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

by VICTORIA DOWD

  She glanced up the stairs. I don’t know if she was checking whether Mother had gone or hoping she was still there. ‘I can’t say any more, Ursula.’

  I squeezed her arm tighter. ‘You have to! You can’t say that and just leave it.’

  ‘Say what?’ Mirabelle was at the sitting room door. I don’t know how long she’d been there but she was looking at us suspiciously.

  ‘Nothing, Mirabelle.’ Aunt Charlotte stood up with a look of guilt.

  ‘It’s never nothing with you, Charlotte.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, what I meant was, it’s nothing to do with you. Family matter.’ She pushed past Mirabelle into the sitting room.

  Mirabelle looked over at me, her eyelids narrow. ‘I’m warning you, if this has anything to do with Pandora . . .’

  ‘Ladies.’ Leaves flurried across the floor as if they were running away from whatever was coming through the door. Spear strode across the hallway with a new purpose. ‘Let’s get moving this body.’

  ‘Now you’re talking!’ Bottlenose leaned into the door frame to the sitting room and winked. He smiled at me before falling into another round of his hacking cough.

  CHAPTER 20: THE THREE BAREFOOTED DEAD MEN

  Bottlenose and Spear struggled to carry the limp corpse. Aunt Charlotte kept trying to intervene and help but continued to trip on Spear’s feet.

  As we walked in yet another solemn procession towards the waiting chapel, I tried to picture where everyone had been last night, but my mind was a tight mess. I looked along the line of faces. Now that everyone was a suspect, no one looked innocent anymore. I was even worried that I might be starting to look guilty. I tried to walk respectfully, yet innocently. I had no idea what that should look like.

  I remembered Dad’s funeral, a sour memory now. There’s none of him in it anymore. That day was for everyone else, for all those eyes to watch me and see how a young mind deals with death. They watched me like a specimen. A room of awkward strangers all dressed up, low voices sharing memories of him around like bits of stale cake. One woman even took a photograph. Mother was furious, which the woman seemed to enjoy. I remember it because it was the only emotion Mother had shown all day. ‘Get her out! Get her out now!’ I’d never seen the woman before. She didn’t seem angry or embarrassed, just satisfied. I didn’t see her again after she was asked to leave by Mirabelle and some more of Mother’s henchwomen. It seemed cruel, but then Mother never was very good at sharing grief.

  As soon as Spear opened the door to the small, mean chapel, the rough wind greeted us with renewed vigour, eagerly tracing round our strange, sombre group like a keen animal. It was certainly a funereal sky with no more than a blank, insipid light to guide us in.

  Spear and Bottlenose made less-than-perfect pallbearers, Bottlenose staggering and dropping Angel’s legs, Spear increasingly frustrated with his captain’s inadequacies.

  Spear resolutely did not look back. The cut to the side of his head had bloomed with a yellowing bruise now. I thought of him there again, lying in that room full of frantic birds. He was on the hearth. There was blood. I’d assumed he’d fallen, disorientated by the birds around him, his head striking the fireplace somehow. But how? I hadn’t asked that until now. No one had. I’d assumed he’d stumbled with all the birds circling his head.

  He’d been on his side, facing the door. There was blood on his face. It had been trickling down his temple from the cut. So the cut was on the upper side of his head, not the side that hit the hearth. The wound couldn’t have happened when he fell because when we saw him he was still lying where he’d fallen. Something else had caused that injury. Something else had struck him. It definitely wasn’t the fight with Angel. That had happened before we’d even got to the house and there was no injury then. That injury happened inside the house, inside that room.

  I watched Spear carrying the dead man now. He’d been so angry with Angel, about his wife, his missing wife with her sea-green eyes. And it wasn’t the first time Spear had been angry. On the ship, hurling the backpacks into the water, he’d been livid. What had happened to make him do such a ridiculous thing? I pictured him on the boat. He was standing, the boat lurched. His wife stumbled and fell . . .

  Nothing would focus. The deaths were taking a heavy toll now. And the fear.

  Had Spear been in the room with us all last night? I’d thought he was downstairs but perhaps exhaustion had anaesthetized us all enough for any one of us to have sneaked out of the room.

