Death on Lindisfarne

by Fay Sampson

“Can you remember what happened? Not surprisingly, you weren’t exactly coherent yesterday.”

  The grin faded to a frostier look. “If you don’t mind, I’ve been over all that with the police. I don’t know what you told them, but from the way they questioned me, you’d have thought it had something to do with that poor girl’s death. I told them, I’d barely met her. If she had troubled relationships with anyone, it would have to be you and Peter. You’ve been involved with her for years. Not like me.”

  How like him, Lucy thought, to go on the offensive. All I’ve done is show the natural concern of a leader for a member of her group; of any decent human being. And he acts as if I’ve accused him of something and then throws it back in my face.

  “James,” she said, trying to hold herself calm, “I’m not the police. Not these days. I’m a minister of religion. I’m running the course that brought you here. I can’t help feeling a bit responsible if you get injured on my watch. I’d just like to understand what happened.”

  A glance passed between James and Sue.

  “If you must know, we were in the garden near the castle. Have you seen it? The planting’s supposed to have been planned by Gertrude Jekyll. Anyway, Sue was keen to go on to Emmanuel Head, but I could see the heavens were going to open before long. I opted to head back here. I slipped. That’s all. Easy to do on wet stone. When I came round I was lying in a pool of blood and in danger of drowning in a rainstorm. The rest you know.”

  Lucy looked past him at the obstinate set of Sue’s mouth.

  He’s lying, she thought. Aidan and Melangell heard them quarrelling and then Sue stalked off. James would never take that kind of rebellion lying down. He’d have to go after her and try to dominate her again. They must both have been out among the rocks around the headland. I’m sure of it.

  But were they alone? Was it remotely possible they had come upon Rachel there? Much of Holy Island was bare of hiding places, but those coves and rock stacks were one place a wounded soul might hope to find privacy.

  If James had come across her, alone and vulnerable, what would he have done? How would Rachel have reacted? What might have happened between the two of them?

  And was there any way that Sue would ever tell?

  The insistent voice murmured in her mind: That wouldn’t answer the question. How did her body get to a beach so far to the west?

  She got up from the bench. “Well, I’m glad you’re back and no permanent damage done. I’m sorry you missed our outing to Bamburgh Castle. I’ll see you both at supper.”

  She tried to make her parting smile as genuine as she could.

  “And what romantic story did you spin them this time?”

  “I told them about St Wilfrid, the worm in the rose of Celtic Christianity.”

  He raised his eyebrows, and winced as the movement puckered the skin around his wound.

  “I sometimes wonder if your beloved Celtic Christians weren’t a touch too close to heathenism.”

  She fought back the flash of anger.

  “If you mean they had a love of God’s creation and didn’t think it sinful, that they gave positions of authority to women, then I think they were ahead of their time.”

  She was striding towards her room, all the refreshment of the afternoon at Bamburgh gone, when she remembered that Mrs Batley had wanted to talk to her urgently.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  LUCY FELT THE STONES OF THE WALKWAY pushing against the balls of her feet as she sped towards the house. The entrance hall was empty. There were sounds from the kitchen: a brisk chopping, the rattle of a pan. As she turned towards them, it struck her how much of the work Mrs Batley took on herself. Perhaps there had been a Mr Batley not long ago. Or maybe no woman from the village came up to her exacting standards.

  She tapped on the half-open door. “Mrs Batley? It’s me, Lucy. You wanted to speak to me.”

  As she spoke, she pushed the door wider. Mrs Batley stopped what she was doing. She stood, the sharp vegetable knife in her hand poised over the table. There was no smile of welcome. Her lips tightened as she looked straight at Lucy.

  “And about time too, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “I’m sorry. I was concerned about James. I needed to check how he was.”

  “Well enough, if you ask me.” Mrs Batley sniffed. “Hardly got a foot in the house before he was ordering me about. ‘Would you fetch this?’ ‘Mrs Batley, I’m sure you could find me a bottle of lager from somewhere.’ I’m licensed to serve drinks with meals, but I’m not a barmaid.”

  “I’m really sorry. That was wrong of him. I’m afraid James does rather like to have women waiting on him.”

