears? It must be to do with Penny’s death – something that’s clarified things, not made them worse.

  Suddenly I get it. Even a woman in knots of anxiety the whole time, like Penny, would not spontaneously drop dead. There’s only one explanation that makes sense of Gita’s attitude. And fits all the facts. Penny must have stabbed Rachel, then decided she couldn’t live with herself – or the consequences – afterwards. She killed herself.

  Well, it’s not great – that’s the understatement of the century – but I suppose it beats having a psychopath in our midst. I smile tentatively at the girls and get a few lukewarm flickers back. Jane is still giving me the cold shoulder but she seems to have relaxed. No one is brave enough to look towards Roderick. The thought that his sister was a killer is not going to cheer him up at all, if it’s even crossed his mind as a possibility. He’s still sniffling away in his chair. I’m glad Rachel saw fit to kit this room out with a large box of tissues. She always did think of everything, though even she can’t have foreseen this shitshow.

  I take another sip from my cup. Gita tracks me. She doesn’t quite sigh in disappointment, but I feel the judgement. Thanks, Gita. Thanks for thinking I’m a hopeless drunk. I’m stone-cold sober now. Though I am beginning to feel a massive glass at lunchtime might be just what the doctor ordered. And the least I deserve. I’m already anxious about Raf’s mission. ‘What time does the tide go out?’ I ask the room. There’s silence.

  ‘Hello? Anybody? Just want to know when my lad will be setting out,’ I say a little more loudly. Gita looks at me incredulously.

  ‘Haven’t you been watching?’ she asks, almost crossly.

  I shrug. ‘Apparently not,’ I say. ‘Do you know?’

  ‘For your information, the tide has been and gone. The causeway’s covered again, now.’

  ‘So he’s off, already?’ I can feel the relief coursing through me. ‘He should be there soon. We shouldn’t have too long to wait, now. Before help gets here.’

  Gita just looks at me for a moment. Then she replies. ‘Yes. Shouldn’t be long now.’ She turns away. Something’s off, but I can’t work out what. And I’m too tired to puzzle at it, after the night we’ve all had. ‘Thank God, we won’t be on this godforsaken rock much longer.’ There’s a movement from Roderick and I shut up. I keep forgetting. This is his home, not just some sort of posho theme park gone wrong.

  But I really mean it. I need to be away from here. I don’t want to think about Raf out there, anywhere near those waves, dark grey-green, shifting and turning and looking about as cold and horrible as water ever could. Rachel’s pretty paved pathway has vanished again under all that brine, has it? I can’t help shivering. There’s a place for sea salt, and it’s on a nice bag of chips on the front at Middleton or Horden beach. A million miles from here. I don’t even want to wait for my lad to get back. I want to save him the trouble of the return journey. I want to leave now, too.

  ‘This is stupid,’ I say, then try and change my tone. The last thing I want to do is sound like one of Gita’s whining girls. ‘Doesn’t Rachel have a boat or anything?’

  Roderick raises his eyes from his snotty tissue for long enough to give me a baleful look. ‘The Tregowan family has a boat, yes of course,’ he says with some semblance of dignity. ‘You might remember your friend Jane arrived in it on Friday night.’

  ‘Must have missed that somehow,’ I say. I’d had a couple by the time she and Geoff turned up. ‘Well, what are we waiting for, then? Let’s bloody go and get in it,’ I say, levering myself to my feet. The cup sloshes and Gita tuts but I don’t care, it’s not going to stain. Everyone else stays put and stares at me as though I’m an exhibit at the zoo.

  ‘Come on, you blithering idiots! I can’t believe I’m the only one who wants to get away … get back to normality. Gita, don’t you want to save your girls?’

  ‘Shut up, Vicky,’ she hisses at me, and reaches across to Ruby, as though her touch can obliterate my words.

  ‘Let’s not do anything precipitate,’ Geoff pipes up. He’s been silent so long, I’d almost forgotten he was here. But now I turn on him.

  ‘Precipitate? Precipitate? We’ve been sitting here, waiting to be picked off for hours …’ I start.

  ‘Come now. The news about, erm, poor Penny … It puts paid to those concerns,’ he says in that dry way.

  ‘Well, even if she did bump off Rachel and then top herself,’ I rail, as Roderick flinches in his chair, ‘I certainly don’t want to stay marooned here with their dead bodies. Do you?’

