BODY ON THE ISLAND a gripping murder mystery packed with twists (Smart Woman's Mystery Book 2)

by VICTORIA DOWD

  In the hall, I could see that the front door had been left slightly open and great flurries of leaves had blown in, filling corners and littering the floor. They crumbled beneath my boots, crackling with every step. Strange, I thought Mirabelle had closed the door. She’d said she had, but then she says a lot.

  I made my way slowly to the bottom of the stairs.

  A window at the top of the stairs gave just enough fragile light to draw out the shape of the staircase and the thick wooden settle in the hallway. I reached out for the banister and felt a quick breath on my hand. I pulled it back as if I’d been scalded.

  Clunk. Slare. Clunk.

  The noise grew louder. And a strange, distant tune began. Whistling. I was sure of it now. I even thought I might have recognized it, but I couldn’t place it. I looked back to the sitting room and could still see the bodies of the others laying out on the floor as if they’d been pulled from the sea and dumped there. Still, no one else stirred but the slight melody carried on the air. It had a familiar, old nature — like a school hymn or playground song half-remembered. A quick little jig, the notes happily sailing up and down as it drifted and grew faint.

  It paused as if it was aware of my presence. I waited. Nothing. The distant hush of the sea was the only sound. I took a step, the rush of my own pulse sharp down my neck.

  Each stair was worn, ashen wood, weak and stressed beneath my feet. I glanced back through the open sitting room door. The cracks and moans didn’t seem to be disturbing the sleeping bodies. But something was waking. I could hear it moving again.

  Clunk. Slare. Clunk.

  I stopped. Now I could hear voices whispering. Hurried voices that were alert, hissing anxiously in the darkness. Something had alarmed them, disturbed them. Me.

  The click of a door and my chest flushed with blood. I was caught, unable to move up or down. I looked back for Dad’s spectre. Gone as always.

  A rush of noise filled my head.

  Footsteps. Quick, eager feet were scuttling above me. Towards me.

  ‘Hello?’ My voice came out broken. ‘Who’s there?’

  More panicked steps, moving busily towards the stairs. My stomach tilted. There was a figure.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  ‘It’s us! Who else would it be on a deserted island?’ Bridget stood, dog in hand, looking down. ‘Were you expecting someone else?’

  Bottlenose appeared beside her and spat by way of announcement. ‘Got that brandy, girl?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Liar.’

  I was suddenly very conscious of being caught in a no man’s land on the stairs, standing awkwardly with one foot above the other. ‘What are you doing here?’ I tried to look a little more natural.

  ‘Same as you, lady.’ Angel had surfaced from the other door straight ahead at the top of the stairs. He was crudely adjusting the zip on his trousers before rearranging the bracelets on his arm. His face fell into a frown and his voice grew distracted. ‘We’re getting some shelter for the night. Didn’t want to wake you all when we came in.’ He paused and looked up at me. ‘Nice little surprise for you in the morning though, hey—’ He winked — ‘to find me sleeping upstairs in your house.’

  All eyes turned to him.

  ‘I don’t think “nice” would be the word for that, do you?’ It was Spear. He was walking out of the sitting room, his hand cautiously touching the side of his head. He paused and looked at me. ‘What are you doing on the stairs?’

  I looked down as if I hadn’t realized where I was. ‘I heard a noise.’

  ‘Maybe she was making her way up to my room, you never know, Spear.’

  ‘Just be quiet, Angel.’ Spear glanced at the dried blood on his hand. ‘Someone hit me,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t look at me, man. I’m a lover, not a fighter.’ Angel shrugged and went back to rearranging his multitude of charms and bracelets.

  ‘It was the birds. The birds in that room.’ I pointed to the left up the stairs. ‘We’ve closed it. You fell. Hit your head on the hearth. You remember?’

  He didn’t speak but walked towards the stairs. I looked up at Angel and Bridget. Bottlenose was staggering back into the room he’d come out of.

  ‘Well, you have been busy, haven’t you, Ursula.’ Bridget stroked Mr Bojingles. ‘Looks like you just can’t go anywhere without someone having a life-threatening injury inflicted on them. Makes you wonder if you’re the thing that links them all together, doesn’t it?’

  ‘She didn’t hit me. She came in afterwards.’

