For Death Comes Softly

by Hilary Bonner

  Robin returned with a bottle of Tattinger cold from the fridge and two elegant glasses. With his usual efficiency he popped the cork and poured.

  ‘Rose,’ he said, and he was grinning from ear to ear. ‘Abri Island may not be lost for ever, after all.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  ‘Robin,’ I protested. ‘Abri has been lost for ever. Forty-four lives have been lost for ever. What are you talking about?’

  ‘Look, I’ve been studying the new plans of the mines which the enquiry’s surveyors drew up, and I’ve had a good look around Abri myself, and tried to take an unemotional look at the damage.’

  Abri had officially been designated a disaster area, and even the sheep had been evacuated. It went without saying that both boats and helicopters were no longer allowed to land there and visitors, including the island’s owner, were forbidden.

  He saw my look of surprise and touched my cheek with one hand in a vaguely apologetic gesture.

  ‘I persuaded Eddie to take me over in the chopper,’ he said. ‘We landed on the north side which is quite safe. I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d only fret.’

  ‘Damn right,’ I said, and waited for him to continue, which he did at once, his enthusiasm bubbling over, the words pouring out of him.

  ‘I had a meeting with AKEKO this morning, and I offered them the only hope there is of getting any return for their investment. They neither like nor trust me, but they are businessmen. They listened. You see I do not believe that the damage to Abri is irretrievable. We could either fill up or excavate the remaining tunnels. I am sure the place could be made safe – at a cost. There were mine shafts, many more than we knew about, right under the village, the church, and the site of the new hotel. The building activity and all those people at our wedding were the last straw for Abri, we certainly know that, and the structure of the place just collapsed, but we could build another village somewhere where there aren’t any tunnels.’

  ‘I got the impression from the enquiry report that the tunnels were everywhere,’ I said lamely.

  ‘Not quite,’ said Robin. ‘It can be done, I’m sure of it, and AKEKO have the funds. They just need convincing that they won’t be putting good money after bad. I have offered to re-invest most of what they paid me for the lease as a gesture of good faith.’

  ‘But you could lose everything, Robin,’ I said.

  He looked angry for a moment. ‘This isn’t about money, Rose,’ he said quite sternly. ‘It’s about my island.’

  I studied him carefully. His cheeks were slightly flushed. There was a gleam in his eyes. Abri would always belong to Robin Davey, and he to it. Even after all that had happened.

  ‘Surely you’ll never be allowed to rebuild, will you, Robin?’ I asked. ‘Even if it were possible I don’t see you getting planning permission. Isn’t there a bloody great crack across the island?’

  Robin was really impatient now. ‘We can landscape it,’ he snapped.

  I stared at him in astonishment. Forty-four people had been killed on his blessed island and he was talking about landscaping the crack in the earth which had swallowed them up.

  ‘It could be a kind of memorial,’ he said, as if reading my mind. ‘It could even become a tourist attraction. People find that sort of thing fascinating. They flocked to Lynton and Lynmouth after the terrible floods in the 1950s. And look at all the Diana memorials – millions visit them.’

  I was completely speechless. We were sitting in armchairs facing each other. He got up, came and kneeled on the carpet before me.

  ‘Rose, what’s wrong?’ he asked, and I was amazed that he did not know how I felt.

  ‘It just doesn’t seem right, that’s all,’ I stumbled eventually.

  He took both my hands in his.

  ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong with wanting to rebuild? You didn’t expect them not to rebuild the freeways after the LA earthquake, did you? If Abri were a town instead of an island, you would expect it to be rebuilt, wouldn’t you? What’s the difference?’

  There really were no more words. I supposed that in some ways he was right. It was just that I couldn’t bear even to think about Abri and he was patently still possessed by the place. I knew he loved me deeply, but I suspected even I was nothing to him compared with his island. And if he was disappointed with my reaction to his news, it certainly didn’t stop him babbling on.

