A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave ANTONIA FRASER

This is your graveyard in the sun—” The tall young man standing in her path was singing the words lightly but clearly.

It took Jemima Shore a moment to realize exactly what message he was intoning to the tune of the famous calypso. Then she stepped back. It was a sinister and not particularly welcoming little parody.

“This is my island in the sun

Where my people have toiled since time begun—”

Ever since she had arrived in the Caribbean, she seemed to have had the tune echoing in her ears. How old was it? How many years was it since the inimitable Harry Belafonte had first implanted it in everybody’s consciousness? No matter. Whatever its age, the calypso was still being sung today with charm, vigour, and a certain relentlessness on Bow Island, and on the other West Indian islands she had visited in the course of her journey.

It was not the only tune to be heard, of course. The loud noise of music, she had discovered, was an inseparable part of Caribbean life, starting with the airport. The heavy, irresistible beat of the steel band, the honeyed wail of the singers, all this was happening somewhere if not everywhere all over the islands late into the night: the joyous sound of freedom, of dancing, of drinking (rum punch), and, for the tourists at any rate, the sound of holiday.

It wasn’t the sound of holiday for Jemima Shore, Investigator. Or not officially so. That was all to the good, Jemima being one of those people temperamentally whose best holidays combined some work with a good deal of pleasure. She could hardly believe it when Megalith Television, her employers, had agreed to a program which took her away from freezing Britain to the sunny Caribbean in late January. This was a reversal of normal practice, by which Cy Fredericks, Jemima’s boss — and the effective boss of Megalith — was generally to be found relaxing in the Caribbean in February while Jemima herself, if she got there at all, was liable to be dispatched there in the inconvenient humidity of August. And it was a fascinat-ing project to boot. This was definitely her lucky year.

“This is my island in the sun—” But what the young man facing her had actually sung was “your graveyard in the sun.” Hers? Or whose? Since the man was standing between Jemima and the historic grave she had come to visit, it was possible that he was being pro-prietorial as well as aggressive. On second thought, surely not. It was a joke, a cheerful joke on a cheerful, very sunny day. But the young man’s expression was, it seemed to her, more threatening than that.

Jemima gazed back with that special sweet smile so familiar to viewers of British television. (These same viewers were also aware from past experience that Jemima, sweet as her smile might be, stood no nonsense from anyone, at least not on her program.) On closer inspection, the man was not really as young as all that. She saw someone of perhaps roughly her own age — early thirties. He was white, although so deeply tanned that she guessed he wasn’t a tourist but one of the small loyal European population of Bow Island, a place fiercely proud of its recent independence from a much larger neighbor.

The stranger’s height, unlike his youth, was not an illusion. He towered over Jemima and she herself was not short. He was also handsome, or would have been except for an oddly formed, rather large nose with a high bridge to it and a pronounced aquiline curve.

But if the nose marred the regularity of his features, the impression left was not unattractive. He was wearing whitish cotton shorts, like more or less every male on Bow Island, black or white. His orange T-shirt bore the familiar island logo or crest: the outline of a bow in black and a black hand drawing it back. Beneath the logo was printed one of the enormous variety of local slogans — cheerful again — designed to make a play upon the island’s name. This one read: THIS IS THE END OF THE SUN-BOW!

No, in that friendly T-shirt, he was surely not intending to be aggressive.

In that case, the odd thing about the whole encounter was that the stranger still stood absolutely still in Jemima’s path. She could glimpse the large stone Archer Tomb just behind him, which she recognized from the postcards. For a smallish place, Bow Island was remarkably rich in historic relics. Nelson in his time had visited it with his fleet, for like its neighbors Bow Island had found itself en-gulfed in the Napoleonic Wars. Two hundred or so years before that, first British, then French, then British again had invaded and settled the island which had once belonged to Caribs, and before that Arawaks. Finally, into this melting pot, Africans had been brought forcibly to work the sugar plantations on which its wealth depended. All these elements in various degrees had gone to make up the people now known casually among themselves as the Bo’landers.

The Archer Tomb, the existence of which had in a sense brought Jemima across the Atlantic, belonged to the period of the second — and final — British settlement. Here was buried the most celebrated Governor in Bow Island’s history, Sir Valentine Archer.

Even its name commemorated his long reign. Bow Island had originally been called by the name of a saint, and while it was true the island was vaguely formed in the shape of a bow it was Governor Archer who had made the change: to signify ritu-ally that this particular archer was in command of this particular bow.

Jemima knew that the monument, splendidly carved, would show Sir Valentine Archer with Isabella, his wife, beside him. This double stone bier was capped with a white wood structure reminiscent of a small church, done either to give the whole monument additional importance — although it must always have dominated the small churchyard by its sheer size — or to protect it from the weather. Jemima had read that there were no Archer children inscribed on the tomb, contrary to the usual seventeenth-century practice. This was because, as a local historian delicately put it, Governor Archer had been as a parent to the entire island. Or in the words of another purely local calypso:

“Across the sea came old Sir Valentine—

He came to be your daddy, and he came to be mine.”

In short, no one monument could comprise the progeny of a man popularly supposed to have sired over a hundred children, legitimate and illegitimate. The legitimate line was, however, now on the point of dying out. It was to see Miss Isabella Archer, officially at least the last of her race, that Jemima had come to the Caribbean. She hoped to make a program about the old lady and her home, Archer Plantation House, alleged to be untouched in its decoration these fifty years. She wanted also to interview her generally about the changes Miss Archer had seen in her lifetime in this part of the world.

“Greg Harrison,” said the man standing in Jemima’s path suddenly. “And this is my sister, Coralie.” A girl who had been standing unnoticed by Jemima in the shade of the arched church porch stepped rather shyly forward. She, too, was extremely brown and her blond hair, whitened almost to flax by the sun, was pulled back into a ponytail. His sister. Was there a resemblance? Coralie Harrison was wearing a similar orange T-shirt, but otherwise she was not much like her brother. She was quite short, for one thing, and her features were appealing rather than beautiful — and, perhaps fortunately, she lacked her brother’s commanding nose.