  I seem to have hit a nerve, finally. Geoff looks round the room, as though waiting for volunteers, then finally says. ‘Well, as Jane and I arrived by boat, I do know exactly where it’s tied up. I suppose I could venture
forth and see whether there’s any possibility of …’

  Jane turns on him. ‘Oh, don’t be so ridiculous, Geoff. We’re in the middle of a storm. It was rough enough coming on that thing on Friday afternoon. It would be total madness putting out in that tub in this weather. Even going outside to look is a waste of time.’

  Well, that seems to have done it. Geoff, on his dignity, marches across the room and addresses everyone but Jane as he grasps the door handle. His knuckles are white. ‘I’ll be back shortly,’ he says, shutting the door sharply behind him.

  ‘I’m glad someone’s seen sense. But what’s got his knickers in a twist?’ I ask with a chuckle. Now Jane does the same number on me.

  ‘As if you didn’t know. Why did you say that to him? Why?’ She’s screwed up her face and she’s advancing towards me. Wow. No more Mrs Nice Mice. She looks demented.

  Luckily, Roderick pipes up at the same moment with a very strange sound. After a moment, I realise it is a reedy, warbling laugh, teetering on the wrong side of hysteria. ‘You people! Bickering amongst yourselves. What do all your petty quarrels matter? Haven’t you learned anything from this weekend?’

  Thank God, it’s enough to distract Jane. Her narrowed eyes turn on Roderick instead. ‘Yes, that’s right, that’s right,’ he says, almost frothing at the mouth now. ‘Tear yourselves apart, why don’t you? But you don’t know anything about real suffering. Not like my sister, or my mother … you’re not worthy of sitting in their places. Get up, get up!’ By now he’s yelling at Gita and her girls. Their sofa must have been the spot where the late Penny, and the even later Evelyn, used to perch themselves.

  ‘Roderick!’ The voice is as sharp as a gunshot. ‘Pull yourself together, boy.’ It’s Ross, breaking his long, anguished silence. ‘What would your mother think?’

  Roderick has already started to blub again and I’m trying to look anywhere but at him. We’re spared the rest of the dressing-down, thank goodness, when Geoff erupts back into the room. The little hair he has is slicked around his head like seaweed, and drops of water scatter and fall onto his shoulders from his pate. His face, though, is the shocking thing. He looks as though he’s aged ten years. Jane dashes forward, and he seems too numb now to shy away from her as he was doing before.

  ‘Are you all right, Geoff? What happened? What did you see out there?’

  There’s silence for a few beats, as Geoff looks around, blindly, clearly trying to compute what he’s just witnessed. Finally he speaks, in a strange, hoarse whisper.

  ‘Someone’s scuppered the boat.’

  Chapter 50

  Gita

  Mount Tregowan, 1st November

  You can cut the atmosphere in the library with a knife, once Geoff’s made his pronouncement. It’s not helpful; it really isn’t. All right, I realise it’s a horrible shock. I mean, I want to know who did it as much as anyone else. Try as I might, I just can’t see Penny whacking the bottom out of the boat, no matter how deranged she must have been last night. She wouldn’t have had the strength.

  But it’s too horrible to think about, and it’s not good for the girls. Everything was sorted, with the finger pointing at Penny. The last thing they need now is to think there might be someone else out there who wishes us ill. Someone up to their neck in evil, to have done something so awful and destructive.

  I take a breath, to steady myself, and smile reassuringly at the little faces on either side of me. Anyway, as Jane pointed out, we couldn’t possibly have sailed off in that boat. The waves are mountainous. And it wouldn’t have been big enough for all of us anyway.

  ‘The boat being scuppered, Roderick,’ I say to him, cutting across Vicky, who is lurching around, drunkenly asking people if they did it. As if anyone’s going to stick their hand up. ‘That doesn’t mean other boats can’t get to us, does it?’

  He looks at me blankly and for a moment I worry he’s going to burst into tears again. His glance darts to his father, as though dreading another telling-off. His eyes are red and moist, like Ruby when she had that galloping conjunctivitis. I can hardly hold his gaze. I want to give him antibiotic drops, but of course in this case that would do no good at all. This is no bacterial infection. This is something else. This is sudden death, and we’re all stuck with the symptoms.

  But the prospect of giving me a lecture on something really dull seems to perk him up. ‘Scuppering just means someone’s taken an axe to it, made a hole in the bottom so it’s no longer seaworthy. Of course another boat could still put in here. Potentially. But it all depends on the weather,’ he says, his squeaky voice petering out as everyone turns to the window.

  I don’t even bother to say I already know what ‘scupper’ means. I think we’ve all been pretty well acquainted with the meaning, this afternoon. But, like the boat itself, that won’t get us anywhere. Nothing will, from the looks of things. Sea and sky are charcoal-grey now. Rachel would probably have had a spectacular dress made in that shade already, from some couture house I could only dream of. She’d be appearing, round about now, and swishing about in her frock for us all to admire. Horror and disbelief pounce again. She’s not here anymore. Now my own eyes sting.

