Death on Lindisfarne

by Fay Sampson

  Again, Lucy wrestled with her duties. Inside the house, nine other people would be gathering in the lounge. They would be expecting her to join them. She could slip away again for a while before evening prayers. Rachel would be back in their bedroom by then, wouldn’t she?

  She turned reluctantly for the house.

  Chapter Eight

  THE LOUNGE WAS ALREADY HALF-FULL of people when Aidan and Melangell entered. Aidan crossed the carpet to the coffee table with a sense of trepidation. He had been hoping that he could tuck himself away in a corner sofa again and listen to another of Lucy’s stories about Northumbria’s past. There would have been no compulsion on him to say anything. He would not have to join in the discussion, or reveal anything more about himself.

  Now he felt exposed. He faced a wall of almost-strangers, any one of whom might turn an interested face to him and engage him in conversation. Aidan was not by nature unsociable, but he knew from recent experience that even the most innocent of conversations could soon turn to the question of why he and Melangell were here without Jenny.

  Without Jenny.

  That one irreversible reality that was a wound too dreadful to touch.

  He poured himself a cup of coffee and took it quickly to a chair beside the window where no one was sitting yet.

  Melangell helped herself to a chocolate biscuit and came to curl up on the carpet at his feet. A tug of conscience told him he ought to find something to amuse her. There was a cabinet in the corner with books on shelves and a cupboard below which might contain games.

  Peter, the archaeology student, was bending to open it. His floppy dark hair fell forward as he searched inside. After a moment, he straightened up. He came towards the Davisons, waving a chessboard and a box of chessmen. His grin was directed at Melangell, not Aidan.

  “Do you play chess?”

  “Of course I do.” Melangell scrambled to her feet.

  “I thought you looked as though you might.”

  He laid the board on the floor and settled his ungainly bulk beside it. Melangell took up her favourite position, flat on her stomach, with her elfin face propped up on her hands. Aidan felt a rush of gratitude towards Peter.

  His relief was cut short when the Cavendishes settled themselves into the sofa next to his chair. Frances took out some white knitting. A baby jacket, by the look of it. She turned to him with what he was sure was meant to be a friendly smile.

  “It’s lovely to see the kiddies playing, isn’t it?” She nodded to Melangell. “She’s a bright one, your Mel…”

  “Melangell.”

  “We said to ourselves, Dave and me, it’s a pity her mum couldn’t be here as well.” Her pale eyes turned to him enquiringly.

  There it was. Hardly three sentences into the conversation and the wound was gaping wide.

  “Yes.” He took a gulp of his coffee. He had a sudden wish that he smoked, so that he could make an excuse to escape into the garden.

  The best defence was to turn the questioning back on her.

  “Where was the children’s home you ran?”

  “On the Kent coast, near Broadstairs. We always liked to be beside the sea, Dave and me.”

  “Can’t keep away, can we? Seaside holidays,” her husband joined in.

  Aidan sat back and let the reminiscences of the pair wash over him.

  A detached part of his mind roamed over the rest of the room. He sensed an absence. Lucy still hadn’t returned. He had seen her coming out of the kitchen with a tray of food, presumably for the missing Rachel.

  His photographer’s gaze framed James and Sue sitting on a sofa across the room. They were physically together, but with a tension in their body language that made the gap between them seem wider than it was.

  Valerie Grayson sat alone in another corner. Belatedly, Aidan wished he had gravitated towards her, rather than being cornered by the garrulous Cavendishes. He sensed a delicate reserve about Valerie. She would not have pressed him for information he did not want to give. She had one of Lucy’s books on her knee, but she was not reading it. She looked slightly worried.

  There was no Elspeth Haccombe. The room seemed emptier without her large presence.

  The moment Lucy entered the room, Aidan could see that something was wrong. She threw a distracted look around the group, as though she had forgotten they would be here. Then he saw her make the physical effort to gather herself together. Her rounded chin went up. She shook her head so that her fair curls danced for a moment. She squared her shoulders. Then, with a smile she succeeded in making look more genuine than professional, she headed for the only person sitting alone: the grey-haired Valerie.

