“Honest, Mum, I’m fine,” she murmured soothingly. “Now, I think I heard a customer coming up. I have to go.”
As Rosie switched the phone off, Alix gave a little cough. Rosie turned to look at her.
“Can I — oh, it’s you!”
The interrupted offer of help was expressed wearily enough; as soon as the girl recognised Alix, her hostility was undisguised. Her heavy frame seemed to stiffen, as if in self-defence. Alix felt a small stab of pity for the girl. She was unattractive and she was branded as her father’s daughter. But pity never got a television show on the screen.
“Hi. I was wondering if we could have a quick word.”
“My mother told you yesterday. We just want to be left alone.”
“I tried to explain to her, Rosie. This programme’s going to be made, whether you and your mum cooperate or not. What I’d like is to make sure you have your say, put forward your dad’s point of view. Tell the viewers how things really were in the Sunny Hours Home. After all, it was a family concern, wasn’t it? Your parents ran the place and you helped to look after the wrinklies. That was the title we were thinking of, by the way. A Family Concern.”
Rosie’s jaw was square and solid. Uncompromising. Loudly, she said, “No way. Why don’t you just go back home and pester someone else? Leave us in peace.”
From downstairs, the Magnus Barefoot fan called, “Is everything all right, Rosie?”
“In case you’re wondering,” Rosie hissed, “he’s a cousin of my mother’s. He was glad to give me a job. So don’t even think of threatening to tell him that I’m the daughter of William Ive. He already knows.”
An afternoon spent asking around convinced Alix that Jayne Ive had made a shrewd move, returning to her native island. No wonder she hadn’t needed to change her name, assume a false personality, and keep on the move, the usual fate of serial killers’ spouses. Plenty of people seemed to think that William Ive might be innocent. There were hints that the relatives of the dead were Scousers on the make, that the defence pathologists might have been right after all and the aged victims had indeed died natural deaths. In the dim and distant past, Jayne Ive’s long-dead parents had been well known on the island, and well regarded. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the trial, she and her daughter were widely regarded as luckless victims of one man’s personal catastrophe.
“One thing puzzles me,” she said to Rupert over dinner that evening. “Why bury herself away here when it’s so far to visit her husband in prison?”
“Well, if she’s among friends...”
“Sure, but she’s also supposed to be the devoted little woman. Yet she hardly ever goes to see him. As for Rosie, someone told me she doesn’t think the girl’s visited him once since the sentence was passed. Not what you’d expect from a devoted family.”
“Why worry?” he asked. “You’re a programme maker, not a detective.”
“I’m not sure this programme’s ever going to get made,” she said. “Too many bloody contradictions.”
“At least you got a nice holiday out of it,” he said. “A short break in Sunset City.”
“Sunset City?”
“Yeah, that’s what they call Peel, haven’t you read the brochure in your room?”
“I seem to remember I was otherwise engaged last night. Too occupied to leaf through the literature, let alone the Bible so kindly left by the Gideons.”
“Well, to you and me this may be a seaside resort, but the Manx see it differently. Something to do with the reddish hue of the sandstone everything’s built of, apparently. Hence ‘sunset.’ And there’s a ruined cathedral in the grounds of the castle. Hence a city.”
“Darling, you know everything,” Alix said teasingly.
“At least, after last night, I know what you like,” he said. And they spoke no more of the Ives that night.
When they drew the curtains the next morning, Alix was surprised that visibility was so poor. It wasn’t September yet.
“I never knew a place like this for fog,” Rupert said. He was an authority on the island’s imperfections. “I tell you, this is nothing. Later in the year...”
She kissed him goodbye when his taxi arrived and let him promise to get in touch when she was back in London. She didn’t think he’d bother. On too much of a good thing with the accountant girlfriend, probably. Oh well. Easy come, easy go.
After a leisurely continental breakfast — she still didn’t fancy kippers — she caught the bus which took her back into Peel. The mist was clearing and, according to the forecast, the day was going to be bright, the temperature in the low seventies. Still not exactly Bondi, and the scarf she put on wasn’t intended simply as a fashion accessory. After making her way back up onto the cliffs, she pressed the bell beside Jayne Ive’s front door.
“I thought I told you not to come back.” Jayne had opened the door, but kept it on the latch. Treating her like an unwelcome intruder, someone who might be wanting to ransack the house.
“Jayne, we need—”
“Listen, all I need, all Rosie and I need, is that you leave us alone. She told me that you’d been to see her while she was working. It’s disgusting, the way you people harass children.”
“Jayne, she’s not a child, she’s a grown woman. You had her working for you.” A thought struck her. “Did she guess what was going on?”
The face in the crack darkened with rage. “Get away from here!”
At last, Alix thought, I’ve broken through her defences. No chance of cooperation now, though. So: May as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. “What are you hiding, Jayne?”
“I’m not hiding anything! Now go and leave us alone, or I’ll call the police.”
She slammed the door fast and hard, before Alix had time to think up an ironic rejoinder. In frustration, Alix banged hard on the door, but all that happened was that she barked her knuckles and Jayne didn’t answer.
For a minute or so, Alix stood outside the bungalow, swearing quietly to herself. She’d messed up, there was no denying it. She hadn’t handled Jayne Ive well, and without her input, she didn’t have nearly enough material to persuade the powers that be to make a fifty-minute programme about what it’s like being married to a serial killer.
Could she put a different spin on her original idea? Her old boss back in Sydney had told her that was the secret of all the successful programme makers. As she trudged back along the unmade road, she juggled the possibilities in her mind.
The mist had vanished, leaving the skies bright and clear. Slowly, too, the fog in Alix’s head was beginning to disperse. What if Rupert had been half right? Maybe she helped her old man to do in the geriatrics — that was what he had said. What if William Ive had, indeed, been innocent? What if Jayne were responsible for all the crimes?
She quickened her pace. It made a kind of sense, if Jayne were the killer. The forensic evidence in the case hadn’t been up to much. The Devaneys had focused their attention on William Ive, since he had been named in their late mother’s will; maybe when the postmortems had revealed something untoward, the police had taken the easy option. For all anyone knew, William might even have connived in taking the heat off his wife. By all accounts, they were a devoted couple.
Maybe this programme would turn into a detective story. A quest for truth that ended up with the unmasking of an unexpected culprit. Terrific. But how to pin the crimes on a woman who had, as she’d already pointed out, never been charged with anything?
She could see people scrambling over the grassy mound inside the castle walls. The sun was bright on the sandstone of the little houses crammed between St. Patrick’s Isle and the quayside. Sunset City, yes, the nickname made a kind of sense.