  “Went so far as to tell me women weren’t too proud to follow Jesus and provide what he needed. That’s blasphemy.”

  “Gosh! Did he really say that?” Lucy was genuinely alarmed that James’s self-conceit could have gone that far. “Was that what you wanted to see me about?”

  “No. I didn’t need you to give him a flea in his ear. And he’s not used to being spoken to straight, I could tell. Still, he’d sobered up by the time the police had finished with him.”

  Lucy’s heart fell further still. That feeling of sickness again. What had emerged from DI Harland’s final questioning? If only she could have been a fly on the wall. She desperately wanted something to come out of the investigation, and yet she increasingly feared what it might be.

  “No,” Mrs Batley was saying. She laid down the knife and advanced around the table. She grabbed up a wet cloth and wiped her hands with it. Anger was wrestling with concern in her face. “No, it’s those women: Dr Haccombe and Miss Grayson. I’m not the fool they must think I am. If it had been Ellie doing out their rooms this morning, she’d probably never have noticed.”

  So there was a cleaner.

  “But we were all at sixes and sevens, what with the police poking their noses into everywhere. You’d told me to leave your room for them to see, but I didn’t trust her not to get the wrong one. It wasn’t until this afternoon I got around to doing the chalet bedrooms myself.” She paused dramatically.

  “And what? You found something?”

  Lucy’s pulse was racing fast. What could Elspeth and Valerie possibly have left in their room that might incriminate them? Even as she thought this word, her brain caught up with the implication. Incriminate them in what? She had been surprised, angry even, about Elspeth’s mysterious behaviour on Saturday evening. But Rachel had come back then, apparently unharmed.

  She thought of Elspeth, prowling around the ruins of the priory on Sunday morning, while the others joined in Lucy’s act of worship. Then she remembered. The history don had rejoined them for the story of Aidan’s coming to Lindisfarne. She had still been with them when Rachel had silently disappeared from the group.

  Her tumbling thoughts came to an abrupt halt. Mrs Batley was waiting with growing indignation. As soon as Lucy met her eyes, she gave an almost savage smile.

  “This.” She drew out from the pocket of her apron a plastic bag. She cleared a corner of the table and set out the meagre contents: a small folded piece of white paper, some crumpled silver foil, a cut-off straw. Lucy’s police experience did not need the faint residue of powder to tell her exactly what she was looking at. Her eyes widened.

  “Yes,” said Mrs Batley triumphantly. “You know what that is, don’t you? Cocaine. They may come over all posh, like she’s some great scholar from Oxford, but that’s a criminal offence. And what’s more, I know the law. If I let that sort of thing go on in my house, I’m liable too. It’s a disgrace.”

  Lucy struggled to make sense of this new drama. If Mrs Batley had found this while the police were still on the island, she would almost certainly have confronted them with it, whether it had anything to do with Rachel’s death or not.

  Had it? She remembered suddenly Rachel’s mood shifts on Saturday. From the teenage girl singing songs in the back of the car, to the huddled silent figure who had refused to come t
o supper. And then the bright-eyed Rachel who had come back to their room on a high. Elspeth’s enigmatic message to Lucy. She cursed herself for assuming it had simply been Rachel’s bipolar mood swings. If Elspeth… She felt anger begin to consume her.

  She tried to gather her wits to deal with Mrs Batley. “You were absolutely right to tell me. I’m really sorry they’ve abused your hospitality this way. I’m going to see Dr Haccombe and Miss Grayson right away.”

  She was out of the door and striding towards the chalets, blood pounding in her head.

  She rapped on the women’s door, but she hardly heeded the answering call from within before she threw it open.

  She surprised the bulky figure of Elspeth Haccombe, peeling off her trousers, but with a lacy petticoat already pulled on over her upper half. Valerie, more completely dressed, stood rigid with alarm.

  Lucy ignored the first flush of embarrassment she felt warming her cheeks.

