Palmer-Jones 03 - Murder in Paradise by Ann Cleeves

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.