For Death Comes Softly

by Hilary Bonner

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Hilary Bonner

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Hilary Bonner is a former showbusiness editor of the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mirror. She now lives in Somerset and continues to work as a freelance journalist, covering film, television and theatre. She is the author of four previous novels, The Cruelty of Morning, A Fancy to Kill For, A Deep Deceit and A Passion So Deadly.

  Also by Hilary Bonner

  FICTION

  The Cruelty of Morning

  A Fancy to Kill For

  A Passion So Deadly

  A Deep Deceit

  NON-FICTION

  Heartbeat – The Real Life Story

  Benny – A Biography of Benny Hill

  René and Me (with Gorden Kaye)

  Journeyman (with Clive Gunnell)

  FOR DEATH COMES SOFTLY

  Hilary Bonner

  For

  Detective Superintendent Steve Livings

  and

  Detective Sergeant Frank Waghorn

  With thanks to:

  Dr Hugh White, Home Office Pathologist; Paul Westaway, emergency officer for the West Country ambulance service; North Devon coroner Brian Hall-Tomkin (who bears absolutely no relation to the appalling coroner in this book, but could be the wise man who proceeded him), North Devon coroner’s officer Keith James (whom I’m sure would not allow any coroner to behave the way my fictional one does); Hilary Corrin, Devon County Council emergency officer; Jeremy Metcalf of the Minmet gold-mining company – and, as ever, my Avon and Somerset police friends Steve and Frank, to whom this book is dedicated.

  I shall always be grateful for the extraordinarily generous way in which all of these have given me their time and the benefit of their knowledge and experience.

  Creeping, crawling

  Towards the heart.

  Tearing, ripping

  Apart.

  Unseen, unthreatening.

  Silent until the last

  Until all hope is past.

  Still as the frozen whiteness

  before an avalanche,

  Sleek as a barracuda

  slicing through the ocean,

  Sweet as a peach

  steeped in poison.

  Wrapped in a dream

  of peace and passion,

  Wracked with the ache

  of desire –

  That’s how life’s fire

  Is quenched.

  Unexpectedly. Inexplicably.

  For death comes softly.

  Hilary Bonner

  One

  It began with the holiday – if you could call it that. More like a last-ditch attempt at a cure for deep depression really.

  Abri Island was not the place everybody would choose to get over a broken marriage and struggle with somewhat premature mid-life crisis. It suited me. I thought it would be bound to be peaceful, perhaps even to the point of being stupefyingly boring – which was just what I wanted. Somewhere you could do nothing except rest and recuperate, and nothing more would be expected by anyone.

  I could not imagine that anything exciting or dangerous ever happened there. And that was a classic example of how wrong I can be.

  Abri is a four-square-mile hunk of granite shaped like an upturned wash basin. It looms out of the Atlantic Ocean about fifteen miles off the North Devon coast, just beyond the mouth of the Bristol Channel. As soon as I caught sight of it for the first time from the blustery decks of the island ship, the Puffin, I could sense the magic of the place. There was something unreal about Abri too. It sounds daft to say that my first sighting was unexpected, when I not only knew the island was there but had booked a holiday on the place and even studied maps and photographs of it. Nonetheless Abri’s towering bulk, rising from nowhere in the middle of a seemingly endless expanse of sea, came as a kind of surprise. It was windswept and bleak and yet stunningly beautiful. There was no proper harbour and only dinghies and tenders could come into the rugged landing beach, Home Bay on the leeward east side. Abri’s purpose-built landing craft, an elderly flat-bottomed boat, ferried passengers ashore from the Puffin, which had her own mooring buoy as close into land as her draft allowed. The journey and the island were unique. Seabirds fished all around us, shags sitting watchfully on the water and then swiftly diving down after their prey, herring gulls wheeling above, soaring through the sky, their cries harsh and relentless. I looked up at them and at the bare black cliffs which overshadowed the rough shingly beach – and I was hooked on Abri from the moment I stepped unsteadily on to the little wheeled wooden jetty manoeuvred as far as possible into the water by the island tractor.

