by Jessica Mann
“You not going to keep her company?”
“I am going over in a couple of weeks. It’s when she’s convalescing that Freya will need me, and I’ve got some work to finish.”
Pedro did not look in the best of health himself. He had always been a small man, but with bright eyes and a clear, olive skin that originally led his friends to address Peter Seton Barnes by the Spanish nickname of Pedro. Now his deeply lined face looked weather-beaten and worn.
I had written to them when Ian died, of course, and now I mumbled something again.
“He was a great loss to us,” Pedro said simply. “I am afraid that it will leave Freya very much alone. She is fifteen years my junior, as you know.”
There was a hard-bottomed though not surfaced strip known as The Road, some of the way across the hillside, and then a vestigial track that led past my father’s cottage on the Aragon farm, and on to the Barnes’s place. The van was so shaken by the wind that one continuously feared being overturned.
“Is anyone looking after you while Freya’s away, Pedro? Shall I come and see you?”
“I can manage very well, my boy, thank you. I’m busy with some work for the next few days. I shall be glad to see you after that.” A courteous way of telling me to leave him alone. I slid back the van door into the wind’s attack and leaped out to close it as fast as I could. But a little thing like wind would not keep my father indoors. He came out to greet me, drawing in deep breaths as though the harsh air did him good. Unlike Pedro Barnes, he was blooming. I allowed the thought to cross my mind that my own early death would be unlikely to affect him as much as Ian’s had Pedro; my fault, or his? The Aragons’ two dogs ran across the farmyard, barking hysterically, and my father shoved the collie away with a shining shoe.
“The Aragons are selling up,” he bawled and did not lower his voice very much in the shelter of the cottage to tell me that some cousins of Freya Barnes were coming over to look at the place. “They can’t make much more of a mess than Peter Aragon has, that’s one thing,” he said. “Sign of the times though, the old families leaving and young townees coming here to live.”
The wind strength increased in the night, and the next day was a full-blown storm force eleven. Once it is force twelve, they call it a hurricane. The weather seemed appallingly wild to me; but then, I had never been on the island during one of those storms that are used as measurement of the passing time—“the year of the great storm,” as people would say. I had been told that after such days, people are left literally deaf, sometimes for weeks, from the cacophony of pounding sea, howling wind, and thunder.
I stayed indoors. I was past the age of having to obey my father’s injunctions to blow the cobwebs away. I had plenty to read, since I was preparing to write a book about Younghusband, and I tried to divert my father’s disgusted appeals by seeming abstracted in scholarly concentration. The house, and all the things in it, shook and rattled. Few structures on Forway rise above one storey and some are dug into the ground so as to present only a smooth line of roof to the west. This gale was, unusually, from the south-east, and treacherously it found every corner or protrusion or gap.
Some of the time it rained, and then the water was driven against the windows with the blinding violence of one of these mechanical car washes. In the dry intervals I watched through the newly clean glass how everything that grew was forced horizontal and how the mountainous seas—visible from every point on the island—were crashing in avalanches over the coast.
Occasionally I caught sight of Peter Aragon or his wife, bent double against the onslaught, running across the farmyard to the sheds. There could hardly be worse conditions for the prospective purchasers to view the property in. I saw them more than once, as they examined the structures of the farm. When I saw them coming huddled arm in arm from the hilltop, I thought scornfully that only townees born and bred would go for walks in this weather.
My father made several determined outings, but all were for some practical purpose. Once he went to call on Pedro Barnes, but he came back saying that the door was closed against callers. Once or twice I went with my father, though it offended him to hear me imply that I was better able to carry loads of peat than he. It was still midwinter-chilly on Forway. In London there had been tulips and lilac in the park and pink May-blossom outside my study windows.
On the fifth day the wind dropped to force seven. I paid duty calls and was told how like my mother, stroke father, I looked, and what unseasonable weather we were having. Neither the ferry nor the helicopter had called since the day I came, but Forway men are used to being cut off from supplies, sometimes for weeks at a time, and it was only luxuries that we went without. At least there was the radio link nowadays. A lot of people could remember when the only way to get messages off the island in bad weather had been to attract the attention of passing shipping (which was hard, since no sensible captain willingly passed anywhere near Forway) or had been, quite literally, to send messages in bottles. The St. Kildans had developed a system of sending message canoes, like kayaks, and the prevailing currents and wind did tend to wash them up on Scottish shores. Forway’s bottles were too seldom found for any more sophisticated conveyances to have been invented. Of most there was never a trace. Occasionally children from far away places like the Baltic coast or the Canary Islands would write asking for rewards.
Forway runs with surface water in heavy rain, which drains the soil and seeds with it into the sea. I was keen to leave this barren, battered rock, and on the sixth day I told my father that I would be off when the helicopter next called.
On the seventh day the air was suddenly still. The sky was blue, the sea all brilliant peacock shades flecked with white. As always after such storms, the swell would take ages to settle but, to the eyes of one who did not intend to embark upon it, was very beautiful.
We had left Pedro undisturbed.
