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

by VICTORIA DOWD

  ‘Not forgetting me as well, Mother.’

  ‘Oh yes, you, of course.’

  ‘Thanks, Mother.’

  ‘So, it was someone else,’ Mother carried on. ‘Someone in the other group who wasn’t with us. Who was in that group? Angel — he’s dead. Bottlenose — he’s dead. Now, we have Bridget and the dog. She was back here when Bottlenose was killed too.’

  ‘Typical.’ Bridget held her head high. ‘Blame the vulnerable one.’

  ‘You’ve never been vulnerable in your life,’ Mirabelle sighed. ‘You’d survive a nuclear bomb.’

  ‘Why would I hit Mr Spear and kill Bottlenose? Motive, dear. I have no motive. Next you’ll be blaming Mr Bojingles.’

  All eyes settled on the dog.

  ‘And then there’s you — Jess,’ Mother added.

  The eyes shifted again. Even the candle flames seemed to be moving in concert now.

  ‘You’re the only one who had the opportunity to kill both Angel and Bottlenose,’ Mirabelle said.

  ‘You did have a bust-up with Angel and you pulled a knife on him,’ Aunt Charlotte added.

  ‘And you’ve been in the chapel without us,’ I said.

  Everyone paused.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Mother stared at me as if I’d been keeping secrets again.

  ‘Because, Mother dearest, Jess said she wouldn’t go into that chapel to lay out Angel’s body, especially not since he hadn’t even bothered to put her fiancé’s boots back on. When we got there, her fiancé did indeed have bare feet and the boots had just been thrown to one side. Angel hadn’t bothered to put them back on her fiancé’s feet. But how would Jess have known that unless she’d been back in the chapel on her own since we put her fiancé in there?’

  Everyone’s attention travelled back to Jess. She sat, motionless, and closed her eyes. ‘I loved Ryan with every single part of me and now he is gone. He won’t come back. He’ll stay here, lost on this island for ever, floating around this horrible old house with the rest of the ghosts.’

  ‘I knew it!’ Aunt Charlotte said. ‘I knew it was haunted.’

  Bridget leaned forward and placed her hand on Jess’s leg. ‘He won’t. We will be rescued very soon. We’re not far from the mainland and when they see all the candles we’ve lit and the fires, they will realize where we are and come, I’m sure. You can take Ryan back for a proper burial then. They know Mr Brown is out here looking.’

  Bridget’s words were uncharacteristically calming. My mind began to settle. I started to put the pictures together. I could hear their voices at the edge of my thoughts.

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ Jess was saying in the background. ‘His spirit will be here. He will be here, wandering around lost in these cold hills when I have gone. I had to be with him, see him again and hold him. That’s why I went to the chapel, if you must know. Yes, I went to the chapel. Yes, I wanted to be with him.’ She sobbed quietly, her eyes clenched tight as if she never wanted to see anything ever again.

  The distant breaking waves were almost soothing now, out beyond the hills. The drifting lights were pricking the skyline. Witch lights, I’d imagined them. But those lights had been no more than a small bothy, its chimney smoking, a long-set fire inside. My mind wandered out there in the dusk again.

  ‘And what about you, Brown? How long have you really been here?’ Spear said. ‘Because, you see, I’m not sure you haven’t been trotting around this island all along, bashing me over the head and murdering people.’

  ‘Wait a minute!’ Kemp protested. ‘I was with you lot when Bottlenose was killed. I wasn’t even on your boat when it sank. I definitely was not even here when the other bloke, Angel, was killed and I’ve got absolutely no reason to kill any of you.’ He looked around, appealing to all of us. A line of sweat travelled down his temple.

  I watched Jess, weeping her broken tears. No other feeling on earth can compare to overwhelming grief. Nothing. In this state, she could have been capable of anything. Nothing could have broken the tears or the heart-wrenching feeling that I would never see my dad again when he was gone. Grief takes hold of you deep inside and fills you up like a sickness. Everything is skewed by it, every moment tinted. It’s a toxic little friend who is always there humming away in the background, waiting for any weak, stolen moment to reinfect you. And part of you welcomes it. It brings the sense of the person back to you in that moment of pain. But it’s an imitation. The black figure that stalks me is not the real man, not my dad, but a mark that his passing has left behind — just like the smoke left on the walls is not the fire that was lit there before. It is a reminder, but it isn’t the real, living flame at all, just what remains. There is no warmth left to it. It is cold, barren. Only smoke.

