“Oh, God!” the mustached boy cried. “Not you, too!” He stood up, swaying, his arms outstretched.
I kept sliding. The boy reached up and caught me by the arm. He staggered back toward the edge and we both fell to the hard rocky ground. For a moment, we both lay there panting. When I finally sat up, I saw we were inches from the sheer drop to the surf.
The boy sat up, too, his scared eyes on me. His companion was flattened against the cliff wall.
“It’s okay,” I said shakily.
“I thought you’d fall just like the old woman,” the boy beside me said.
“It was an accident, wasn’t it?”
He nodded. “We didn’t mean for her to fall.”
“Were you teasing her?”
“Yeah. We always did, for fun. But this time we went too far. We took her purse. She chased us.”
“Through the tunnel, to here.”
“Yes.”
“And then she slipped.”
The other boy moved away from the wall. “Honest, we didn’t mean for it to happen. It was just that she was so old. She slipped.”
“We watched her fall,” his companion said. “We couldn’t do anything.”
“What did you do with the purse?”
“Threw it in after her. There were only two dollars in it. Two lousy dollars.” His voice held a note of wonder. “Can you imagine, chasing us all the way down here for two bucks?”
I stood up carefully, grasping the rock for support. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
They looked at each other and then down at the surf.
“Come on. We’ll talk some more. I know you didn’t mean for her to die. And you saved my life.”
They scrambled up, keeping their distance from me. Their faces were pale under their tans, their eyes afraid. They were so young. To them, products of the credit-card age, fighting to the death for two dollars was inconceivable. And the Japanese woman had been so old. For her, eking out a living with the wild mustard, two dollars had probably meant the difference between life and death.
I wondered if they’d ever understand.
Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave
ANTONIA FRASER
Lady Antonia Fraser (b. 1932), the London-born daughter of Lord Longford, earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and served as editor of the publisher Weidenfeld and Nicolson’s Kings and Queens of England series before her marriage to Hugh Fraser in 1956. Her first books were children’s accounts of King Arthur and Robin Hood, followed by Dolls (1963) and A History of Toys (1966). Beginning with the hugely successful Mary Queen of Scots (1969), she became a best-selling author of popular British history and biography. Books on Cromwell, James I, Charles II, and the wives of Henry VIII followed. Her broad literary background also includes a translation from the French of Christian Dior’s autobiography, radio and television plays, and the editorship of a number of poetry anthologies. Her first marriage having been dissolved in 1977, she married the playwright Harold Pinter in 1980.
She turned to crime fiction with Quiet As a Nun (1977), the first novel about Jemima Shore, one of the first and most successful sleuths to come from the world of broadcast journalism. In the final revised edition of his crime-fiction history Bloody Murder (1992), Julian Symons wrote that Fraser “might reasonably be called a feminist crime writer, but she could also be called a cosy one. Her writing has an evident pleasure in what she is doing that is engaging but her individual distinction is in the construction of particularly clever plots, of which Cool Repentance (1982) seems to me the most brilliant.”
Detection with a touch of romance in an exotic background show the author and character at their best in “Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave.”
This is your graveyard in the sun—” The tall young man standing in her path was singing the words lightly but clearly. It took Jemima Shore a moment to realize exactly what message he was intoning to the tune of the famous calypso. Then she stepped back. It was a sinister and not particularly welcoming little parody.
“This is my island in the sun
Where my people have toiled since time begun—”
Ever since she had arrived in the Caribbean, she seemed to have had the tune echoing in her ears. How old was it? How many years was it since the inimitable Harry Belafonte had first implanted it in everybody’s consciousness? No matter. Whatever its age, the calypso was still being sung today with charm, vigour, and a certain relentlessness on Bow Island, and on the other West Indian islands she had visited in the course of her journey.
It was not the only tune to be heard, of course. The loud noise of music, she had discovered, was an inseparable part of Caribbean life, starting with the airport. The heavy, irresistible beat of the steel band, the honeyed wail of the singers, all this was happening somewhere if not everywhere all over the islands late into the night: the joyous sound of freedom, of dancing, of drinking (rum punch), and, for the tourists at any rate, the sound of holiday.
