Death on Lindisfarne

by Fay Sampson

  He took his hands away and dashed outside, past Elspeth and Mrs Batley.

  The occupants of St Colman’s were gathered on the lawn. Melangell rushed towards him.

  “Daddy! Where were you? I couldn’t find you.”

  “Sorry, poppet.” He picked her up and held her close. “There was a nasty man in Lucy’s room. I had to see to him.”

  “Peter told me not to wait for you. He brought me downstairs. But there isn’t a fire, is there?”

  “No, honey. Thank you, Peter.”

  The big archaeology student nodded silently.

  “Somebody had better cancel the fire brigade callout.”

  “Goodness me! It went right out of my head,” Mrs Batley cried. “We’ll have that lifeboat out from Seahouses if we’re not careful!” She hurried off to the house.

  The others were subdued, still shocked by the sight of Lucy’s attacker dashing past them into the dark. Gradually, they began to stir, but there was too much unexplained for them to start back for their bedrooms.

  James’s voice came out of the shadows on the lawn. “We should have known earlier what sort of person is leading this group.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Peter rounded on him.

  Aidan put Melangell down. He stepped forward, stiff with fury. “Lucy’s got enough to put up with, without this.”

  They were interrupted by David Cavendish’s voice from further down the verandah. “Well, I suppose we know now who killed that poor girl.”

  Aidan turned towards him with a sense of shock. He had not for a moment connected what had happened tonight with the murder that hung over them all. Was it possible? Could Lucy’s rejected partner have hated her so much he would kill the girl she cared for? Anything to get his own back on her?

  He saw again the eyes glaring through the slits of the balaclava and shivered.

  It was four o’clock in the morning before Lucy and Aidan had told their stories to the police sergeant and his female constable who came in answer to Elspeth’s call.

  “Lucky the tide was going out when we got the call,” the sergeant said. “It’s always touch and go on Holy Island. Just as well we don’t often get trouble here. They’re a law-abiding lot. But on the downside, your man will have got clean away. If the causeway had been shut, we might have cornered him.”

  “You’re really sure it was Constable Parkinson?” the PC asked Lucy. “I mean, it was the middle of the night. You were asleep when he broke in, and you said he had a mask on. You never saw his face.”

  “It was him.” Lucy shuddered. “But you’re right. I can’t prove it. He won’t have left any evidence. And Aidan can’t identify him.”

  She fingered the bruises on her neck. “If Aidan hadn’t come when he did…”

  “We’ll take him in for questioning, of course,” Sergeant Meldon said. “If we can get hold of the clothes he was wearing, there might be something. A hair of yours, if we’re lucky.”

  “You won’t find the clothes. He’ll have ditched them. He knows too much about how you work.”

  “Then there’s nothing more we can do here, I’m afraid. No chance of anyone seeing his car in the dark.”

  “Was he here yesterday?” she asked quietly. “Making enquiries about Rachel’s death?”

  “We’ll check that out. But if he’s clever, he won’t have stayed behind. Someone would have noticed. Easy to come back after dark, when the causeway opened again.”

  He had come once. He could come again.

  Aidan sat across the room from Lucy. He was disturbed by how much he wanted to cross that space and put his arms around her.

  Suddenly his tired brain sprang to life. “Ask him to show you his back!”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “If it was him, then he should have a massive bruise across the small of his back. I threw a stool at him.”

  Lucy turned to him. He was rewarded by the first flash of hope in her pale face.

  Something was bouncing up and down on Aidan’s chest. His eyes flew open. Melangell was shaking him.

  He winced as pain caught him in the ribs. He struggled to sit up.

  The memory hit him. Lucy struggling for her life under that almost obliterating shadow. The venom of the eyes that had turned on him beneath the black mask. His own helplessness against the hands that had seized him and hurled him aside.

  “What time is it?” he said thickly.

  “Quarter to nine. I’m hungry.”

  Aidan groaned again as he shot his feet to the floor.

  “Give me ten minutes. I need to shower.”