  What Jess had said sounded suspicious but I could understand her stealing out to that chapel to hold her fiancé one more time, or what was left of him, imagining that he was just sleeping. Imagining that he would wake up and give a slow smile of recognition. She would feel his warmth and then it would be over. The grief would die. But it doesn’t. Grief is not just a jacket you can take off. It becomes part of you.

  I pictured the poor man lying in a strange, abandoned tomb with strangers for company. What awful, cold places we condemn our loved ones to haunt. Jess would have seen his marble face, as perfect as it had always been, wearing his same clothes as if he could just stand up on those bare feet. They had been an affront to her, his boots so precious that she’d held a knife to a man to make sure they were returned to such useless feet.

  I thought of her dead fiancé. He was showing me those boots again on the boat, so proudly, such care over their choice. What had he said? ‘The Tecnica CAS are the best money can buy. CAS — Custom Adaptive Shape? Heat-formed custom mouldable hiking boots with a Vibram sole?’ I remembered him holding his foot up for inspection.

  His words smouldered in my mind as the voices still bickered around me. They faded into the background.

  ‘Give me the phone,’ I said in a dream-like voice.

  They stopped talking.

  ‘The phone.’ I held out my hand to Kemp.

  He frowned and fumbled in his pocket. Slowly, he unlocked it and handed it to me. I went to the photographs, the macabre selfie with me and the watch and Bottlenose dead. The photograph showed it all just as it had been, just as I remembered it. Only, it wasn’t. Something was different.

  ‘Ursula?’ Mother’s hand was on my arm.

  ‘Oh, what is it now?’ Mirabelle sighed. ‘These endless battles for attention are just so—’

  ‘Be quiet, Mirabelle,’ Aunt Charlotte said.

  ‘It’s different.’ I studied the screen.

  ‘Dear, give the phone to me,’ Aunt Charlotte said softly. ‘This fascination with dead bodies has clearly moved up a gear.’ She held out her hand.

  ‘For the millionth time, Aunt Charlotte, I don’t have a fascination with dead bodies, they just keep cropping up in my life. I can’t help it.’ I looked into the screen and imagined the body upstairs on the floor. ‘We need to go back upstairs. We need to see Bottlenose.’

  ‘See! What did I say? Back to the bodies again.’

  CHAPTER 27: A PICTURE TELLS A THOUSAND LIES

  I studied the small image on the screen in my palm and everything was just as it should be, in its right place. And yet it wasn’t.

  ‘Ursula?’ Mother looked impatient. ‘Well, are you going to let us in on this?’ Mother can’t bear secrets when they are other people’s.

  ‘How can I let you in on this, when I’m not sure what this is yet?’

  ‘It’s a phone, dear,’ Aunt Charlotte offered.

  I turned it over in my hand as though I’d never seen one before.

  ‘It’s not top-of-the-range,’ Kemp said. ‘I keep breaking them.’

  ‘Whipping that belt around,’ Mirabelle muttered.

  I stood up and everyone’s eyes stayed on me. ‘I need to go upstairs and look at the body again.’

  ‘Oh no, dear,
’ Aunt Charlotte sighed. ‘We need to stop this.’

  ‘Now, Aunt Charlotte! I need to see that room again now.’

  They followed me up the stairs like I was some strange Pied Piper. Whether they were the rats or the children was unclear. Slowly, I opened the door to Bottlenose’s death-room.

  My eyes went straight to him, the giant knife still sticking straight up from his back. It was so tempting to run to him and pull out the knife, as if that might do any good. The iron smell hit us, like walking into an old butcher’s shop on a hot day. The dull silver of the blade reflected our movement as we came in. His dead finger reached out to the word it had written in the dust.

  Aunt Charlotte sounded it out again. ‘Macdiv.’

  ‘That’s not what it says,’ Mother corrected her.

  I bent down in the exact same place as before. I looked at the phone and then back at Bottlenose. The picture I’d taken was exactly the same as what I saw now.

