The Island

by Mary Grand

  ‘But I didn’t, I never really thought that.’

  ‘Gabriel showed me proof, he showed me tickets, a letter he’d sent to say goodbye to his running coach.’

  Cassie’s lips started to tremble. ‘Gabriel told me about the tickets, but I didn’t want to believe him. Look, I’m not that eighteen-year-old, I see now Harry was no angel, in fact he could well have been a terrible husband. When he died though, I felt like part of me had gone with him. What with that, and all the emotional stress of Rosalind, well, to be honest I’m amazed I stayed as sane as I did.’

  ‘Do you know what Mum thought Harry was doing?’

  ‘Not really. I told her he was staying; I have no idea if she believed me. Why?’

  ‘Did you see Mum at all that evening when you got back, did you go in to see Rosalind?’

  ‘Well, no, I went to my own room. Mum knew how tired I was, she said she would do the night on her own.’ Cassie paused. ‘Why are you asking?’ Juliet looked away and Cassie grabbed her arm. ‘You don’t suspect Mum, do you? That’s absurd.’

  Juliet frowned. ‘Wait a minute.’ She went and found the envelope and the cloth and explained to Cassie about the ignition key.

  ‘So, Gabriel found the key and thought I had killed Harry? He’s really believed that all this time?’

  ‘Yes, I think he believes it was one of our family and he thought that in your heart you knew Harry was leaving and you couldn’t bear it, and so, well, you killed him to stop him leaving you. The cloth to Gabriel was the proof.’

  Cassie picked up the cloth. ‘It’s the kind of cloth you might use to clean a violin or any number of things, but it’s not one of mine. I’d never have a green one, you should have realised that.’

  Juliet stared. ‘Of course. How did I miss that? So, who put the old key back in the garage?’

  Cassie shrugged. ‘I have no idea. Look, Gabriel was young, you know how it is at that age, everyone thinks they are Sherlock Holmes. The key could have been there for all kinds of reasons, maybe it was never used, maybe a perfectly innocent person found it and thought the easiest thing was to put it back at the garage, people hate getting involved with the police.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You have become obsessed with Harry’s death, Juliet, but the police will have looked into everything. Mum and Dad aren’t killers, and you know now I had nothing to do with it.’

  Juliet sighed. ‘Why did Dad get so upset about the key then? Why change his mind about telling Rosalind?’

  ‘I think Dad was always conflicted about telling Rosalind, the key just stressed him out further.’

  Juliet shrugged. ‘Even if that was all true, Rhys’s death needs explaining. I know the police think it is someone from off the island, but every time I want to go with that, something new comes up. Tonight, for example, it was the crucifix.’

  Juliet watched Cassie closely as she explained about seeing their mother hiding the crucifix.

  ‘You don’t think she was telling the truth about it being out there?’

  ‘No, I think Mum was either hiding it because she’d kept it herself or because she’d found it in the house and thought it implicated someone here in Rhys’s death.’

  Cassie screwed up her eyes. ‘It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re thinking, and of course Mum would never kill anyone.’

  ‘Well, someone brought it to the house, and that someone I guess was Rhys’s killer. Even without Harry, there are plenty of motives for killing him. You and Mum wanted to protect Rosalind from the truth about her parents. Rosalind was furious with him and she was out there a very long time.’

  Cassie shook her head violently. ‘No way, absolutely no way.’ She scratched her forehead. ‘Okay, I’ll admit to something.’

  Juliet held her breath.

  ‘I was the person who went out at half twelve the night Rhys died.’

  Juliet stared at Cassie – was she at last finding out the truth about who had left the house? She watched Cassie carefully, trying to judge if she was telling the truth. Because, if she was, then her mother had not gone out a second time, and wouldn’t that mean she was innocent?

  Cassie continued. ‘I wanted to talk Rhys, ask him not to tell anyone about me and Harry. Rosalind had to be the first person to be told the truth and me or Mum were the people to do that. Neither of us felt it was the right time. I wasn’t up there long, but I did come back just before one. I went over to the workshop, looked through the window and saw Rosalind. She looked up and smiled and waved to me.’

