The Island Murders (Dorset Crime Book 3)

by Rachel McLean

  “Were you puzzled by that, given that you’d seen her the previous night?”

  “I assumed she had a hangover.”

  “So she drank a lot?”

  “No, but Simone was not good with alcohol.”

  Tina nodded. To call in sick when you lived minutes away from your work seemed unusual if Simone had a hangover induced by a couple of beers. Could she have suddenly fallen ill? Or had that argument kept her from coming into work?

  The other possibility was that she was already dead. In which case, she hadn’t called in sick at all.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  As Lesley returned to the quay, she spotted Tina leaving a cottage over towards the lagoon. Lesley gave her a wave to summon her over.

  “Whose house was that?”

  “Anya Davinski. She says she met Simone for a drink on Monday night and that they didn’t argue.”

  “Nothing at all? They didn’t fall out over anything?”

  Tina shook her head. “She said they had a friendly evening and then Simone left her. Anya went home, Simone headed off to her cottage. Anya didn’t hear anything.”

  Lesley dragged her hand through her hair and looked out to sea. “So the next person she spoke to is Bernard Williams. I’ll go and talk to him and his wife.”

  “You want me to speak to Frankie Quinn?” Tina asked.

  “Yes,” Lesley replied. “I’m not expecting much more from her, but it can’t do any harm to cover the whole team. I’ve got a meeting in the castle to go to before the John Lewis people leave the island and then I’m just hoping we get something more from Gail.”

  She slumped onto a bench looking out over the harbour, tiredness washing over her. “We’re getting nowhere. One of these people is hiding something. Somebody fell out with Simone, and that somebody could have been the person that killed her.”

  “Or could have seen the person who killed her maybe?” Tina suggested.

  Lesley shrugged. “You talk to Frankie, I’ll talk to Natasha and Bernard. Let me know if you find anything useful.”

  “No problem, boss.”

  Frankie Quinn lived with her partner Adam in the house next door to the one Simone had occupied. It was a fifteen minute walk from the quayside. Lesley watched Tina walking briskly away, and then turned and began to trudge in the other direction, towards the Williams’s house, dragging her heels. As she passed the church she heard the familiar shriek of the peacock. She turned and peered into the churchyard. Sure enough it was wandering around, looking bored.

  “What did you see on Monday night?” she muttered to the creature.

  She shook herself out and carried on walking. Twenty minutes later she was knocking on the Williams’s front door.

  Natasha opened it almost immediately. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her hair hadn’t been washed.

  “Come in,” she said, her voice flat.

  Lesley followed her through into the kitchen. The lights were out and the room was dark. Behind here were the woods where the squirrels reputedly lived. It meant very little sun got into this kitchen. The room was gloomy, the woman standing opposite her gloomier still.

  Lesley stood next to the table, placing a hand on its surface. “I want to ask you if you knew anything about Simone falling out with someone.”

  Natasha frowned. “Who?”

  Lesley looked into her eyes. “A woman. We don’t know who.”

  Natasha leaned against the sink, her body slack. “Simone never fell out with anyone. She was one of those people who everybody liked. She was kind, funny.” She looked down at the floor. “I have no idea who would want to kill her.”

  Lesley watched Natasha carefully. Her movements were steady even if they did indicate a woman who was deeply distressed. She didn’t appear to be lying.

  “She rang you early on Tuesday morning,” Lesley said, “Called in sick.”

  Natasha looked and nodded. “She spoke to Bernard, my husband.”

  “Is he here?”

  “He’s over at…” Natasha tailed off.

  “Where is he?” Lesley asked. “I’ll need to speak to him.”

  Natasha swallowed, her cheeks flushed. “He’s probably at the beach where we found her.”

  “Why would he be there?”

  Natasha pushed her shoulders back, trying to project confidence. “He’s a journalist. He’s reporting on the crime.”

  Lesley felt her nostrils flare. So Bernard Williams was profiting from Simone’s death. The press had their job to do, she supposed. Maybe she could speak with him, make sure that what he published would help them find the killer.

  “OK,” she said. “I’ll go and find him. But can you tell me what reason she gave for calling in sick?”

  “Some sort of bug, Bernard told me. She had sickness and diarrhoea.”

  Tina hadn’t mentioned Anya saying anything about a bug. The two women had been sitting in the garden outside the café, drinking.

  “It wasn’t a hangover?” Lesley asked.

  “Oh, no,” Natasha replied. “Simone would never get drunk on a work night.”

  “Anya says the two of them met up on Monday night, that they went for a drink in the garden of the café.”

  Natasha nodded. “They did that regularly. I joined them sometimes, Frankie too. It’s different for us because we’ve got partners, but Simone and Anya were close.”

  “And how would you say their relationship was?” Lesley asked her.

  “Good. Like I say, Simone got along with everybody. She was that sort of woman.”

  It was the second time Natasha had said this. Lesley wondered if Natasha resented Simone being the kind of person everyone liked. Lesley had managed people like that. It wasn’t always easy to avoid feeling threatened by them.

  “And how was your relationship with Simone?” she asked.

