The Island Murders (Dorset Crime Book 3)

by Rachel McLean

  As she neared the castle, her phone picked up a signal and pinged. A text from Elsa, sent at 10pm last night.

  Sharon’s at my flat. Call me.

  Lesley stopped in her tracks. She read the text again. She checked the sender. It was Elsa all right, not Terry.

  Sharon had come all the way to Bournemouth and turned up at Elsa’s flat. Did that mean she’d gone to Lesley’s house in Wareham first, or had she gone straight to the flat knowing it was closer to the station?

  Sharon knew that Lesley spent most weeknights at Elsa’s flat. Even so, the thought of her sixteen-year-old daughter landing in Bournemouth and knocking on doors in the hope of finding her filled Lesley with guilt.

  She dialled Elsa. Voicemail. Why was nobody picking up?

  “Elsa, it’s me. I just got your text. I’m stuck on Brownsea Island on a case and didn’t have a signal last night, sorry. Is Sharon still with you? Call me or get her to call me.”

  She hung up and dialled Sharon’s number: no answer. Sharon never answered her phone. She sent her a text.

  Elsa tells me you’re at hers. Call me, let me know you’re OK. Mum x.

  She hesitated then deleted the x. She pulled in a breath and rang Terry.

  “What is it?” he snapped. “Tell me you’ve found her.”

  “Hey,” she said. “Don’t take it out on me.”

  “You won’t believe the night I’ve had,” he replied. “I’ve been driving around Edgbaston and Harborne, knocking on the doors of her friends.”

  “Don’t you have their phone numbers?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Anyway,” she replied. “She’s turned up, she’s in Bournemouth.”

  “Bournemouth?” he repeated.

  “Yes.” Lesley bit her fingernail. Terry didn’t know about Elsa. “One of my friends,” she said. “Sharon turned up at her flat, she thought I might be there.”

  “But you’re on Brownsea Island.”

  “Sharon didn’t know that.”

  “I looked it up,” he told her. “What the hell are you doing there?”

  “Check the news. There’s been a murder here.”

  “Another one? You’re not very good for the death rate, are you?”

  Lesley didn’t reply to that.

  “I’ll call you when I speak to her,” she said. “I’ll tell her she needs to go home.”

  “You haven’t spoken to her yet? What the hell—“

  She hung up, then regretted it. She hadn’t asked him what had happened to make Sharon leave Birmingham without telling him. To provoke that I’ve had enough text. She could guess, though. Terry’s girlfriend Julieta, and her son.

  Lesley redialled to find his number engaged. She wasn’t about to leave a message.

  She was past the farm buildings now, halfway to Diana Berry’s house. She needed to click into professional mode. Stop being a mum and start being a copper. But she still didn’t know where Sharon was. Was she at Elsa’s, or had she set off for Wareham?

  Lesley pulled a hand through her hair. She texted her daughter again.

  Stay at Elsa’s. Call me, tell me you’re safe.

  It was all she could do. Sharon was sixteen. Legally she could take care of herself. But in real life, it didn’t work like that.

  Diana Berry’s house was up ahead. Lesley squared her shoulders, pulled her jacket straight, and sniffed at the air, checking the faint scent of her own armpits. She knocked on the door, hoping the witness wouldn’t notice.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Elsa Short parked her car around the corner from the beach and closed the door. She looked up and down the coast road, shuddering as she caught a glimpse of the apartment building in which she’d been imprisoned a month earlier. Priscilla Evans, the girlfriend of her old business partner Harry Nichol, had locked her in overnight. If Lesley hadn’t turned up in time, she had no doubt the woman would have killed her.

  She shook the tension out of her body. Get a grip. She needed to be sharp for this meeting. She turned the corner and approached the café in the side road leading to the beach. She’d been in the habit of meeting Harry here on alternate Wednesday mornings. A regular occurrence, to discuss cases they preferred not to talk about in the office. Until Harry had been murdered by his insane girlfriend.

