by Ann Cleeves
She heard the noise of the generator. It must be ten o’clock. Maggie had told her that they had the generator on for two hours every morning for the freezers and so that the women could use vacuum cleaners and washing machines. Sarah boiled a kettle to make a cup of instant coffee. She used the rest of the hot water for washing, then dressed.
She went outside. There was a cold wind from the north. She walked across the patched tarmac lane to Buness where Alec and Maggie lived. The boys were playing outside with a go-cart. It was Saturday. Parties on Kinness were always held on Friday nights. If they were held on Saturdays, they would have to stop at midnight. Dancing wasn’t allowed on a Sunday. She knocked on the front door of the white house. No one answered and she went round to the back. The back door was open and Maggie was in the kitchen pushing children’s clothes into a spin dryer.
“Hello,” Sarah said. “I was wondering if you knew where Jim was. Did they find Mary?”
She felt young and shy in front of this competent woman engrossed with her domesticity.
Maggie looked up.
“They hadn’t done last night, when I went to bed. Alec and Jim came here later, not long after we came back. They came to get some warmer clothes. Jim said that he hadn’t unpacked, and borrowed Alec’s. They’d looked in all the obvious places then, but she hadn’t been found.”
“You haven’t heard anything this morning?”
Maggie shook her head. “But then I’d be the last person to hear. You’ll get used to that.”
She straightened her back and switched off the machine.
“I’m going to make a cup of tea,” she said. “ Come on in and have one.”
Sarah hesitated.
“I was going to find Jim. I thought I might be able to help.”
“They’ll let you know if you can be any use. Come on in.”
Awkwardly Sarah went.
Robert found Mary and he wasn’t really looking for her. After looking in the empty buildings and Mary’s usual hiding places, the men had stopped at Sandwick. Robert had followed them at first, after the dancing had finished, limping after them, afraid of missing anything. But he wasn’t invited back to Sandwick and he went home and slept.
He woke early and went looking for wood. Wood was precious on Kinness, and had been more so when he was a boy and imports were unheard of. All the furniture on the island had been made of driftwood. Robert still hoarded driftwood. He did not use it so much himself now, but it pleased him when one of the younger men came begging for a plank to mend a fence or build a new gate.
He scrambled down a rabbit track, sliding on his bottom with his stiff leg out before him, to the rock and shingle at the base of the cliffs, and began to walk along the tide line. His dog was with him as it always was. The fresh wind of the day before promised well. He found some small pieces of wood and began to make a pile above the tide line. He would mark the pile with his own sign—a circle of pebbles—so that anyone else scavenging would know that it was his. He would take it home later, a little at a time.
He found the girl below Ellie’s Head, crushed like a doll on the rocks. She had landed above the line of the tide, and her clothes were hardly wet. He felt a moment of pity, but accidental death was not so unusual there. He went back to Sandwick to tell Agnes and Sandy, but before he did so he marked his pile of driftwood with a circle of pebbles.
They asked George to go with them when they went to fetch the body. There had been other accidents around the island—a climber had fallen once from the cliff and someone had drowned after falling from a fishing yawl—and they knew that it meant official questions. If George went with them, he could answer the questions. He was an Englishman and had been a civil servant. He would know how to handle them. George took his camera and insisted on photographing the body before they moved it. They stood awkwardly while he did that, as if embarrassed by his lack of propriety, then lifted her on to a makeshift wooden sledge and pulled her along the shingle and up the rabbit track. He made a note in a small book of the clothes she was wearing. She was wearing the party dress of the night before, and a warm jacket, but not the silk scarf.
He was surprised at how calmly they took the news of her death. Perhaps they had been preparing themselves for it when they had not found her the night before.
“She must have fallen from Ellie’s Head,” Sandy said.
“She must have run up there for some game. She probably thought that we’d notice sooner that she was gone and chase after her. Then she must have lost her footing and fallen. I should have noticed that she wasn’t there.”
He turned to George:
“Do you think that’s how it was?”
But George did not answer him directly.
“You mustn’t blame yourself,” George said. “I actually noticed that she wasn’t there. I’d promised to dance with her and I went to find her. I thought that she was hiding somewhere. When did you last see her?”
He spoke to all the men who were struggling to pull the sledge over the sharp rocks: Mary’s brothers Alec, Jim, and Will, her uncle James, and her father. They stopped to catch their breath, but they could give him no satisfactory answer. They wanted to get it sorted out with him so that he could act as their intermediary with the officials from Baltasay, but they could not remember.
“I saw her dancing with Robert,” James said. “But that was a while before the interval. I don’t remember seeing her after that.”
The others shook their heads. There had been too many drams, they said. It had all been a terrible muddle. They could not remember. They lifted the wooden stretcher again and began the climb up the steep grassy slope. George saw that Will was crying.
They took Mary home to Sandwick, and at Agnes’ insistence they took her into her small bedroom and laid her on the bed.
They sat around the big table in the kitchen and Agnes made them breakfast. It was as if she had wasted all her grief in her hysterics of the night before. Now she was calm, numb, and made breakfast as she always did at this time when the men came in from the croft or from fishing.