  ‘AKEKO have agreed to at least arrange to send an engineering team in,’ he continued just as eagerly as before. ‘It’s a start, anyway, I’m quite sure the practical problems can be overcome . . .’

  I let his words wash over me. His excitement merely reminded me of the depth of his obsession with Abri Island.

  On top of what Julia had told me that day, I found myself seriously unnerved.

  The next morning, immediately after a still-ebullient Robin had left for the office, I called Julia.

  I didn’t mess about. She was, after all, my oldest and best friend.

  ‘Sorry I went off in a huff,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Rose, I probably shouldn’t have said anything,’ she replied. ‘Just dinner-party gossip. A juicy story like that gets told everywhere, and sometimes it’s quite apocryphal. Means bugger all, probably.’

  ‘You don’t believe that,’ I said, and I heard her give a little sigh.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know what to believe, Rose,’ she said, unconsciously echoing my sister.

  ‘Look, Todd Mallett and his team are sure to have known about the Jeremy Cole angle and checked it out,’ I told her. I knew I was lying to myself and I guessed what her response would be.

  ‘Nothing about Natasha Felks having possibly had a special reason to be interested in old mines or at least having a strong connection with a mining expert, let alone one as well-known as Cole, came out either at her inquest or the Abri enquiry did it?’ Julia asked.

  It was a rhetorical question to which we both knew the answer.

  ‘I can’t believe Todd wouldn’t have found out about it though . . .’ My voice tailed off. I was beginning to realise that I wasn’t being very convincing, to myself, let alone to Julia.

  ‘Why on earth should the police have found out about it?’ Julia sounded exasperated. ‘Natasha Felks was having an affair with a married man, and an eminent one in the public eye at that. The three in a bed story may have been common gossip at the Beeb, but it is the kind of tale people wouldn’t know whether to believe or just take as a good yarn, and Natasha’s name wasn’t generally known. It was an absolute freak that I stumbled across it and put two and two together.’

  ‘It might still all be a load of nonsense, like you said.’ I was clutching at straws and I knew it.

  Julia sighed again. ‘Yes, Rose, it might. But I can’t get it out of my head. I tried to forget all about it after you told me you and Robin were married. But I couldn’t.’

  I tried desperately to think. ‘Look, surely when the Abri Island disaster happened Cole and his wife would also have put two and two together.’

  ‘I don’t know the answer to that, Rose. Maybe they didn’t want to get involved.’

  ‘What, when so many people had died?’

  ‘Particularly then,’ said Julia wearily. ‘Anyway, the way the story was told to me, Marjorie Cole was so caught up with her marriage and her own petty jealousies that it may have been quite possible that she genuinely didn’t connect the Abri disaster with Natasha’s drowning. Where Natasha died meant nothing to her, she just revelled in the fact that her rival was no more.’

  That hit home. I had reacted in a rather similar way for totally different reasons.

  I had one last point. ‘If Jeremy Cole is such an expert on the dangers of old mines why wasn’t he called in to give evidence at the Abri enquiry?’

  ‘I’m ahead of you,’ said Julia. ‘I’ve done a bit of phoning around. Apparently he was the first academic expert approached but he suggested another man, based at Exeter University, whom h
e claimed was better qualified because he had specialist knowledge of West Country mining.’

  I wasn’t sure whether that might be significant or not. I remained silent.

  ‘Look, Rose,’ Julia continued after a pause. ‘I’m so glad you called. I didn’t know what to do after you walked out of lunch yesterday. You see, whatever lies behind this I really think it should be put into the hands of the police. It needs to be investigated.’

  ‘I am the police,’ I interrupted lamely.

  Julia sighed again. ‘Rose, I’m so sorry about this, but you’re being ridiculous again. Forty-four people died when those mines fell in on Abri. Natasha’s death remains a mystery. If I’m right and she did suspect the island was unsafe and if she did tell Robin that she suspected it, at the very least they would have had an almighty row, wouldn’t they? If it wasn’t all so serious I would be telling my editor, not Todd Mallett or anybody else till my paper ran the story. But this is too horrendous for playing newspapers. Too many people were killed. I know you. Now I’ve told you, you won’t be happy until you know the truth, either. It has to be a police matter.’