  The gusting sea wind nearly blew me over and a boy with a wide tanned face and big black eyes, standing rock steady on seaman’s legs, grasped my elbow to steady me.

  ‘You must be Miss Piper,’ he said, consulting a list of names on a clipboard. ‘Miss Rose Piper?’

  Part of my cure was to go back to being a ‘Miss’. At the very least it saved on explanations, I had already discovered.

  There were a number of day-trippers arriving, but just five of us planning to holiday on the island – two couples, possibly on honeymoon certainly still obsessed with each other, which was all I needed – and me, conspicuously alone and telling myself resolutely that was just how I wanted it.

  With muscular ease the boy hoisted our luggage into a trailer attached to a vehicle which was a bit like a motorbike with four wheels, and gave us all directions to our accommodation. I already knew that the sole motor vehicles allowed on Abri were the tractor, an ancient Land Rover used only for emergencies and to ferry supplies to the village, and a pair of the chunky four-wheeled motorbikes known as quads. Visitors were expected to use their own two legs. I was staying at the Old Lighthouse, a couple of miles away, and set off briskly enough up the steep path which led almost vertically, or so it seemed, to the village. By the time I reached the church I was flagging. It had been cold and wet when I had left Ilfracombe aboard the Puffin that morning, and I was wearing a quilted jacket and my riding Barbour over jeans and a sweater. Now, in spite of the wind which still whistled around my ears, the day had brightened, the midday sun was shining, and although this was the first week in November I was becoming uncomfortably hot. My clothes felt heavy and restrictive, so I took off my Barbour and carried it over my arm which was almost as cumbersome. But the walking was much easier on the flat plateau of the island top, through the village past The Tavern and the shop, along the stony path rather endearingly called the High Street, and across the field of springy moorland grass which led to the Old Light.

  Nothing had quite prepared me for the spectacular beauty of my little one-roomed granite house attached to the base of the lighthouse, nor its superb vantage point at the height of the island. I leaned against a wall, slightly overwhelmed. Nobody had told me ab
out the quality of daylight on Abri, which was the brightest I had ever experienced in the British Isles, more so even than on the north coast of Cornwall. I was still leaning against the wall absorbing the magnificence of it all, when the boy on the quad arrived with my luggage.

  I had tried to travel light but not succeeded all that well. Nonetheless the boy lifted my over-stuffed rucksack easily, as if it were a carrier bag containing no more than a couple of pounds of sugar. I opened the lighthouse door and he swung the rucksack inside for me.

  His smile was warm and he had a rough natural charm.

  ‘My name’s Jason, if there’s anything I can do for you just shout,’ he said.

  He was about six foot two tall and built in that smooth solid way body builders used to be before steroids. I had to remind myself that he was also not a day over eighteen, if that, and I was a thirty-five-year-old divorcee. I was also a Detective Chief Inspector in the Avon and Somerset Constabulary, and I knew I was pretty damn good at my job, whatever some of the other buggers thought. It therefore remained a mystery to me how I could continue to be so damn stupid in other directions.

  You’re getting to be sad, Rose, I told myself, as I thanked young Jason politely, tipped him a quid, and sent him on his way.

  I took my first look then inside my little house and found that it was simply but comfortably furnished, effectively warmed by a solid fuel stove and an electric storage heater. It had a small kitchen area complete with an efficient-looking fridge with a freezer compartment. I checked it at once, and was delighted to find that this already contained a couple of trays of ice cubes. Seriously good news. Running away to the Bristol Channel’s equivalent of a desert island was all very well – but only if you could make yourself a decent gin and tonic. I dug into my rucksack for the bottle of each, which I had carefully packed wrapped in my thickest clothes, and made myself a large one. Then I set out to explore the reason I had chosen to stay here. A second door in one corner of my room led into the old light’s circular base. I went through it and began to climb the spiral staircase, clutching my glass firmly in one hand and the rusting iron stair rail with the other. I had to remind myself that, in spite of the rust, the old light was a solid enough construction and still considered quite safe. Trinity House, to their embarrassment, had been forced to abandon it soon after it had been built because its high and central location meant that its light was all too often shrouded in mist, making it useless as a warning to shipping.