  “Sorry,” she said, in a brisk tone that held little real apology. “I thought you said ‘Come in’. I need to speak to you.” She held up the plastic bag and opened it sufficiently to show the contents. “Mrs Batley found this while she was cleaning your room today. Fortunately, she recognized what it was. Her usual cleaner might not have done.”

  “Oh, dear,” Valerie said quietly. “I’ve told you, Elspeth. You need to be more discreet.”

  “It’s not a hanging offence, is it?” Elspeth countered, her voice as forcible as ever. “It’s not my fault this country has some antiquated laws. What consenting adults do in their private space is their own affair.”

  “Consenting adults? It’s bad enough that you abuse Mrs Batley’s hospitality. She can be held responsible for what goes on on her premises. Have you thought of that? But there’s worse, isn’t there? On Saturday evening, Rachel was missing from her room. You knew that, when no one else did. And you knew when she came back. When I went to see, Rachel was on a high. Feverish. Aggressive. I put it down to her bipolar disorder, fool that I was. But it wasn’t, was it? You’d given her cocaine.”

  Lucy glared at the older woman, expecting a blustering denial. It was not what she got.

  “Well, poor little sod. She looked like something the cat brought in. A victim. I was doing her a favour. If there’s one way to put all your troubles behind you, it’s the blessed snow. I wouldn’t have got through the challenges of my own career without it. Oxford can be a bloody cock fight.”

  “You idiot! Rachel had worked for months to get herself off drugs. Have you any idea how difficult that is? She was clean. And in a single evening you wrecked all of that.”

  “She was an adult. She knew the score.”

  “She may have been over eighteen, but she was a vulnerable adult, with an alcoholic mother, a childhood in care, drugs, theft. The last thing she needed was someone like you. And now she’s dead.”

  Elspeth rose in all her majestic height. “Now look here, young lady. You be careful what you say. I’ve been honest with you. From the look on Valerie’s face, I’d say she thinks too honest. I gave Rachel a snort. Right? That’s all. An evening off from whatever hell she was inhabiting. I… did… not… kill her.”

  “Not intentionally, perhaps. But if the black dog got her next morning when she came down off her high, what then? She was always a suicide risk.”

  Valerie came towards them. Her grey eyes were troubled, her face tightly lined. “Lucy. This has all been very painful for everybody. Most of all you. I’m truly sorry if anything Elspeth has done contributed to that. But it’s over now. Nothing is going to bring Rachel back. And you have it in your power to ruin Elspeth’s career. How will that help anybody? You said yourself, Rachel was always a suicide risk. What she did could have happened any time, for any reason. It might have nothing to do with Elspeth.”

  Lucy was still seething. “And what about other vulnerable girls? Elspeth’s students, perhaps?”

  “She wouldn’t. She doesn’t.” Valerie was visibly agitated. “I can assure you, Elspeth is responsible. Drugs are hardly a novelty among the Oxford staff, but most of them have enough sense to keep it to themselves. Elspeth wouldn’t be so foolish as to lay herself open to a charge of pushing them to students.”

  Elspeth had stepped out of her trousers and was fastening herself into a skirt. “Thank you, Valerie. I think I’m capable of speaking in my own defence. Assuming there’s anything I want to defend.”

  “Rachel wasn’t your student,” Lucy protested. “She was just a teenager you’d only just met, and wouldn’t see again after this week. Not a gifted scholar. Not a bright graduate of the future. She didn’t have pushy parents behind her. She was nobody important. She wasn’t likely to complain, and who would listen to her if she did?”

  “There, you see?” Triumph sparked in Elspeth’s eyes. “You’ve said it yourself. She wasn’t complaining. I did her a favour, for God’s sake!”

  Lucy stared at her for a long moment, unable to find the words to express what she felt. Then she turned on her heel and strode out of the room.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  THERE WERE ONLY TWENTY MINUTES to supper. Lucy really should be showering and changing. But the anger was pounding inside her. She needed to run. She looked at her watch. Ten minutes, she promised herself.

  Some of the group were already gathering on the lawn: Aidan and Melangell, Peter, Sue and James. She lifted her hand in acknowledgement and jogged past them, heading for the road.