  I looked at Spear. I could have sworn he was unconscious when I got in the room.

  He’d started up the stairs and I didn’t know whether to stay where I was or carry on walking. I took one step forward but he spoke again, so I stopped.

  ‘Where’s the other woman?’ Spear frowned.

  ‘What woman?’ Angel was still trying to look distracted by his bracelets.

  ‘Boots Woman!’ Spear said, clearly frustrated by his own inability to remember her name.

  ‘Jess,’ I whispered.

  ‘Thank you.’ Spear was alongside me now and I could see the brown-black blood matted into his hair. The cut was deep but had stopped bleeding.

  Angel continued nonchalantly counting through his beads and charms. He held one of the chains round his neck between his teeth and pulled it to and fro. It glimmered against his lip. Then he turned with a sudden savage glare. ‘What? How would I know where she is? Why are you even speaking to me? Why is everyone looking at me? Don’t even look at me. Don’t ever look at me!’

  We all looked at him.

  He held the palms of both hands to the sides of his head and began pushing. ‘I don’t know! I don’t know!’ His eyes sparked with a strange fury. ‘It hurts.’

  Bridget frowned and held Mr Bojingles closer. ‘Is something wrong, Mr Angel?’ The tone was more suspicion than concern. ‘Are you in some way ill? You are disturbing Mr Bojingles.’

  ‘Me?’ He paused, his hands still either side of his head. ‘Ill? Don’t you even dare—’

  ‘She didn’t mean anything by it,’ I added quickly. I walked up the final few stairs, my hands outstretched as if calming a wounded animal. Spear walked in front of me and reached across me for the banister. He held his arm there so I couldn’t walk any further.

  ‘We’re all just tired and tense,’ Spear said. ‘Let’s just take it easy.’

  ‘You take it easy!’ Angel dropped his hands. ‘You and your crazy bitch there.’ He snorted. ‘I thought you were missing your whore of a wife. You don’t even know if she’s dead and you’re moving on. That’s real quick, man.’

  Spear took a fast breath. ‘I’m warning you, Angel.’

  ‘Oh, oh you hear that, little lady?’ He jutted his chin out towards me. ‘Your new stud is warning me.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean but—’

  ‘You ask him. You ask him, little sad lady, about him and his wife. She was leaving him and he knew it.’

  I looked quickly at the side of Spear’s head. He purposefully didn’t look back at me. There was a new threatening tone to his voice. ‘Angel, stop. You know absolutely nothing about this.’

  ‘Oh, don’t I, Mr SAS? I know she’d asked for a divorce. I know she slept around, with anyone but you.’

  ‘You fucking . . .’ Spear was moving fast up the stairs.

  ‘Save yourselves!’ Bridget shouted and ran through the door to the right with Mr Bojingles under her arm.

  ‘Don’t!’ I reached out and grabbed Spear’s wrist.

  He paused and looked down, then back at me.

  ‘Please don’t.’ I kept a tight hold. ‘There’s been enough death.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of killing him.’ He frowned before letting out a long sigh. ‘You can let go of me now.’

  Angel laughed and I felt Spear clench his fist.

  ‘You sure?’

  Spear closed his eyes. ‘Yes, I’m sure.’

  I slowly let my grip l
oosen.

  ‘Oh, she’s got you good and—’

  ‘Just be quiet, Angel,’ I said. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, please.’ I could feel Spear’s hand relax and I let it go. ‘Now, if we can just start being civil to one another, we might survive.’

  ‘I’ll survive, with or without fucking Jason Bourne here,’ Angel sneered.

  ‘Who?’ It was Aunt Charlotte, bleary-eyed at the bottom of the stairs. I was glad to see her face, full of sleep, fresh and pink as a boiled ham.

  ‘Oh, Aunt Charlotte, thank goodness you’re here. We were just asking Mr Angel a few questions.’

  ‘About his outfit?’

  I paused. ‘No, not about his outfit, Aunt Charlotte. About the missing girl.’

  ‘Oh, the one you saw pushed under?’

  I looked quickly at Spear, who was staring at me. ‘You saw someone pushed under? Under where?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes. I don’t know. I don’t know what I saw.’

