Death on Lindisfarne

by Fay Sampson

  “Not necessarily,” Lucy said, more curtly than she intended. “But if a body is washed up on the beach, they can’t take the cause of death for granted. There’ll have to be a post-mortem. We don’t know at this stage if Rachel died accidentally, or she took her own life. Or…” a catch in her breath.

  “Or something worse?” Elspeth swung her heavy figure round slowly to look at all of them around the table. “Unless…” she focused on the woman in the doorway, “Sue can tell us more.”

  Sue’s face went white, then flamed. “That’s a ridiculous suggestion! I hardly knew the girl.”

  “Ah, but James did, didn’t he? Or he was getting to know her pretty fast.”

  “What the hell…” The uncharacteristic expletive made Sue blush again. “What on earth do you mean by that?”

  “I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that.”

  Lucy rang her spoon against her cup again. She needed to get control of the situation. “Look, folks, this isn’t helping. We’re all on edge. Let’s just remember Rachel is dead and show some respect for her, shall we? I’ll lead morning prayers in the lounge, since the police have taken over our chapel, at…” she looked at her watch, “quarter to nine. Then I suggest we all make ourselves available to DI Harland. And if there’s anything you know, anything you remember at all, however insignificant it may seem, then for goodness’ sake tell him.”

  “Like her earring?” Melangell’s voice piped up. “The one I found in the sand.”

  “Yes.” Lucy smiled at her, glad of the diversion. “That’s just the sort of thing.”

  It was only as the others got up from the table and began to leave for their rooms that it occurred to Lucy to wonder just how significant Melangell’s small find might seem to the detective inspector.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “I’LL NEED TO SEE THE YOUNG LADY’S BEDROOM. I take it I can get the key from Mrs Batley?”

  Detective Inspector Harland rose from his chair in the television room, signalling that his interview with Lucy was over. She had told him, with a weary sense of hearing herself repeat her statement to DC Chappell, the same sad details of her past experience with Rachel and her movements during their two brief days on Holy Island.

  The detective inspector was a lean and taciturn man, perhaps in his forties. Deep lines in his face had a weary downturn. Not a high flier, Lucy guessed. It was a relief to find that she had never worked with him on a murder team when she was in uniform. Probably from a different station. It kept her past at bay. He seemed to be going through the motions of an investigation, rather than keen on the scent of solving a mystery.

  Was there really a mystery? Lucy asked herself. Surely what Aidan had suggested was unthinkable. Rachel was a suicide risk, with bipolar moods that could swing to black depression; a lack of self-worth.

  Yet how could she have committed suicide on a flat, sandy beach?

  DI Harland had talked to the coastguard. What was going through his mind? His face gave nothing away.

  “No need to ask for a key,” she said, getting to her feet as well. “We shared a bedroom. I’ll take you.”

  Outside the interview room they met Detective Sergeant Malham. She was quizzing a harassed-looking Mrs Batley about tide times and transport links for getting on and off the island. She swung round and raised her eyebrows to the inspector. A large-boned woman, not much older than Lucy, but taller. A sensible waxed coat hung open over a polo-necked sweater and trousers. Like the detective inspector, she was a stranger to Lucy.

  “We’ll take her room next,” DI Harland told her. “Lead on, Miss Pargeter.”

  “She’s a Reverend,” put in Mrs Batley in Lucy’s defence.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lucy said, colouring. “Most people call me Lucy.”

  She led the way along the verandah and unlocked the bedroom door.

  She had tidied her own half of the room meticulously, knowing this would happen. But the inner half was just as Rachel had left it. In daylight, the little heaps of discarded clothes looked less sinister than the night before. Just pathetic. The grey tee-shirt and black shorts Rachel slept in, tumbled on the pillow. Underwear she had pulled from her case and neither worn nor put away. A pair of dark jeans that Lucy knew she had bought from a charity shop. All sad-coloured, anonymous.

  Perhaps it had been a mistake to buy her that bright pink holdall. It wasn’t Rachel. She seemed not to believe she deserved anything cheerful and colourful.

