hung in the air.
Joseph spoke for the first time since they had entered the room.
“I want to look at the house,” he said harshly.
“Jo-seph Archer, you get out of here. Back where you came from, back to your off-ice and that’s not a great fine house.” Then she addressed Jemima placatingly, in something more like her usual sweet manner. “I’m sorry, but, you see, we’ve not been friends since way back. And, besides, you gave me such a shock.”
Joseph swung on his heel. “I’ll see you at the funeral, Miss Archer.”
He managed to make the words sound extraordinarily threatening.
That night it seemed to Jemima Shore that she hardly slept, although the threads of broken, half remembered dreams disturbed her and indicated that she must actually have fallen into some kind of doze in the hour before dawn. The light was still gray when she looked out of her shutters. The tops of the tall palms were bending — there was quite a wind.
Back on her bed, Jemima tried to recall just what she had been dreaming. There had been some pattern to it: she knew there had.
She wished rather angrily that light would suddenly break through into her sleepy mind as the sun was shortly due to break through the eastern fringe of palms on the hotel estate. No gentle, slow-developing, rosy-fingered dawn for the Caribbean: one brilliant low ray was a herald of what was to come, and then, almost immediately, hot relentless sunshine for the rest of the day. She needed that kind of instant clarity herself.
Hostility. That was part of it all — the nature of hostility. The hostility, for example, between Joseph and Tina Archer the night before, so virulent and public — with herself as the public — that it might almost have been managed for effect.
Then the management of things: Tina Archer, always managing, always a schemer (as Coralie Harrison had said — and Joseph Archer, too). That brought her to the other couple in this odd, four-pointed drama: the Harrisons, brother and sister, or rather half brother and sister (a point made by Tina to correct Miss Izzy).
More hostility. Greg, who had once loved Tina and now loathed her. Joseph, who had once also perhaps loved Tina. Coralie, who had once perhaps — very much perhaps, this one — loved Joseph and certainly loathed Tina. Cute and clever little Tina, the Archer Tomb, the carved figures of Sir Valentine and his wife, the inscription. Jemima was beginning to float back into sleep, as the four figures, all Bo’landers, all sharing some kind of common past, began to dance to a calypso whose wording, too, was confused:
“This is your graveyard in the sun
Where my people have toiled since time begun—”
An extraordinarily loud noise on the corrugated metal roof above her head recalled her, trembling, to her senses. The racket had been quite immense, almost as if there had been an explosion or at least a missile fired at the chalet. The thought of a missile made her realize that it had in fact been a missile: it must have been a coconut which had fallen in such a startling fashion on the corrugated roof. Guests were officially warned by the hotel against sitting too close under the palm trees, whose innocuous-looking fronds could suddenly dispense their heavily lethal nuts. COCONUTS CAN CAUSE INJURY ran the printed notice.
That kind of blow on my head would certainly have caused injury, thought Jemima, if not death.
Injury, if not death. And the Archer Tomb: my only wife.
At that moment, straight on cue, the sun struck low through the bending fronds to the east and onto her shutters. And Jemima realized not only why it had been done but how it had been done. Who of them all had been responsible for consigning Miss Izzy Archer to the graveyard in the sun.
The scene by the Archer Tomb a few hours later had that same strange mixture of English tradition and Bo’lander exoticism which had intrigued Jemima on her first visit. Only this time she had a deeper, sadder purpose than sheer tourism. Traditional English hymns were sung at the service, but outside a steel band was playing at Miss Izzy’s request. As one who had been born on the island, she had asked for a proper Bo’lander funeral.
The Bo’landers, attending in large numbers, were by and large dressed with that extreme formality — dark suits, white shirts, ties, dark dresses, dark straw hats, even white gloves — which Jemima had observed in churchgoers of a Sunday and in the Bo’lander children, all of them neatly uniformed on their way to school. No Bow Island T-shirts were to be seen, although many of the highly colored intricate and lavish wreaths were in the bow shape of the island’s logo. The size of the crowd was undoubtedly a genuine mark of respect. Whatever the disappointments of the will to their government, to the Bo’landers Miss Izzy Archer had been part of their heritage.
Tina Archer wore a black scarf wound round her head which almost totally concealed her bandage. Joseph Archer, standing far apart from her and not looking in her direction, looked both elegant and formal in his office clothes, a respectable member of the government. The Harrisons stood together, Coralie with her head bowed.
Greg’s defiant aspect, head lifted proudly, was clearly intended to give the lie to any suggestions that he had not been on the best of terms with the woman whose body was now being lowered into the family tomb.
As the coffin — so small and thus so touching — vanished from view, there was a sigh from the mourners. They began to sing again: a hymn, but with the steel band gently echoing the tune in the background.
Jemima moved discreetly in the crowd and stood by the side of the tall man.
“You’ll never be able to trust her,” she said in a low voice. “She’s managed you before, she’ll manage you again. It’ll be someone else who will be doing the dirty work next time. On you. You’ll never be able to trust her, will you? Once a murderess, always a murderess.
You may wish one day you’d finished her off.”
The tall man looked down at her. Then he looked across at Tina Archer with one quick savagely doubting look. Tina Archer Harrison, his only wife.
“Why, you—” For a moment, Jemima thought Greg Harrison would actually strike her down there at the graveside, as he had struck down old Miss Izzy and — if only on pretense — struck down Tina herself.
“Greg darling.” It was Coralie Harrison’s pathetic, protesting murmur. “What are you saying to him?” she demanded of Jemima in a voice as low as Jemima’s own. But the explanations — for Coralie and the rest of Bow Island — of the conspiracy of Tina Archer and Greg Harrison were only just beginning.
The rest was up to the police, who with their patient work of investigation would first amplify, then press, finally concluding the case.
And in the course of the investigations; the conspirators would fall apart, this time for real. To the police fell the unpleasant duty of disentangling the new lies of Tina Archer, who now swore that her memory had just returned, that it had been Greg who had half killed her that night, that she had had absolutely nothing to do with it.
And Greg Harrison denounced Tina in return, this time with genuine ferocity. “It was her plan, her plan all along. She managed everything. I should never have listened to her!”
Before she left Bow Island, Jemima went to say goodbye to Joseph Archer in his Bowtown office. There were many casualties of the Archer tragedy beyond Miss Izzy herself. Poor Coralie was one: she had been convinced that her brother, for all his notorious temper, would never batter down Miss Izzy to benefit his ex-wife. Like the rest of Bow Island, she was unaware of the deep plot by which Greg and Tina would publicly display their hostility, advertise their divorce, and all along plan to kill Miss Izzy once the new will was signed. Greg, ostentatiously hating his ex-wife, would not be suspected, and Tina, suffering such obvious injuries, could only arouse sympathy.