  “Excellent,” Natasha said. “She was a high performing member of the team.”

  “What about your personal relationship. Were you friends?”

  “All four of us are friends,” Natasha said. “Were. You become close to your colleagues when you live here.”

  Lesley nodded. “Had she suffered from stomach bugs before? Did she call in sick frequently?”

  “Never.” Natasha gripped the edge of the sink. “It was the first time she’d called in sick since she started working here.”

  Lesley pulled in a breath. “And you didn’t think to tell me that before?”

  Simone had been killed on Monday night or Tuesday morning. Which meant there was a good chance the sickness wasn’t real.

  Had Simone’s killer made the call?

  Or had it not been made at all?

  “Did your husband get on with Simone?

  A brief flinch. “Yes. Everyone did.”

  “Did he say how she sounded when she spoke to him on Tuesday morning? When she told him about the stomach bug?’

  “He said she sounded weak.” Natasha sighed. “I was going to go and see her on Tuesday afternoon. I got distracted. If only…”

  “If you’d gone to see her on Tuesday afternoon it would have made no difference. She was dead by then.”

  Natasha’s face fell.

  “Natasha, I need to know if Simone had fallen out with someone,” Lesley continued.

  “Why?” Natasha asked.

  “An argument was overheard on Monday night between two women.”

  “One of them was Simone?”

  “It’s a fair assumption.”

  Natasha’s cheeks reddened. “I have no idea who would have fallen out with her. Simone got on with everybody.”

  Again. Simone clearly hadn’t got on with everyone, or she would be alive today.

  “Well if you do think of anything, call me. OK?”

  “Of course.”

  Lesley left the house. As she walked back through the woods, she spotted a middle-aged man coming the other way. Bernard Williams.

  Perfect.

  Lesley stopped as she neared him. “
Bernard Williams?”

  “That’s me.”

  “DCI Clarke, Dorset Police.” She held up her badge. “I wonder if I might ask you a few questions.”

  He looked around. The shrieks of birds surrounded them. Lesley had never heard anything like it.

  “Somewhere else would be better,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but I can’t hear a thing.”

  Lesley didn’t want to take him back to the house, where he might confer with his wife.

  “Let’s go to the church,” she said. There was a bench outside.

  Ten minutes later they were sitting on the bench. The peacock wandered off to one side, pecking at the grass, mercifully quiet.

  “So,” she asked Bernard, “Simone called your house to ring in sick on Tuesday morning and she spoke to you. Is that correct?”

  “It is.” He looked straight ahead, towards the castle.

  “And how did she sound?”

  He shrugged. “Weak, I suppose. I never thought she was faking it.”

  Lesley hadn’t suggested that.

  “It was definitely her that you spoke to?”

  He turned to her. “Who else would it be?”

  “So it was her?”

  “Yes,” he replied, looking into Lesley’s face. “It was her. She told me she had a stomach bug and wasn’t feeling well enough to work. I said I’d pass on the message to Natasha. The conversation took one minute, if that.”

  “What time was this?”

  “I didn’t think to make a note,” he said. “But I imagine it would have been around half past seven.”

  Lesley nodded. “And nobody called her back? Natasha didn’t follow up?”

  “Why would she? She had the message from me. Simone was trustworthy, there’s no chance she would have lied.”

  His eyes were steady on her face. There was confidence in his expression, arrogance maybe.

  “Tell me about your journalism,” Lesley said to him. “I gather you’re reporting on Simone’s death.”

  He turned away from her to look ahead again. “I realise that’s a bit awkward. What with my wife being so close to her. But I had a call from an agency, they wanted me to put together a report for the Daily Mail. When you’re a journalist working in the modern world, you don’t pass up work. It’s hard enough to come by, especially when you live out here.”

  “You’re not happy about living on the island?”

  He clenched his fist in his lap. “It’s fine,” he said. “We have internet, I work from the cottage.”

  “Did you know anything about Simone arguing with anybody?”

  Bernard clenched his fist tighter. “No. I barely knew the woman.”

  “Despite her being one of your wife’s best friends?”

  He turned to her. “I wouldn’t say she was her best friend. Natasha was Simone’s boss, you have to keep a level of professional detachment.” He raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure you understand that, Detective Chief Inspector.”

  She met his gaze. “So Natasha and Simone weren’t friends?”

  He chuckled. “Now you’re trying to twist my words. They were friendly, they weren’t best friends, but they got on well. From what Natasha told me Simone was a nice woman, liked by everybody. Natasha certainly hadn’t fallen out with her.”

  Lesley hadn’t asked him if Natasha had fallen out with Simone.

  “So you know nothing about an argument that happened on Monday night?”

  He shrugged. “Sorry, I was tucked up at home on Monday night watching Lupin. On Netflix, we do get the twenty-first century over here.”

  Lesley looked at him. She didn’t like this man. There was something about the cold way he’d taken the work reporting on his wife’s friend’s death. The way he was responding to her questions now. It made her uneasy, but that didn’t make him a killer.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Frankie opened the door to see a young uniformed policewoman with mid-length dark hair and a friendly smile.

  “You need to speak to me again?” she asked.

