Palmer-Jones 03 - Murder in Paradise

by Ann Cleeves

  Then Sylvia came in and switched on the light, and threw a couple of logs on to the fire.

  “You were asleep,” Sylvia said. “ You were late last night, and then they got you out so early this morning.”

  “No,” he said. “ Not asleep. I was just thinking.”

  “About Mary?”

  He nodded.

  “She used to come to see me sometimes,” she said. “You know that her parents had asked special permission for her to stay on at school here, because of her handicap. Otherwise she would have started at the big school on Baltasay this term. Sometimes she said that she wished that they would let her go and that it would be fun to live in the hostel with all the others, and at other times she was desperate to stay. I don’t know which would have been best for her.…

  “She used to love to read my magazines, especially the fashion articles. Once I caught her in my bedroom, putting on the make-up which was lying around on the dressing table. I suppose that she was just a normal twelve-year-old and she never had a chance to do that sort of thing at home. Agnes must have been forty when she had Mary so there was quite a generation gap between them. She still treated her as a very young child, and Mary reacted accordingly—tantrums and all.”

  George had an idea.

  “That scarf that she was wearing all day yesterday,” he said. “Do you know where she got it?”

  “Oh yes,” Sylvia said. “It was mine. I gave it to her.”

  Sarah stayed with Jim at Sandwick in the afternoon while they prepared to receive the police. Alec was there, too, until eventually he went home to tell Maggie what was happening and to collect his car. Will was out all afternoon. No one knew where he had gone.

  “I’d better go home,” she said when they heard the plane coming low over the house. “They won’t want to talk to me.”

  “No, I don’t suppose that they will.”

  “You’ll come back as soon as you can?”

  Agnes kissed her before she went and thanked her for being there, and sent her quickly home. She saw Will, standing on the boulder beach below Unsta throwing pebbles into the tide. She almost approached him to offer him comfort, but he seemed absorbed in himself. Perhaps he wanted to be alone, and besides it was very cold.

  It was cold in the house too, although there was light. She found paper, sticks and coal in a cupboard in the scullery, but when she tried to light the range it hissed and went out. She had never tried to light a fire before. She felt helpless and incompetent. She had wanted the house to be warm and welcoming for Jim when he came in. She needed to prove to herself that she was a better wife than Elspeth would have been. She wondered if Will was still out on the beach, but when she went outside to call him to help her, he was gone.

  When Jim came in the table was laid and the food was ready, but the house was still cold. He showed her how to light the range, but it seemed to her that he was distant and preoccupied.

  “I’m so sorry about Mary,” she said.

  As a nurse she had comforted grieving relatives, but that had been easier. They had been comforted by the uniform, the image of calm authority. She had not needed to think what to say. Now it was an effort, because she was thinking of Elspeth, wondering if he was thinking about her too. He turned the conversation to other matters, to the croft, the house, and neither Elspeth nor Mary was mentioned.

  Chapter Five

  In the morning they had an argument about going to church.

  “But you don’t believe in it,” Jim said. “You said that it was all superstition. You never went at home. We should start as we mean to go on. If we go today, they’ll expect us to go every Sunday.”

  “It’s different here. Perhaps we should go every Sunday.”

  “Why? Why should we go?”

  “It’s the custom. Everyone goes. I don’t want to upset things. I want to belong.”

  “This is our home. It’s not a bloody museum. We’ll never be happy here if we start off by pretending.”

  “But we should go today. Your mother is so upset. It would hurt her, wouldn’t it, if we didn’t turn up?”

  So he agreed that they would go today. They were standing in the kitchen. The wind had blown itself out. Jim had been out and he held a mug of tea to warm his hands. Sarah was proud because she had managed to light the range. She was wearing jeans and one of Jim’s rugby shirts.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  “To watch the milking at Buness. It’s all new since I was last here. They did it by hand before. Then I walked around our land. Just to get an idea of what needs to be done. I didn’t get a chance yesterday. It’s been left to run down. The fencing’s in a dreadful state.”

  “I’ll help you,” she said. “ You’ll have to tell me what to do, but I’d enjoy it. We can start this afternoon.”

  “Not this afternoon,” he said. “ Not on a Sunday.”

  “So you do care what they think.”

  She thought at first that he was angry, but he laughed and caught her round the waist.

  “Do you want breakfast?” she asked.

  “No. I had some at Buness.”

  They went into the bedroom to change for church. He put on his wedding suit. She was looking for a respectable dress when she stepped on something and bent down to pick it up. It was the pin caught in the square of paper which had been attached to her wedding dress. She looked again at the words. “He should have been mine.” Now they had some meaning. She was quite convinced that the message had been written by Elspeth.

  Jim’s back was turned to her. He was facing the mirror, knotting his tie. She quickly screwed the paper into a ball, took it into the kitchen, and threw it on to the fire.