  ‘Julia, can we hold off until I have talked to Robin?’ I asked plaintively.

  ‘I think that’s the last thing you should do, to be perfectly honest,’ said Julia sharply.

  ‘Look, I cannot believe that Robin would have deliberately put all those people’s lives at risk. I don’t believe it. He’d never do that. They were his people. His family, his islanders. And you can’t be also suggesting that he murdered Natasha surely?’

  ‘Rose,’ Julia’s voice was surprisingly gentle. ‘I remember you confiding in me that you once had your own suspicions about her death. How you couldn’t understand her allowing herself to be dropped off at the Pencil by a young man she knew only too well suffered epileptic trances. Remember?’

  ‘That was before I really got to know Robin, to realise the kind of man he is.’

  ‘Rose, are you truly sure you know the kind of man he is? You seem mesmerised by him. Blinded to reality. You have done ever since you first slept with him . . .’

  I was fully aware that she was telling the truth. But I still wasn’t ready for it.

  ‘I’m not mesmerised by him, honestly,’ I insisted. ‘Just let me talk to him before you do anything. I will know if he is guilty of anything. I’ll know if he lies to me, I’m quite sure of it . . .’

  I was still in an emotional state. The thought of anything intruding on my newly rediscovered happiness with Robin, let alone something as ominous as this, was too much for me. I started to sob as I pleaded with her to back off.

  Julia was my very best friend in all the world. She loved me. She gave in.

  ‘You’ve got twenty-four hours,’ she said.

  That evening I confronted Robin as soon as he returned home. He listened quietly as I related all that Julia had told me. I waited, wondering what on earth he was going to say.

  He looked very grim.

  ‘So you see fit to question me on the grounds of dinner-party gossip, do you, Rose?’ he queried eventually. And in a very reasonable tone.

  I didn’t reply. Put like that I felt almost ashamed.

  ‘Spell it out, Rose,’ he went on. ‘What exactly do you think this piece of rubbish means?’

  ‘Maybe it means that Natasha had found out something about Abri’s mines,’ I said. ‘And if she had, well she would have told you, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Rose, Natasha was not an expert on anything. She fucked a geologist, that’s all. It didn’t make her one.’

  I had to persist now. ‘No, but if you have a relationship with someone you do learn something about their work. At least you pick up an interest.’

  ‘Really,’ he replied coldly. ‘What do I know about your work, exactly, I wonder?’

  ‘I don’t even do The Job any more,’ I remarked obliquely.

  ‘No, and there’s a reason for that, isn’t there? You are on extended sick leave because you have been emotionally disturbed by all that you have been through. You’re still disturbed, Rose, you must be to even consider what I suspect you are thinking. Your judgement is way off beam, it really is.

  ‘We were on Abri for our wedding. You know what I told the enquiry, and you have to believe it, surely. Would I have ever set foot on the place again, let alone let you and all our families and friends do so, if I did not think it was safe?’

  I shook my head. I desperately wanted to believe him, but I had so many doubts and fears.

  ‘Maybe you had kidded yourself into believing that it was safe,’ I said. ‘After all those mine shafts had been there for 150 years, why should they suddenly collapse?’

  Robin looked at me in amazement.

  ‘I never thought you would doubt me, Rose,’ he said.

  I studied him carefully, this beautiful man I had married and was so in love with. He seemed so sad.

  ‘I just want you to look me in the eye and tell me the truth,’ I said.

  He sighed. ‘There is no truth other than what you already know. Do you really think I would have taken any notice of anything Natasha might have said, just because she was the mistress of a geologist? If Natasha knew anything about mining and geology she didn’t share it with me, but then she wouldn’t, would she? It seems pretty damn likely from what you have told me that she may have been still seeing her geologist after she and I got together. And I’ll tell you what, Rose, if you care any more, that’s something I’d never do. I’ve never cheated on anyone in my life.’