  The woman smiled and held up her ID. “My name is PC Abbott. We’ve had more evidence come to light, and I’m checking it with all Simone’s friends.”

  Frankie shrugged and let the woman in. She led her into the living room where she sat down on the sofa. PC Abbott took the armchair next to her.

  “What’s this evidence?” Frankie asked.

  “Somebody overheard an argument on Monday night between two women. I don’t suppose you know who those women might have been?”

  Frankie frowned. “So there’s somebody who heard the argument, but they didn’t know who they heard?”

  “Just two women,” the constable replied. “We’re trying to find out if one of them might have been Simone.”

  Frankie looked down at her fingers. Her nails had been bitten to the quick. She turned them over in in her lap and looked back at the constable.

  There’d been tensions between Natasha and Simone over the last week or so. Nothing had come to the surface, nothing had been said, but Frankie had detected an atmosphere. They were skirting around something, refusing to get it into the open. Frankie had wondered if Simone might be at risk of losing her job.

  She looked at the constable. “I don’t know who they would be, sorry.”

  The constable looked down at her notebook. “Everybody we’ve spoken to has told us that Simone got along with all her colleagues. Would you say that was true?”

  “Generally, yes,” Frankie said, closing her eyes briefly. “Simone was lovely, she never had a bad word for anyone. She was the sort of person who you could rely on if you needed a favour, even at short notice. Nothing was too much trouble.”

  PC Abbott crossed her legs and licked her lips. She eyed Frankie. “If you don’t mind me saying, that makes her sound a bit too good to be true.”

  Frankie tensed. “She’s dead. Let’s not.”

  The constable leaned forward. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but there must have been somebody she didn’t get along with.”

  “Well, there were some tensions between her and Natasha.”

  Frankie didn’t like betraying Natasha. All she’d witnessed was an atmosphere, nothing specific. There’d been no arguments, no harsh words. But by saying this to the police, would she be making Natasha a potential suspect?

  “But it was only tension,” she added, speaking quickly. “They didn’t have an argument. I never heard anything, I never saw them fall out. Simone never said anything to me, nor Natasha. I’m probably just imagining things.”

  “So what made you think there was an atmosphere between them?”

  Frankie felt her body slump. She wished she’d never said anything.

  “Look, it’s probably nothing.”

  But if Simone’s killer was going to be found, the police needed to know everything. And there was no way Natasha had killed her, so she had nothing to hide.

  She sighed. “They weren’t meeting each other’s eye as much as they might have done. They only seemed to talk about work stuff. Nothing personal, no banter.”

  “Is there normally a lot of banter in your team?”

  Frankie gritted her teeth. The policewoman was putting words in her mouth.

  “Yes,” she said, “I suppose there is. We get along well, we have fun. Four women stuck on an island together, we make the best of it.”

  “OK,” the constable said, writing in her notebook.

  Frankie wished she could read upside down.

  “So did Natasha say anything to you about why she and Simone weren’t getting along?”

  “I didn’t say they weren’t getting along, I just said I’d witnessed some tension between them. And no, neither of them said anything to me about it.”

  “And you definitely didn’t witness an argument on Monday night? Between Simone and someone else, or between any two women amongst your colleagues?”

  Frankie dug her fingers into her thighs.

  “I certainly hav
en’t seen anything in the last week or so,” she said. “We all get along here. I know people expect that with an isolated community like this, we end up tearing each other’s hair out. But this isn’t Lord of the Flies. We’re professionals. We know how to conduct ourselves.”

  The policewoman stood up. She dug into the pocket of her jacket, making Frankie wonder how hot she was, and fished out a business card. “In case you think of anything else.”

  For some reason Frankie hadn’t expected a police constable to carry business cards. “Of course.” She took the card. PC Abbott. Major Crimes Investigation Team.

  “Please,” PC Abbott said, “if you do remember anything, no matter how small, contact me.”

  Frankie grunted in response. She needed to get back to work. She would go to Natasha’s, check in and then find a way to lose herself in bird habitats. She closed the door behind the constable, not waiting to watch her leave.

  Simone’s death had cast a shadow over the island, over their team most of all. Adam was upstairs watching wall-to-wall TV news on his laptop. The volunteers had been stood down and he had nothing to do. The two of them had snapped at each other last night: he was just as tense as she was.

  The sooner the police found their suspect and got off the island, the better.

  She went into the kitchen. A cup of tea would calm her nerves. As she approached the kettle, her phone buzzed. She pulled it out of her pocket: a text from Anya.

  I need to talk to you, it said. It’s important. Meet me outside the cafe at 7pm.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Johnny had arrived in the office at half past nine, looking sheepish. Dennis had asked how his wife was and Johnny had shrugged in response.

  “Are you sure you should be here?” Dennis said.

  Johnny nodded. “Best to distract myself.” He didn’t meet Dennis’s eye.

  Now, an hour later, the three men were at their desks peering into their computer screens. Johnny and Mike were trawling through records of the people working on the island. Dennis was looking at tidal maps, trying to work out where Simone might have gone into the water in order to wash up on the beach where she’d been found. He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up.