It wasn’t the sound of holiday for Jemima Shore, Investigator. Or not officially so. That was all to the good, Jemima being one of those people temperamentally whose best holidays combined some work with a good deal of pleasure. She could hardly believe
it when Megalith Television, her employers, had agreed to a program which took her away from freezing Britain to the sunny Caribbean in late January. This was a reversal of normal practice, by which Cy Fredericks, Jemima’s boss—and the effective boss of Megalith—was generally to be found relaxing in the Caribbean in February while Jemima herself, if she got there at all, was liable to be dispatched there in the inconvenient humidity of August. And it was a fascinating project to boot. This was definitely her lucky year.
“This is my island in the sun—” But what the young man facing her had actually sung was “your graveyard in the sun.” Hers? Or whose? Since the man was standing between Jemima and the historic grave she had come to visit, it was possible that he was being proprietorial as well as aggressive. On second thought, surely not. It was a joke, a cheerful joke on a cheerful, very sunny day. But the young man’s expression was, it seemed to her, more threatening than that.
Jemima gazed back with that special sweet smile so familiar to viewers of British television. (These same viewers were also aware from past experience that Jemima, sweet as her smile might be, stood no nonsense from anyone, at least not on her program.) On closer inspection, the man was not really as young as all that. She saw someone of perhaps roughly her own age—early thirties. He was white, although so deeply tanned that she guessed he wasn’t a tourist but one of the small loyal European population of Bow Island, a place fiercely proud of its recent independence from a much larger neighbor.
The stranger’s height, unlike his youth, was not an illusion. He towered over Jemima and she herself was not short. He was also handsome, or would have been except for an oddly formed, rather large nose with a high bridge to it and a pronounced aquiline curve. But if the nose marred the regularity of his features, the impression left was not unattractive. He was wearing whitish cotton shorts, like more or less every male on Bow Island, black or white. His orange T-shirt bore the familiar island logo
or crest: the outline of a bow in black and a black hand drawing it back. Beneath the logo was printed one of the enormous variety of local slogans—cheerful again—designed to make a play upon the island’s name. This one read: THIS IS THE END OF THE SUN-BOW!
No, in that friendly T-shirt, he was surely not intending to be aggressive.
In that case, the odd thing about the whole encounter was that the stranger still stood absolutely still in Jemima’s path. She could glimpse the large stone Archer Tomb just behind him, which she recognized from the postcards. For a smallish place, Bow Island was remarkably rich in historic relics. Nelson in his time had visited it with his fleet, for like its neighbors Bow Island had found itself engulfed in the Napoleonic Wars. Two hundred or so years before that, first Bri
tish, then French, then British again had invaded and settled the island which had once belonged to Caribs, and before that Arawaks. Finally, into this melting pot, Africans had been brought forcibly to work the sugar plantations on which its wealth depended. All these elements in various degrees had gone to make up the people now known casually among themselves as the Bo’landers.
The Archer Tomb, the existence of which had in a sense brought Jemima across the Atlantic, belonged to the period of the second—and final—British settlement. Here was buried the most celebrated Governor in Bow Island’s history, Sir Valentine Archer. Even its name commemorated his long reign. Bow Island had originally been called by the name of a saint, and while it was true the island was vaguely formed in the shape of a bow it was Governor Archer who had made the change: to signify ritu-ally that this particular archer was in command of this particular bow.
Jemima knew that the monument, splendidly carved, would show Sir Valentine Archer with Isabella, his wife, beside him. This double stone bier was capped with a white wood structure reminiscent of a small church, done either to give the whole
monument additional importance—although it must always have dominated the small churchyard by its sheer size—or to protect it from the weather. Jemima had read that there were no Archer children inscribed on the tomb, contrary to the usual seventeenth-century practice. This was because, as a local historian delicately put it, Governor Archer had been as a parent to the entire island. Or in the words of another purely local calypso:
“Across the sea came old Sir Valentine—
He came to be your daddy, and he came to be mine.”
