“It’s up to you, of course,” Tara said. “But the children are getting older. We might not have much time left for family holidays.”
“What about China?” Jonas asked. “Do they eat a lot of fish?”
“Again, I don’t know,” Tara replied. “We should talk to the travel agent. She’ll know.”
“I don’t like them,” Jonas said. “And I don’t want to waste my time. You can go and talk to them after lunch. Stay all day for all I care. Just get something booked so you can quit nagging me about it.”
“Yes, dear,” Tara replied.
The pair remained silent after that until Bessie and Mary were almost done with their meals.
“We don’t want pudding,” Jonas told their waitress. “And I wasn’t happy with my food, either. I don’t expect to see my meal on the bill.”
“But, sir, you ate it all,” the waitress replied.
“I was hungry, but it was substandard. I won’t pay for it,” Jonas replied.
“I’ll have to get the manager,” the waitress told him.
“No need,” Jonas snapped. “Here,” he handed the waitress a folded note. “This will pay for our drinks and my wife’s meal. That’s all you get. Come on, Tara.”
Jonas rose to his feet and stomped towards the door, leaving his wife to rush after him. At the door, she stopped. “I’ve forgotten my bag,” she said. “I’ll catch up.”
Jonas sighed deeply and pushed his way out of the building, leaving Tara to hurry back to their table.
She picked up her bag, and eyes on the door, pulled out her wallet. “Here,” she said to the waitress, handing her another note. “I hope that’s enough to cover everything. I can’t, that is, he tracks, I mean, I hope that’s enough.” The woman rushed out, leaving Bessie and Mary staring after them.
“What a horrible man,” Mary said loudly.
“He is, at that,” the waitress said, walking over from the other table. “He comes in once in a while with his latest girlfriend, whoever that might be. He’s a bit nicer when he’s with one of them than he is with his poor wife. I don’t know why she puts up with him.”
“That’s a very good question,” Bessie said. “Maybe the police should ask her just that.”
Mary insisted on paying for lunch over Bessie’s protests. While Mary was driving Bessie home, Bessie rang the police station.
“Laxey Neighbourhood Constabulary, this is Doona, how can I help?” came the familiar voice.
“Doona, it’s Bessie. Is John available?”
“Oh, no. Sorry, Bessie, but he’ll probably be out of the office all day today. There’s quite a lot happening at that old farm he took you to yesterday,” Doona replied.
“I don’t want to ring his mobile and disturb him,” Bessie said. “But I wanted him to be aware that Jonas Clucas and his wife are planning a holiday, leaving almost immediately. I don’t know if the man is a suspect or not, but based on what I’ve seen of him today, I hope so.”
“I’ll pass the message along to John,” Doona promised. “I’m sure he’ll be in touch later today. As I said, there is a lot going on.”
Bessie switched off the phone, feeling sad. It sounded very much like they’d found bodies at the Grantham farm.
“So they’ve found the bodies then?” Mary asked.
“I don’t know anything for sure,” Bessie told her. “But it certainly seems like it.”
“And nasty Jonas Clucas is a suspect?”
“Again, I don’t know,” Bessie told her. “Someone told me that he was involved with Karen Kelly before she disappeared, but I don’t know if that’s true. Anyway, even if he was, as far as I know, there isn’t any evidence to link him to the murders.”
“But now he’s planning a last-minute holiday,” Mary pointed out.
“Yes, but he didn’t sound too interested in going,” Bessie said. “It sounded like his wife wanted a holiday more than he did.”
“If I were her, I’d want a holiday from him, not with him,” Mary replied.
“Indeed.”
There was a car parked outside of Bessie’s cottage when Mary pulled up. “You have a visitor,” Mary said.
“I don’t recognise the car,” Bessie replied.
“Maybe we should ring John,” Mary said nervously.
“I’m sure that isn’t necessary,” Bessie said firmly, squashing her own apprehension as she opened her car door. The driver’s door on the other car opened as Bessie stood up.
“Aunt Bessie? I don’t know if you remember me?” the woman called across the short distance.
Bessie studied her for a moment and then nodded. Last week she might have struggled more to recall the woman’s face, but with everything that had happened lately, the woman had been on her mind. “Margot? Margot Lane?” she asked.
“I gather I haven’t aged as badly as I feared,” the woman said with a small laugh. “I was hoping we could talk, just for a minute, if you have time.”
“It’s okay,” Bessie told Mary. “I know her.”
“What’s her name?” Mary asked.
Bessie repeated the woman’s name and Mary wrote it down on a scrap of paper. “If you don’t ring me in an hour, I’ll send the police,” Mary said.
“Don’t be silly,” Bessie told her. “I’m sure I’ll forget to ring you and then you’ll just worry the police unnecessarily. I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll ring you, then,” Mary said. “I won’t forget.”
Bessie wanted to argue further, but Margot was waiting, watching the conversation with a curious look on her face.
“Is everything okay?” she asked as Bessie walked towards her.
“It’s fine,” Bessie replied. “My friends are just a touch overprotective.”
“That’s hardly surprising, considering everything that’s happened to you in the last year or so,” Margot said.