  “If you ever want us to do some baby-sitting, don’t be afraid to ask,” Frances was saying at his elbow.

  “What? Oh, that’s very kind of you. But really, Melangell’s no trouble.”

  “Still, we’d be glad to take her off your hands. Play some games with her,” David Cavendish put in.

  “We miss the children,” Frances agreed. “And they do need someone to mother them, don’t they?”

  He could stand it no longer. “Excuse me.” He got up. “I think I could do with a breath of fresh air.”

  Melangell’s clear voice cut across the room. She had lifted her tousled head from the chessboard and was looking up at Valerie.

  “My mother wrote that book you’ve got. It’s the one about St Cuthbert, isn’t it?”

  Aidan flinched.

  Both Valerie’s and Lucy’s heads shot up.

  The image of the small, glossy-covered book on Valerie’s knee burned on his brain.

  Lucy exclaimed, “Jenny Davison? I never realized.” She looked more closely at the cover. “Of course! Photographs by Aidan Davison. Aidan, I’m so sorry! I never made the connection.”

  Aidan felt as though a storm was churning in his head. He couldn’t handle this.

  Valerie smiled. Her quiet voice spoke the words he dreaded: “What a pity Jenny couldn’t be here as well.”

  Lucy laughed. “She could have led this course better than I can.”

  He could stand it no longer. The words were torn from him, in a voice so harsh he hardly recognized it as his own: “I didn’t come here to discuss my wife!”

  He found himself standing outside the house, hardly knowing how he had got there. He was shaking.

  The road was quiet now. A string of lights beaded its way towards the village, still hardly visible beyond the trees that lined this street. The sky was not completely dark. Stars shone hazily through the slight mist. The air was welcomingly cool and damp on his cheek, as though someone were pressing a satin cloth against his skin.

  “Are you all right?” He jumped as a voice spoke beside him. He had not heard Lucy’s light step in those trainers.

  He felt his hairs prickle. She was the last person he wanted to talk to. He knew what she must be thinking – what everyone in that room would assume – a broken marriage. It happened all the time. It would be her job to show a pastoral concern for him.

  He could not bring himself to tell her the truth.

  “Yes,” he said curtly.

  He ought to apologize for his outburst, but he wasn’t going to. The words stuck like a hard knot in his throat.

  It felt threatening to have her stand beside him in the half-light. He tensed, waiting for the next question that would probe beneath the armour of his reticence. Please don’t ask about Jenny, he prayed.

  “Sorry! I guess I put my foot in it back there,” she said quietly.

  He didn’t answer.

  “You probably don’t want me crowding you.” She moved away towards the road and drew a deep breath of night air. “I feel the same. I’m fairly new to being a minister. Sometimes I think I can’t hack it. Then I come to somewhere like Holy Island and the spirits of all these marvellous people who worked and prayed here come out of the mist to hold me up and give me peace. I think of all that they had to suffer: invasion, betrayal, violent death, the loss of every
thing they held dear. And somehow my own problems don’t seem quite so insurmountable.”

  He clung grimly to his silence. Whatever problems she had, they could be nothing like his own pain.

  Lucy sighed. “I ought to be getting back to see to the rest of my flock. I’ll leave you to the night and the peace.”

  “Yes.” He turned an ungracious shoulder.

  He heard the whisper of her rubber soles fading towards the door. A solitary seagull ghosted between the street lights.

  It was only the thought of Melangell in the room behind him that made him turn.

  He thought he was far enough behind her, but Lucy was waiting in the hall. He stopped abruptly at the front door. He tried to avoid the probing blue eyes. All he wanted was to be left alone.

  “I’d better see if Melangell’s beaten Peter yet,” he said gruffly.

  “She’s special, isn’t she?” Lucy paused by the lounge door.

  “Yes,” he said, again abruptly. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that Melangell was all he had.