  I pictured the sitting room in my mind. Spear was there, definitely, when I drifted into unconsciousness, and certainly when I’d woken at dawn to the noise of the rocking horse.

  Mother and Mirabelle had been opposite me and close to each other, Aunt Charlotte the other side of Mother. The growl of her snoring had been constant. She would have had to cross the whole of that rickety floor without waking anyone up.

  I watched her stumbling around on the uneven ground, her feet catching in the tails of long grass. No, she could not have crossed that creaking floor without us hearing.

  Mother and Mirabelle would have woken each other up and then Spear on the way out. So either they’d gone together or not at all. Most importantly, neither of them had any reason to kill Angel. There were plenty of people Mother would cheerfully kill, but Angel was not on that list.

  It was far easier for the people upstairs to have gone into his room.

  Jess sprang to mind first. She’d stayed in the bird room by herself. She could easily have sneaked into Angel’s room, poured the mercury into his mouth and run back to her room. She was familiar with those necklaces. She had one of the phials too and yet she said she’d just thrown it away. She couldn’t remember where. Maybe she’d used the contents of hers as well to make sure of the job.

  She definitely had the instinct for it. As Spear pointed out, she had pulled a knife on Angel. But then, it was Spear’s knife. What kind of trip had he planned that required such a weapon? It seemed entirely over the top. But why had Jess been so angry over some boots? I know only too well how grief can cripple someone. Even the slightest thing the dead person has touched is somehow imbued with sacred status, a relic of their life. Still, that was a long way from justifying pulling a knife on someone over a pair of boots.

  Jess had refused to come with us to lay Angel to rest in the chapel. It was entirely possible that she just didn’t want to see the dead body of her fiancé. That was completely understandable. But she’d definitely had more opportunity than any of the rest of us to kill Angel. Apart from Angel, she was the only other one who had slept alone. Bridget and Bottlenose had been in the room with Mr Bojingles, who certainly wouldn’t have let anyone leave that room without the yap alarm going off.

  I watched Bottlenose and Spear carrying the lifeless body. Angel was still in the uncompromizing black leather jacket and jeans, just a thin hammock now sagging between the two men. There was no dignity in this. It was all so wrong. He looked like he was no more than a binbag being slung out in the rubbish.

  ‘This is horrible.’ Aunt Charlotte shook her head. There was genuine anguish in her soft, old face. ‘He was young. He had all his life ahead and such plans. His bot . . . his botan . . . you know, his odd little shop.’

  ‘And that’s making you sad?’ Mother’s voice hardened. ‘Not the fact that we’re stuck on the Isle of Death?’

  ‘Oh my God, Pandora! Why? Why would you say that?’

  ‘She’s working on her next TV interview,’ Bridget said in a long, sly voice as if she was concentrating hard on sharpening her blade. ‘I can see it now: Slaughter House Survivor Tells of Horror Mark II on the Isle of Death.’ She laughed in a way people don’t usually do around dead people.

  ‘What exactly is wrong with you, Bridget?’

  ‘I got involved with you, Ursula, and your family.’

  ‘You are not in any way involved with us.’

  ‘Please,’ Spear said, pausing for a second to readjust his hold on Angel, ‘can we just
stop with the sniping while I carry this dead body?’

  We all looked a little ashamed, except for Mother of course. Mother doesn’t do shame. ‘No one made you the priest.’ She looked at him with a cold, challenging stare.

  Spear waited for a moment at the chapel door. ‘I didn’t say I was. Now, we’re going to go in and place Angel under the altar.’

  ‘’Tis bad luck to—’

  ‘I don’t care, Bottlenose! Three dead bodies is pretty bad luck, wouldn’t you say? There’s no other space. He’ll have to go there.’ Spear didn’t wait for any other suggestions or criticism. He gripped Angel tight under the arms. Bottlenose had dropped the legs again and now the bare feet were being dragged pitifully across the cold stone floor.

  A butcher’s smell of cold, wet meat had already begun to build. It ran with the sharp taint of seawater that leached from the damp clothes and pooled on the flagstones below. The bodies were barefoot as if they had taken their shoes off in some great pious act before coming to lay down here and die. Angel had brought the boots back as ordered by Jess but had petulantly thrown them by the side of Ryan’s feet, not bothering to put them back on the body. Ironically, although I’m sure Angel would not describe it as that, he’d died in the night with no boots on either. They had walked out of this world with their feet as bare as the day they came into it.