  She took a table outside the café and scanned the area. There was no sign of the woman she was meeting. Elsa hadn’t been expecting to return here after Harry’s death. But a text had arrived this morning: We need to talk, same place you used to meet Harry.

  Elsa had left Sharon in her flat, sulking on the sofa about something her dad had done. Elsa loved Lesley, but she wasn’t keen on becoming a surrogate mother to her daughter.

  A waitress appeared and Elsa ordered a double espresso. She needed the caffeine shot, she’d been up late trying to convince Sharon to call her dad. But Sharon had been insistent: she’d had enough of her dad. She hated his new girlfriend’s little boy and she wanted to come down here to Bournemouth for good.

  Elsa hadn’t bargained on becoming a stepmum when she’d met Lesley and she wasn’t sure how she felt about it. If only Lesley had picked up her phone.

  “Good morning, Elsa.”

  Elsa turned to see a woman standing behind her. Early sixties, with greying hair piled on top of her head. She wore an expensive lime-green suit and heels that were too high for a café by the beach.

  Elsa gave the woman a nod. “Morning, Aurelia.”

  Aurelia Cross sat down. She was the third member of their legal partnership, the Cross in Nichol, Cross and Short. They still hadn’t changed the name of the firm.

  Harry had been the founding partner; it seemed disrespectful to take his name off the door. But Elsa knew that at some point, they would need to replace him. Whether they’d recruit internally from the junior partners or they’d look outside the firm, she wasn’t sure. She imagined Aurelia had a view on it. Aurelia tended to have a view on everything.

  The waitress reappeared with Elsa’s coffee and took Aurelia’s order for a pot of herbal tea. Aurelia placed her bag on the seat next to her as the waitress walked away. It was expensive, designer.

  “So,” she said, leaning back in her chair and eyeing Elsa. “You used to meet Harry here on a regular basis.”

  Elsa met her gaze. “I did.”

  “And I don’t suppose I need to ask what you met to discuss.”

  “I don’t suppose you do.”

  Aurelia had never got involved with the firm’s biggest client. Elsa had been assigned to his account not long after joining the firm, Harry handing the reins over to her eagerly. But Aurelia had refused to go near the man.

  “Are things going as they should?” Aurelia asked.

  Elsa shrugged. “Difficult to say what ‘as they should’ is when it comes to this particular client.”

  “No recent arrests among his people? No nosing around by the police?”

  Elsa shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “All financial affairs above board?”

  Elsa locked eyes with her partner and returned the woman’s smile. They both knew Elsa wasn’t about to give a truthful answer to that question.

  The client in question, Arthur Kelvin, kept accounts that looked regular enough, on the surface. He paid his accountant a lot of money to make it so. But the accountant and Elsa both knew that the figures submitted to the authorities each year hid a multitude of sins. Kelvin had a wide variety of constantly changing businesses, new concerns being added and subtracted from his portfolio on an almost weekly basis. Some were above board. Others were designed as a smokescreen for his real activities. Elsa had some knowledge of which was which, but wasn’t allowed the full facts.

  “Everything’s under control,” she told Aurelia. “You don’t need to worry.”

  “So the investigation into Harry’s death didn’t cause the police to look at your client list?”

  “Why would it?”

  “I thought you got Ameena Kha
n involved in a couple of cases?”

  Elsa swallowed. Ameena Khan had been a junior partner, she’d died two days before Harry. And she’d been sleeping with him, it turned out. Along with Priscilla Evans, the woman who’d killed him.

  “Ameena was only tangentially involved,” she said. “Once the police found out Harry and Ameena had been having an affair, they realised there wasn’t any point digging into his clients. You don’t need to worry, Aurelia.”

  “Good.”

  Aurelia stopped talking as the waitress reappeared. She placed a tray on the table and offloaded a pot of tea and a cup. Aurelia nodded her thanks and poured for herself.

  “Is that all you wanted to speak to me about?” Elsa asked.