  But no. There had been other, rarer times, when those mood swings carried her to a high of frantic activity and too-brittle laughter.

  She had fallen in love with the pair of earrings that Lucy had brought back from a previous trip to Lindisfarne, when she had been checking out the possibility of running this holiday. Red and gold enamel. A strange little beast with a scarlet tongue, its tail twisting in Celtic interlace.

  And what about the red waterproof jacket she had been wearing the day they arrived? Before the day was over, Rachel had reverted to the shapeless black coat she had been wearing when Peter found her body on the beach. Lucy had found the jacket pushed to the back of the wardrobe.

  She watched the two detectives professionally sorting through Rachel’s meagre possessions, the empty bedside drawers, the holdall pushed into a corner.

  Detective Sergeant Malham moved on to the bathroom.

  “Excuse me.” She put her head out of the connecting door. “Can you show me which things are hers?”

  Lucy went to join her. She was acutely conscious that some details of her own private life were under scrutiny.

  “There wasn’t much of Rachel’s. She had next to no money. On benefits. That’s hers.”

  DS Malham picked up a foil sheet of tablets and examined them.

  “Do you know what these are?”

  “Mood stabilizers. Lithium. Rachel had a rough time. Rehab, to get her off drugs. And she was bipolar. She could get really black moods.”

  “Did she ever mention suicide?”

  “No. I’ve told your inspector that. But if I’m honest, it wouldn’t really surprise me if she felt that way. Life’s been pretty much stacked against her ever since she was a kid.”

  “Hmm.” The detective sergeant put the tablets back on the glass shelf. She looked around. “Not a lot to go on, is there? I take it there wasn’t a note.”

  “Nothing. She was there at the priory with the rest of us. Next moment, she’d gone. No reason. Or none that I know of. We never saw her again.”

  “No row with any of the others?”

  “No.”

  She had said all she felt she needed to about Sue’s outburst. And that had been directed against James, not Rachel.

  “No undercurrents of feeling you picked up? Somewhere the vibes just didn’t seem right?”

  Lucy hesitated. The detective inspector hadn’t asked her that. She had been as honest as she could about the possibility that Rachel might have gone off with, or met up with, James Denholme on Saturday afternoon. But there had been something else – too slight to form an answer to any of DI Harland’s lacklustre questions.

  “Just one thing. Saturday evening, something had upset Rachel. She wouldn’t tell me what it was. She refused to come to supper. And when I brought a tray out for her, she wasn’t here. I’ve no idea where she was. Then, when I was back at the house, Elspeth Haccombe came in. She told me I could stop worrying because Rachel was back in the bedroom.”

  “And?” prompted Malham.

  “How did she know Rachel was missing? I hadn’t told anyone. And when I came over here to check, Rachel was… I don’t know… different.”

  “How?”

  “Sort of high. Bright eyes. Tense. Quite aggressive to me when I tried to ask where she’d been. Of course, it could just have been the bipolar thing. A swing from a low to a high.”

  “But?”

  Lucy sighed. “If you pressed me, I’d have to say it looked the sort of high you
might get off drugs. Rachel had been clean for months. I’m as sure as I can be she didn’t bring any with her.”

  “Hmm.”

  You may be only the sergeant, Lucy thought, but you’re taking this more seriously than your inspector is. To him, it’s a simple case. Open and shut. He just needs to wrap up the formalities. You’re prepared to consider something more alarming.

  “Well,” said the detective sergeant briskly, “I guess we’re done here. I’ll need to write out a statement for you to sign. About the drugs – both the ones on the shelf and the ones she may or may not have got hold of here.”

  “I can’t imagine how she could.”

  “No. But take a job lot of people, like the ones you’ve got here in St Colman’s House, and you can bet at least some of them have got murky little secrets they wouldn’t want everyone to know.”

  For a moment, Lucy was tempted to share her own secret: those years in the police force; a greater knowledge of the seamy world of drugs and crime than a young Methodist minister would normally be expected to have.

  But something held her back. It was still too painful. DS Malham might be sympathetic, but she was bound to ask why Lucy left. And that was something she was not yet ready to share with anyone.