  “And I need to see if Rachel’s back. She wasn’t in our room. It’s probably nothing. She goes off sometimes when things get too much. She’s had a lot to put up with. The sort of damage no one can ever quite heal.”

  He saw her square her shoulders and lift her head as she pushed the lounge door open, like a soldier preparing for combat.

  “I hope she comes back soon,” he said with a stiff attempt at politeness.

  She threw him a brief smile over her shoulder. “There’s a voice in my head telling me the things I used to say in my previous existence, when other people reported a teenager missing. She’s eighteen, an adult. Lots of teenagers walk out when things get too much. They usually turn up pretty soon. It’s too early to send out a search party yet.”

  As she took a step into the crowded room Aidan’s mind caught up with what she was saying.

  “Your previous existence?”

  “A policewoman. In this area, actually. I haven’t been a Methodist minister very long. It probably shows.”

  Aidan halted in the doorway. He did not think he could face the rest of the group tonight after that dreadful cry of pain. All those curious eyes.

  Melangell’s head shot round. She scrambled up from the chessboard. Her smile was bright with excitement.

  “Did you say you were in the police?”

  Faces turned, all around the room. The murmur of voices stilled.

  Lucy laughed uneasily. “That’s a conversation-stopper, isn’t it? My sister’s a maths teacher and she gets the same response. But it was a few years ago now. My guilty past. I’m not going to be checking up on you all. My work now is less about crime, more about forgiveness.”

  “We’d better watch ourselves, though,” David Cavendish laughed. “Once a copper, always a copper, I’d say. Better mind our Ps and Qs.”

  “Oh, please!” Lucy had coloured. “Being an ordained minister can be barrier enough. Don’t hold that against me as well.”

  There was a disturbance behind Aidan. He saw all the eyes in the room swing past Lucy to the newcomer.

  Elspeth Haccombe strode into the room. She clapped a hand on Lucy’s shoulder. “You can stop worrying. There’s a light on in your room. She’s back.”

  Lucy felt a flash of joy. In spite of her confident words to Aidan, she felt that Rachel was on a knife-edge.

  Then, as the pressure of Elspeth’s hand on her shoulder lifted, a thought struck her. How had the Oxford don known that Rachel was missing? Lucy had told no one except Aidan. Others might have read anxiety in her body language, but Elspeth hadn’t been in the lounge after supper to see it. Hers and Valerie’s room was next to Lucy and Rachel’s. Had she simply seen the darkened windows and made her own assumption?

  She was aware that Peter had hoisted his bulk from the chess game on the floor and was looking at her with consternation and reproach. Should she have told him? Peter was always so sweetly protective of Rachel. But Lucy had not wanted to spell out her greatest fears before the whole group. She had just prayed that Rachel would come back soon. Apparently she had.

  With a quick word of apology, she made for the door before she could meet Peter’s accusation.

  Melangell had run to throw her thin arms around Aidan. Lucy brushed past them both. Aidan Davison was a prickly customer. The way he had shouted at her made her wonder if he might even be violent. Was that why his wife had left him? A memory of her own past made her shiver.

  The garden was quiet, softly lit by the lamps along the verandah outside the chalet bedrooms. It was a joy to see that Elspeth was right. There was a glow behind the curtains of her own room.

  She tapped briefly and stepped inside.

  Rachel was back where Lucy had left her, sitting on her bed, with her feet tucked under her.

  But there was something different. This was not the huddled and fearful figure, shrinking from the world, that she had been this afternoon. Rachel’s long hair was tossed back from her face. Her eyes were bright. The food on the tray had gone.

  “There you are!” Lucy said, trying to keep her voice light. “You gave me a fright when I found you’d gone.”

  “Why?” Rachel’s voice sounded stronger. “I can go where I like, can’t I? It’s not a bleeding prison.”

  “Of course not! I only meant… Well, it’s after dark, and you didn’t tell me you were going out. I just like to know where you’re heading, and when you’ll be back. So I’ll know when to start worrying.”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything. You’re not my mother.”