  The winding staircase was narrow and dark in places, but when I reached the glass light chamber at the top I thought I had arrived in heaven. Certainly the ground seemed a long way down. The emptiness of the sky engulfed me, and when my eyes became accustomed to the sun’s dazzling glare I could see not only the entire island but across the channel to North Devon in one direction and Wales in the other. A circular metal terrace, just a foot or two wide but thankfully with a tall safety rail, surrounded the top of the lighthouse and I wrenched open a door and stepped out onto it. The silence was deafening – only the cries of the birds disturbed it, and the whistle of the wind. Eventually the wind forced me back inside. Somebody had thoughtfully left a deck chair right in the middle of the glass chamber. Smiling to myself I sat in it and lifted my glass to my lips. This must surely be the best gin and tonic seat in the world, I thought.

  The island exceeded my expectations, and at first my stay was all that I had hoped for. Four peaceful days followed of reading, walking, watching for Sika deer on land and seals and dolphins at sea, enjoying the gin and tonic seat, and eating surprisingly good meals at The Tavern in the evenings. I dutifully did all the things you should do on holiday on Abri, like buying the unique Puffin stamps, getting them franked, and sending postcards. In the shop I also bought a book called The Flora and Fauna of Abri, and amused myself considerably searching for plants I barely believed existed with extraordinary names like mouse-ear chickweed, bladder campion and hairy pepper-wort.

  The Tavern was convivial. There was company when I wanted it and not when I didn’t. I started to sleep well again. I even began to feel almost happy. I might have known it wouldn’t last.

  The fifth day was exceptionally bright and beautiful. Unusually for Abri at any time of year let alone approaching the latter end of the Autumn, the wind dropped away almost to nothing making the island unseasonably warm. In the late morning, having packed myself a few sandwiches as a make-shift picnic lunch, I walked across to the far north to the point from which you have the best view of the narrow phallic rock known as the Pencil, which juts a hundred feet or so out of the sea at low tide. In spite of the bad weather I had left on the mainland, it hadn’t rained on Abri since I had arrived there, and the ground, covered in this part of the island by heather, was dry enough. I lay on the purple carpet, relishing the moment, propped on one elbow, my eyes half-closed against the sun’s glare, gazing idly out to sea.

  ‘I could take you out there if you like,’ said a voice right by me. I nearly jumped out of my waxed jacket. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’

  It was Jason, looking even more handsome than ever, still standing like a seaman, legs akimbo.

  ‘The seals nest in the caves on the far side of the Pencil,’ he went on. ‘You’re here at the right time of year. They’ve got young now, and in this weather they’ll be out basking on the rocks. The conditions are perfect for dolphins out there today, too. If you get lucky they’ll dance right up to you.’

  To hell with it, I thought, while at the same time lecturing myself on not indulging in any more fantasising.

  Jason guided me down a steep path to a little rocky inlet. An inflatable dinghy equipped with a reassuringly powerful-looking outboard motor had been dragged onto a small patch of shingle above the high-water line. I began to help him push the inflatable into the water. He was wearing waders. I had on only ankle-length walking boots. Jason grinned as I hesitated and, slightly to my embarrassment, lifted me easily off the shingly beach and into the boat. I know I’m only five foot three and slimmer than I deserve to be considering the amount of booze and bacon butties I put away – nonetheless it was pretty impressive.

  We took about fifteen minutes to reach the Pencil. The sea is often inclined to look deceptively calm studied from the solid comfort of land. In reality on this day the breakers crashed into the steep sides of the rock, and the water foamed like the top of a warm pint of lager, spilling over the base of the abruptly vertical landmass. The inflatable rose and fell crazily with the swell, and I couldn’t imagine where it would be possible to land.

  Jason yelled above the tumult. ‘There’s a gap there, see. It’s easier than it looks. You step onto that ledge and the entrance to the tunnel is just above, an easy step up.’