  ‘Rosalind told me she didn’t see anyone.’

  ‘She’d either forgotten or she didn’t want to say I’d been out.’

  Juliet considered this. Of course, Rosalind did say she’d been smoking weed but not for long at that point of the night and surely, she’d have remembered seeing Cassie. No, either Cassie or Rosalind was lying, and her gut instinct was that Cassie was making this up to give Rosalind an alibi.

  ‘Supposing what you say is true,’ Juliet said, ‘what about the crucifix? Even if Mum had just found it in the house, why was it here?’

  Cassie scowled, scratched the back of her hand. Suddenly she looked up, her face bright. ‘What about Anwen? Just say she’d killed Rhys. She could have taken the crucifix and then planted it here in the house.’

  ‘Hang on, you suspect Anwen of killing Rhys?’

  ‘Why not? She was your number one suspect from the start, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Well yes, but I know she definitely went to the hospital.’

  ‘Oh, are you sure?’

  ‘Yes definitely.’ Juliet frowned. ‘I’m surprised you’re accusing her; you were prepared to lie for her not so long ago.’

  ‘I know. If I’m honest, I think I’ve always been a bit scared of her. When she got the message after Rosalind’s meal here, she told me she had to go out, that she would be gone all night, but that it was private. I was obviously a bit confused, but she said that we both kept secrets for each other, it was the way we worked. She had a point, she knew about Tim and about why I was leaving orchestra, but I didn’t really like the way she was using that. Anyway, she sent me a voicemail later, and again there was an edge to it.’

  Juliet sat up. ‘She sent you a voicemail? What time? Do you still have it?’

  Cassie picked up her phone, flicked through. ‘Here it is. Half twelve.’ Cassie played the message.

  ‘Hi, remember to stick to the story, I was in all night, it’s important. I’m depending on you like you depend on me.’ The message ended abruptly.

  Cassie looked searchingly at Juliet. ‘How can you be so sure she went to the hospital?’

  ‘Her aunt told me and then I spoke to the taxi driver, she was picked up from here at half ten and then brought back about six. There is missing time though of maybe about an hour when I don’t know what she was doing, but I can’t think of any way she’d have got from the hospital to here and back again.’

  Cassie screwed up her face. ‘Oh, that scuppers it then.’

  Juliet, however, was curious. ‘Play the message again, make it as loud as you can.’

  They listened and then their eyes met; they’d both heard it.

  ‘Who was that? Cassie asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Juliet, ‘but there was definitely a man shouting Anwen’s name in the background, which is odd; she was meant to be on her own.’

  Cassie played the message again; there were other voices, but the one calling Anwen was by far the loudest.

  Juliet felt the excitement grow. ‘So, someone could have met her, brought her back here and then taken her back to the hospital. She had all kinds of friends; I reckon she could pay one of them to do this and keep quiet.’

  ‘Yes, she could have,’ agreed Cassie.

  ‘We ought to tell the police about this,’ said Juliet.

  Cassie shivered. ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘Look, I know how threatening she can be, but we have to do this. If Anwen killed Rhys,
then she can’t go free, can she?’

  Juliet could see Cassie still looked reluctant. ‘Send me the message and I will send it onto Adam, it’s up to them then what they do with it.’

  Cassie did and Juliet forwarded the message to Adam Smith.

  ‘There. That was the right thing to do.’

  Cassie smiled. ‘Right, that’s the end. Harry was killed by a stranger, and Rhys, if anyone we know really killed him, well, it had to be Anwen.’

  Juliet sat back. Was that really it? All the suspicion, the anger, had it come to an end?

  It clearly suited Cassie to persuade her that neither Harry nor Rhys’s deaths were anything to do with the family. And yet, she knew that Cassie had been lying to her. That business about seeing her mother, Juliet didn’t believe it was any truer than her story of seeing Rosalind. Cassie’s concern seemed to be to provide alibis for her family and herself. If those stories were not true, it left her mother in the frame for Harry’s death, and Cassie, Rosalind or Anwen for Rhys’s. On the other hand, it might have nothing to do with any of them.