  No, Lucy thought with a flash of anger. I’m not the woman who was so under the power of drink and drugs that they had to take you away from her, for your own safety. I actually care what happens to you.

  She swallowed back the retort before it sprang to her lips. She strove for the professional tone of calm and cheerfulness that years of training for life on the beat had instilled in her.

  “You’re right. I’m not your mother. But I was hoping we were friends. Friends trust each other. They tell each other stuff.”

  “Yeah. Like that Jamie creature kept saying. Like Jesus was my best friend and so was he. And he was going to save me, if I’d just confess my sins to him. Creep.”

  Lucy sat down on her own bed and gave a sigh. “I’m sorry about that. I truly am. I didn’t think there’d be anyone like that on this course – the sort that tries to ram Jesus down your throat. It doesn’t work like that. It really doesn’t. That’s what I want to tell people this week: saints like Aidan and Cuthbert, they weren’t that sort of tub-thumper. They lived the gospel. And that was enormously attractive.”

  A thought flashed across her mind. James, the self-opinionated evangelist. Was that whom Rachel had been with this evening?

  No. Common sense caught up with her. James and Sue had been at supper with everyone else. Lucy had left them in the lounge.

  Uneasiness was returning. There was an unnatural brightness in Rachel’s eyes. Her policewoman’s instincts alerted her. Drugs? But Rachel was in rehab. She’d been clean for months. This was just one of her bipolar highs.

  A scowl darkened Rachel’s face. She tossed her head angrily and gave a bitter laugh.

  “You could tell he took one look at me, out of everyone else here, and thought, ‘Right, we’ve got a proper sinner here. Let’s clock her up as my next convert.’ He’s right, isn’t he? I’m rubbish.”

  “Rachel! That’s not true. You’ve been more sinned against than sinning. You’re doing marvellously. You’ve been clean of drugs for ages.”

  “Huh!” Rachel flounced off the bed and slammed the bathroom door behind her.

  A selfish part of Lucy wished she had booked a single room upstairs for herself. She had enough to worry about as it was. And now she would have to spend the night with a volatile teenager who could swing from deep affection to open hostility. It was a big responsibility.

  She looked at her watch. She had wrested autho
rity back from James by saying she would lead evening prayers herself. She picked up the liturgy of the Northumbrian Community and thumbed through the pages.

  She found the service of Compline for Saturday evening:

  In the name of the King of life;

  in the name of the Christ of love;

  in the name of the Holy Spirit:

  the Triune of my strength.

  It would be among the service sheets she had duplicated for use this week.

  I am placing my soul and my body

  under Thy guarding this night, O Christ.

  May Thy cross this night be shielding me.

  Where had Rachel been in the dark?

  Chapter Nine

  “THAT’S MORE LIKE IT.”

  They turned a corner between the houses and Melangell gave a little skip as the ruins of Lindisfarne Priory came into view. Aidan couldn’t help it. His hand closed round his camera. He already had shots in plenty. Shots he had used to illustrate Jenny’s book. But the broken pillars, the single perfect arch soaring above the short green turf stood out against the blue sky in a way that called to him irresistibly to capture them through his lens.

  They reached the statue of St Aidan: tall, lean, calm-faced. You could tell the encircling sea was in his uplifted eyes. Golden lichen peppered his shoulders and tonsured head.

  Melangell stroked the reddish concrete folds of his robes, almost possessively. “Hello. I’ve wanted to meet you for such a long time.”

  St Aidan’s namesake could see the knot of people gathering on the turf that had once been the nave of the Norman priory’s church. It was too soon yet to be certain of faces.

  The woman in the entrance booth waved them through. The solid figure of the student Peter, his shaggy hair flopping over his dark-rimmed glasses, was waiting inside. He handed them their tickets.

  “Hi. You found it.”

  “It’s hard to miss.”

  “We’re special, aren’t we?” Melangell turned up a happy face to Aidan. “We can come in as soon as we like. Everybody on the mainland will have to wait until the tide goes down.”