“Welcome to Bow Island, Miss Shore,” she began. But her brother interrupted her. He put out a hand, large, muscular, and burnt to nut color by the sun.

“I know why you’re here and I don t like it,” said Greg Harrison.

“Stirring up forgotten things. Why don’t you leave Miss Izzy to die in peace?” The contrast between his apparently friendly handshake and the hostile, if calmly spoken words was disconcerting.

“I’m jemima Shore,” she said, though he obviously knew that.

“Am I going to be allowed to inspect the Archer Tomb? Or is it to be across your dead body?” Jemima smiled again with sweetness.

“My dead body!” Greg Harrison smiled back in his turn. The effect, however, was not particularly warming. “Have you come armed to the teeth, then?” Before she could answer, he began to hum the famous calypso again, jemima imagined the words: “This is your graveyard in the sun.” Then he added: “Might not be such a bad idea, that, when you start to dig up things that should be buried.”

Jemima decided it was time for action. Neatly sidestepping Greg Harrison, she marched firmly toward the Archer Tomb. There lay the carved couple. She read: “Sacred to the memory of Sir Valentine Archer, first Governor of this island, and his only wife, Isabella, daughter of Randal Oxford, gentleman.” She was reminded briefly of her favorite Philip Larkin poem about the Arundel Monument, beginning, “The Earl and Countess lie in stone—” and ending, “All that remains of us is love.”

But that couple lay a thousand miles away in the cloistered cool of Chichester Cathedral. Here the hot tropical sun burnt down on her naked head. She found she had taken off her large straw hat as a token of respect and quickly clapped it back on again. Here, too, in contrast to the very English-looking stone church with pointed Gothic windows beyond, there were palm trees among the graves instead of yews, their slender trunks bending like giraffes’ necks in the breeze. She had once romantically laid white roses on the Arundel Monument. It was as the memory of the gesture returned to her that she spied the heap of bright pink and orange hibiscus blos-soms lying on the stone before her. A shadow fell across it.

“Tina puts them there.” Greg Harrison had followed her. “Every day she can manage it. Most days. Then she tells Miss Izzy what she’s done. Touching, isn’t it?” But he did not make it sound as if he found it especially touching. In fact, there was so much bitterness, even malevolence, in his voice that for a moment, standing as she was in the sunny graveyard, Jemima felt quite chilled. “Or is it revolting?” he added, the malevolence now quite naked.

“Greg,” murmured Coralie Harrison faintly, as if in protest.

“Tina?” Jemima said. “That’s Miss Archer’s — Miss Izzy’s — companion. We’ve corresponded. For the moment I can’t remember her other name.”

“She’s known as Tina Archer these days, I think you’ll find. When she wrote to you, she probably signed the letter Tina Harrison.”

Harrison looked at Jemima sardonically but she had genuinely forgotten the surname of the companion — it was, after all, not a particularly uncommon one.

They were interrupted by a loud hail from the road. Jemima saw a young black man at the wheel of one of the convenient roofless minis everyone seemed to drive around Bow Island. He stood up and started to shout something.

“Greg! Cora! You coming on to—” She missed the rest of it — something about a boat and a fish. Coralie Harrison looked suddenly radiant, and for a moment even Greg Harrison actually looked properly pleased.

He waved back. “Hey, Joseph. Come and say hello to Miss Jemima Shore of BBC Television!”

“Megalith Television,” Jemima interrupted, but in vain. Harrison continued:

“You heard, Joseph. She’s making a program about Miss Izzy.”

The man leapt gracefully out of the car and approached up the palm-lined path. Jemima saw that he, too, was extremely tall. And like the vast majority of the Bo’landers she had so far met, he had the air of being a natural athlete. Whatever the genetic mix in the past of Carib and African and other people that had produced them, the Bo’landers were certainly wonderful-looking. He kissed Coralie on both cheeks and patted her brother on the back.

“Miss Shore, meet Joseph—” but even before Greg Harrison had pronounced the surname, his mischievous expression had warned Jemima what it was likely to be “—Joseph Archer. Undoubtedly one of the ten thousand descendants of the philoprogenitive old gentleman at whose tomb you are so raptly gazing.” All that remains of us is love indeed, thought Jemima irreverently as she shook Joseph Archer’s hand — with all due respect to Philip Larkin, it seemed that a good deal more remained of Sir Valentine than that.

“Oh, you 11 find we’re all called Archer round here,” murmured Joseph pleasantly. Unlike Greg Harrison, he appeared to be genuinely welcoming. “As for Sir Val-en-tine”—he pronounced it syllable by syllable like the calypso—“don’t pay too much attention to the stories. Otherwise, how come we’re not all living in that fine old Archer Plantation House?”

“Instead of merely my ex-wife. No, Coralie, don’t protest. I could kill her for what she’s doing.” Again Jemima felt a chill at the extent of the violence in Greg Harrison’s voice. “Come, Joseph, we’ll see about that fish of yours. Come on, Coralie.” He strode off, unsmiling, accompanied by Joseph, who did smile. Coralie, however, stopped to ask Jemima if there was anything she could do for her. Her manner was still shy but in her brother’s absence a great deal more friendly.

Jemima also had the strong impression that Coralie Harrison wanted to communicate something to her, something she did not necessarily want her brother to hear.

“I could perhaps interpret, explain—” Coralie stopped. Jemima said nothing. “Certain things,” went on Coralie. “There are so many layers in a place like this. Just because it’s small, an outsider doesn’t always understand—”

“And I’m the outsider? Of course I am.” Jemima had started to sketch the tomb for future reference, something for which she had a minor but useful talent. She forbore to observe truthfully, if platitudinously, that an outsider could also sometimes see local matters rather more clearly than those involved — she wanted to know what else Coralie had to say. Would she explain, for example, Greg’s quite blatant dislike of his former wife?