  At the gate, she hesitated, then swung left, past the coach park and out towards Coombs Farm. The world fell quiet along the cart track beyond. Far ahead she saw the piled-up dunes that hid Cover Bay. The hedgerows on either side were breaking into new leaf. As she ran between level meadows, there were lambs frisking among the ewes. All around her, spring was rising. New life.

  But not for Rachel. Only the chill of saturated clothing, a scrubbed slab in the mortuary, the pathologist’s knife. Lucy shuddered. She wished she knew less than she did about post-mortems.

  This wasn’t helping. The feet that pounded the path were now expressing anger with herself. What sort of minister was she? Her group had been confronted with a death. She, more than anyone else at St Colman’s, should be prepared to handle it; to say the words that would comfort others.

  It was the week after Easter. Not just spring, but resurrection was in the air. She had to believe that Rachel was in the arms of mercy. It no longer mattered what was done to her body. That would be returned to them, outwardly at peace.

  To whom? Her mother?

  Lucy slowed her stride. She had given little thought to Karen Ince, other than to tell the police how to contact her. But, sooner or later, she would need to see Rachel’s mother. She would have to find words of comfort.

  She checked her watch. There had never been any chance that she would get to the rocky northern coast. She ought to turn back. Another supper, another story; trying to disguise her fury with Elspeth.

  But the rush of energy, the pounding feet, had done their work. She felt calmer as she turned back to St Colman’s House. She prayed for strength to get through the evening.

  Lucy was coming out of the bathroom, towelling her hair, when there was a rap at the door.

  “Who is it?” She grabbed a clean white shirt from the bed.

  “Valerie.”

  Lucy quickly donned her shirt and trousers. “Come in,” she called.

  The grey-haired bookseller walked in and closed the door behind her. She stood stiffly in front of it.

  “Hello,” said Lucy. “It will need to be quick. Supper’s in a few minutes.”

  “This won’t take long.” Valerie’s face was grim. There was no sign of her usual sweet smile. “I know what you think about Elspeth. It was very wrong. But I need to have your word that this won’t go any further. Elspeth…” She swallowed with difficulty. “Elspeth was not entirely honest with you. There was some business with a student. It was eight years ago. She got off with a reprimand. But I don’t exp
ect the Principal to be as lenient the second time around. Elspeth is brilliant, both as a scholar and a teacher. Some people find her abrasive, but her students adore her.”

  “All the more reason she needs a sense of responsibility towards them.” Lucy tried to keep her voice level, not to snap.

  “I know. I couldn’t agree more. But you must see that if this became public, it could be the end for her. A vulnerable girl like Rachel, and then a suicide. I want you to promise that this will go no further. Elspeth would have difficulty in admitting it to anyone, but she’s really contrite. It won’t happen again.”

  Lucy straightened up. “That’s not my decision to make. Or yours. I know you’re trying to be a good friend to her, to protect her, but Rachel’s death is under investigation. The police have to know the truth.”

  “They know it’s suicide. That’s all they need.”

  Lucy’s mouth opened. But she caught back what she had been about to say. Instead she protested, “Valerie, I was in the police myself. I can’t hold back relevant information.”

  The older woman took a step towards her. She was taller than Lucy. Still no hint of a smile softened her face. Her voice was harsher than Lucy had heard it yet.

  “Reverend Pargeter, I need to make myself clear. If you were to say anything to anyone else about Saturday evening, I should regard that as a serious matter. I want your promise that it won’t happen.” Valerie’s grey eyes looked at her steadily.

  Lucy stared back with incredulity. “Are you threatening me?”

  The eyes were steely. Still there was no answer. Then Valerie turned on her heel. The door closed behind her.

  Lucy sat down on the bed. She felt shaken to the core. Valerie?

  Aidan came down the stairs after a quick trip to the bathroom after supper. He paused on the landing. There were voices in the hall below. When he looked over the banister, he saw the fair head of Lucy and the dark bush of a man he did not immediately recognize. Then he heard a low cry, “Lucy! My poor lamb!” the voice struck a memory. Brother Simon was back. He sensed an intimacy about the pair. But he could not stay in the shadows, overhearing them. He came down the stairs.