  It was crowded in that little chapel, no bigger than the size of the smallest bedroom back home — mine. We were trying hard not to knock into the bodies but it was almost impossible to avoid, especially for Aunt Charlotte.

  ‘Careful,’ I whispered and bent down to pick up the coin that she’d knocked to the floor. I looked at the young lad, his eyelids so thin with death that I could make out the shape of the eye below.

  I was caught by panic. I didn’t know what to do. I held the coin out for inspection as if I’d found some marvellous treasure, but I had no idea what should come next. There was no way I could make my hand reach out and place it back on that dead eye.

  Bottlenose had seen me stall. He shook his head and took the coin. I could feel his hands, rough and impolite. ‘You people out there in your real world, you’re all allergic to death these days.’ He placed it back on the boy’s eye. He gave a rasping laugh that ended in him spitting a great ball of phlegm into the corner. It was no less shocking than if he’d spat on someone’s grave.

  ‘Bottlenose, please!’ Spear hissed. He dragged Angel’s body round and laid it carefully across the top width of the chapel under the simple altar. ‘Altar’ was perhaps too grand a word. It was more of a small, wooden bench. We stood in the cramped silence for a moment, listening to the rabid wind desperately trying to find a way in.

  I looked around the chapel. So many years that were due to be lived, taken in such meaningless gestures. And now Angel, his life cut far too short. Had he really been murdered? Was he poisoned, perhaps by his own mercury? Perhaps it was some natural cause, a heart condition? He could have already been ill. We knew nothing about him, not even his surname or if he left any family to grieve. He’d spoken about his Puerto Rican mother, but we didn’t know if she was alive or if she’d even been real. Maybe she was just part of this strange fictional character he’d created with all his charms and the rag-and-bone collection of beliefs. What I did know was that he’d left the world surrounded by strangers in a strange land.

  As we walked back into the mournful light, I turned and watched Spear close over the door to the makeshift tomb. There was one thought close to the top of all our thoughts right then — would we be opening that door again?

  The answer was a resounding yes.

  CHAPTER 21: MORE BODIES

  We were silent. There were no more words now. Words could wait. We walked along the strip of beach in front of the house but if we’d thought the long grass was exhausting, this was even more draining. The sand was being driven hard on the wind, scouring our faces. Fleshy seaweed dragged around our feet with pieces of driftwood ensnared among it. I walked slightly behind the others, my feet shuffling through the damp white sand. Aunt Charlotte was wandering by my side.

  ‘Let’s just say he was murdered—’

  ‘He was murdered,’ Aunt Charlotte parroted.

  ‘No, no, I mean “say” as in “say for instance” or “just imagine”.’

  She looked confused. ‘Oh, I see.’ From the look on her face, she clearly didn’t.

  I continued regardless. ‘If we assume that the murderer is not one of us—’

  ‘And why would we do that, dear? It wasn’t a very good idea the last time we were trapped in an isolated house with a killer.’

  ‘True, but just say they’re not—’

  ‘They’re not.’

  I gave Aunt Charlotte my best approximation of The Look. ‘That leaves only one other possibility. Someone else is on this island with us.’

  The others had begun to slow down and were listening now.

  ‘You mean someone else survived the shipwreck?’ As Aunt Charlotte spoke, I watched them look back and their faces fall.

  ‘We know no one lives on the island,’ I continued, ‘and they haven’t for some time. We arrived in a storm so it’s unlikely anyone was out there sailing as well.’

  ‘Only a fool would have been doing that.’ Mother glared at Bottlenose.

  ‘Then there’s only one other person on board unaccounted for,’ I said.

  Spear turned. ‘If you’re suggesting my wife had anything to do with this, I swear—’

  ‘We don’t need you to swear to anything yet, Mr Spear.’ Bridget walked assuredly up the steps to the house. ‘Shall we go inside, have a nice cup of tea and talk it over?’

  ‘Charlotte ate all the tea,’ Mirabelle said and pushed past everyone. Even Bridget looked lost for words.

  ‘Ate it?’ I looked at Aunt Charlotte.

