Chapters (31)
She had been struck several times with a rock. It was lying on the ground next to her, smeared with blood. I remembered the woman I had met at the party with her strawberry blonde hair, her designer dress, her diamond necklace. Again, I thought of her sitting in her bedroom, the white teddy bear with the sachet of dried lavender. This brutalised and casually discarded body was not her. The injuries to her head and to her face were vicious. She was almost unrecognisable. But it was more than that. She had been bored, sullen, sexy, distraught, angry, obstinate. Whoever had killed her had taken all that away and there was nothing left behind.
Three police officers were moving around her. One of them was the photographer. The other two were scouring the floor and the walls, examining everything minutely. We hung back, unable and perhaps unwilling to get too close. The air in the cave was cool and clammy. It was a horrible place to die.
‘Did she meet her killer here?’ I asked. My voice didn’t sound like my own, underground, with the rock and the soil pressing down.
‘I don’t think so,’ Hawthorne replied. ‘Whoever texted her asked her to come to them.’
‘Then why did she come in here?’
‘She could have been attacked outside and then carried in.’ Hawthorne examined the ground. ‘Doesn’t look like she was dragged.’
‘If she’d told you what she’d seen out of her window on the night of the party, she might have saved her own life.’
Hawthorne nodded. ‘Maybe.’
We made our way back into the daylight, squeezing past the stretcher-bearers who had arrived to take the body away. I had never been more glad to feel the sun on my skin.
‘She was on her way to a meeting,’ I said. ‘So whoever it was must live quite close.’ I looked around me. ‘The lighthouse?’
The lighthouse stood some distance away, a clean, modern-looking building painted black and white. I had already seen it twice: once from the airplane as we approached the island and again, briefly, when I had cycled round the island.
‘Not the lighthouse,’ Hawthorne said. ‘But over there . . .’
I followed his eye to a small farmhouse standing on its own in the middle of a field. At the same time, Torode came over and joined us.
‘Is that inhabited?’ Hawthorne asked him.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s occupied. And guess who by.’
‘I never guess,’ Hawthorne said, gloomily.
‘It’s a friend of yours. Derek Abbott. That’s where he lives. Maybe it’s time the two of you had a chat.’