  His mouth hung open for a moment. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? How can you not know? This is what you were talking about on the beach, isn’t it?’

  The words stumbled out of me. ‘I was drowning. We all were. I saw . . . I saw a woman. At least, I think it was a woman. She was . . . She had green eyes and she was struggling with someone.’

  ‘Who?’ Spear’s face was pleading. ‘Who was she struggling with?’

  I shook my head and looked at the stairs. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see. I only saw the back of their head.’

  ‘And you think it was me?’

  I looked up. ‘No, I didn’t say that. I don’t even know who the woman was. It could have been your . . . your wife. It could have been Jess. She has green eyes. Her fiancé turned up dead with her lying across him. I don’t know. I don’t know what I think.’

  Angel was laughing and turning away. ‘Of course she thinks it’s you. Who else would take the chance to bump off your wife? I’d be surprised if you hadn’t planned the whole thing, sunk the boat and then killed her.’

  ‘Everyone stop!’ I said. ‘Look, has anyone seen Jess?’

  ‘Who, dear?’ Aunt Charlotte was on the stairs walking towards us.

  ‘The woman with the red hair? Angel, we just want to know, was she with you?’

  Angel looked at me for a moment as if a cloud was parting. ‘You mean the crazy little bitch who made me take off my shoes?’

  ‘I’m here.’ Jess appeared from the door to the left, where we’d found Spear with the birds. She looked at me. There was no way she hadn’t just heard what I’d said about her and the possibility she’d been fighting with her fiancé in the water and killed him.

  She was different, changed somehow. She looked dazed. Grief was weaving its spell fast. The thin light from behind cast her as a gaunt silhouette now, with tails of lank hair down her shoulders. All the colour had leached out of her so that she could almost have been a ghost standing there, thin and bent.

  I hesitated. ‘Are you OK?’

  She nodded.

  But it was Angel who was twitching erratically beside her. ‘I’m fine! I’m fine!’ His voice was fractured.

  ‘All right,’ I said. I slowly edged around Spear, being careful not to touch him or look at him. He stared resolutely ahead.

  ‘So that’s everyone accounted for, is it?’ Bridget poked her head through the door she’d scurried into. She spoke efficiently as if she hadn’t just dramatically run for cover.

  I nodded. I didn’t bother to tell them about the extra, silent figure that had stood watching me from the corner of the sitting room. As Bob the Therapist says, if I go around telling everyone my dead dad is in the corner of the room, they’ll think I’m mad. I’m not sure that’s a technical term, but I take his point.

  ‘Who’s in that room, then?’ I nodded towards the closed door on the left of the stairs, next to the room Jess had just come out of. It had to be where the noise had been coming from, I was sure of it. ‘Is someone using that room as well?’

  They all looked at me with rising concern. Angel leaned against the door frame to the room he’d slept in, winding his pendants round his finger and picking his way through the bracelets, a seething little mess of anxiety — that’s what Mother calls me when I do that.

  ‘What exactly is going on, Ursula?’ Aunt Charlotte was alongside me now at the top of the stairs, her voice still bleary with sleep.

  Angel paused, beaded bracelet in hand. ‘We just told you, or weren’t you listening, you stupid old—’

  ‘Don’t speak to her like that. In fact—’ I held my face up defiantly — ‘don’t speak at all.’ I walked past him towards the closed door.

  ‘You better watch yourself, crazy girl.’

  ‘She doesn’t like being called crazy,’ Aunt Charlotte muttered. ‘Not since—’

  ‘Leave her alone, Angel,’ Spear interrupted in a low voice. He was at the top of the stairs now too. It was getting pretty tight there.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ Mother’s voice was already well-stoked with irritation. ‘Why is everyone awake? And why are you defending my daughter?’ Her eyes were clamped on Spear.

  ‘I heard something, Mother,’ I called.

  ‘Oh, you’ve always heard something.’

  ‘She’s creeping around like she thinks she’s some sort of sleuth, your daughter, that’s what’s happening.’ Angel looked down at Mother.

  Aunt Charlotte looked confused.

  ‘I am the victim of a crime.’ He announced it as though he was almost proud of the fact. ‘Someone stole from me.’ He took a moment to enjoy the attention, but I watched his frenetic fingers jitter through the chains round his neck.