“He’ll be busy inventing something profitable,” my father said. “Amazing the way the feller makes his fortune by patenting some formula.” I wondered whether the old man should be left alone through such a storm, but my father said huffily that Pedro was only two years older than he was. “I can cope, so can he,” he insisted.
Dr. Thetis Lisle dropped in to check my father’s blood pressure and said she had just come by the Barnes place. The outer door of Pedro’s laboratory was still closed. He maintained the Oxford custom of sporting his oak. When that outside door was shut, it meant “Do not disturb.”
“Yes, it was closed when I went up there the other day too,” my father said.
“I expect he’s working hard to get finished before he goes off to keep Freya company.”
My father said, “Extraordinary brain that chap has, as fertile as ever.”
“Every idea a winner,” Thetis agreed. She undid the cuff. “You’ll do.”
My father and I discussed Pedro’s Midas touch as we walked up the hill. My father said, “Pedro doesn’t take the money seriously. It’s fairy gold to him.”
“What will happen to it all?”
“No idea. I don’t think they have much family left.”
“Don’t they think of moving somewhere more comfortable? This climate can’t do Freya’s arthritis any good.”
“They feel about Forway as I do,” my father told me. “There is nowhere better. Plenty of good uses for their money here, come to think of it.” He began to enumerate the comforts that Pedro’s wealth could acquire for Forway. But he ended morosely, “Shouldn’t be surprised if he leaves the lot to a cats’ home in the end.”
Pedro’s oak was still sported. I said, “We had better not disturb him.”
“I suppose you are right.” But from farther up the hill, I noticed that the line that took power from the electricity generator to the laboratory was flapping across the ground.
“Is that Pedro’s power line down?” I said.
“Very likely after the weather we have had. I think we had better just see …” My father returned to th
e closed outer door of the laboratory, a low concrete building with a green painted corrugated shed. It looked more like a cow shed than the birthplace of great invention. My father sacrilegiously knocked.
“Are you sure … if he’s working—?” I said nervously. When Ian and I were boys, disturbing Pedro was the major crime.
My father edged his way round the side of the shed, placing his feet in the narrow gully that was supposed to prevent the accumulated water from seeping under the walls. “Just have a look to make sure.”
I followed rather reluctantly. Although my father reached the small window before me, my eyes are sharper, so that we saw simultaneously through the dirty panes that Pedro’s body was twisted awkwardly in collapse across the work-bench. I knew he was dead before we forced our way in through the doors.
Once we were in the room, the smell made it very apparent that Pedro had been dead for some days. It was very cold, since the electric fire must have failed when the power line came down.
Among Dr. Thetis Lisle’s numerous accomplishments was a knowledge of pathology. She was able to establish that the direct cause of Pedro’s death had been hypothermia. But by the time that her husband, Godfrey Lisle, acting as coroner, signed the burial certificate (before he officiated at the funeral in his role of Island Captain), everybody on the island understood how the appalling accident had happened.
Pedro’s habit had been to sit at his work-bench on a high wooden stool. When he got to his feet, as he frequently did, especially when talking to people, for he had retained his Socratic teacher’s habit of pacing up and down in conversation, he would push himself up in the manner of most old people, taking the weight on his wrists, with the palms of his hands flat on the work-bench in front of him.
What had he been doing? None of the scribbled papers lying around the room meant anything to those of us who tried to see whether a magically profitable formula was waiting to be patented. He would have been making something, since he never sat idle. Several half-completed models were scattered about the room, of boats and houses and machinery. The Barnes’s own house, and the island’s schoolroom, was full of Pedro’s accurate miniatures.
He had ready to hand a tube of “super glue,” that contact adhesive that so often sends model makers to the hospital with their fingers stuck together. Apparently Pedro had inadvertently spilt some of this transparent substance on his work-bench. When he put his hands down flat to rise from his stool, he was caught like a limed bird. When the electricity went off during the storm, he froze to death, there where he was stuck.
I heard one of the Yetts women, who had done a postal course on psychology, talking about death wishes and the loss of the will to live.
Sergeant Hicks, who combined the roles of coastguard, customs officer, and policeman, said that the tests had shown no alien fingerprints on the tube of glue. There was no sign that an outsider had entered the lab. Foul play was not suspected.
“But Pedro Barnes was always so scrupulously careful,” my father said. Mrs. Yetts started on again about suppressed desires to end it all. Annie Windows, who had been helping Freya do housework when she was laid up with her arthritis, remarked that the house had always had an awful lot of things lying around.
“No way of making her husband tidy after all these years, Mrs. Barnes would say.”
“If only one of us had noticed that he was in need of help,” Thetis Lisle said mournfully. “I feel dreadfully guilty about it. I went past the place while he must have been struggling in there, and with the door closed I thought …”
“So did I,” my father muttered.
“Did you go and see him, Mr. Gerson?” Thetis Lisle asked. “Before he closed the outer door?”
“Yes, he was very friendly to us,” Rik Gerson said, and his wife nodded vigorously, “but when we went again the door was closed.”
“How did you know what that meant?”
“He warned us, that first time. Said we shouldn’t knock if he left it shut. So we didn’t.”
“There’s no need for anyone to feel guilty,” I said. “Pedro was of sound mind. If he sported his oak, he knew nobody would come.”