“Someone should phone to Baltasay,” George said tentatively. “Do you want me …?”
“No,” Jim said. “It should be one of us. I’ll go.”
He went into the living room to the telephone. Agnes laid the table, put plates of food in front of them, and the men began to eat. She sat in the straight-backed driftwood chair by the range. Absentmindedly she took up her knitting and strapped the horsehair belt around her waist. Island women always used the belt for knitting. It held one of the needles firm. The other began to move quickly as mindlessly she counted stitches and changed coloured wools.
Jim came back into the kitchen.
“It’s all sorted,” he said. “ Because of the way she died there’ll have to be formalities. They’ll be coming in on the plane, this afternoon.”
“Who will?” Alec asked.
“The police. It’s routine, they said. They’ll be taking the body away with them.”
Agnes looked up sharply.
“No,” she said. “She’s to stay here. She’s to be buried here.”
“She can be. They said that we could make our own arrangements for the funeral, once the … formalities are over.”
They were still sitting around the breakfast table when Sarah knocked at the door. Maggie had been friendly. They had drunk tea and talked about the children, Sarah’s honeymoon, general plans for the future.
“Do you think that you’ll like it here?” Maggie asked at the end, just as Sarah was preparing to go.
“Of course I will. It’s Jim’s home.”
“But you. Will you like it?”
Sarah hesitated. Yesterday she would have been certain, she would have answered immediately: “ Of course. Of course I’ll like it.”
But today she hesitated.
“It’ll take some getting used to,” she said. “But I want to make a go of it. I’m quite determined.”
As she wa
lked up the road to Sandwick the wind blew against her, and she was hot and breathless when she reached the gate. It was an ugly house, big by Kinness standards, square and functional. The yard was ankle deep in mud and two mongrels barked at her as she approached the door. The effort of the walk, the remnant of the hangover and the dogs’ muddy footprints on her coat made her angry. It seemed inexcusable to her that Jim had left her alone on her first morning on the island.
The men sitting at the dining table heard the knock on the door but they continued drinking tea and it was Agnes who opened it. Sarah saw that she had been crying, and the anger disappeared. She did not know what to say.
“Come in,” Agnes said. “You’ll be wondering what happened to Jim. I’m so sorry.”
She led Sarah into the room, where the men were still sitting.
“I didn’t want to intrude,” Sarah said. “Is there any news?”
When she had first seen Agnes, she thought that there must have been a terrible accident, but now, seeing the men carmly at the table, the debris of the breakfast, she thought that she must have been mistaken.
“She’s dead,” Jim said. “She fell from Ellie’s Head. She must have slipped.”
Sarah began to cry. She wished that she was alone in the room, and they would all stop staring at her. Agnes took her into her arms as if she were the child.
“That’s right,” she said. “ You cry. It’s good to have someone shed some tears for her.”
Robert went straight from Sandwick to the post office, the untidy brown dog still at his heels. In the post office Kenneth Dance was serving an old woman. Robert was glad that there were enough people there to give him an audience.
“Mary Stennet’s dead,” he announced as soon as he got in through the door. There was a satisfying response from the old woman, but Kenneth Dance was harder to rouse to interest. He had left the island when he was a teenager, after telling everyone that he was off south to make his fortune. He had been a postman in Glasgow. Occasionally a touch of Glaswegian still appeared in his speech. He had returned to Kinness when Annie, a distant cousin, had inherited the post office. They had married soon after. He still liked to pretend that he was sophisticated, worldly, wise. He looked up from the postal order he was stamping, but he said nothing.
Robert looked at the daughter, hoping for more reaction from her. Her face was white, but her eyes were blank as if she were remembering something painful, and she, too, was silent.
“She was lying at the bottom of Ellie’s Head,” Robert said, exacting as much drama as he could from the situation. “I found her. She will have fallen.”
“From Ellie’s Head?” The daughter looked up sharply, then she said: “ The poor child. How horrible.”
Robert thought that she was a strange girl, and wondered what had really brought her back to the island. Kenneth and Annie said that she had left her husband, but Robert thought it more likely that he had left her. She would be a difficult woman to live with.
“Do you know what they’re doing with the body? I suppose that they’ll telephone the police.”
Dance was mourning the introduction of the new automatic telephone system. Just a few years ago he would have known the direction of all the calls.
Robert did not have the opportunity to answer. Annie appeared in the shadow of the door which led from the post office into their kitchen.
“Did you say that the child has been found?” she asked.
Elspeth did not give Robert the chance to tell his story. “At the bottom of Ellie’s Head,” she said quickly, and again he thought how strange she was. “ Isn’t it a coincidence? At this time of the year. You don’t think she meant …”
“No,” said her mother firmly. “It will have been an accident. Poor Agnes. I will go to Sandwick later and see if there’s anything I can do. She was so fond of the girl.”
She disappeared back in to the shadow and into the kitchen.