“Yes, well, it’s also unnecessary and a little annoying,” Bessie replied.
“You should be grateful someone cares,” Margot told her.
Bessie flushed and unlocked her door, counting to ten before she blurted out something she might regret later. “Would you like tea?” she asked, changing the subject.
“I’d rather sit on the beach, if that’s okay with you?” Margot asked.
“It’s a bit chilly,” Bessie replied. “Let me get a warmer jacket.”
There was a large rock planted firmly on the beach behind Bessie’s cottage and it was just the right size for two people to sit on. Once they were both comfortably settled in, Bessie looked at the other woman.
Margot’s makeup-free face was lined and careworn, her hair streaked with grey. It was tied back in a sloppy ponytail. Her clothes looked inexpensive and seemed a bit too large for the woman.
“How are you?” was the first thing Bessie thought to ask.
“Tired and old,” the woman replied. “Oh, I know, I’m not even fifty yet, but mostly I feel much older. The years have been, well, difficult.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault,” Margot shrugged. “Not anyone’s fault, really. Well, maybe Susan’s, if she really did run away. Her disappearance changed everything. I sometimes wonder how different things would be if she hadn’t gone.”
“I’m sure you’ve been over the events of the weekend she vanished a million times with the police,” Bessie said.
“Maybe not quite that many,” Margot smiled. “Actually, I think I only spoke to the police a few times back then. They didn’t seem all that interested in what I had to say. My mother did her best to keep them away, as well. She was afraid I’d be scarred for life if they worked out that something awful had happened to Susan.”
“It must have been difficult for her too,” Bessie suggested. “She must have been terrified that something might happen to you as well.”
Margot shrugged. “Anyway, now it’s been thirty or so years and I’ve had to revisit the whole thing, this time without my mother chasing the police away.”
“Oh, aye,” Margot said. “Hugh Watterson is a great guy. He was very gentle with me, really. It isn’t his fault that I’ve had nightmares ever since I spoke to him.”
Bessie patted her arm. “I’m sorry,” she said softly.
“And then this morning one of my friends rang me to say that she’d heard they’d found Susan’s body,” Margot said. “I don’t know if that’s true, but I need to find out. I thought maybe you would know.”
“I wish I did,” Bessie replied. “I’ve been hearing rumours myself, but I don’t know anything for certain.”
Margot nodded. “Of course you’d say that, even if you did know,” she said. “You know what’s weird? In all these years, after everything that happened, I never once thought that Susan might be dead. That’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Maybe you just didn’t want to consider the worst-case scenario,” Bessie suggested.
“We had a fight,” Margot said, her voice almost dreamily detached. “She was meant to stay for the weekend, but we had a fight and she decided to go home. We didn’t fight very often. We were both nice girls, girls who were young for our age, really.”
“Can you remember what you fought about?” Bessie asked.
“Every single word,” Margot said bitterly. “Susan had a new boyfriend. She was so excited. Neither of us had ever, well, as I said, we were young for our age. She was first of the pair of us to get a boyfriend and I was jealous. She wanted to sneak out that first night to meet him and I said she couldn’t. I told her I’d tell my mom if she went, so she didn’t, and then the next morning she told me she was going home. She said she could sneak out of her house without getting caught. She didn’t need my help.”
“Do you know who he was?”
“She wouldn’t tell me,” Margot said with a sigh. “I told Hugh that she was very secretive about him. I’m sure he was too old for her or something. She definitely didn’t want me to know who it was.”
“That wasn’t like her,” Bessie remarked.
“No, it wasn’t,” Margot agreed. “I was really angry with her and I told her that she was going to get herself into trouble, but she just laughed and said something about it being her turn to have some fun. I’m sure she was thinking about Karen, who’d already had a dozen or more boyfriends.”
“If you had to guess, who do you think the boyfriend was?”
“I don’t know,” Margot said. “I think, at the time, I thought maybe she was seeing one of the Clucas boys. Peter was okay. I really liked him, actually and Susan knew that. I assumed, back then, that that was why she wouldn’t tell me who she was seeing. I thought she was involved with Peter behind my back.”
“What about Jonas?”
“He was busy with Karen,” Margot told her. “From what I could see, those two were inseparable at the time. I kept expecting to hear that Karen was pregnant, really.”
“If it wasn’t one of them, was there anyone else?”
“Oh, Matthew Kelly’s name came up when I was talking to Hugh,” Margot said. “He was involved with Helen, but they kept splitting up and getting back together every other day. He might have starting chasing after Susan to make Helen jealous. That would have been like him.”
“It’s hard to imagine anyone killing any of the girls,” Bessie said.
“I know. I suppose that’s why I never gave the idea any thought. I always assumed she’d run away. When she first went, I thought maybe she’d gone with the new boyfriend, but no one else went missing, well, not until the next weekend.”
“If she did run away, why hasn’t she been in touch for all these years?” Bessie asked.
Margot shrugged. “There was a time when I thought I knew Susan better than anyone, but when she told me about her new boyfriend, she was different, somehow. I saw a side to her that I hadn’t known existed before that night. Now I wonder how well I knew her at all.”
