Death on Lindisfarne

by Fay Sampson

  They looked around them at the shrouded scene. The road, Aidan was relieved to see, had swung marginally away from the sea. Rough grass separated them now from the advancing tide. The ground on their right was beginning to rise. There were glimpses of hummocks of sand dunes beyond the fence.

  Would Karen really have run this far in her bare feet, fleeing from her daughter’s killers? Or tracking them?

  He peered at the damp tarmac ahead. But the road stretched away into nothingness.

  “I’m getting out to see what I can.” Lucy switched off the engine and stepped out into the grey silence.

  Aidan fought back an instinct to grab the steering wheel and drive on in pursuit. He watched Lucy climb the fence and wade through the long grass to stand on a low mound. A pall of denser fog crept in. He could no longer see her.

  His eyes struggled to probe the road in front of him. He was willing the Cavendishes’ Honda to appear out of the mist, even momentarily. For some reassurance that they were still on the island. That he might get to Melangell before it was too late.

  Then Lucy was beside the car again.

  “Nothing. Visibility’s terrible.”

  “I keep thinking I can hear the police helicopter. But it’s just my imagination. You can’t even hear the waves lapping now. We might be in the middle of nowhere.”

  Lucy settled into her seat and switched the engine on. “They won’t be able to bring the helicopter in this weather. It’ll have to be a lift in the lifeboat from Seahouses.”

  Aidan tried to remember how far down the coast that was. Past Bamburgh Castle. How long would the sea crossing take? His knuckles tensed.

  Lucy drove on. Like Aidan, her head was bent forward, peering ahead.

  “There!” he cried.

  Out of the gloom, a red vehicle loomed at the side of the road. Lucy accelerated, then swung in beside it. They both jumped out. Lucy checked the numberplate.

  “It’s them.”

  The Honda was empty. Heart hammering with fear, Aidan pulled the rear door open. The Cavendishes’ luggage was thrown in the back. His whole body gave an enormous lurch of relief. There was no sign of Melangell. He closed his eyes with a prayer of thankfulness. He had been denying to himself the fear of finding her bound and gagged. Or worse. Was that how the Cavendishes had brought Rachel along this road, to drive over the narrow neck of dunes and leave her body on that deserted beach at the edge of the rising tide?

  A new fear almost paralysed him. Had they carried Melangell from here?

  Suddenly urgency galvanized him. He raced up the grass-grown dunes. The fog was patchier here. As it lifted momentarily, he thought he could glimpse the sea, not more than a few hundred metres on the other side of the island.

  Then he turned and saw them. Two figures widely spaced, stumbling through the sand. One in a beige raincoat, the other in green.

  Even at this distance he knew them.

  David and Frances Cavendish.

  The wind changed. The mist came rolling back to cover them.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  “MELANGELL!” AIDAN’S SHOUT WAS SWALLOWED up in the fog. “Melangell!” he cried again.

  He started to run towards where he thought he had seen those figures. He was stumbling in shifting sand.

  “Be quiet, Daddy! They’ll hear you.” The voice was startlingly close.

  The blood seemed to leave Aidan’s face as he spun round. Had he wanted to find her so much it was her ghost he was hearing?

  A tousled, and very real, curly head emerged from a hollow in the dunes. Bright grey-blue eyes rebuked him. Mist beaded the tips of her hair. There were bits of broken grass on her tee-shirt.

  Behind her, Karen was struggling up the slope of sand, hauling herself on tussocks of grass. Sand and fragments of vegetation clung to her striped sweater. Her feet were bare and scratched.

  But Aidan gave Rachel’s mother only a second’s glance. He was plunging over the top of the dune to take Melangell in a hug. His arms went round her tightly. Only now did the full horror of his fears declare itself. He had hidden from himself the depth of the devastation he would feel if he had lost not only Jenny but Melangell as well. For the moment, the realization of that pain eclipsed his joy.

  Melangell wriggled free.

  “Silly Daddy. You’re crying.”

  “I’m not. It’s just the wind making my eyes water.”

  “There isn’t any wind.”

