The pub is full to the gills, visitors and islanders gathering there for snippets of news, while also spreading rumours, sharing opinions, dissecting reputations. The music is kept at a low level as a mark of respect. Some are out searching still, but only in daylight hours. There’s no hope now. She’s been missing for days.
Bobby smiles sadly and shakes the hands of the new guests as they arrive, saying, ‘Yes, terrible business,’ and then he swiftly moves the conversation along. Tragic accidents happen everywhere where the sea adjoins the land, more so when alcohol is involved. The intimation is that only the drunk and foolhardy are victims.
And somehow, thankfully, the panic about the attacks flared, blazed, and is now already ebbing. It is now almost universally agreed that the man who assaulted Charlotte Howard-Dormer and Beatrice Wallace must have been someone over for the gig 282championships last week, who slipped away with the hundreds of other visitors. A one-off. It was not an islander; it couldn’t possibly be someone who lived here.
Mercifully, the victims of the attacks only suffered superficial injuries according to police and both will be going home to recuperate. Bobby hasn’t seen the women’s faces, but even he wonders at the word superficial. It must have been terrifying.
Most people, including Bobby, think the barmaid’s disappearance was an accident, an unrelated incident. They may never know.
Taking his drink outside to the pub garden to make the most of the sunshine, Bobby closes his eyes for a moment. He needs a few minutes to himself; a quiet pause where he doesn’t have to manage the endless questions from tourists and locals alike. But there’s no peace here on the island – the wind sighs, the birds cry, and the waves slap incessantly against the granite of the rocks and the concrete of the quay.
As if reading his thoughts, the sky above the sun umbrella is suddenly filled with a shriek as two gulls swoop, dispersing the smaller sparrows and thrushes mooching about for treats from the visitors who constantly ignore the signs not to feed them. The gulls settle on a nearby table, hangrily eyeing Bobby and the visitors drinking outside.
Bobby’s taking the first sip of his invigorating G&T when Old Betty plonks her glass of half a Guinness on his table and plonks herself down next to him. She sets about cleaning her specs like she’s scouring the roast pan.
‘Have you heard the latest?’
‘What?’ asks Bobby, sighing heavily. There are so many theories swirling around at the moment and he’s probably heard 283most of them, including the more flamboyant: Hannah was involved with international drug smugglers; Hannah took Kit for a mug and did a runner with that Frenchie sailor; Kit did away with Hannah in a jealous rage and covered it up by rowing out to sea and dumping the body; someone saw Hannah swimming over to the Eastern Isles; Hannah was spotted at Gimble Point, hovering over the sea in a halo of light, although that was probably a Brocken spectre, an illusion, a mirage.
Not a grain of actual evidence. Chinese whispers. He catches himself – is that racist?
Old Betty leans in to say, ‘John from the garden and his Mary-Jane from the café? I heard they were closer than husband and wife, if you get my drift.’
‘I’m aware of that. I was the one who had to inform The Family and the police.’ Bobby feels responsible for starting this particular strand of gossip. ‘I’d rather you not go spreading that around,’ he warns.
‘Please yourself,’ sniffs Betty, getting up and flouncing away in a huff, although it is an incremental flounce, such is the state of her hips. ‘You’ve opened a can of worms there. Now you have to lie in it.’
Bobby takes a large gulp of his drink. And blushes.
Unfortunately, after one or two drinks the night he discovered the husband and wife were actually brother and sister, he confided in Alison. He needed to talk it over with someone in order to make sense of it. He blames the shock for his indiscretion. He shouldn’t feel guilty because Alison is obviously the source of this leak, but it doesn’t sit easily with him. He should have known better. He trusts Alison, but she probably told someone she trusted too, who passed it on to just the one 284person, in strictest confidence, naturally, who passed it on … That’s how it works here.
And there has been another worrying snippet doing the rounds. The vet has been shifting ketamine according to one of the chambermaids, who heard it from Isak Mensah, who has refused to reveal his source. The man has been asked to leave. Bobby thinks the fact that he didn’t fight to stay says it all.
When this information spread, it spawned one of the more popular theories – that the barmaid slipped into the sea whilst off her head on drugs, although a few folk, like Kit, believe that whoever attacked Beatrice and Charlotte was also responsible for Hannah’s disappearance.
However it happened, Hannah is now missing, presumed dead. Water closes over the heads of the drowned soon enough. Put it out of your mind, Bobby tells himself. Guests have shelled out for their holidays in paradise, and while they might pay lip service to the missing woman they still want to be shown a good time.
He’s about to head to the bar for a refill when he pauses.
There’s something else niggling at him. Before he came to the pub today he helped Fiona prepare for another gallery party. Something caught his eye and he’s just realised what it was.
Fiona and her assistant were hanging a new work, a whimsical picture of sheep tombstoning off a cliff, so Bobby set about unloading crates of wine from the golf buggy, carrying them through to pile them in the store cupboard. He’d just noticed a glimpse of pink right at the back, but at that very moment, Fiona and her assistant both screamed. He rushed through to find the ladder had almost toppled, but luckily no harm done. He then had to take a call from The Family, so that had further distracted him. 285
It’s only now he wonders if it could possibly be his own pink waterproof, mislaid months ago during an unfortunate week of advanced tipsification (one of many jokey words and phrases he uses – along with sozzled, a little worse for wear, a tad out of it – to make his drinking seem less worrying).
It is now common knowledge that someone reported seeing Hannah up at the North End on the day she went missing – arguing with someone who was wearing a pink coat, presumably a woman. If it was Bobby’s own coat abandoned in the art gallery’s back room, anyone might have used it. It is probably not the time to say he owns one, or to claim it.
He’ll leave it where it is. Why would he put himself under suspicion.
He makes his way to the bar, where two of the mainland police officers stand drinking together – the one with the closely cropped grey hair, well-built, hard eyes, terribly sexy in that super cocky manner possessed by those in uniform, indeed most straight white men, and the woman.
They admit to Bobby that they are bewildered. They seem to be getting nowhere fast. This is like no investigation they’ve ever been on. Usually, the police are treated with suspicion; usually they have to work hard to prise information out of interviewees. But on this island they are welcomed. Drinks are provided and people are keen to engage them in conversation. There is not so much a reluctance to help as a tsunami of scandal and gossip and rumours, which only serve to muddy the waters. They talk and talk, these islanders – mainly the women, but men sidle up in the bar to offer opinions too – about the guests who were attacked, about the barmaid:
‘Put it about a bit…’ 286
‘Polish mafia …’
‘She was a witch, that one …’
‘I heard she did a runner with one of the sailors …’
They have also interviewed dozens of islanders and visitors alike but they’re still no closer to clarifying what happened.