  Bridget handed me her watch. ‘Any difference?’ She was genuinely intrigued.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Take the picture again,’ Spear said. ‘Maybe it will occur to you.’

  ‘Can it occur quickly? It stinks in here.’

  We all looked at Aunt Charlotte and she shrugged. ‘I’m just saying what everyone else is thinking.’

  I crouched down in the exact same position and held out the phone and the watch. I could see my own face, exhausted and pale, then the hair of the dead body and the blade in the corner. The phone jittered in my cold, shaking hand. The smell of the body breathed out in waves across my face. I held my thumb over the button on the phone and just as I was about to take the shot, it was there. My thumb hovered over the button. I didn’t dare move. Barely opening my lips, I whispered, ‘The picture is different.’

  ‘In what way, Ursula? You’ve said it was different already. How?’ Mother sounded irritated.

  ‘Just take the shot,’ Jess said drily.

  ‘No, it’s not the shot that’s different.’

  ‘You’re making no sense, dear,’ Aunt Charlotte said.

  ‘Shhh,’ Bridget hissed. ‘Let her speak!’

  My thighs were beginning to shake from the crouching position. ‘Come closer, everyone. Get behind me,’ I whispered as if the dead body could hear me.

  They paused.

  ‘Quickly,’ I hissed.

  They gathered behind me, trying not to nudge or touch me.

  ‘Now, crouch low and look at the screen.’

  They did and I could feel them all clustered round me. It began to look a little like the celebrity selfies that do the rounds after award ceremonies, only this time there was a dead body in the foreground.

  ‘Look, it’s different to the eventual picture. The selfie image I can see before I take the shot is backwards. It’s a mirror image. The camera then normalizes the picture so it no longer appears backwards when the shot is taken. But I saw it like a mirror image when I was holding up the phone for the selfie before I pressed the button to take the picture.’

  They all stared at the screen and there it was, an exact mirror image of what we were seeing.

  ‘Look at the word as it appears on the screen before I take the shot,’ I whispered.

  I felt them all move slightly.

  ‘Vibram,’ Spear whispered.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Jess breathed.

  ‘Now, if I take the shot—’ which I then did — ‘the word is now normalized and appears as we are seeing it on the floor with our eyes. It is no longer the mirror image that was there when I was readying to take the selfie.’

  We all stared at the shot I’d taken on the screen, which had the letters as we were seeing them on the floor now.

  To prove it, I moved around the body and held out the phone in front of the word ready as if to take a selfie but without taking the shot. The word appeared filling the screen, the phone’s screen acting as a mirror before I took the picture — Vibram.

  ‘What the hell is Vibram?’ Mirabelle sighed.

  ‘The make of a fancy shoe,’ Kemp said as he took the phone back. ‘Technical walking shoe, high-end. Very expensive. They have the name Vibram on the sole in raised-up letters.’

  ‘So if you had Vibram stamped on the bottom of your shoe and you stood in a pile of dust, the letters would make their marks in the dust but they would be backwards,’ Bridget stated as if this was in some way her discovery. ‘Like this.’ She pointed to the markings on the floor. ‘But the phone acts as a mirror before a selfie is taken. So, when she holds up the phone for the selfie, it shows her the mirror image of the letters. Exactly how they would appear if we looked straight at the sole of the boot. But only the person taking the shot would see that momentarily.’

  ‘All right, we get it,’ Mirabelle said sourly.

  ‘Do we?’ Aunt Charlotte was utterly mystified by all of it. She’s only had a mobile phone for a couple of years and I’m yet to see her indulge in taking selfies.

  ‘It’s important to clarify matters for the cheap seats.’ Bridget looked pointedly at Aunt Charlotte, who then looked behind her as if Bridget must mean someone else.

  Aunt Charlotte began, ‘I’m afraid I don’t . . .’

  ‘Understand? I know.’ Bridget cleared her throat. ‘The footprint has left the word the wrong way round but in a mirror it would look exactly how it does on the sole of the shoe. Only Ursula, who was holding the phone up to take the selfie, would have seen how the word really appears on the boot rather than the print it leaves behind. If we were to see the boot now, we would see the word “Vibram” on the sole.’