  As they walked to the kirk the sun came out and lit up the water in the bay. The kirk was just beyond the hall, built of the same stone, with a steeply sloping roof and a bell above it in a small open turret. The bell was ringing a single, monotonous note. They walked past the hall and nearby, just in a field and surrounded by a drystone wall, was a graveyard. Sarah remembered the night of the dance, sitting by a gravestone, thinking that everyone else was in the hall and hearing the running footsteps.

  Jim’s uncle James was the preacher. Sarah had expected primitive religion, Old Testament Christianity, a rigid formality, but there was nothing of that. James spoke sadly and gently about Mary, about the difficulty of maintaining faith in the face of such tragedy. He gave no easy answers. Then the school choir sang a modern children’s hymn accompanied by guitars and recorders. She found it disconcerting. Had she wanted the island to remain a museum, as Jim had said, old-fashioned and predictable, to satisfy her sense of the dramatic? It might perhaps have been easier.

  Melissa sat at the back of the church. She had arrived late so that she need talk to no one, but she would have to see Agnes before she and James returned to Kell. Agnes had lost a child now. They had something in common again. As she listened to the children singing she began to weep, and she wondered if the sound of the sweet, high voices was having the same effect on Agnes.

  When the service was over, the worshippers stayed in their seats until James had walked down the kirk to the door so that he could greet them as they left.

  On the other side of the aisle from the Stennets, Kenneth Dance was talking to his daughter. She sat still and upright with her son close by her side.

  “I see that they haven’t come from the school house today. You’d think that they’d make the effort this once.”

  But she was not listening. She was watching Jim Stennet take the hand of his pretty young wife and hold it discreetly under the shelf meant for hymn books and gloves.

  “Father,” she said suddenly. “It’s all been a mistake. I can’t stay.”

  “You don’t want to go back to see Gordon?” he whispered. He was horrified.

  “No. Not that. But I can’t stay on the island.”

  Annie had heard her. “ You’ve nothing to go back to. Not now. You must stay.”

 
Robert was wondering if someone might invite him back to dinner. Agnes and Sandy did sometimes, but he supposed that the family would be there today. As soon as the service was over and James had opened the door, he loped up the aisle to be there first, and stood there, in the sunshine, with a vacant, begging leer. They all knew what he was doing, but no one took pity on him.

  Melissa did not have to find the courage to approach Agnes, because Agnes came to her. Melissa was still sitting in the pew at the back of the church, and Agnes broke way from the rest of the family and sat beside her.

  “It was good of you to come,” Agnes said.

  “I had to come today.”

  “Mary would have liked the service. She couldn’t join in but she liked to watch the children singing. James spoke well. He’s a great comfort.”

  Melissa did not want Agnes to be too comfortable.

  “I have to go now,” she said. “James will be waiting.”

  “You won’t come back for dinner?”

  “No.” She could feel the old panic. She had to be out of the church. She had made the effort, and now she had to be away. She stood up.

  “Oh well,” Agnes said. “Another time, then.”

  Melissa hurried outside and waited for her husband at a distance from the others so that she would not have to speak to them.

  Outside they stood, talking together in the sunshine, the Stennets and the Dances, but when they started walking away down the hill to the houses, they split into separate family groups and each went their own way.

  At Sandwick Sarah felt in the way. Maggie was helping Agnes in the kitchen and her own offer of help was refused. The men were talking about sheep. It seemed impossible to her that they could talk about sheep after such a tragedy. In the end she went outside and played with Maggie and Alec’s children, until they were all called in for lunch. Then she felt childish and irresponsible.

  Over the meal Maggie tried to organize the domestic affairs at Unsta.

  “We’ve put some of our meat in your freezer, but you’ll need to order more from the butcher in Baltasay, until your beasts go for slaughter in the spring. You’ll have to buy groceries through the shop here—Kenneth Dance has some arrangement with the wholesaler over there, some fiddle, and they won’t sell directly to individuals.”

  Sarah listened to the lecture, tried to be interested. Nobody mentioned Mary. It was as if she had never existed.

  They all sat crowded round a table which was not big enough, in a room too small and hot. The men piled their plates with food. After the meal Sarah was allowed to help with the washing up. She watched Agnes absentmindedly blowing her nose on a tea towel and felt that she had seen enough of Jim’s family.

  She had expected it to be different. The short space of time on Kinness had been as crowded with events as the Sandwick kitchen was with people. She needed to be on her own for a while.

  “I think I’ll go for a walk,” she said, “while it’s still light.”

  “Shall I come with you?” Jim was looking at plans with Alec. He would not have minded going, but he was interested in Alec’s ideas and he was pleased when she said she would go alone.