  He let cold water flow over him, shocking him awake.

  No time now for that early morning walk with his camera, drinking in the beauty of the island.

  Would Lucy have been out on the run that was part exercise, part prayer time? His mouth twisted in a painful smile at her eccentricity.

  No. The shock was sinking in as he towelled himself. A man she had once loved had tried to kill her. If Aidan had not woken up, their little community might be reeling now with the horror of another murder. He did not think Lucy would be running on the dunes alone.

  There was a lesser shock as Aidan and Melangell came downstairs to breakfast. James and Sue were handing over their keys at the reception desk. Their bags stood packed by the door.

  Words like “rat” and “sinking ship” flew through Aidan’s mind.

  “You’re leaving early?”

  James swung round on him. Aidan was struck again by the plaster on the side of his head, in the very same place as Aidan’s own lump where Gerald had knocked him against the wall.

  “I should never have allowed Sue to talk me into coming if I’d known the sort of sentimental twaddle this was all about. Next door to paganism. I’m going back to where the real Lord’s work is.”

  “It was my fault,” Sue said humbly. “‘Mission to Northumbria.’ I thought it would be about planting churches in northern towns. Unemployed. Broken families. You know.”

  “Do you think Lucy doesn’t know that too? This is where she gets her strength to go back and do that.” Aidan was surprised at the vehemence in his own voice.

  “She has some very strange friends for a minister of religion.”

  “He tried to murder her! Is that her fault?”

  “It was hardly a Christian relationship, was it? By the sound of it, they weren’t married.”

  Aidan turned on his heel and strode into the breakfast room.

  Lucy raised her eyes to Aidan momentarily, then lowered them again. She had wrapped a white silk scarf around the bruises on her neck.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nodded.

  He could have kicked himself for the inanity of the question. Of course she wasn’t all right. The shock of the attempted murder was only hours away. The horror of it would haunt her all her life.

  There was a moment’s hesitation. Then he laid a hand gently on her shoulder. His grip tightened.

  “Thank you,” she said in a husky voice.

  He fetched a glass of orange juice and sat down beside her.

  “Look. I don’t know what you were planning, but you’re not fit to be running a course for us this morning. Don’t even think about it. Everyone will understand.”

  “I was planning to do the Lindisfarne Gospels. How the book was made in St Cuthbert’s honour.”

  “Why don’t I do it?” The thought took him by surprise. “I could. There’s that great story about the monks putting it in his coffin when they carried his body away for safety. But a storm washed over their ship and the Gospel book was lost overboard. One of the monks had a dream. St Cuthbert had appeared to him and told him where it had been washed up. When the tide went out, they found it lying there on the sands.”

  She managed a smile. “You know so many of the stories already, I don’t know why you bothered to come.”

  He took his eyes away from hers. He found the words hard to speak. “Let’s sa
y it’s a family pilgrimage. Bringing Melangell to the places Jenny loved.” His voice brightened, and he lifted his head. “Honestly, I probably know more than you think about how these illuminated Gospels were made. The way they prepared the vellum from calf skin. The inks from lampblack, or red from insects living on Mediterranean oak trees. Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. Did you know that the left wing of a wild goose provides a better quill for a right-handed scribe?”

  She gave a shaky laugh. “I think you’ve got the job. I’ve even brought some sheets of the designs for people to colour in with felt-tip pens.”

  “Great. Melangell will enjoy that, won’t you?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Lucy moved a teaspoon in a slow circle. “I’ve been worrying about something else. Karen was trying to tell me something yesterday. Something important enough to make her slip away from Gerald and find me. She knew he didn’t want her to talk to me. I hate to think what she’s suffered for that.”

  “It was someone she recognized, wasn’t it? Someone here.”

  Aidan glanced along the table. Elspeth was engaged in a booming conversation with Valerie. The Cavendishes were pushing back their chairs.

  Lucy’s voice came low. “I need to know who that was. It may very well have been Rachel’s murderer.”