  ‘I’m starving, darling.’

  ‘We all are!’ My stomach seemed to respond with a sour turn. Aunt Charlotte shrugged.

  Back inside the house, my eyes struggled to adjust to the heavy light. The shape of Jess moved quickly across the top of the stairs. She looked almost ghost-like with her ethereal skin and floating hair. She flickered across my vision in one brief, silvery moment. Then she was gone.

  She’d been alone in the house. What would I have done if I’d been alone here? It’s a long time since I was alone in a house. Mother is always just there — like the furniture but slightly more judgemental.

  ‘Hello?’ I called.

  No one answered.

  ‘We don’t have time for this.’ Spear strode into the sitting room. ‘We need to get out there and find some food and my wife.’

  ‘In that order?’

  He stared at Bridget but she didn’t flinch.

  ‘You really should have brought some food with you.’

  ‘We were supposed to forage. Nell . . . Nell was very good . . .’ His voice trailed to nothing.

  ‘You clearly know nothing about middle-aged women,’ Aunt Charlotte sniffed.

  He lifted his head and I felt sure his eyes had a filmy glaze. He sniffed. ‘There weren’t supposed to be any middle-aged women booked on my course. You got on the wrong boat, remember? And even if there were, they’d be treated no different from anyone else.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it!’ Bridget said.

  ‘Well, I’m not!’ Aunt Charlotte blustered.

  ‘I’m not middle-aged,’ I was about to say, but Mother got there first.

  ‘Mother is fifty-seven.’ I find it’s important to make sure everyone knows that. Mother doesn’t agree.

  ‘Ursula! No one needs to know my personal details.’

  ‘I’m sure everyone could guess your age anyway, Mother.’

  Spear made a strange growling sound that sounded like frustration or possibly indigestion. ‘However old you are, you still need to eat.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t,’ I said as an aside, but nothing is an aside with Mother.

  She gave me The Look.r />
  ‘I’ve checked the kitchen again and there’s just tea and coffee.’ He looked at Aunt Charlotte. ‘Well, there was until someone ate the tea, of course.’

  ‘I thought it was something like quinoa or . . . or bulgur whatever. You know, hipster stuff.’

  We took a moment.

  ‘We need to get foraging.’ Spear stood, hands on hips. He seemed strangely enthused. He was, after all, a survivalist facing a real-life survival situation. There had to be some part of him that was at least a little bit excited. A bit like a doctor faced with his first genuinely ill patient. There was the unfortunate, underlying concern that there might be a death though.

  ‘We need to get out there and scope the island. There might be . . . there might be a survivor.’ He said it like he didn’t think there was. We watched him closely. ‘There might be food sources. Look for anything that might have washed ashore and could be useful. Remember, this is not a training exercise.’ Spear was starting to look like he might even be enjoying this. ‘We need to stop sitting back waiting to die. We need to grab this place by the cojones.’ Mr Bojingles had walked over to him and was sitting at his feet looking up at him expectantly. Spear glanced down at the dog and then back at our expectant faces.

  ‘Do we just grab any cojones to hand?’ Aunt Charlotte mimed gripping. Mother slapped her hands down.

  Bottlenose leaned into Mother’s side and smiled with a very wet-lipped mouth. Mother pulled away in disgust.

  We divided into teams in a nightmarish recreation of a school netball team selection. Spear was leading our little party that included me, Mother, Aunt Charlotte and Mirabelle — the Smarts, or ‘not-so-Smarts’, as Bridget kindly renamed us. Bottlenose was to remain at the house with Jess, Bridget and Mr Bojingles.

  I looked back at them as we walked away. They stood there in front of the house looking faintly reminiscent of the cast of Scooby-Doo, if they’d been arrested and put in a line-up.

  The rest of us set off with a quiet sense of purpose and Aunt Charlotte’s complaints about her bunions. The sky was laid out in grey layers like perfect fish-scales. The shadow of every heavy cloud left its dark reflection across the sea. We were under a watery light that barely left any space for daytime in the hours between dawn and dusk. But as we walked out from the house and I looked across the sands, there was a stillness, almost a pureness to the island’s muted colour. There was a simplicity to all this that brought a new sense of calm.