“Did you notice the container of glue on his desk?” Sergeant Hicks asked Rik Gerson.
“Yes, I did. And I heard the electric generator chugging away. He had a cosy fug going in there. Snug as a bug in a rug, I thought.”
Nobody else had been near the Barnes place during the storm at all.
I was to leave the day after the funeral. “What do you think Freya will do now?” I asked my father.
“She will be rich enough to do exactly as she pleases.”
“What is there left to please her, with Ian and Pedro both gone?”
My father’s voice sounded a little evasive. “I shall help her as best I can. We are very old friends.”
The idea floated into my mind that these two old friends might marry and end their days together, but I said nothing of that when I bade my father goodbye. The Gersons were travelling back in the helicopter too, having arranged to take possession of the Aragon farm in June, and Godfrey Lisle was coming too. Thetis had decided he should go to be with Freya.
Chapter 6
With no known starting point, Tamara had to begin her work, of both kinds, at random. Her curiosity had been aroused by talk of Mrs. Anholt’s Irish lodger at The Castle. She had been trained to follow random scents when the course of an investigation was vague; in any case, there was an ineradicable connection in her mind between her undercover trade and the Irish.
Tamara walked from Freya’s cottage towards Trader’s Island—an island in name only, except at high tide, or when there was a strong north-west wind; otherwise, there was a causeway formed by a bar of shingle that led to the three-acre mound of heather and bracken. The old man who had caused The Castle to be built had planned to raise the causeway and have it surfaced but in the end enjoyed his isolation too much to do so.
Continuous barking could be heard from The Castle. Unimaginative though she liked to think herself, Tamara felt a prickle of illogical fear down her spine. She swung her ranging-pole jauntily and hitched her field-bag more firmly across her shoulder. As far as anyone else was concerned, this expedition was both innocent and licit. To prove it, she made first for Trinder’s Barrow, a long low mound at the top of the hill. The hillside was peaty and her feet sunk into the sweet-smelling ooze, but the barrow itself was dry, and Tamara unhitched her equipment and lay down on the ground.
She was at the highest point of the western cliffs. To her right was the ravine that separated Trinder’s Island from the rest of Forway; behind, the mossy damp hillside gradually shaded to the marginally richer fields near The Town; in front of her, four hundred feet of sedimentary rocks fell to a boiling sea. The cliff side was tufted with grass and whitened by bird droppings, but the general impression was dark and lowering. It was hard to believe that until quite recently islanders would let themselves down from here to collect eggs, as the Faeroes islanders were said still to do.
Trinder’s Barrow was falling into the sea. Tamara edged forward on her stomach to peer over the eroded edge. Ian Barnes’s notes, made when he was still a schoolboy, mentioned that he had found some sherds, later identified as Bronze Age, sticking from the section of earth.
Tamara was absorbed by archaeological fascination when she felt a nip on her left buttock. With a presence of mind an assailant had no right to expect she jerked backward, not forward over the cliff, before rolling over and sitting up. She stared furiously at the man who was standing above her.
“You see that I couldn’t resist it,” he said.
“You are bloody lucky you didn’t kill me,” Tamara answered and got up to find that her eyes were level with his. A small man, then, bearded, and wearing clothes that were tattered even by the standards of Forway. “You must be Mr. Gerson,” she said coldly.
“That’s right, pleased to meet you. Miss Tamara Hoyland, from the smoke, isn’t it?” he said, hold
ing out a very dirty hand. She shook it unenthusiastically. “Wonderful up here, isn’t it?” he went on, sweeping the horizon with a huge pair of field-glasses. He took a notebook from his backpack. “I always note down unusual birds,” he said.
Tamara looked through her own very powerful miniature binoculars. “Those are only shags,” she said.
“I was looking farther out.”
There were no birds to be seen farther out and Mr. Gerson did not seem interested in the fulmar that sailed in and out of the cliff; but on the horizon, ships of various sizes could be seen all around the island, and the horizon was castellated by tankers. Tamara had a disquieting vision of ships circling Forway like sharks around a sinking ship.
Rik Gerson squatted down on the barrow. “Dandelion coffee?” Tamara shook her head and drew out her own flask of caffeine-laden liquid. She had never much liked the people of her own generation who dropped out of society, and like a Tory die-hard, which otherwise she was not, she resented the proportion of her earnings that was taxed to support them. A pair of ravens were calling and swooping near the cliff top, but Rik Gerson ignored them, and Tamara swung her binoculars round to survey the rest of Trinder’s Island. From this vantage point The Castle was supremely apparent, a statement of neurosis and folie de grandeur on a massive scale. The side visible from the main island, and from passing ships, was a long crenellated wall built of the ugly local stone, with a few ill-proportioned windows all covered with rusty iron grilles. This frontage was attached to a disproportionately small house, fully visible only from the hill above. Behind it a yard was littered with rubbish, and two large dogs were leaping and tugging at their chains.
“Funny you should come to Forway just now,” Rik Gerson remarked. He scratched his knee through a tear in his jeans and then withdrew his bloody finger to suck it.
Tamara looked away and said, “Early summer is the usual time for archaeological field-work.”