  ‘Someone stole from you?’ Bridget said in disbelief.

  ‘OK,’ Mother sighed, walking slowly up the stairs. ‘Come on then. Out with it.’

  Angel placed his hands on his hips and repeated, ‘I am the victim of a theft.’

  Mr Bojingles yapped. Angel glared at the dog as if he could be a suspect. ‘Well, why is everyone looking at me as if I haven’t got anything worth nicking. This jewellery is from all over the world!’ The words quick-fired out of him with nervous energy.

  ‘Oh, so it didn’t come from Garrard’s then?’ Mother never misses an opportunity. ‘You do surprise me.’

  Angel laughed at her, his head shaking slowly. He sounded crazed. ‘These are treasures.’ He held up a fistful of necklaces and pendants, then plucked at the bracelets on his arms. ‘Like I told her—’ He nodded towards Jess, who was utterly unresponsive — ‘I got charms and talismans here to heal all regret and loss, ward off the Evil Eye, and some that might even make a person fall in love with the likes of you.’ He widened his eyes at me. ‘If anyone is going to survive this nightmare, it’s me. I always travel with protection.’

  ‘Oh, they all say that,’ Aunt Charlotte sighed.

  We paused.

  ‘What?’ She looked around at us.

  ‘Superstitious nonsense,’ Mother sniffed. ‘Utterly worthless.’ We were all clustered in the small landing now, which was starting to get a little bit claustrophobic.

  Angel pushed his face close to Mother’s. ‘Nonsense, is it? Well, if it’s so worthless, you tell me why someone has stolen one of my bracelets.’

  Mother didn’t blink. She shook her head. Angel scanned our disbelieving faces. ‘Hey! This is no joke! Someone has stolen from me. Someone here is a thief, I tell you.’ He shook his fist and a great jumble of bracelets ran down to his wrist. Like trinkets from a child’s jewellery box, they were all shapes and sizes, colours and charms from various religions. He had icons and crucifixes dangling from his neck, jostling for position with miniature perfume bottles, bike chains and long links of paper clips. He was the kind of man who had more friendship bracelets than friends.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘we’ve been through the worst the Sound of Harris has to offer us—’

  ‘Them again.’ Aunt Charlotte shook her head.

  ‘We�
��ve been shipwrecked on a deserted island that has nothing but driving rain and frozen air.’ I leaned so close to Angel now that I could smell the lingering remains of his Paco Rabanne mingled with sour sweat. I lowered my voice to something barely above a whisper. ‘There will be losses.’ I patted him on the arm and turned to the closed door. ‘You just have to stay calm. We must all try to be rational and think clearly. Now, I just need to go in this room for a moment and see if it’s haunted.’

  No one said a word as I walked towards the closed door. Although, I thought I might have heard Angel murmur, ‘Mad as a hatter,’ again. But I could have been mistaken.

  The paint had blistered and peeled on this door as well, as if something had tried to burn its way out of the room. I reached for the handle and turned it. I pushed and the door slowly scraped along the planks of the coffin-wood floorboards, groaning as if it was unused to this action.

  I looked into the one room none of us had been in yet.

  CHAPTER 17: SKULDUGGERY

  Inside was dead. This whole house was dying but here seemed to be where all the rot stemmed from — this place. I could smell it, the ripe decay growing through everything, rotten tendrils infesting every crack and pipe. The house occasionally let out a resigned groan as another part of it perished. On the far wall, an old spinning wheel stood silent as if abandoned at the end of a dark fairy tale, banished to this broken room until some foolish traveller might lose their way and find themselves opening this door.

  Two old banister ends leaned in a corner. A cold fireplace was framed by a blackened mantelpiece. Its iron fireguard was bent and bulging out as though something had pushed hard against it from inside the fireplace. As I looked closer, I saw tiny porcelain-white bones clustered in the hearth in small piles. They were chalky with age, falling to dust at the edges. A small smattering of dry, crumbling droppings and ragged feathers betrayed that there had once been birds in this room too, lost and frantic with life, exhausted from battering at this cage. Finally, they’d succumbed to this strange new world. Nothing lived here anymore.

  I looked back towards the landing, where all the voices had gone silent. Spear watched me from the door. He didn’t speak.