  ‘The make of shoe I believe you wear, Jess.’ Spear looked at her defiantly. ‘If you wouldn’t mind showing us all.’

  Jess stared at us and sighed. ‘Lots of people wear them.’ She held up her foot and there on the sole of her shoe in raised letters was the emblem ‘Vibram’.

  ‘Dear God, girl.’ Aunt Charlotte held up her hands. ‘But why? What had Bottlenose ever done to you?’

  ‘Wait!’ Bridget said. ‘What did you just say, Jess?’

  ‘What? When?’ She lowered her foot.

  ‘“Lots of people wear them”,’ I repeated for her.

  Mother looked around quickly. ‘Is anyone else in this room wearing boots with that on the sole?’

  No one moved.

  ‘Come on,’ Mother ordered. ‘Feet up!’

  Slowly, we all raised a foot.

  ‘Right, let’s see.’ She ran down the line of us, careful not to trip over the dead body in the middle of the room. It didn’t seem like the most respectful pose for us all to be lifting a leg over the corpse with a massive knife in its back but sometimes, in a survival situation, you have to do what’s necessary.

  Mother grabbed each trouser leg as she passed and pulled the foot up. Every foot got a thorough examination and the conclusion was no one else had that raised lettering on their shoe.

  ‘Right, missy, put your foot in the dust next to that lettering,’ Aunt Charlotte directed Jess.

  ‘And if I won’t?’ Jess folded her arms.

  ‘That’s not really going to make you look any less guilty is it?’ Mirabelle grabbed hold of the girl’s elbow.

  ‘Hey!’ Jess pulled free. ‘OK, OK!’ She walked over to the markings in the dust and placed her foot down next to the word. She left it for a moment then lifted her foot. There in the dust was the exact same backwards impression.

  ‘I believe you are looking at your murderer!’ Spear said with a triumphant smile, as if that was a good thing. ‘No wonder you were so quick to point the finger at me. Did you kill my wife as well?’ He stepped towards her.

  ‘No, we’re not looking at the killer,’ Bridget said.

  ‘Well, we’re looking at the shoe-print of the murderer and she’s wearing the shoe.’ Kemp was still looking between his phone and the print in the pile of dust. It didn’t look as though he was entirely clear about what had just happened.

  ‘No, we’re not looking a
t that either.’ Bridget spoke in that irritating sanctimonious way she has when we all know she’s right.

  ‘The lettering is too small,’ I said slowly. ‘It’s not her shoe.’

  Everyone turned to look at me now.

  ‘But someone else had Vibram soles. Your fiancé’s boots had that on them as well, didn’t they, Jess? You both showed them to me on the boat.’

  ‘Oh, I see what she did,’ Aunt Charlotte began. ‘She told us she went to the chapel on her own. She changed into the other boots there!’

  ‘And why exactly would I do that?’

  ‘To disguise yourself, dear.’

  ‘Oh, so I changed into a pair of boots that had exactly the same name on the sole so I could purposefully leave a footprint next to the body I’d just murdered.’ She leaned closer to Aunt Charlotte. ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier for me just to leave no footprint or rub it away?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The footprint has to be a mistake on the part of the killer. But they were wearing your fiancé’s boots, that’s for sure.’

  Bridget spoke carefully and slowly. ‘Jess, when your fiancé was washed ashore and you lay across his body, you told us he was dead. No one else could take his pulse or check him because you were sprawled across him spreadeagled, preventing us from doing so. You were the only one who confirmed he was dead.’

  ‘And by your own admission, you have been visiting the chapel without us,’ Mother added.

  ‘Was there a reason you objected so strongly to Angel taking your boyfriend’s boots, Jess?’ Mirabelle asked.

  ‘Was your boyfriend really dead, Jess?’ Mother was on the same track.

  We all looked at one another in the awful silence.

  ‘Oh my God, are you in league with your dead boyfriend?’ It sounded slightly crazy when Aunt Charlotte said it, but there was no denying we were all thinking the same thing.

  Jess started laughing. ‘You people are utterly insane. No one will ever believe you!’

  We paused and looked at one another.

  ‘They’re his boot marks, Jess,’ Bridget said matter-of-factly, ‘and you’ve been visiting him out there. None of us ever checked to see if he was dead because you told us he was.’