  There was a sudden silence. Elspeth had finished what she was saying and turned to them, her dark eyes suddenly sharp. Valerie stared inscrutably. The Cavendishes halted on their way to the door. All eyes were on Lucy.

  “Sorry,” she said huskily. “It’s not a nice thought.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  AIDAN LOOKED ROUND THE SITTING ROOM with a feeling of satisfaction. He had got through the story of the Lindisfarne Gospels creditably. The details of the vellum, the inks, the precious cover of gold and jewels. The single scribe, Bishop Eadfrith of Lindisfarne. The craftsmen who bound and ornamented it. The scholar who added an Anglo-Saxon translation.

  “I could take you to the ruins of the farm where they raised the calves for the vellum. It’s on the other side of the island.”

  Not far from where Rachel met her death, he reminded himself.

  The monks had left Lindisfarne to escape the marauding Vikings. The precious manuscript had been swept overboard and miraculously found. Seven years they wandered through Northumbria, until they found a resting place at Chester-le-Street. And then the final translation of Cuthbert’s body to lie before the high altar in Durham Cathedral.

  “That stone in the floor bears a single word: CUTHBERTUS. If you’re a Northumbrian, you don’t need to be told anything else about Northumbria’s favourite saint. The Lindisfarne Gospels themselves are in the British Museum.”

  He had distributed Lucy’s photocopied sheets, showing the outline of the initial page of St Luke’s Gospel. The curious bird which poked its beak from the finial of the great capital letter reminded him of Rachel’s earring, which Melangell had found in the sand.

  He showed them how the scribe had ruled faint lines and pricked the vellum to guide the flowing interlace in a series of red dots. But the overall impression of the great illuminated page was not only of mathematical order but of riotous spontaneity.

  He had a feeling of self-consciousness as he handed out the felt-tip pens.

  The morning’s group was startlingly depleted. Rachel was heartbreakingly dead. James and Sue had driven off the island. Lucy was recovering from the shock of being nearly murdered. Peter was nowhere to be seen.

  Only Elspeth and Valerie and the Cavendishes were here. And Melangell, of course. She grabbed a fistful of pens with enthusiasm and set to work in the position she liked best, flat on her stomach on the floor.

  Elspeth inspected the choice of colours. “Haven’t done this since I was in kindergarten.” She sounded oddly uninsulted for an Oxford don. She seized on the scarlet.

  Valerie chose more delicate colours, mauve and pale green.

  Only David Cavendish looked as though he might be going to protest that this was beneath his dignity. But Frances held out the packet of pens to him with an encouraging smile.

  “We used to do this with the kiddies, didn’t we?”

  The room fell silent, except for the whisper of felt pens across the paper. Aidan looked out of the sitting room window behind him. The air was grey. Fingers of mist were beginning to creep under the trees that lined the road.

  He saw a figure in a navy-blue tracksuit striding across the car park, almost at a run. Lucy turned to the left, towards the village centre. He went to stand in the bay window and watched her lope away up the road.

  She was probably going to the Fellowship of St Ebba and St Oswald, to Brother Simon. No doubt she would pour her heart out to him about what had happened and seek his consolation.

  Spiritual comfort, or something more?

  Aidan felt something sharp twist inside him. He remembered the shudder of Lucy’s body against his own last night.

  Don’t be ridiculous. They’re old friends. It was here that Lucy fled when she ran away from Bill. What possible reason could you have to feel jealous of Simon?

  Then memory overwhelmed him. Jenny was only six months dead. The pain hit him again, and swept away all thought of Lucy.

  It was minutes before he turned back to the room and today’s reality. There was a low buzz of chatter in the room. Lucy had guessed right. Adults four of them might be, but three of them seemed to be enjoying themselves as much as Melangell. David alone had done very little of his. He had filled in a few of the spaces a dull brown. Melangell’s was already a riot of colour. David seemed to be watching her work more than his own.

  “That’s great,” Aidan told her. “We’ll show Lucy at lunchtime.”