  Juliet closed her eyes. She was so tired, not just of trying to work things out, but of being the outsider in her family. Why not trust the police, accept Harry and Rhys were killed by people on the mainland? If she did that, everything could go back to how it had been. She remembered Rosalind had said the same thing, to turn back the clock as if nothing had happened. She looked down at the old key. Both her parents had said to get rid of it, maybe they were right, throw it away, bury it, make it disappear.

  ‘I need to go and do something,’ she said to Cassie, and before Cassie could ask where she was going, she left.

  As she walked out of the room, she almost collided with their mother, and for a moment Juliet panicked; how long had her mother been there?

  However, she needed to get out and so, without speaking to her mother, she went downstairs. She picked up an old raincoat from the porch, then put the old key and the cloth in her bag and left the house.

  As she walked down the road, she felt the rain seep through her trainers and the seams of the old coat. However, she kept walking, oblivious of the cold, the blackness of the sky. She crossed the road and walked through the car park, down the steep, crumbling path to the beach.

  The beach was, of course, deserted and the waves were crashing onto the shore as if the island was angry and hurt. There was no comfort here tonight.

  Juliet removed her soaking shoes and socks and rolled up her wet trousers. She took the VW car key from her bag and then found her own car keys with the heart keyring still zipped in the pocket. She took them out, they could go as well. Juliet left her handbag on the stones and stumbled over the small pebbles and shingles that dug into her feet. She crossed the foamy shoreline, dragged her feet into deeper water, not sure now what was making her wetter, the sea or the rain.

  She swung back her arm, prepared to throw all the keys and the cloth as far as she could; burial at sea seemed a good way for this to end.

  But then she paused, because deep down she knew it wouldn’t end here. She felt the cold, stone heart on the key ring in the palm of her hand. For her, mislaying this set of keys with their key ring had been where so many of her doubts had started and she still had no answers as to who took them and who returned them. She would live her life haunted by them, looking at her family, never sure, never quite trusting them, and she didn’t want to live like that.

  Juliet turned around, looked up the beach at her bag on the pebbles. Her mind went back to that hot summer evening with Gabriel, down here drinking. A soft breeze off the sea, a relief after such a hot day. She’d paddled that evening, she remembered Gabriel getting his camera, taking pictures of them. After the strain of the evening, it had been a slice of heaven.

  Suddenly, an enormous, hard, cold wave came crashing against her legs. She staggered forward. Another came drenching her hair, she could feel the cold water seeping through her coat. It was if the sea was shouting something at her.

  Juliet gripped the keys tight, staggered out of the water, her trousers sodden and heavy. She trudged up the beach, thrust wet, sandy feet into her dry socks and shoes and then picked up her bag. She looked out at the sea, back down at her things and then, in a flash, she knew what the sea had been trying to tell her. Of course, why hadn’t she thought of it before? She started to go through everything that had happened, but this time from a new perspective and found things that had seemed insignificant suddenly took on a different meaning. Pictures flashed through her mind: bags and keys, that day Cassie told them about the restaurant and she’d met Gabriel, the letter, it all started to make sense.

  She walked quickly off the beach and up the path. Once at the top she walked into the field, looked over at Rhys’s car that she’d parked in the same place she used to park her own car. She remembered the last time she’d seen it, her little car had been so neat and tidy after two years in Mira’s care, although it was shame about that awful air freshener, the terrible smell of fake lavender. For a moment, her mind stalled, the lavender, the smell of fake lavender – why did that matter? Her mind stumbled around. She stood very still, putting all her energy into trying to work things out. She glanced back down the beach. Yes, it was possible.

  Juliet rushed home. She was soaking wet, but she didn’t want to have to explain why to anyone. She went to the porch, hung up her soaking coat and took off her shoes and socks. Then she ran upstairs, went into the bathroom, took off her clothes and threw them in the washing basket, then she wrapped a warm bath towel around herself and started to dry her hair with a hand towel and left. She had started walking to her bedroom when she saw her mother.