  But there was. A breeze was strengthening, tugging at the strands of mist. As it streamed them out, he had a clear view of the sea below him. Next moment, it was lost again. Patches of blue were beginning to appear overhead.

  He raked the uneven dunes for the beige- and green-coated figures of the Cavendishes. The tumbled landscape and the lingering fog still hid them.

  “They heard you,” Lucy called. “They were making for their car.”

  Aidan was already sprinting after them.

  Her voice arrested him. “Leave them. They can’t get off the island. The police are on their way.” She had her phone out.

  Still Aidan ran. He crested the next ridge and looked down. Below him was the road and the two parked cars. The Cavendishes were getting into their 4x4.

  He realized he was still holding Melangell’s hand. He did not think he would ever let go of her.

  Then shifting trails of mist hid the scene below. He heard the engine roar.

  Lucy had come up behind him. “Where do they think they’re going?” he asked her.

  As if in answer, the fog was torn apart. The red Honda reversed, then shot forward. It was startled seconds before Aidan realized it was heading straight up the bank towards them. He leaped back, pulling Melangell with him. The four-wheel drive came lurching up the sandy slope, slithering sometimes on the flattened grass. Aidan, Melangell and Lucy woke up to their danger and fled.

  Aidan turned his head. The Honda was tottering on the ridge of the dunes. It came plunging down towards them. He scrambled aside, and threw Melangell behind him.

  But the vehicle was not aimed at them. When he looked down, he saw a flash of white, spreadeagled in the hollow. White jeans, blue-and-white striped jersey, blonde hair. Karen lay sprawled where she had fallen. The Honda swerved and plummeted towards her.

  He heard Lucy cry out, and clutched Melangell to him.

  Suddenly, above the roar of the straining engine, he heard the clatter of another, larger, machine approaching. He looked round in bewilderment. A black helicopter, yellow-topped, came swooping in low over the shoreline.

  When he looked back, the Cavendishes’ vehicle hid Karen’s prostrate body from view. He let go of Melangell and raced down the slope towards it.

  The rotors of the helicopter flattened the grass on the top of the dunes and whipped up the sand around him. He crouched and covered his face.

  The Honda skidded to a halt. David Cavendish was wrestling the wheel, changing direction. It was climbing the dunes now, heading back towards the road.

  Lucy sprinted past Aidan into the hollow. As Melangell ran after her, Aidan caught the child and held her back.

  Karen was on her knees, head hanging. Aidan let out a long-held breath. There was no visible blood.

  Lucy shouted up at him. “Get the ambulance. Quick. I think they hit her.”

  The helicopter wheeled around. Aidan had to shout into his mobile above the roar of its engine.

  By the time he scrambled back on to the ridge and looked down, the Honda was speeding off down the road.

  “It’s all right,” he said, squeezing Melangell’s hand. “They can’t get away. The tide’s too far up on the causeway.”

  “What are they going to do?” Melangell asked. “Will they get out and hide among all these sand dunes?”

  “Search me.”

  The police helicopter was hovering low in the Cavendishes’ wake. Would it be able to put down on the road?

  Yet still the red vehicle sped on round the bend in the shore road. It was heading st
raight for the tip of the island and the wide channel between Lindisfarne and the mainland.

  “It’ll have to stop soon.”

  “Is Karen going to be all right?”

  “I hope so.”

  He looked behind him. To his relief, Karen was sitting up, supported by Lucy. But he was too far away to know how badly she had been hurt.

  “What happened?” he asked Melangell. “How did you get away from them?”

  “I wasn’t with them, silly. It’s a long story. Look, Daddy! You were wrong. They aren’t stopping, are they?”

  He followed her eyes. The breeze had blown the last shreds of mist away. Morning sunlight gleamed on the strait, turning the steel grey to silver. And out in that water, the red vehicle was still moving forward. Slower now. The waves were mounting around it.

  “Idiots!” Aidan murmured under his breath. “There are always some people who think the laws of nature don’t apply to them.”

  The helicopter had landed on the road. Two police officers jumped out.