  Aurelia took a sip from her tea and grimaced: hot. “I just want to make sure you keep all this separate from the firm’s other undertakings.”

  “Of course,” Elsa replied. “That’s what I’ve always done.”

  Elsa had been hoping that Harry’s death would mean the breakup of the firm. At the very least she’d hoped it would scare Arthur Kelvin away. She wanted out.

  If Kelvin ever got caught, she would be too.

  And now she was shacked up with a copper. Was she stupid? Or was she just naive?

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Diana Berry sat at the kitchen table in her cottage, her fingers entwined around a mug of coffee. Lesley sat opposite her, having refused the offer of a cup. Between them, at the end of the table, sat a small girl, three or four years old. She was colouring in a picture of children at the seaside. Lesley wondered if the girl had made the connection between her own life and the imagined one in the picture.

  Diana’s eyes were clouded. She yawned and took a long gulp of her coffee.

  “My colleague PC McGuigan has told me you witnessed something on Monday night,” Lesley said to her.

  Diana nodded, then glanced at the little girl. “Two women,” she said, “arguing.”

  Lesley looked her in the eye. “Did you see anything?”

  “Nothing. I was over by the quay taking a walk. I sometimes go out at night when the kids are in bed and my husband’s catching up on his work. It’s calm at that time, peaceful. It allows me to think.”

  Lesley nodded. “What time was this?”

  The woman frowned, thinking. “I reckon it was about nine o’clock.” A pause. “Yeah. I left the house at quarter to, I remember checking the clock before I told Simon where I was going. So by the time I got to the quay, and had stood there for a while… I like to look out to sea,” she said, looking embarrassed. “Collecting my thoughts.”

  “And you heard two women?” Lesley asked her.

  Diana reached out and touched her daughter on the hand. “Charlie love. Why don’t you go upstairs and get your Play-doh down?”

  The girl frowned. “I like this.”

  “Please, love. Just fetch it down and we can make stuff together.”

  The girl looked at her mum for a moment, then shrugged and climbed down from her chair. Diana watched as she left the room, closing the door behind her. Lesley heard the thump of feet running up the stairs and turned back to the girl’s mother.

  “Tell me what you heard.”

  “I heard a woman shouting, first. Screaming blue murder she was.”

  “Could you make out any words?”

  “Not much. It was a way away.”

  “So where was she?”

  “Over towards the church. The woman was… well, she wasn’t happy.”

  “And you didn’t catch any words at all?”

  “Oh, I caught some. Ripe they were, the woman had a mouth like a toilet bowl.”

  Lesley smiled. She’d talked like that before she’d met Dennis and had been forced to tone down her language.

  “And then you heard another woman?” she asked.

  Diana nodded. She took another slurp of her coffee and leaned back in her chair. “The second woman’s voice was lower, quieter, but it was definitely a woman. She was trying to calm the first woman down, but the first woman just kept yelling at her.”

  “Did you approach them?” Lesley asked her.

  “I walked up towards the church. I stood by the wall to the castle. There were two figures, they were at the side of the church on the path leading up to the hides.”

  “Did you see their faces?”

  Diana shook her head. “Sorry. They disappeared not long after I got there.”

  “Which way did they go?” Lesley asked. “Did they both go the same way?”

  “I saw one of them heading over towards the farm buildings, and then when I looked back at the church, the other one was gone. I’m not sure where she went, but I assume…”

  “You assume what?”

  “Well, I assume she went up to the houses past the hides.” She looked at Lesley. “There’s only two women who live up there, Simone Browning and Frankie Quinn.”

  Lesley nodded slowly. “Those are the only houses on that side of the island?”

  “There’s a visitor centre up there, a small one. It covers the habitats on that side of the island, and then there’s the two houses. Frankie and Adam live in one, Simone lived in the other.”

  “So you think one of the women was either Simone or Frankie?”

  A shrug. “I can’t be sure, all I can say is which way she went.”

  “And the other woman went up towards the farm buildings?”

  “Yes.”