  “You might as well eat your lunch here. I got in food for eleven.”

  Mrs Batley’s invitation to the detectives was not exactly gracious, but she managed a smile. Sue had grabbed a sandwich before setting off to fetch James from hospital the moment the causeway opened.

  Lucy could have wished the police officers had eaten somewhere else. It was hard enough to restore anything like an air of normality, to give those remaining at least a semblance of the holiday they had paid for. Valerie and Aidan had proved understanding, but it would not have surprised Lucy if the Cavendishes took off as soon as they could. She wondered if she should offer them a refund, to make it easier for them to go.

  No, darn it, she thought, suddenly belligerent. It’s not my fault. I didn’t plan any of this: Rachel’s death, Sue and James having whatever row it was that ended with a dent in James’s head.

  Detective Inspector Harland was saying something to her over the quiche and salad. “We’ll wait for this young man – Mr Denholme? – to get back. Then we’ll hear his side of the story. Miss English seems pretty clear. They had an argument and she walked away from the castle, leaving him OK. As likely as not, he was upset and didn’t watch where he was putting his feet. Stone’s treacherous stuff when it’s wet. I don’t see how it could have anything to do with Miss Ince’s death.”

  “Then that’s it?” Lucy wasn’t sure whether her immediate reaction was relief or surprise. “You won’t want the rest of us again?”

  “My dear young lady… My dear Reverend lady,” he gave her a patronizing smile, “it’s a tragic affair, but I think we’ve taken enough of your time. It’s not for me to pre-empt the coroner, but I’d be very surprised if she didn’t come up with an open verdict: accident or suicide. I think we can be confident there are no indications of foul play.”

  He tucked into Mrs Batley’s lunch with gusto.

  Lucy was aware of Aidan watching her and the inspector intently.

  She felt an air of desperation as she put her question. “Did you talk to the coastguard this morning?”

  The inspector’s thick eyebrows rose. “I am not obliged to give you the details of a police investigation.”

  Everyone around the table was listening now. The implications of what she was thinking could affect any one of them.

  “The tides,” she said, hearing how lame it must sound. “Where could she commit suicide? How did her body get on that particular beach?”

  The detective sergeant’s head shot up, but her inspector’s face did not change.

  “Death by drowning is hardly an uncommon method of suicide. Especially by young women.”

  If the coastguard had told him what he had said to Aidan, then the knowledge of the Holy Island currents had left the inspector unmoved.

  “So? That’s it? We’ve got the green light for Bamburgh Castle?” Elspeth had been listening with undisguised curiosity.

  “We have your statements. I see no reason why you shouldn’t resume your planned programme. Once we’ve heard Mr Denholme’s version of what happened, we’ll be off ourselves.”

  “And let poor Len Chappell get back to his long-suffering wife,” Sergeant Malham laughed.

  Lucy felt an unexpected sense of loss. It was what she wanted, wasn’t it? The necessary enquiry gone through, the sad presumption that Rachel had taken her own life, or that she had slipped, as James had in the garden, and fallen to her death. But where?

  What other possible explanation could there be?

  She looked around the depleted group at the table. There were questions about some of their relationships with Rachel that would never now be answered. But it was overdramatic to suppose that one of them could possibly have had anything to do with Rachel’s death.

  She rearranged her face into a forced smile for DI Harland.

  “You’ll be relieved, I expect, police budgets being what they are. You’ll probably have saved yourself a million or so by ruling out a suspicious death.”

  She saw the flash of surprise in his face. Immediately, she wished she’d kept her mouth shut. A Methodist minister probably wasn’t supposed to know how much the decision to open a murder enquiry could cost.

  A murder enquiry? It was the first time she had allowed herself to put a name to the doubt in her mind.

  Too late now. By the time they got back from Bamburgh, the police would have gone. Case closed.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Are you sure it’s going out?”

  Melangell peered out of the side windows of Elspeth’s car. The water was still lapping close to the causeway on either side. “Yes,” Aidan assured her. “The tide turned a couple of hours ago. And we’ll still be able to get back for supper.”