  Along the road below Aidan and Melangell there came speeding a dark blue and yellow Land Rover. The Holy Island coastguards. It shot past, circled the stationary helicopter, and stopped where the water lapped up over the causeway.

  Far out in the channel, the Honda had come to a stop. The refuge box on stilts was still a long way off.

  There was nothing anyone on the island could do.

  A figure was crawling out of the window onto the roof. They watched him, sprawled out, leaning over to the open window on the other side. The water was mounting. The vehicle shifted. The current was tugging it sideways. Still Frances had not appeared through the window.

  “Dear God,” Lucy murmured.

  Aidan struggled to know how he felt. One part of him knew a terrible anger that would be satisfied only to see the couple disappear beneath the tide. Yet still his heart wrenched at the human drama being played out before his eyes.

  It seemed an eternity before the orange inshore rescue boat of the RNLI came scudding across the waves from the south. He watched the lifeboatmen haul the Cavendishes on board from their flooded vehicle.

  The inflatable veered sharply. It came shooting in to where the police were waiting on the causeway.

  Aidan let go of Melangell’s hand and breathed again.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  “SO TELL ME,” LUCY PLEADED with Melangell. “How did you get away from the Cavendishes?”

  “I’ve just told those policemen.”

  “I know. But I wasn’t there. Humour me. Please!”

  Melangell made a show of buttoning up her lips, but her eyes were dancing with mischief.

  They were sitting on a bench overlooking the harbour, eating ice creams. Almost, Aidan thought, with a wrench that was part pain, part pleasure, as though they were a family. The ice creams had been Lucy’s idea.

  To one side of the sheltered bay, Lindisfarne Castle stood proud on its rock. On the other, the sandstone arch of the ruined priory showed above a meadow. The picture postcard perfection, boats rocking on the blue water, seemed unreal after what had gone before.

  He still remembered that mixture of anger and alarm as the tide mounted around the Cavendishes. He was only beginning to be relieved that the lifeboat had arrived in time.

  Karen had been airlifted to hospital. The 4x4 had struck her a crushing blow on her shoulder and ribs, but that last-minute swerve as the helicopter came over the ridge had meant that the wheels did not run over her. She was in pain, but conscious.

  Melangell licked the dribbles round her ice cream cone. She looked up at Lucy with her head on one side and relented.

  “I didn’t have to get away from them, because I wasn’t with them. When Karen ran away, they forgot all about me and chased after her. So I ran away and hid, in case they came back.”

  “I’m sorry,” Aidan exclaimed. “I should never have left you with them. I had no idea. They seemed such a harmless pair.”

  “I tried to tell you. But you went running after Lucy and you wouldn’t listen.”

  His ears were burning now.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Well, you know the police kept asking us if anybody had a white jumper, or if we’d seen anyone else wearing one?”

  “I thought that might have been Gerald’s cricket sweater,” Lucy said.

  Aidan shot her an amused glance. “People talk about cricket whites, but that was cream. But I did notice Karen had a blue-and-white one.”

  “Not Karen, silly,” Melangell protested. “And it wasn’t a sweater at all. I’d been puzzling as hard as I could, and then this morning I remembered. It wasn’t just because Mr Cavendish makes me feel creepy. Mrs Cavendish was always knitting something. The day we came, she was making a little white jacket for a baby. Then next day, after Rachel died, it was a blue one.”

  She left a triumphant silence. Into Aidan’s photographer’s memory came the image of Frances’s ageing fingers making the needles dart in and out of the fluffy white wool.

  Lucy gasped. “You know, that never occurred to me! You mean that was what they used to… to stifle Rachel?” She looked down in sudden concern at the child between them, then up at Aidan. “I wonder where they did it? Did they find her alone on the beach? Was it in the guesthouse, and they somehow smuggled her out in the back of their car? But there’s no doubt about the reason. They might not have realized who Rachel was at first, but she must have recognized them. Everything changed for her after that. If only I’d known! If only she’d told me.” She turned her attention back to Melangell. “But if they went after Karen without you, what were you doing out on the dunes with her when we found you?”