  ‘Oh, you’ve had a shower,’ said her mother.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, smiled and walked on, and she knew the shower excuse had worked.

  Juliet stopped. That should be telling her something, but what?

  Juliet went back to her bedroom and glanced over at the corner, saw the box that contained her father’s collections, remembered looking through them the day of Rosalind’s meal. Her mind started to click through pictures of that day and suddenly she knew there was something else.

  Juliet dragged out the box of her father’s collections, flicked through books and albums… and there it was. She realised she’d been gathering all the pieces of the puzzle; she’d simply been putting them in the wrong places. There were a few things though she needed to check, to figure out. Once they were done, she would know exactly who had killed Harry and who had killed Rhys.

  Tomorrow she would give herself time to think, and then she would talk to people. Juliet felt fear grip her because she knew she would be alerting the killer that she was closing in on them. And with that thought she remembered the warning of her father’s that she had pushed to the back of her mind – ‘Anyone who has the motive can kill.’

  Her father had been afraid, and Rhys had admitted to fear, to a sense of evil. She’d promised her father she would be brave. Now it was time act.

  33

  Juliet woke on the Sunday morning with a kind of sickening feeling of anticipation. However, she’d promised herself time to think, and she decided to go to the workshop and draw. For her, the process of sketching often calmed her, cleared her mind.

  And so, she went out into the workshop, spent her time, drawing, thinking. The morning and then the afternoon drifted away from her, but slowly her mind unscrambled.

  Before she went back in the house, she took out a piece of paper which she headed ‘The Killing of Harry and Rhys’ and proceeded to write in detail everything she had learned. She knew how dangerous the next few hours were going to be, this was her insurance, the truth would not die. When she finished, she carefully folded the piece of paper and tucked it in her draw in the workshop.

  Then Juliet went back into the house. It would soon be time to go to the barbecue. She went to find Mira who was sat with Lola, reading.

  ‘HI,’ signed Juliet and she lent to stroke Lola. ‘L
ooking forward to this evening?’

  Mira shook her head. ‘Not particularly. I know it’s rather late compared to some, but I’ve started feeling ever so sick.’

  ‘You could stay home.’

  ‘No, I had a text from Gabriel earlier; I promised I’d go for a short time anyway. I’m not taking Lola though; I think all the smells of food will drive her mad.’

  Juliet smiled but then she heard the house phone ring and went to answer it.

  To her surprise, it was DC Adam Smith.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to get back to you about the voicemail you sent me. Could you tell me more about how you came to have it?’

  Juliet explained and then he said, ‘Right, well, it was very interesting, and we would like to talk to Anwen about it. I was wondering if you or anyone in the family has seen her, we are having problems tracking her down.’

  ‘I don’t think any of us have seen her since Rhys’s funeral.’

  ‘I see. Didn’t your sister Cassie mention her and Anwen were going to start some kind of business together?’

  ‘That’s not happening now. When I spoke to Anwen at the funeral, she told me she was planning to move back to the mainland.’

  ‘Ah, well, I hope she hasn’t gone yet; we really need to speak to her.’

  Juliet hesitated. ‘Do you suspect her of Rhys’s murder?’

  There was a pause and then he answered, ‘I’m very sorry, I can’t say any more. But I would be very grateful if you could tell me if anyone sees or hears from her.’

  Juliet ended the phone call. She remembered Anwen’s threats, the talk of violence, of desperate people doing ugly things. If Anwen found out that she’d sent that voicemail to the police, what would she do? Juliet could feel herself getting hotter, a fear deep in her stomach, making her feel sick.

  Juliet went into the kitchen where she found her mother, Cassie and Rosalind, ready to leave. She told them about the phone call and Anwen.

  ‘So, the police are taking the voicemail seriously,’ said Cassie.

  Their mother frowned. ‘I do hope Anwen doesn’t get blamed in any way for Rhys’s death. It wouldn’t be right.’