But an impatient cry from her brother now in the car beside Joseph meant that Coralie for the time being had nothing more to add. She fled down the path and Jemima was left to ponder with renewed interest on her forthcoming visit to Isabella Archer of Archer Plantation House. It was a visit which would include, she took it, a meeting with Miss Archer’s companion, who, like her employer, was currently dwelling in comfort there.

Comfort! Even from a distance, later that day, the square, lowbuilt mansion had a comfortable air. More than that, it conveyed an impression of gracious and old-fashioned tranquillity. As Jemima drove her own rented Mini up the long avenue of palm trees — much taller than those in the churchyard — she could fancy she was driving back in time to the days of Governor Archer, his copious banquets, parties, and balls, all served by black slaves.

At that moment, a young woman with coffee-colored skin and short black curly hair appeared on the steps. Unlike the maids in Jemima’s hotel who wore a pastiche of bygone servants’ costume at dinner — brightly colored dresses to the ankle, white-muslin aprons, and turbans — this girl was wearing an up-to-the-minute scarlet halter-top and cutaway shorts revealing most of her smooth brown legs. Tina Archer: for so she introduced herself.

It did not surprise Jemima Shore one bit to discover that Tina Archer — formerly Harrison — was easy to get on with. Anyone who left the hostile and graceless Greg Harrison was already ahead in Jemima’s book. But with Tina Archer chatting away at her side, so chic and even trendy in her appearance, the revelation of the interior of the house was far more of a shock to her than it would otherwise have been. There was nothing, nothing at all, of the slightest modernity about it. Dust and cobwebs were not literally there perhaps, but they were suggested in its gloom, its heavy wooden furniture — where were the light cane chairs so suitable to the climate? — and above all in its desolation. Archer Plantation House reminded her of poor Miss Havisham’s time-warp home in Great Expectations. And still worse, there was an atmosphere of sadness hanging over the whole interior. Or perhaps it was mere loneliness, a kind of somber, sterile grandeur you felt must stretch back centuries.

All this was in violent contrast to the sunshine still brilliant in the late afternoon, the rioting bushes of brightly colored tropical flowers outside. None of it had Jemima expected. Information garnered in London had led her to form quite a different picture of Archer Plantation House, something far more like her original impression, as she drove down the avenue of palm trees, of antique mellow grace.

Just as Jemima was adapting to this surprise, she discovered the figure of Miss Archer herself to be equally astonishing. That is to say, having adjusted rapidly from free and easy Tina to the moldering, somber house, she now had to adjust with equal rapidity all over again. For the very first inspection of the old lady, known by Jemima to be at least eighty, quickly banished all thoughts of Miss Havisham. Here was no aged, abandoned bride, forlorn in the decaying wedding-dress of fifty years before. Miss Izzy Archer was wearing a coolie straw hat, apparently tied under her chin with a duster, a loose, white, man’s shirt, and faded blue-jeans cut off at the knee. On her feet were a pair of what looked like child’s brown sandals. From the look of her, she had either just taken a shower wearing all this or been swimming. She was dripping wet, making large pools on the rich carpet and dark, polished boards of the formal drawing room, all dark-red brocade and swagged, fringed curtains, where she had received Jemima. It was possible to see this even in the filtered light seeping through the heavy brown shutters which shut out the view of the sea.

“Oh, don’t fuss so, Tina dear,” exclaimed Miss Izzy impatiently — although Tina had, in fact, said nothing. “What do a few drops of water matter? Stains? What stains?” (Tina still had not spoken.) “Let the government put it right when the time comes.”

Although Tina Archer continued to be silent, gazing amiably, even cheerfully, at her employer, nevertheless in some way she stiffened, froze in her polite listening attitude. Instinctively Jemima knew that she was in some way upset.

“Now don’t be silly, Tina, don’t take on, dear.” The old lady was now shaking herself free of water like a small but stout dog. “You know what I mean. If you don’t, who does — since half the time I don’t know what I mean, let alone what I say. You can put it all right one day, is that better? After all, you’ll have plenty of money to do it. You can afford a few new covers and carpets.” So saying, Miss Izzy, taking jemima by the hand and attended by the still-silent Tina, led the way to the farthest dark-red sofa. Looking remarkably wet from top to toe, she sat down firmly in the middle of it.

It was in this way that jemima first realized that Archer Plantation House would not necessarily pass to the newly independent government of Bow Island on its owner’s death. Miss Izzy, if she had her way, was intending to leave it all, house and fortune, to Tina. Among other things, this meant that Jemima was no longer making a program about a house destined shortly to be a national museum — which was very much part of the arrangement that had brought her to the island and had, incidentally, secured the friendly cooperation of that same new government. Was all this new? How new? Did the new government know? If the will had been signed, they must know.

“I’ve signed the will this morning, dear,” Miss Archer pronounced triumphantly, with an uncanny ability to answer unspoken questions.

“I went swimming to celebrate. I always celebrate things with a good swim — so much more healthy than rum or champagne. Although there’s still plenty of that in the cellar.”

She paused. “So there you are, aren’t you, dear? Or there you will be. Here you will be. Thompson says there’ll be trouble, of course. What can you expect these days? Everything is trouble since independence. Not that I’m against independence, far from it. But everything new brings new trouble here in addition to all the old troubles, so that the troubles get more and more. On Bow Island no troubles ever go away. Why is that?”

But Miss Izzy did not stop for an answer. “No, I’m all for independence and I shall tell you all about that, my dear”—she turned to Jemima and put one damp hand on her sleeve—“on your program.

I’m being a Bo’lander born and bred, you know.” It was true that Miss Izzy, unlike Tina for example, spoke with the peculiar, slightly sing-song intonation of the islanders — not unattractive to Jemima’s ears.