Reluctantly Robert left the post office. He stood for a moment out in the road, not quite sure what he should do next. He would have liked to go to watch the Stennet men fetch the body up the cliff but he did not think that they would like it. A sudden gust of wind caught his cap and blew it from his head. He limped after it, swearing. She’s right, he thought. It was this time of year. And it was a day like this. He could not remember exactly how many years ago it was. Sixty maybe. Perhaps more than that. He had only been a boy. That started with a gusty little wind from the north, then in the afternoon it started to blow.
He decided that he did not want to watch the men on Ellie’s Head. He was an old man now. He would go and sit in front of his fire, and later perhaps he would have a dram.
In the afternoon the wind increased, so that there were doubts about whether the plane from Baltasay, chartered by the police, would be able to get in. After Sarah’s arrival at Sandwick, George Palmer-Jones returned to the school house. He walked up the island against the blustery north wind, and enjoyed the vigorous mindless movement. Jim had asked him if he would come up to the airstrip to meet the police, but he had refused.
“It won’t be a pleasant walk in this weather,” he had said, “ and I don’t want to put Alec to any trouble by asking for a lift. I’ll be in the school house if they want to see me.”
After the first exhilaration of walking, he began to think again about the accident. He tried to reconstruct it so that all the details would be clear in his mind and he would be able to communicate to the police precisely what had happened. When he started, he was quite sure that it was an accident. Mary must have run out of the hall sometime before the interval. He remembered her, as he had seen her the day before, running up the island with pigtails flying behind her. He supposed that some game of her own took her up to Ellie’s Head, or perhaps it was a desire to frighten the adults and draw attention to herself.
But what about the secret? he wondered. She was so eager to tell him her secret. It was not like her to forget a thing like that, but she was so unpredictable that perhaps her new game was more important to her. So, she was on Ellie’s Head and she must have slipped. He tried to guess how she must have fallen. It was a clear night and there was a moon. He had seen her before clambering about the rocks and down the steep gulleys or “geos” as the local people called them. She was as surefooted as a feral cat. Her deafness seemed not to have affected her sense of balance, and she knew every inch of the place. So how did she fall? Perhaps she had been drinking from the Cup, he thought. That would impair anyone’s judgement. If the police thought that it was necessary, they would order a post mortem and that would show whether she had been drinking. In the meantime Jim would know. But where was the green silk scarf? It had been tied tightly round her neck all day. He knew that it had not been left in the hall because he had asked, and it had not been near Mary on the rocks where she fell. He considered the problem all the way back to the school house, but he could think of no satisfactory explanation for the scarfs disappearance. Well then, he thought, perhaps she’s been murdered. He did not take this conclusion seriously—it was simply an absurd extension of his argument—but the idea was lodged in his mind and began to bother him.
Despite the weather the plane did land. The two policemen, when they climbed out of the small eight-seater aircraft, were shaking, ill. The pilot was English and it seemed at first that he treated the difficult landing into the gusting wind as a game. Throughout the manoeuvre he shouted flippancies to the terrified men behind him. Later, when they were safely back on Baltasay, he was to say to them:
“Sorry about that, but I had to have a go, you see. One needs to practise in difficult conditions. It might have been a hospital flight, a matter of life and death.”
Alec met them in his car, a battered Escort eaten away by rust. It had no road tax, but the policemen did not notice. They were pleasant, sympathetic men, frightened of intruding on recent grief, and after they had talked together with gentle, northern voices, Agnes did not mind entrusting the body of her dau
ghter to them.
The policemen called to see George on their way back to the airstrip. They were in a hurry because the light was falling and it was still windy. The last thing that they wanted was to stay overnight on Kinness.
George explained in detail the circumstances surrounding Mary’s disappearance, the search for her, the discovery of the body. The policemen congratulated him on his attention to detail.
“It all seems very straightforward then,” one of them said. “An unfortunate accident.”
“There is one thing,” George said. “She was wearing a scarf at the dance. A silk scarf. It wasn’t on her when she died.”
“I expect it came off when she fell.” The younger man was looking at his watch. He was wondering if he could be home for his son’s bedtime. He liked to be back to read the boy a bedtime story. “Then the tide will have taken it.”
“It was tied with a knot round her neck. Quite tightly.”
“She must have taken it off then at some time before she fell. There’s not another explanation.”
There is, George thought, but you’re too young, and too trusting and too innocent to consider it. But he said nothing and let them rush off to their plane.
When the police had gone, George sat alone in the living room. Jonathan Drysdale had gone out to walk to the north end of the island, to a pool where there were sometimes wild swans. He was planning a trip to catch them and ring them, and he wanted to check that they were there before making the arrangements. He had gone out straight after lunch. Sylvia was in the school room. She was working on some of the craft work she had done with the children. So George could sit there, in the gloom in front of a dying fire, and go through every detail of the thing again, and still it seemed unlikely to him that Mary would have left the hall without telling him about her secret and claiming her dance, and still he could find no explanation for the disappearance of the scarf. So that the thought which had come to him as a ridiculous result of abstract thinking, of isolated reasoning, that the girl might have been murdered, grew more solid. It can’t be true, he thought. I’m a meddling old man. But he would not allow himself to escape the facts.