  “Well, I was hiding in the bushes when they came back from looking for her. And they were really angry. Mr Cavendish said something about going after her, and they went to get their car. So I ran to the back of the garden where Karen went, and I saw her running down the field. And I went after her. She’s, well… she’s not very clever sometimes, is she, when she’s had a lot to drink?”

  Aidan and Lucy’s eyes met over her head.

  “No, love. So what did you want her to do?”

  “Phone the police, of course. I told her. She had to tell them what she was going to tell Lucy. She didn’t want to. I don’t think she likes the police. Only then we saw their big red car coming down the road. And we just ran. It was hard for Karen, because she didn’t have any shoes on. But then the ground got all sort of lumpy, and we couldn’t see the road and they couldn’t see us. I thought we’d got away. But we didn’t know where we were going. We couldn’t see the sea without going up to the top of the dunes, and that would mean they could see us. Then I heard the engine stop. And that was really creepy. I knew they were looking for us.”

  Her face had paled beneath the freckles. Aidan took her hand.

  “I was just saying to Karen that if we ran back the way we’d come, they wouldn’t know where we’d gone. And then I heard you shout. I’ve never been so glad to see you, Daddy.”

  He hugged her hard, wordlessly.

  “Will Karen be all right?”

  “Yes, I think so. It was lucky the mist lifted when it did. The police helicopter came just in time. That was your doing. If you hadn’t made Karen ring the police, they wouldn’t have known where you were. You saved her.”

  “Did I?” Her eyes were suddenly bright again. “I wanted to.”

  Aidan stood up. His eyes found Lucy’s. “You can’t have expected a week like this when you advertised your course. We’ve been a bit like the ten green bottles sitting on the wall. How many of us are there left now?”

  “There’s you and Melangell, and Elspeth and Valerie. Oh, and Peter.”

  They started to walk along the beach.

  “We never did find out why James came back with his head bleeding and concussed. I really thought he’d been in some sort of fight with Rachel. A seduction gone wrong, perhaps, and he’d killed her, perhaps unintentionally. But mayb
e his head wound was just a common or garden accident after all. He fell in the castle garden, as he said.”

  “What do you think will happen to Elspeth, now I’ve told the police she gave Rachel cocaine? Will her university get to hear of it?”

  He shrugged. “Not necessarily. It had nothing to do with Rachel’s death. There’s no reason why it should come up at the Cavendishes’ trial. And if they prosecute her for it, the hearing will be a long way from Oxford.”

  “Unless the press get hold of it.”

  Something in Lucy’s voice arrested Aidan. He looked up at her face. Melangell was skipping along the shore ahead of them.

  “That’s what happened to you, isn’t it? The papers printed a story about Rachel’s death, mentioning you. And your ex got hold of it.”

  Lucy’s hand strayed to her neck, where the bruises still showed above the white silk scarf.

  Had that really been only in the small hours of this morning?

  He took her hand and squeezed it. “I’m sorry. The Cavendishes had driven it out of my mind. But you still have to face this. I wonder if they’ve arrested him.”

  Her clear eyes met his. “I thought they wouldn’t find any evidence. He’s clever. It would have been my word against his. But he can’t hide the bruises you left on him. I owe you twice over.”

  “He took a gamble. With Rachel dead, he must have figured the police would think it was the same killer who went for you. It was just luck that I woke up.” He was still holding her hand for reassurance. “He won’t try a second time.”

  Her grave face flowered into a smile. “Once was bad enough. Thank you.”

  He had to let go of her hand. He had no right to be holding it. He had only known her three days. And he was still mourning Jenny. But he felt an overwhelming urge to protect her.

  “I thought… Well, I thought two things really. When I first saw you with Brother Simon, it was obvious that you two… But then I came across the pair of you in the church, and I had an idea he might be a danger to you.”

  Lucy stopped dead on the beach. “You thought… Me and Simon! Yes, we go back to when I’d just left Bill. He picked me up when I was at my lowest. But he’s celibate. I mean, it’s really important to him. And he’d never hurt a hair of my head.”