  When she left the house she hesitated, uncertain of which way to go. She was used to signposted footpaths on her walks, and was frightened of damaging crops or offending people’s privacy. She was beginning to find her bearings on the island, but decided to follow the road north towards the harbour where they had landed the day before. In such a strange place it was reassuring to take a road she already knew. She walked quickly and quite soon passed the school house. Then the island became wilder, less cultivated. On one side of the road was the hill, bare but for heather and sheep, and to the east a low marsh crossd with ditches. There, just by the side of the road was a derelict croft, roofless, much of its walls pulled down, the stone used for building the dyke which marked the beginning of the Kell land. Kell was built into the hill, windswept and exposed to north-easterly winds, sheltered only to the west. The fields around the house were small, surrounded by high walls. It stood well away from the road beyond a small lochan. On the other side of the water she could see James. He was leaning against a gate, smoking a pipe. He had changed out of his suit. He waved and shouted hello, but he did not ask her in.

  She walked on as far as the harbour and sat there for a moment on the sandy beach. North of the harbour the road petered into a track which led to the airstrip and eventually to the lighthouse. It rose steeply through bare, windswept grassland and seemed uninviting, rather daunting. She told herself she must have something to explore later, and retraced her steps. Just north of the school house the road forked. She knew that it joined again near Buness. The track which she knew went to the west past Sandwick. She took the easterly road. It, too, followed the fertile area of the island. There were small fields of oats, grass, and vegetables. There was a steep incline and then in a small valley, right next to the road, end on to it, a low grey house. It had a red post box in the wall and a small sign which said: Kinness Post Office and General Stores.

  There was no display window. A small boy, Ben, was kicking a football against the wall with intense concentration.

  “Hello!” she said. She liked children.

  He stared at her but said nothing, then scuttled indoors like a frightened animal.

  As she drew level with the kirk the sun was beginning to set below the west cliffs. From every point on the island there was a sight of the sea. She walked off the road and up the hill to the church to get a better view. The pink light of the sun caught the gravestones in the small cemetery, and threw long shadows, so that they could have been prehistoric standing stones. She went over to them and began to read the inscriptions on them. Nearly all of them remembered Stennets, Dances, or Andersons. With pleasure she read the old names—Jacobina, Jerome, Alexander, which recurred generation after generation. Then she saw a name which she recognized and she stopped the idle movement from one stone to another, without reading them carefully. The stone was in a corner, near the protecting wall, and seemed not to have weathered like the others. “ Elspeth Dance 1900—1925,” it said. Then underneath: “We remember her as she was once and forgive her. The shame is with us all. He should have been hers.”

  The last phrase was familiar to Sarah. Elspeth must be about twenty-five now, she thought. What can have happened to the poor woman sixty years ago?

  Before she could think clearly why she felt that she had seen the last phrase recently, she heard someone coming up behind her and she fumed round, startled.

  For George Palmer-Jones it had been an unsatisfactory day. He had not slept well. In his mind he had repeated the details of Mary’s death, looking for some other fact which might explain it differently. He had found none. And the problem—the need to come to a decision about his future—had not been replaced by the new one. As he tried to sleep the two subjects became linked in his mind, as if the discovery of a logical explanation of the child’s death was a test of competence, and if he failed at that, the new venture of his own business would be a failure. If I knew her secret, he thought. If only I knew her secret.

  Then there had been the dilemma of whether or not to go to church. It was not that he had no faith. He was church warden in his parish church and he had a strong, though idiosyncratic, commitment. It was a matter of delicacy. He was not sure that he would be welcome. Jonathan and Sylvia never attended services. He knew that when they first came to Kinness they were under considerable pressure to go. Jonathan had even been expected to preach. They had seen it as a matter of principle, and never went, even when the children from school were performing.

  Sylvia did not appear for breakfast. The two men sat at the pine table in the small, immaculate kitchen, drank percolated coffee from expensive hand-thrown mugs. George felt a deep nostalgia for the large untidy kitchen at home, for tea from a jumble-sale teapot, and for Molly.

  “I’m sorry that Molly couldn’t come this year,” he said.

  “So
am I. Sylvia misses the company.”

  “She did want to come, but there was a crisis in the refuge for battered wives where our daughter works. One of her staff is sick. Molly said she’d help for a while. I’m not sure that she’s settled to retirement.”

  Nor have I, he thought. He said:

  “I thought I might go to church this morning.”

  Jonathan was disappointed, offended. “I was planning a walk,” he said, “see if the wind brought in anything interesting.”

  “I’ll come with you then.” It was easier that way. He was the Drysdales’ guest. He supposed that Jonathan enjoyed his company on these walks around the island. It was hard to tell. The previous visits to Kinness had been different. Molly mixed with everyone. She had made them all laugh. There had been a sense that they were on holiday. It occurred to him that he was there under false pretences—he had only been invited in the past because of Molly’s ability to make them happy. The least he could do was to go birdwatching with his host. He must be unsettled, he thought. He never usually needed an excuse to go birdwatcbing.

  It was a depressing walk. There were no birds.

  “It’s like this sometimes,” Jonathan said, “then the wind goes south-east and something unusual turns up. Of course I miss a lot.”

  “It must be difficult to get an accurate record when you’re on your own here.”

  “Impossible. I’ve tried to get Sylvia involved, but she doesn’t seem interested. Then the big falls of birds always seem to happen during the week while I’m at school.”