“I was born in this very house eighty-two years ago in April,”

went on Miss Izzy. “You shall come to my birthday party. I was born during a hurricane. A good start! But my mother died in childbirth, they should never have got in that new-fangled doctor, just because he came from England. A total fool he was, I remember him well. They should have had a good Bo’lander midwife, then my mother wouldn’t have died and my father would have had sons—”

Miss Izzy was drifting away into a host of reminiscences — and while these were supposed to be what Jemima had come to hear, her thoughts were actually racing off in quite a different direction.

Trouble? What trouble? Where did Greg Harrison, for example, stand in all this — Greg Harrison who wanted Miss Izzy to be left to

“die in peace”? Greg Harrison who had been married to Tina and was no longer? Tina Archer, now heiress to a fortune.

Above all, why was this forthright old lady intending to leave everything to her companion? For one thing, Jemima did not know how seriously to treat the matter of Tina’s surname. Joseph Archer had laughed off the whole subject of Sir Valentine’s innumerable descendants. But perhaps the beautiful Tina was in some special way connected to Miss Izzy. She might be the product of some rather more recent union between a rakish Archer and a Bo’lander maiden. More recent than the seventeenth century, that is.

Her attention was wrenched back to Miss Izzy’s reminiscing monologue by the mention of the Archer Tomb.

“You’ve seen the grave? Tina has discovered it’s all a fraud. A great big lie, lying under the sun — yes, Tina dear, you once said that.

Sir Valentine Archer, my great great great—” An infinite number of greats followed before Miss Izzy finally pronounced the word

“grandfather,” but Jemima had to admit that she did seem to be counting. “He had a great big lie perpetuated on his tombstone.”

“What Miss Izzy means—” This was the first time Tina had spoken since they entered the darkened drawing room. She was still standing, while Jemima and Miss Izzy sat.

“Don’t tell me what I mean, child,” rapped out the old lady; her tone was imperious rather than indulgent. Tina might for a moment have been a plantation worker two hundred years earlier rather than an independent-minded girl in the late twentieth century. “It’s the inscription which is a lie. She wasn’t his only wife. The very inscription should have warned us. Tina wants to see justice done to poor little Lucie Anne and so do I. Independence indeed! I’ve been independent all my life and I’m certainly not stopping now. Tell me, Miss Shore, you’re a clever young woman from television. Why do you bother to contradict something unless it’s true all along? That’s the way you work all the time in television, don’t you?”

Jemima was wondering just how to answer this question diplo-matically and without traducing her profession when Tina firmly, and this time successfully, took over from her employer.

“I read history at university in the UK, Jemima. Genealogical research is my speciality. I was helping Miss Izzy put her papers in order for the museum — or what was to be the museum. Then the request came for your program and I began to dig a little deeper.

That’s how I found the marriage certificate. Old Sir Valentine did marry his young Carib mistress, known as Lucie Anne. Late in life — long after his first wife died. That’s Lucie Anne who was the mother of his youngest two children. He was getting old, and for some reason he decided to marry her. The church, maybe. In its way, this has always been a God-fearing island. Perhaps Lucie Anne, who was very young and very beautiful, put pressure on the old man, using the church. At any rate, these last two children of all the hundreds he sired would have been legitimate!”

“And so?” questioned Jemima in her most encouraging manner.

“I’m descended from Lucie Anne — and Sir Valentine, of course.”

Tina returned sweet smile for sweet smile. “I’ve traced that, too, from the church records — not too difficult, given the strength of the church here. Not too difficult for an expert, at all events. Oh, I’ve got all sorts of blood, like most of us round here, including a Spanish grandmother and maybe some French blood, too. But the Archer descent is perfectly straightforward and clear.”

Tina seemed aware that Jemima was gazing at her with respect.

Did she, however, understand the actual tenor of Jemima’s thoughts?

This is a formidable person, Jemima was reflecting. Charming, yes, but formidable. And ruthless, maybe, on occasion. Jemima was also, to be frank, wondering just how she was going to present this sudden change of angle in her program on Megalith Television. On the one hand, it might now be seen as a romantic rags-to-riches story, the discovery of the lost heiress. On the other hand, just supposing Tina Archer was not so much an heiress as an adventuress? In that case, what would Megalith — what did Jemima Shore — make of a bright young woman putting across a load of false history on an innocent old lady? In those circumstances, Jemima could understand how the man by the sunny grave might display his contempt for Tina Archer.

“I met Greg Harrison by the Archer Tomb this morning,” Jemima commented deliberately. “Your ex-husband, I take it.”

“Of course he’s her ex-husband.” It was Miss Izzy who chose to answer. “That no-good. Gregory Harrison has been a no-good since the day he was born. And that sister of his. Drifters. Not a job between them. Sailing. Fishing. As if the world owes them a living.”

“Half sister. Coralie is his half sister. And she works in a hotel boutique.” Tina spoke perfectly equably, but once again Jemima guessed that she was in some way put out. “Greg is the no-good in that family.” For all her calm, there was a hint of suppressed anger in her reference to her former husband. With what bitterness that marriage must have ended!

“No-good, the pair of them. You’re well out of that marriage, Tina dear,” exclaimed Miss Izzy. “And do sit down, child — you’re standing there like some kind of housekeeper. And where is Hazel, anyway? It’s nearly half past five. It’ll begin to get dark soon. We might go down to the terrace to watch the sun sink. Where is Henry?

He ought to be bringing us some punch. The Archer Plantation punch, Miss Shore — wait till you taste it. One secret ingredient, my father always said—”

Miss Izzy was happily returning to the past.

“I’ll get the punch,” said Tina, still on her feet. “Didn’t you say Hazel could have the day off? Her sister is getting married over at Tamarind Creek. Henry has taken her.”

“Then where’s the boy? Where’s what’s-his-name? Little Joseph.”