  And the beach, Lesley thought. The beach where Simone had been found.

  “OK.” She fished her card out of the inside pocket of her jacket. “If you think of anything else, call me.” She jabbed at the card. “This is my mobile number. I’m staying on the island, so you can call me day or night.”

  Diana pocketed the card. “I will.”

  The door opened and the little girl clattered in, hauling a plastic box. “Are we going to play now, Mum?”

  Diana looked at Lesley. “Are we done here?”

  “I think so,” Lesley told her.

  “Good.” She turned to her daughter. “Come on then Charlie, let’s see what we can make.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Dr Whittaker was playing classical music for the post-mortem. Wagner’s Flying Dutchman this time, a sea-inspired tune. Dennis found it disconcerting, the sudden crescendos taking him by surprise in the incongruous surroundings.

  He stood a few paces back and watched as the pathologist examined Simone’s body. He worked his way over her flesh, looking for bruises and other marks. Whittaker paused at Simone’s neck, moving her head from side to side to get a better angle. He stood back and let his assistant take photographs as he progressed.

  “Those finger-marks,” Dennis said, “Strangulation, you think?”

  Whittaker glanced up at him. “Let me finish, man.”

  Dennis bristled. Whittaker could be tetchy, but the two men had known each other for decades and he normally treated Dennis with a modicum of respect.

  Whittaker walked around the table and examined the other side of the neck. He sniffed and stood up straight, looking at Dennis.

  “I can answer your question now.”

  Dennis raised an eyebrow. “And?”

  “Somebody tried to strangle her. There are clear finger imprints, two at the front, five at the back.”

  “But that’s not how she died?”

  Whittaker took a pencil out of the top pocket of his lab coat and used it to hold the woman’s mouth slightly open. “There was foaming here. Most of it’s gone now, but there was plenty when we picked her up on the beach. Unmistakeable sign that her lungs filled with water.”

  Dennis knew about the signs of drowning. You couldn’t work in a county like Dorset and not see a few drownings in your time.

  “So that’s what killed her?”

  Whittaker nodded. “Maybe she was unconscious when she went in, the strangulation might have made her black out. Her assailant might have thought she was dead and he pushed her in to
remove the evidence.”

  “He?” Dennis asked.

  Whittaker shook his head. “You know what I mean, man.”

  “I don’t. Are you telling me you think this was a man?”

  “Whoever it was, male or female, they were strong enough to get her onto a boat and then push her into the harbour.”

  “Or clever enough to convince her to get on the boat,” Dennis said.

  The pathologist shrugged. “Most killers are men, especially most strangulation killers.”

  Dennis knew he was right. Women were more likely to use an indirect method for murder. Poison, sleeping tablets. With men, it was more common for the victim to have physical marks. When contact was made with the victim, a woman was more likely to take a knife than she was to put her hand on her victim’s body.

  “Any defensive wounds?” Dennis asked the pathologist.

  “Not that I can see. There are some nibble marks on her toes where the fish got her, and the skin on her fingers is peeling away a little. Not what I’d class as gloving, she wasn’t in the water for long enough, but some evidence of damage.”

  “So if she did have any evidence on her hands, we wouldn’t be able to see it?”

  “Afraid not.” Whittaker stood back and surveyed the body, his fingers brushing his chin. He’d grown a moustache since Dennis had worked with him last.

  “So you still think she was in the water for about twenty-four hours?” Dennis asked.

  “It could have been less, I’d say anything from eighteen to twenty-four based on what I can see here.”

  That was a wider window. Dennis wondered how Lesley was getting on, whether she’d found people who’d seen Simone during that time.

  “Right,” said Whittaker. “Time to open her up. I’m pretty sure we’ll get confirmation that she drowned. Do you want to hang around to see?”

  Dennis looked at the body. He needed to get back to the office. He’d had a call from Johnny last night saying he was returning from the island. Dennis wanted to make sure everything was alright with the constable, and he also needed to brief Lesley.