In short, no one monument could comprise the progeny of a man popularly supposed to have sired over a hundred children, legitimate and illegitimate. The legitimate line was, however, now on the point of dying out. It was to see Miss Isabella Archer, officially at least the last of her race, that Jemima had come to the Caribbean. She hoped to make a program about the old lady and her home, Archer Plantation House, alleged to be untouched in its decoration these fifty years. She wanted also to interview her generally about the changes Miss Archer had seen in her lifetime in this part of the world.
“Greg Harrison,” said the man standing in Jemima’s path suddenly. “And this is my sister, Coralie.” A girl who had been standing unnoticed by Jemima in the shade of the arched church porch stepped rather shyly forward. She, too, was extremely brown and her blond hair, whitened almost to flax by the sun, was pulled back into a ponytail. His sister. Was there a resemblance? Coralie Harrison was wearing a similar orange T-shirt, but otherwise she was not much like her brother. She was quite short, for one thing, and her features were appealing rather than beautiful—and, perhaps fortunately, she lacked her brother’s commanding nose.
“Welcome to Bow Island, Miss Shore,” she began. But her brother interrupted her. He put out a hand, large, muscular, and burnt to nut color by the sun.
“I know why you’re here and I don t like it,” said Greg Harrison. “Stirring up forgotten things. Why don’t you leave Miss Izzy to die in peace?” The contrast between his apparently friendly handshake and the hostile, if calmly spoken words was disconcerting.
“I’m jemima Shore,” she said, though he obviously knew that. “Am I going to be allowed to inspect the Archer Tomb? Or is it to be across your dead body?” Jemima smiled again with sweetness.
“My dead body!” Greg Harrison smiled back in his turn. The effect, however, was not particularly warming. “Have you come armed to the teeth, then?” Before she could answer, he began to hum the famous calypso again, jemima imagined the words: “This is your graveyard in the sun.” Then he added: “Might not be such a bad idea, that, when you start to dig up things that should be buried.”
Jemima decided it was time for action. Neatly sidestepping Greg Harrison, she marched firmly toward the Archer Tomb. There lay the carved couple. She read: “Sacred to the memory of Sir Valentine Archer, first Governor of this island, and his only wife, Isabella, daughter of Randal Oxford, gentleman.” She was reminded briefly of her favorite Philip Larkin poem about the Arundel Monument, beginning, “The Earl and Countess lie in stone—” and ending, “All that remains of us is love.”
But that couple lay a thousand miles away in the cloistered cool of Chichester Cathedral. Here the hot tropical sun burnt down on her naked head. She found she had taken off her large straw hat as a token of respect and quickly clapped it back on again. Here, too, in contrast to the very English-looking stone church with pointed Gothic windows beyond, there were palm trees among the graves instead of yews, their slender trunks bending like giraffes’ necks in the breeze. She had once romantically laid white roses on the Arundel Monument. It was as the memory of the gesture returned to her that she spied the heap of bright pink and orange hibiscus blossoms lying on the stone before her. A shadow fell across it.
“Tina puts them there.” Greg Harrison had followed her. “Every day she can manage it. Most days. Then she tells Miss Izzy what she’s done. Touching, isn’t it?” But he did not make it sound as if he found it especially touching. In fact, there was so much bitterness, even malevolence, in his voice that for a moment, standing as she was in the sunny graveyard, Jemima felt quite chilled. “Or is it revolting?” he added, the malevolence now quite naked.
“Greg,” murmured Coralie Harrison faintly, as if in protest.
“Tina?” Jemima said. “That’s Miss Archer’s—Miss Izzy’s—companion. We’ve corresponded. For the moment I can’t remember her other name.”
“She’s known as Tina Archer these days, I think you’ll find. When she wrote to you, she probably signed the letter Tina Harrison.” Harrison looked at Jemima sardonically but she had genuinely forgotten the surname of the companion—it was, after all, not a particularly uncommon one.
They were interrupted by a loud hail from the road. Jemima saw a young black man at the wheel of one of the convenient roofless minis everyone seemed to drive around Bow Island. He stood up and started to shout something.