The old lady was beginning to sound petulant.

“There isn’t a boy any longer,” explained Tina patiently. “Just Hazel and Henry. As for Joseph — well, little Joseph Archer is quite grown up now, isn’t he?”

“Of course he is! I didn’t mean that Joseph — he came to see me the other day. Wasn’t there another boy called Joseph? Perhaps that was before the war. My father had a stable boy—”

“I’ll get the rum punch.” Tina vanished swiftly and gracefully.

“Pretty creature,” murmured Miss Izzy after her. “Archer blood.

It always shows. They do say the best-looking Bo’landers are still called Archer.”

But when Tina returned, the old lady’s mood had changed again.

“I’m cold and damp,” she declared. “I might get a chill sitting here. And soon I’m going to be all alone in the house. I hate being left alone. Ever since I was a little girl I’ve hated being alone.

Everyone knows that. Tina, you have to stay to dinner. Miss Shore, you must stay, too. It’s so lonely here by the sea. What happens if someone breaks in? — Don’t frown, there are plenty of bad people about. That’s one thing that hasn’t gotten better since independence.”

“Of course I’m staying,” replied Tina easily. “I’ve arranged it with Hazel.” Jemima was wondering guiltily if she, too, ought to stay.

But it was the night of her hotel’s weekly party on the beach — barbecue followed by dancing to a steel band. Jemima, who loved to dance in the Northern Hemisphere, was longing to try it here. Dancing under the stars by the sea sounded idyllic. Did Miss Izzy really need extra company? Her eyes met those of Tina Archer across the old lady’s straw-hatted head. Tina shook her head slightly.

After a sip of the famous rum punch — whatever the secret ingredient, it was the strongest she had yet tasted on the island — Jemima was able to make her escape. In any case, the punch was having a manifestly relaxing effect on Miss Izzy herself. She became rapidly quite tipsy and Jemima wondered how long she would actually stay awake. The next time they met must be in the freshness of a morning.

Jemima drove away just as the enormous red sun was rushing down below the horizon. The beat of the waves from the shore pursued her. Archer Plantation House was set in a lonely position on its own spit of land at the end of its own long avenue. She could hardly blame Miss Izzy for not wanting to be abandoned there. Jemima listened to the sound of the waves until the very different noise of the steel band in the next village along the shore took over.

That transferred her thoughts temporarily from recent events at Archer Plantation House to the prospect of her evening ahead. One way or another, for a brief space of time, she would stop thinking altogether about Miss Isabella Archer.

That was because the beach party was at first exactly what Jemima had expected — relaxed, good-natured, and noisy. She found her cares gradually floating away as she danced and danced again with a series of partners, English, American, and Bo’lander, to the beat of the steel band. That rum punch of Miss Izzy’s, with its secret ingredient, must have been lethal because its effects seemed to stay with her for hours. She decided she didn’t even need the generous profferings of the hotel mixture — a good deal weaker than Miss Izzy’s beneath its lavish surface scattering of nutmeg. Others, however, decided that the hotel punch was exactly what they did need.

All in all, it was already a very good party long before the sliver of the new moon became visible over the now-black waters of the Caribbean. Jemima, temporarily alone, tilted back her head as she stood by the lapping waves at the edge of the beach and fixed the moon in her sights.

“You going to wish on that new little moon?” She turned. A tall man — at least a head taller than she was — was standing beside her on the sand. She had not heard him, the gentle noise of the waves masking his approach. For a moment she didn’t recognize Joseph Archer in his loose flowered shirt and long white trousers, so different did he look from the fisherman encountered that noon at the graveside.

In this way it came about that the second part of the beach party was quite unexpected, at least from Jemima’s point of view.

“I ought to wish. I ought to wish to make a good program, I suppose. That would be a good, professional thing to do.”

“Miss Izzy Archer and all that?”

“Miss Izzy, Archer Plantation House, Bow Island — to say nothing of the Archer Tomb, old Sir Valentine, and all that.” She decided not to mention Tina Archer and all that for the time being.

“All that!” He sighed. “Listen, Jemima — it’s good, this band. We’re saying it’s about the best on the island these days. Let’s be dancing, shall we? Then you and me can talk about all that in the morning. In my office, you know.”

It was the distinct authority with which Joseph Archer spoke quite as much as the mention of his office which intrigued Jemima. Before she lost herself still further in the rhythm of the dance — which she had a feeling that with Joseph Archer to help her she was about to do — she must find out just what he meant. And, for that matter, just who he was.

The second question was easily answered. It also provided the answer to the first. Joseph Archer might or might not go fishing from time to time when he was off-duty, but he was also a member of the newly formed Bo’lander government. Quite an important one, in fact. Important in the eyes of the world in general, and particularly important in the eyes of jemima Shore, Investigator. For Joseph Archer was the minister dealing with tourism, his brief extending to such matters as conservation, the Bo’lander historic heritage, and — as he described it to her—“the future National Archer Plantation House Museum.”

Once again it didn’t seem the appropriate moment to mention Tina Archer and her possible future ownership of the plantation house. As Joseph himself had said, the morning would do for all that. In his office in Bowtown.

They danced on for a while, and it was as jemima had suspected it would be: something to lose herself in, perhaps dangerously so.

The tune to “This is my island in the sun” was played and Jemima never once heard the graveyard words in her imagination. Then Joseph Archer, most politely and apparently regretfully, said he had to leave. He had an extremely early appointment — and not with a fish, either, he added with a smile. Jemima felt a pang which she hoped didn’t show. But there was plenty of time, wasn’t there? There would be other nights and other parties, other nights on the beach as the moon waxed to full in the two weeks she had before she must return to England.

Jemima’s personal party stopped, but the rest of the celebration went on late into the night, spilling onto the sands, even into the sea, long after the sliver of the moon had vanished. Jemima, sleeping fitfully and visited by dreams in which Joseph Archer, Tina, and Miss Izzy executed some kind of elaborate dance, not at all like the kind of island jump-up she had recently been enjoying, heard the noise in the distance.