  Something stirred at the back of his mind. That memory of Lucy’s loping figure. Like someone running for a purpose. In haste.

  Suddenly he knew this was not the gait of someone on her way to her spiritual counsellor. Something had overridden the shock of Bill’s attack which had made her so subdued at breakfast time. Something had galvanized her into action.

  In a flash of revelation, Aidan knew now where she was going. The last thing she had said to him at the table.

  “I need to know who that was. It may very well have been Rachel’s murderer.”

  Lucy must be making a last attempt to contact Karen, before Rachel’s mother left the island.

  What would the volatile Gerald do if he found them together?

  Another thought came thundering in behind that.

  Had Lucy guessed what Karen knew?

  A hand seemed to grip his heart. If Lucy, or Karen, knew who the murderer was… If the murderer realized that… Lucy’s life might be in danger twice over.

  He threw a swift glance around the five absorbed in their tasks.

  “Excuse me, folks. I’ll be back.”

  He made for the door. Melangell scrambled to her feet.

  “I’m coming too.”

  “No, love. Not this time. You’ll be fine. Go on with your colouring.” He was striding across the hall as he spoke.

  “I don’t want to stay.”

  Frances appeared in the doorway behind her. She put a capable hand on Melangell’s shoulder.

  “Don’t you worry about her. She’ll be safe with me. Won’t you, Mel?”

  Melangell’s panicked eyes cut Aidan to the quick. But he couldn’t waste time talking sense to her.

  “Do what she says, love.”

  He had a last glimpse of her stricken face as he shot out of the front door.

  Lucy reached the small hotel on the corner and swung into its car park at a run. She was desperately afraid she had come too late. After yesterday’s encounter, when Gerald had ordered Karen away, he might have swept her straight off the island. What would there have been to keep him another night?

  It was both a relief and a shock when the first thing she saw was Gerald loading a suitcase into the boot of his car. No, not his. Lucy recognized one of a fleet of local hire car
s. A man like Gerald Morrison could have given a false identity to the company to hide his tracks. His own car would be something more flashy than this. Too easily recognized and remembered.

  When had he really come to Holy Island?

  Yesterday, she had feared his violence. But nothing could compare with the terror of the man who had loomed over her last night.

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say, “Where’s Karen?” But she checked herself. For reasons she dared not explore too deeply, Gerald had not wanted her to talk to Rachel’s mother.

  Cold fear of another sort was beginning to crawl through her stomach. The doubts were coming back. She looked at the clean-cut face, the handsomely trimmed fair hair, as his gaze swung round to meet hers.

  That cricket sweater. Hadn’t the police been asking about someone wearing white wool?

  Fool! She should never have dashed off like this without telling someone where she was going.

  “Can I help you?” The words were icy. The last thing in the world Gerald Morrison wanted to do was help a friend of Karen’s.

  Where was she?

  “You’re checking out?”

  “I can’t think how I let Karen persuade me to stay another night in this God-forsaken spot. If you’ll pardon the phrase. Nothing here but sand. And not even a golf links. Just a religious tourist trap. Not my scene. There isn’t a decent cocktail bar in sight.”

  He slammed the boot and opened the driver’s door.

  Lucy could restrain herself no longer. “Where’s Karen? Isn’t she coming with you?”

  “I have not the faintest idea where she is. And frankly, my dear, I don’t care.”

  His hand reached out to shut the door.

  “Just a minute.” A wiry figure shot past Lucy and grabbed the door before it fully closed. Aidan was suddenly between them. He was panting from the run. “You can’t just drive off like that. There’s a murder investigation. Karen’s daughter is dead. Was Karen in the hotel last night? When did you last see her?”

  Gerald kept his supercilious smile with difficulty. He looked around him with exaggerated care. “I see no police. They seem to have finished their enquiries here. I gave them my contact details. I’m free to go. If you wouldn’t mind removing your hand, before we have a regrettable accident with your fingers. Don’t forget, I’m a grieving father. Don’t I deserve some sympathy?” He got into the car.