“Greg! Cora! You coming on to—” She missed the rest of it—something about a boat and a fish. Coralie Harrison looked suddenly radiant, and for a moment even Greg Harrison actually looked properly pleased.
He waved back. “Hey, Joseph. Come and say hello to Miss Jemima Shore of BBC Television!”
“Megalith Television,” Jemima interrupted, but in vain. Harrison continued:
“You heard, Joseph. She’s making a program about Miss Izzy.”
The man leapt gracefully out of the car and approached up the palm-lined path. Jemima saw that he, too, was extremely tall. And like the vast majority of the Bo’landers she had so far met, he had the air of being a natural athlete. Whatever the genetic
mix in the past of Carib and African and other people that had produced them, the Bo’landers were certainly wonderful-looking. He kissed Coralie on both cheeks and patted her brother on the back.
“Miss Shore, meet Joseph—” but even before Greg Harrison had pronounced the surname, his mischievous expression had warned Jemima what it was likely to be “—Joseph Archer. Undoubtedly one of the ten thousand descendants of the philoprogenitive old gentleman at whose tomb you are so raptly gazing.” All that remains of us is love indeed, thought Jemima irreverently as she shook Joseph Archer’s hand—with all due respect to Philip Larkin, it seemed that a good deal more remained of Sir Valentine than that.
“Oh, you 11 find we’re all called Archer round here,” murmured Joseph pleasantly. Unlike Greg Harrison, he appeared to be genuinely welcoming. “As for Sir Val-en-tine”—he pronounced it syllable by syllable like the calypso—“don’t pay too much attention to the stories. Otherwise, how come we’re not all living in that fine old Archer Plantation House?”
“Instead of merely my ex-wife. No, Coralie, don’t protest. I could kill her for what she’s doing.” Again Jemima felt a chill at the extent of the violence in Greg Harrison’s voice. “Come, Joseph, we’ll see about that fish
of yours. Come on, Coralie.” He strode off, unsmiling, accompanied by Joseph, who did smile. Coralie, however, stopped to ask Jemima if there was anything she could do for her. Her manner was still shy but in her brother’s absence a great deal more friendly. Jemima also had the strong impression that Coralie Harrison wanted to communicate something to her, something she did not necessarily want her brother to hear.
“I could perhaps interpret, explain—” Coralie stopped. Jemima said nothing. “Certain things,” went on Coralie. “There are so many layers in a place like this. Just because it’s small, an outsider doesn’t always understand—”
“And I’m the outsider? Of course I am.” Jemima had started to sketch the tomb for future reference, something for which she had a minor but useful talent. She forbore to observe truthfully, if platitudinously, that an outsider could also sometimes see local matters rather more clearly than those involved—she wanted to know what else Coralie had to say. Would she explain, for example, Greg’s quite blatant dislike of his former wife?
But an impatient cry from her brother now in the car beside Joseph meant that Coralie for the time being had nothing more to add. She fled down the path and Jemima was left to ponder with renewed interest on her forthcoming visit to Isabella Archer of Archer Plantation House. It was a visit which would include, she took it, a meeting with Miss Archer’s companion, who, like her employer, was currently dwelling in comfort there.
Comfort! Even from a distance, later that day, the square, lowbuilt mansion had a comfortable air. More than that, it conveyed an impression of gracious and old-fashioned tranquillity. As Jemima drove her own rented Mini up the long avenue of palm trees—much taller than those in the churchyard—she could fancy she was driving back in time to the days of Governor Archer, his copious banquets, parties, and balls, all served by black slaves.
At that moment, a young woman with coffee-colored skin and short black curly hair appeared on the steps. Unlike the maids in Jemima’s hotel who wore a pastiche of bygone servants’ costume at dinner—brightly colored dresses to the ankle, white-muslin aprons, and turbans—this girl was wearing an up-to-the-minute scarlet halter-top and cutaway shorts revealing most of her smooth brown legs. Tina Archer: for so she introduced herself.
A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women Page 25