Far away on Archer Plantation’s lonely peninsula, the peace was broken not by a steel band but by the rough sound of the waves bashing against the rocks at its farthest point. A stranger might have been surprised to see that the lights were still on in the great drawing room, the shutters having been drawn back once the sun was gone, but nobody born on Bow Island — a fisherman out to sea, for example — would have found it at all odd. Everyone knew that Miss Izzy Archer was frightened of the dark and liked to go to bed with all her lights blazing. Especially when Hazel had gone to her sister’s wedding and Henry had taken her there — another fact of island life which most Bo’landers would have known.

In her room overlooking the sea, tossing in the big four-poster bed in which she had been born over eighty years ago, Miss Izzy, like Jemima Shore, slept fitfully. After a while, she got out of bed and went to one of the long windows. Jemima would have found her nightclothes, like her swimming costume, bizarre, for Miss Izzy wasn’t wearing the kind of formal Victorian nightdress which might have gone with the house. Rather, she was “using up,” as she quaintly put it, her father’s ancient burgundy-silk pajamas, purchased many aeons ago in Jermyn Street. And as the last Sir John Archer, Baronet, had been several feet taller than his plump little daughter, the long trouser legs trailed on the floor behind her.

Miss Izzy continued to stare out of the window. Her gaze followed the direction of the terrace, which led in a series of parterres, once grandly planted, now overgrown, down to the rocks and the sea.

Although the waters themselves were mostly blackness, the Caribbean night was not entirely dark. Besides, the light from the drawing-room windows streamed out onto the nearest terrace. Miss Izzy rubbed her eyes, then she turned back into the bedroom, where the celebrated oil painting of Sir Valentine hung over the mantelpiece dominated the room. Rather confusedly — she must have drunk far too much of that punch — she decided that her ancestor was trying to encourage her to be valiant in the face of danger for the first time in her life. She, little Isabella Archer, spoilt and petted Izzy, his last legitimate descendant — no, not his last legitimate descendant, but the habits of a lifetime were difficult to break — was being spurred on to something courageous by the hawklike gaze of the fierce old autocrat.

But I’m so old, thought Miss Izzy. Then: But not too old. Once you let people know you’re not, after all, a coward—

She looked out of the window once more. The effects of the punch were wearing off. Now she was quite certain of what she was seeing.

Something dark, darkly clad, dark-skinned — What did it matter, someone dark had come out of the sea and was now proceeding silently in the direction of the house.

I must be brave, thought Miss Izzy. She said aloud: “Then he’ll be proud of me. His brave girl.” Whose brave girl? No, not Sir Valentine’s — Daddy’s brave girl. Her thoughts began to float away again into the past. I wonder if Daddy will take me on a swim with him to celebrate?

Miss Izzy started to go downstairs. She had just reached the door of the drawing room and was standing looking into the decaying red-velvet interior, still brightly illuminated, at the moment when the black-clad intruder stepped into the room through the open window.

Even before the intruder began to move softly toward her, dark-gloved hands outstretched, Miss Izzy Archer knew without doubt in her rapidly beating old heart that Archer Plantation, the house in which she had been born, was also the house in which she was about to die.

“Miss Izzy Archer is dead. Some person went and killed her last night. A robber, maybe.” It was Joseph Archer who broke the news to Jemima the next morning.

He spoke across the broad desk of his formal office in Bowtown.

His voice was hollow and distant, only the Bo’lander sing-song to connect him with Jemima’s handsome dancing partner of the night before. In his short-sleeved but official-looking white shirt and dark trousers, he looked once again completely different from the cheerful ragged fisherman Jemima had first encountered. This was indeed the rising young Bo’lander politician she was seeing: a member of the newly formed government of Bow Island. Even the tragic fact of the death — the murder, as it seemed — of an old lady seemed to strike no chord of emotion in him.

Then Jemima looked again and saw what looked suspiciously like tears in Joseph Archer’s eyes.

“I just heard myself, you know. The Chief of Police, Sandy Marlow, is my cousin.” He didn’t attempt to brush away the tears. If that was what they were. But the words were presumably meant as an explanation. Of what? Of shock? Grief? Shock he must surely have experienced, but grief? Jemima decided at this point that she could at least inquire delicately about his precise relationship to Miss Izzy.

It came back to her that he had visited the old lady the week previously,” if Miss Izzy’s rather vague words concerning “Little Joseph” were to be trusted. She was thinking not so much of a possible blood relationship as some other kind of connection. After all, Joseph Archer himself had dismissed the former idea in the graveyard. His words about Sir Valentine and his numerous progeny came back to her: “Don’t pay too much attention to the stories.

Otherwise, how come we’re not all living in that fine old Archer Plantation House?” At which Greg Harrison had commented with such fury: “Instead of merely my ex-wife.” The exchange made more sense to her now, of course, that she knew of the position of Tina Harrison, now Tina Archer, in Miss Izzy’s will.

The will! Tina would now inherit! And she would inherit in the light of a will signed the very morning of the day of Miss Izzy’s death. Clearly, Joseph had been correct when he dismissed the claim of the many Bo’landers called Archer to be descended in any meaningful fashion from Sir Valentine. There was already a considerable difference between Tina, the allegedly sole legitimate descendant other than Miss Izzy, and the rest of the Bo’lander Archers. In the future, with Tina come into her inheritance, the gap would widen even more.

It was extremely hot in Joseph’s office. It was not so much that Bow Island was an unsophisticated place as that the persistent breeze made air-conditioning generally unnecessary. The North American tourists who were beginning to request air-conditioning in the hotels, reflected Jemima, would only succeed in ruining the most perfect kind of natural ventilation. But a government office in Bowtown was rather different. A huge fan in the ceiling made the papers on Joseph’s desk stir uneasily. Jemima felt a ribbon of sweat trickle down beneath her long loose white T-shirt, which she had belted as a dress to provide some kind of formal attire to call on a Bo’lander minister in working hours.