  And there was the rub. I believed that absolutely. Robin had a strict moral code. It was not in his nature to cheat. I accepted that about him without question, and yet I could at the same time question that he may be capable of other far greater immoralities. Of real evil. I was as confused as ever.

  He started to speak again. ‘There is no new truth, Rose. I still don’t know how Tash died nor why she went off in the boat with Jason. I just don’t know.’

  ‘What if she didn’t go with Jason,’ I blurted out, suddenly putting voice to the grim thought that had lurked somewhere in my mind from the very beginning. ‘What if you took her out there to the Pencil and dropped her off to look at the dolphins. She’d have trusted you to return, wouldn’t she?’

  He stared at me for maybe thirty seconds without speaking. Then he started to cry. I had seen this big powerful man weep before, but I was as moved as I had been that first time, when, after his mother was stricken by her stroke, he had cried in my arms. But then, after all the death and destruction we had witnessed together, I had been relieved to see him give in finally to his emotions, and I had not been the cause of his weeping. This was different.

  ‘I can’t believe you think I would be capable of such a thing,’ Robin said, and his voice came out in a kind of anguished wail through the tears.

  I couldn’t help it. I went to him and took him in my arms. I told him I was sorry, that I loved him, that of course I didn’t believe he was capable of . . . capable of . . . Even then I had been unable to use the right words.

  His tears eased. The inevitable happened. Within minutes we were in bed and my body took over my brain. The sheer physical joy that we brought each other was beyond anything I had ever really thought possible. I told myself it was simply not possible for this man who could make the world so beautiful to be a part of anything ugly.

  Early the next morning we were woken by the telephone. It was Peter Mellor. Richard Jeffries had confessed to the murder of his son Stephen and had admitted also to consistently sexually abusing him. I felt my abdominal muscles contract sickeningly, as if I had been kicked viciously in the belly.

  Apparently forensic had worked miracles with poor Stephen’s body which, like some of the victims of the Fred West murders in Gloucester, was in better condition than might have been expected having been preserved by the type of soil in which it lay. Evidence had been found – including bits of hair and hair root, torn from Richard Jeffries’ head, jammed behind th
e remains of the boy’s fingernails – which had ultimately been enough to enable officers interrogating the man finally, and only after a long struggle, to break him.

  ‘I thought you’d like to know before it’s announced publicly, boss,’ said Mellor. ‘I knew you’d be gutted. He’ll be charged today.’

  ‘Thank you, Peter,’ I said quietly and put the receiver down.

  So Richard Jeffries had been guilty all along. My judgement had been flawed. Worst still, that wasn’t really it. I had always had doubts at the bottom of my mind about Jeffries, but I had not listened to them properly. I had gone with the sway, taken the course of least resistance. I knew I had worked by the book, that on paper the investigation I had headed could not be faulted. That made no difference. I couldn’t get over the idea that a boy was dead who might well have been alive if I had done my job properly. I tortured myself with the ever-present suspicion that had I not been so preoccupied with my personal life, I would have been more thorough, more relentless in the investigations. I looked back at Robin, still lying half-asleep beside me in the bed, his fair hair tousled, the covers only half over his splendid body, and I shuddered. I just prayed that my judgement of him would never turn out to have been so desperately wrong.

  Later that morning I rang Julia.

  ‘I’ve confronted Robin and I believe absolutely that he had no part in Natasha’s death and no idea of the dangers of the old mine workings,’ I blurted out confidently. ‘And I really don’t know how I could have let you or anyone else make me doubt him.’

  Julia sighed. ‘Rose, it’s not just men who sometimes only have brains in their pants,’ she said.

  ‘Julia, you don’t understand . . .’ I began.

  ‘I think I do, Rose, only too well,’ she interrupted tetchily.

  ‘Julia, you’re talking about my husband, not some casual pick-up,’ I remonstrated.

  ‘I know, I’m sorry,’ she said, although she didn’t sound it.