  ‘What about the next tide?’ I say to Roderick desperately. I don’t want to break down again. Vicky’s already asked this question but she’s hardly going to remember. How she has the nerve to sit here with us, nursing her vodka, after Tasha’s heartbreak, after what she did to me, I just don’t know. But that’s Vicky all over. Balls of steel, Rachel used to say.

  Roderick looks at me, surprised. ‘Tides? You and I discussed all that on Friday,’ he bleats.

  ‘A lot has happened since Friday,’ I say heavily. ‘I can’t remember a word of that conversation. And no one was really listening earlier, either.’

  He nods nervously. I feel bad. Talk about kicking him when he’s down. I hope he’s not as delicate as his sister was. Heaven forfend he pulls the same trick as her. Suicide lays such a cruel burden on those left behind. God, imagine his father. In one weekend, he’s lost his wife and his daughter. And his baby-to-be. The poor man. But Roderick is speaking again.

  ‘As I said earlier to, to, her—’ he indicates Vicky, who salutes him ironically with her cup ‘—the next low tide will be in the late afternoon. That’s if the storm hasn’t thrown things too much.’

  ‘It won’t have disrupted the gravitational pull of the earth, will it?’ Nessie’s voice drips with sarcasm. I whip round to look at her. It’s the first time she’s spoken for hours. She’s slumping in that way I can’t bear. I just about resist the temptation to tell her to sit up straight. I hope she’s not sickening for something. She looks pale, but that’s par for the course these days.

  For a second, I wonder about that dry, knowledgeable tone she’s used. But she’s always loved the planets, my Nessie. Her first school project was a model of the solar system. I ran around in my lunch break sourcing tennis and ping-pong balls for her to stick onto wires. She was devasted when her friend with the stay-at-home mum got a gold star for hand-knitting the entire galaxy. She’s older and wiser now, and she’s got a point. I look towards Roderick.

  He manages a weak smile. ‘Of course it won’t have changed anything fundamental. But if the sea is really rough, the causeway can be pretty much impassable anyway. You know, rogue waves sweeping across. Dangerous.’ Again, I see that stick figure disappearing under the weight of water, and instinctively glance at Vicky. But she’s got her nose buried in that damned cup once more, oblivious to what might have happened to her son. I tell myself it’s just as well – and shush the voice that says she has the right to know.

  Roderick is still craning out to sea. ‘It’s possible it might be improving,’ he says. Maybe he’s seeing something different from me. I just notice the constant shifting of the sea and the sheets of rain. ‘The police might try to reach us in a launch, I suppose,’ he goes on. ‘But all the same, I doubt they’d find anyone who wants to sail out past the rocks on a day like today.
Our own boatman wouldn’t dream of it. The Tregowan Needles, the locals call them. They’re notorious, the Needles.’ He chuckles drily. It grates on me. Surely he realises how inappropriate it is, for one of his family to be laughing about sharp pointed objects, at a time like this? But he’s oblivious. ‘They might just decide to wait until the conditions are better.’

  I glance towards the window again. I’m beginning to wonder if this storm will ever end. There’s some sort of bird out there. Looks too dark to be a seagull. It’s being tossed around like a rag. How can he say this is an improvement? Then I remember how awful it was last night, and earlier. Pray God the wind drops, or the waves calm down. Something needs to give.

  I start to wonder. A helicopter, maybe? But with this gale, it would be blown off course. And where could it put down anyway? There isn’t any room. The whole of the top of the island is pretty much taken up with the castle, just with a little apron of garden in the front and then the walled area by the chapel on the level below. Neither look big enough to land a chopper. And both would be perilously close to the edge of the island, the sea and now these Tregowan Needles. I wish Rachel were here. If anyone could organise a way off, she could.

  I must have tutted out loud. Tasha looks across at me – poor, pretty, heartbroken Tasha. God, I’ve got my work cut out with her, and she doesn’t know the half of it. She’s just as oblivious as Vicky. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men. The thought of the endless bolstering, the patient listening and propping up that I might soon need to do. It makes me yearn to be at work. Far, far from all this. I suddenly remember Rachel last night, with her meaningful look at everyone – me, Vicky and even Jane. Her insinuations about Tom, and the situation with his job. Damn Rachel. I don’t believe there was anything between Tom and Jane. For God’s sake. But damn Vicky, too. I look across at her, and she’s clutching her cup as if her life depends on it. I suppose it does.