By this time, Jemima’s disbelieving numbness on the subject of Miss Izzy’s murder was wearing off. She was struck by the frightful poignancy of that last encounter in the decaying grandeur of Archer Plantation House. Worse still, the old lady’s pathetic fear of loneliness was beginning to haunt her. Miss Izzy had been so passionate in her determination not to be abandoned. “Ever since I was a little girl I’ve hated being alone. Everyone knows that. It’s so lonely here by the sea. What happens if someone breaks in?”

Well, someone had broken in. Or so it was presumed. Joseph Archer’s words: “A robber, maybe.” And this robber — maybe — had killed the old lady in the process.

Jemima began hesitantly: “I’m so sorry, Joseph. What a ghastly tragedy! You knew her? Well, I suppose everyone round here must have known her—”

“All the days of my life, since I was a little boy. My mama was one of her maids. Just a little thing herself, and then she died. She’s in that churchyard, you know, in a corner. Miss Izzy was very good to me when my mama died, oh, yes. She was kind. Now you’d think that independence, our independence, would be hard for an old lady like her, but Miss Izzy she just liked it very much. ‘England’s no good to me any more, Joseph,’ she said, ‘I’m a Bo’lander just like the rest of you.’”

“You saw her last week, I believe. Miss Izzy told me that herself.”

Joseph gazed at Jemima steadily — the emotion had vanished. “I went to talk with her, yes. She had some foolish idea of changing her mind about things. Just a fancy, you know. But that’s over. May she rest in peace, little old Miss Izzy. We’ll have our National Museum now, that’s for sure, and we’ll remember her with it. It’ll make a good museum for our history. Didn’t they tell you in London, Jemima?” There was pride in his voice as he concluded: “Miss Izzy left everything in her will to the people of Bow Island.”

Jemima swallowed hard. Was it true? Or rather, was it still true?

Had Miss Izzy really signed a new will yesterday? She had been quite circumspect on the subject, mentioning someone called Thompson — her lawyer, no doubt — who thought there would be

“trouble” as a result. “Joseph,” she said, “Tina Archer was up at Archer Plantation House yesterday afternoon, too.”

“Oh, that girl, the trouble she made, tried to make. Tina and her stories and her fine education and her history. And she’s so pretty!”

Joseph’s tone was momentarily violent but he finished more calmly.

“The police are waiting at the hospital. She’s not speaking yet, she’s not even conscious.” Then even more calmly: “She’s not so pretty now, I hear. That robber beat her, you see.”

It was hotter than ever in the Bowtown office and even the papers on the desk were hardly stirring in the waft of the fan. Jemima saw Joseph’s face swimming before her. She absolutely must not faint — she never fainted. She concentrated desperately on what Joseph Archer was telling her, the picture he was recreating of the night of the murder. The shock of learning that Tina Archer had also been present in the house when Miss Izzy was killed was irrational, she realized that. Hadn’t Tina promised the old lady she would stay with her?

Joseph was telling her that Miss Izzy’s body had been found in the drawing room by the cook, Hazel, returning from her sister’s wedding at first light. It was a grisly touch that because Miss Izzy was wearing red-silk pajamas — her daddy’s — and all the furnishings of the drawing room were dark-red as well, poor Hazel had not at first realized the extent of her mistress’s injuries. Not only was there blood everywhere, there was water, too — pools of it.

Whatever — whoever — had killed Miss Izzy had come out of the sea.

Wearing rubber shoes — or flippers — and probably gloves as well.

A moment later, Hazel was in no doubt about what had hit Miss Izzy. The club, still stained with blood, had been left lying on the floor of the front hall. (She herself, deposited by Henry, had originally entered by the kitchen door.) The club, although not of Bo’lander manufacture, belonged to the house. It was a relic, African probably, of Sir John Archer’s travels in other parts of the former British Em-pire, and hung heavy and short-handled on the drawing-room wall.

Possibly Sir John had in mind to wield it against unlawful intruders but to Miss Izzy it had been simply one more family memento. She never touched it. Now it had killed her.

“No prints anywhere,” Joseph said. “So far.”

“And Tina?” asked Jemima with dry lips. The idea of the pools of water stagnant on the floor of the drawing room mingled with Miss Izzy’s blood reminded her only too vividly of the old lady when last seen — soaking wet in her bizarre swimming costume, defiantly sitting down on her own sofa.

“The robber ransacked the house. Even the cellar. The champagne cases Miss Izzy boasted about must have been too heavy, though.

He drank some rum. The police don’t know yet what he took — silver snuff-boxes maybe, there were plenty of those about.” Joseph sighed.

“Then he went upstairs.”

“And found Tina?”

“In one of the bedrooms. He didn’t hit her with the same weapon — lucky for her, as he’d have killed her just like he killed Miss Izzy. He left that downstairs and picked up something a good deal lighter. Probably didn’t reckon on seeing her or anyone there at all. ’Cept for Miss Izzy, that is. Tina must have surprised him.

Maybe she woke up. Robbers — well, all I can say is that robbers here don’t generally go and kill people unless they’re frightened.”

Without warning, Joseph slumped down in front of her and put his head in his hands. He murmured something like: “When we find who did it to Miss Izzy—”

It wasn’t until the next day that Tina Archer was able to speak I even haltingly to the police. Like most of the rest of the Bow Island population, Jemima Shore was informed of the fact almost immediately.

Claudette, manageress of her hotel, a sympathetic if loquacious character, just happened to have a niece who was a nurse. But that was the way information always spread about the island — no need for newspapers or radio, this private telegraph was far more efficient.