  I was beginning to have qualms. ‘The tunnel?’ I queried.

  ‘Oh, didn’t you know? There’s a tunnel that leads up right through the rock to a higher ledge on the other side overlooking where the seals nest. You can’t get to it any other way. And it makes a spectacular viewing platform. Everybody who comes out here loves it.’

  He must have been aware of my doubt.

  ‘It’s OK. The tunnel’s less than thirty feet long. You can see light all the time.’

  One of my big problems in life is bravado. The number of daft things I’ve done because I am more afraid of stopping than carrying on is legion.

  ‘Right then,’ I said, trying to look and sound butch, which is difficult when you are my size.

  Jason was using the engine merely to keep the boat steady now and was carefully studying the sea.

  ‘We go in on the seventh wave,’ he said. Suddenly he tipped the outboard so that the propeller was no longer in the water and grasped a single oar as a particularly big wave carried us forward. He used the oar to give us some steerage. And he was right. It was easier than it looked. Our boat tossed and pitched its way through a bunch of scarily treacherous-looking rocks and suddenly settled in their lee so that he could bring the little craft qu
ite gently alongside the ledge he had pointed out to me. He slung a line around a rocky outcrop with easy familiarity and helped me scramble across the bow of the inflatable so that I could clamber up onto the small ledge below the tunnel. That too was easier than it had looked. It seemed in fact as if someone might have carved footholds into the rock.

  Jason reached up out of the boat and passed me a torch. ‘Just in case,’ he said. ‘Don’t stay longer than an hour because at high tide the bottom of the tunnel is flooded.’

  My heart lurched again. ‘Aren’t you coming with me?’ I asked, trying to make my voice sound normal.

  He shook his head. ‘I can’t moor the boat here,’ he said. ‘I’ll hover just a few yards out. Don’t worry, I’ll be waiting and I’ll be watching. We do it all the time. I’ll come back in as soon as I see you on this side again.’

  That, of course, was the moment when I should have stepped smartly back into the inflatable alongside him. But I didn’t. Foolhardy as ever.

  ‘Enjoy,’ he called, sounding more like a Californian waiter than a North Devon boatman, as he steered his way out through the rocks.

  I tried to wave cheerily. Well, I thought, not much choice now. I looked around me. The sides of the Pencil were sheer. The only way of leaving the narrow ledge on which I stood was through the tunnel Jason had described. I heaved myself into its entrance and, as Jason had promised, I could see a reassuring circle of light above me and not that far away. I didn’t really need the torch but I was glad of its comfort. I struggled to suppress my fears and groped my way gingerly forwards and upwards.

  When I stepped out on the far side of the Pencil the entire disconcerting experience became instantly worthwhile. The ledge on that side of the rock was much larger than the one on which I had landed, and from its towering vantage point – twenty feet or so up the side of the Pencil – the view was spectacular. Several dozen cow seals and their young were basking on the rocks below, just as Jason had said they would be. I could see the coast of the mainland, pin-sharp in the distance. Something danced in the sea, gleaming in the glare of the afternoon sun. It was a dolphin, one of a vast leaping and diving pod, as the apparently infallible Jason had predicted. The whole thing seemed to have been stage-managed. Thank you Mr de Mille. I sat down on the ledge and drank it all in. Magic. Sheer magic. This was the sheltered side of the rock and the sun seemed even hotter here, not like November at all. I basked in it, just like the seals beneath me. The minutes flashed by, the cabaret was fabulous, the sea roared below – and yet I felt so at peace. I may have dozed off. I glanced at my watch. Almost an hour had passed. Time to return, pretty sharply. I felt guilty about Jason waiting on the other side, and also I was suddenly aware of a distinctly autumnal chill in the air. It was just after 3.30 p.m. Darkness comes swiftly halfway through the afternoon in November and the day was already not quite so bright. The brief journey back through the tunnel seemed easier, though, perhaps because there was a certain familiarity now. It felt damper and colder than before. I shivered. Not a place to be stuck, I thought, and teased myself about what I would do if Jason and his boat were not there.