“This must all be very painful for you,” Bessie said.
“Thinking she might be dead is the hardest part,” Margot admitted. “Maybe not thinking about it as a possibility was my way of dealing with it. Now I have to consider that her death was my fault.”
“In what way?”
“If we hadn’t had that fight, she wouldn’t have left my house,” Margot said, her eyes filling with tears. “She would have been safe there.”
“Nonsense,” Bessie said sharply. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened, whatever that turns out to be. I understand you feel bad about fighting with her, but you can’t possibly believe that that was what got her killed, if she was killed, that is.”
“I don’t know,” Margot said sadly. “I just feel like I could have saved her.”
“She was going to sneak out, you said,” Bessie reminded her. “And anyway, Karen and Helen both disappeared as well and neither of them were meant to be at your house.”
“I know. And I keep telling myself that I’m being silly, but I can’t help but feel like our fight was what sent her to her death.”
“There is only one person responsible for her death, assuming she is dead, and that’s the man or woman who killed her,” Bessie said stoutly. “Whatever circumstances led up to her crossing paths with the killer, he or she made the decision to commit murder and that’s nothing to do with you.”
Margot swallowed hard and then nodded slowly. “I’m sure you’re right,” she said softly. “There’s a part of me that wishes the police had just left the case alone.”
“I know,” Bessie told her. “But it seems as if they might finally be making some progress on it.”
“Yeah, I’m just not sure that’s a good thing,” Margot said.
“If someone did kill the girls, then that someone deserves to be brought to justice,” Bessie said.
“I can’t argue with that,” Margot said. She shivered. “And it’s a scary thought, actually,” she said. “I can’t imagine living with that secret for all these years.”
Bessie nodded. “It’s scary to think that there might be a murderer on the island who has never been punished for his or her crimes.”
“I wish I’d made Susan tell me more about her boyfriend,” Margot said softly. “It just didn’t seem important at the time.”
“And it might not have anything to do with the case,” Bessie pointed out.
“But it seems like it does,” Margot said. “They say you should live life without regrets, but I’d do anything to get that one night of my life back, especially if they do find Susan’s body.”
“We’d all do things differently if we had our lives to do over again,” Bessie told her. “But as you can’t change the past, you must work on making the best of your future. If you think of anything that might help the investigation, let Hugh know as soon as possible.”
“I will,” Margot promised.
“And remember,” Bessie added. “Nothing that happened was your fault.”
Margot nodded, but Bessie wasn’t sure the woman believed her. As Margot made her way back to her car, Bessie let herself back into her cottage. The phone rang almost immediately.
“It’s Doona. Can Hugh and John and I come over for dinner?”
“Of course,” Bessie said.
“We’ll bring Indian food and something borderline healthy for pudding,” Doona told her.
Bessie hung up and spent the next hour tidying her kitchen before vacuuming the entire cottage. She was eagerly anticipating what she might learn during the evening ahead.
Chapter Nine
Hugh was the first to arrive, carrying a large box and a small tub. “Doona said to bring something almost healthy for pudding,” he explained as he put his parcels on the table and gave Bessie a hug. “Apple pie is mostly fruit and vanilla ice cream is mostly milk.”
Bessie laughed. “I’ll go along with that,” she said as she slid the pie into the oven to warm and then put the ice cream in her freezer.
John and Doona arriv
ed together only a few minutes later. John was carrying a box full of takeaway containers, and Bessie inhaled the delicious scent of Indian food as he put the box down to get his own hug.
“Let’s eat before things get cold,” John suggested.
Bessie pulled out plates and glasses as Hugh got everyone cold drinks from Bessie’s refrigerator. They were all sitting down with very full plates only a moment later. Bessie had only taken a single bite when someone knocked on her door.
As she got up to answer it, John stood up and followed her.
“I can answer my own door,” she told him tartly.
“I just need to stretch my legs,” he replied, smiling.
Bessie glared at him for a moment and then sighed as the knock was loudly repeated. She crossed to the door with John right behind her.
“Ah, um, good evening.” The young police constable at the door was a stranger to Bessie.
She blinked in surprise and then smiled. “Good evening,” she said. “Is there something wrong?”
The man shook his head, his eyes moving past Bessie to focus on John. “Oh, Inspector Rockwell, sir. I didn’t realise that you were here, sir.”
“What’s the problem, Constable Jones?” John asked sharply.
“No problem, sir. We were rung by a concerned member of the public and asked to check on Miss Cubbon, sir, that’s all,” the young man said.
“Mary,” Bessie said grumpily. She glanced over at her answering machine and saw the blinking light. “Some of my friends are overprotective,” she told the constable. “I’m very sorry that you were dragged down here. As you can see, I’m absolutely fine.”
“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” the man said. “Have a nice evening.”
John followed the man out, walking back to his police car with him. Bessie grimaced when she saw that he’d left the lights flashing on his car when he’d come to her door. Leaving the cottage door ajar for John, Bessie walked back over to the table and sat down. She took several bites before she stopped herself. Too angry to enjoy her food, she sat back and tried to decide what to do. John was back before she’d come to any decisions.
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