  With only eight of them left, Lucy had decided that two cars would be enough. She was driving in front of them now, with Peter and the Cavendishes. Aidan and Melangell had hitched a ride with Elspeth and Valerie. Aidan decided he would rather watch the seascapes rolling away to left and right than Elspeth’s cavalier driving across the narrow roadway.

  He had thought of a causeway as a raised road above the sea, but the tarmac here was on the same level as the expanse of wet sand.

  They passed the refuge on stilts, where the deep tide channel swung closer to the coast, and then the salt marshes were speeding towards them.

  The mainland again. Melangell craned her neck to the car park where they had left their own vehicle for the week.

  “Hello, car!” She waved. “Bye bye. See you on Saturday.” She turned to Aidan. “Do you think it’s lonely without us?”

  “It’s probably enjoying a week’s rest. A seaside holiday.”

  He sensed they were all glad of the break this afternoon. A chance to get away from the island and its dark memories. Holy Island shouldn’t have been like that. It was not what he had hoped for when he brought Melangell here.

  But he knew the history of Lindisfarne better than most: conflict, betrayal, heartbreak, Viking massacre. Yet still the island kept its aura of sanctity. They would go back this evening, refreshed, and rediscover what they came for.

  He wondered how Lucy was bearing the loss of the girl she had loved and done so much to try and help.

  Would she take a possible suicide personally?

  Suicide? He pushed away the thought that had closed its colder hand over his heart this morning. There must be a sad but unthreatening reason why they had found Rachel’s body on that particular stretch of beach, mustn’t there? The alternative was unthinkable.

  “There!” he cried, suddenly seizing Melangell’s arm. “That’s Bamburgh church, where St Aidan was leaning when he died.”

  Valerie turned round from the front seat. “You really must go and look inside, Melangell. That half-bur
ned beam I told you about. It’s up in the roof now.”

  The road led down through the village to the foot of the castle crag. Melangell craned up in awe.

  “It’s massive.”

  A long line of ramparts marched across the sky above them. Buildings rose within it, dominated by the sturdy square keep.

  They drove up the ramp and parked the cars at the foot of the walls. Across the road, the way led uphill through the gateway. Fran, predictably, was complaining in a low voice to David. When they stood at last on the broad terrace of the middle ward, looking out to sea, the wind tugged at Aidan’s hair. He turned to face the lively waves. Far below, beyond a wilderness of tumbled dunes, the beach ran long and level. Its pale gold sands threw back the light, even on a grey day. Instinctively he raised his camera. Through the long-range lens, the level slabs of rock that formed the Farne Islands sprang into view.

  He lowered the Nikon and took deep breaths of salty air.

  “There! Doesn’t that make you feel great?”

  Melangell was manning the cannons.

  Lucy came towards them. Aidan was glad to see her face was brighter too. With a sweep of her arm she gathered the group around her.

  “You’re standing now where generations of Northumbrian kings stood. And queens too. Bamburgh is named after one of them: Bebba. She wasn’t an Angle. She was a British princess who took the brave decision to marry an Anglian king, one of the leading invaders who was taking over her country. Her people had lost, but she could still put her own son on the throne.

  “This is the place that King Oswald, who founded Holy Island abbey, took as his coastal capital after he marched south from Iona to drive the Mercians out. Forget the Norman castle, of course. Think of a great wooden hall with soaring gable ends, bright with painted carvings. Here Aidan came to talk to the king. And here, after the Mercians killed Oswald, his brother Oswy became ruler of northern Northumbria. He too married a British princess. But when she died, he took his second queen from Kent. She was a very special princess: Eanfled. I’ve told you how, years before, when King Edwin ruled in Northumbria, the Roman missionary Paulinus tried to convert him. Edwin resisted until one day he barely escaped assassination. He was wounded, and his Christian queen went into labour. After all that danger, little Princess Eanfled was born safely. Paulinus proclaimed the survival of all three as a miracle. King Edwin allowed his baby daughter to be baptized as a Christian with twelve Northumbrians to accompany her. And when the king himself was converted, thousands more Northumbrians followed him.