Jemima had spent the intervening twenty-four hours swimming rather aimlessly, sunbathing, and making little tours of the island in her Mini. She was wondering at what point she should inform Megalith Television of the brutal way in which her projected program had been terminated and make arrangements to return to London.

After a bit, the investigative instinct, that inveterate curiosity which would not be stilled, came to the fore. She found she was speculating all the time about Miss Izzy’s death. A robber? A robber who had also tried to kill Tina Archer? Or a robber who had merely been surprised by her presence in the house? What connection, if any, had all this with Miss Izzy’s will?

The will again. But that was one thing Jemima didn’t have to speculate about for very long. For Claudette, the manageress, also just happened to be married to the brother of Hazel, Miss Izzy’s cook. In this way, Jemima was apprised — along with the rest of Bow Island, no doubt — that Miss Izzy had indeed signed a new will down in Bowtown on the morning of her death, that Eddie Thompson, the solicitor, had begged her not to do it, that Miss Izzy had done it, that Miss Izzy had still looked after Hazel all right, as she had promised (and Henry who had worked for her even longer), and that some jewelry would go to a cousin in England, “seeing as Miss Izzy’s mother’s jewels were in an English bank anyway since long back.”

But for the rest, well, there would be no National Bo’lander Museum now, that was for sure. Everything else — that fine old Archer Plantation House, Miss Izzy’s fortune, reputedly enormous but who knew for sure? — would go to Tina Archer.

If she recovered, of course. But the latest cautious bulletin from Claudette via the niece-who-was-a-nurse, confirmed by a few other loquacious people on the island, was that Tina Archer was recovering.

The police had already been able to interview her. In a few days she would be able to leave the hospital. And she was determined to attend Miss Izzy’s funeral, which would be held, naturally enough, in that little English-looking church with its incongruous tropical vegetation overlooking the sunny grave. For Miss Izzy had long ago made clear her own determination to be buried in the Archer Tomb along with Governor Sir Valentine and “his only wife, Isabella.”

“As the last of the Archers. But she still had to get permission since it’s a national monument. And of course the government couldn’t do enough for her. So they gave it. Then. Ironic, isn’t it?”

The speaker making absolutely no attempt to conceal her disgust was Coralie Harrison. “And now we learn that she wasn’t the last of the Archers, not officially, and we shall have the so-called Miss Tina Archer as chief mourner. And while the Bo’lander government desperately looks for ways to get round the will and grab the house for their precious museum, nobody quite had the bad taste to go ahead and say no — no burial in the

Archer Tomb for naughty old Miss Izzy. Since she hasn’t, after all, left the people of Bow Island a penny.”

“It should be an interesting occasion,” Jemima murmured. She was sitting with Coralie Harrison under the conical thatched roof of the hotel’s beach bar. This was where she first danced, then sat out with Joseph Archer on the night of the new moon — the night Miss Izzy had been killed. Now the sea sparkled under the sun as though there were crystals scattered on its surface. Today there were no waves at all and the happy water-skiers crossed and recrossed the wide bay with its palm-fringed shore. Enormous brown pelicans perched on some stakes which indicated where rocks lay. Every now and then, one would take off like an unwieldy airplane and fly slowly and inquisitively over the heads of the swimmers. It was a tranquil, even an idyllic scene, but somewhere in the distant peninsula lay Archer Plantation House, not only shuttered but now, she imagined, also sealed by the police.

Coralie had sauntered up to the bar from the beach. She traversed the few yards with seeming casualness — all Bo’landers frequently exercised their right to promenade along the sands unchecked (as in most Caribbean islands, no one owned any portion of the beach in Bow Island, even outside the most stately mansion like Archer Plantation House, except the people). Jemima, however, was in no doubt that this was a planned visit. She had not forgotten that first meeting, and Coralie’s tentative approach to her, interrupted by Greg’s peremptory cry.

It was the day after the inquest on Miss Izzy’s death. Her body had been released by the police and the funeral would soon follow.

Jemima admitted to herself that she was interested enough in the whole Archer family, and its various branches, to want to attend it, quite apart from the tenderness she felt for the old lady herself, based on that brief meeting. To Megalith Television, in a telex from Bowtown, she had spoken merely of tying up a few loose ends resulting from the cancellation of her program.

There had been an open verdict at the inquest. Tina Archer’s evidence in a sworn statement had not really contributed much that wasn’t known or suspected already. She had been asleep upstairs in one of the many fairly derelict bedrooms kept ostensibly ready for guests. The bedroom chosen for her by Miss Izzy had not faced onto the sea. The chintz curtains in this back room, bearing some dated rosy pattern from a remote era, weren’t quite so bleached and tattered since they had been protected from the sun and salt.

Miss Izzy had gone to bed in good spirits, reassured by the fact that Tina Archer was going to spend the night. She had drunk several more rum punches and had offered to have Henry fetch some of her father’s celebrated champagne from the cellar. As a matter of fact, Miss Izzy often made this offer after a few draughts of punch, but Tina reminded her that Henry was away and the subject was dropped.

In her statement, Tina said she had no clue as to what might have awakened the old lady and induced her to descend the stairs — it was right out of character in her own opinion. Isabella Archer was a lady of independent mind but notoriously frightened of the dark, hence Tina’s presence at the house in the first place. As to her own recollection of the attack, Tina had so far managed to dredge very few of the details from her memory — the blow to the back of the head had temporarily or permanently expunged all the immediate circumstances from her consciousness. She had a vague idea that there had been a bright light, but even that was rather confused and might be part of the blow she had suffered. Basically, she could remember nothing between going to bed in the tattered, rose-patterned four-poster and waking up in hospital.

Coralie’s lip trembled. She bowed her head and sipped at her long drink through a straw — she and Jemima were drinking some exotic mixture of fruit juice, alcohol-free, invented by Matthew, the barman.

There was a wonderful soft breeze coming in from the sea and Coralie was dressed in a loose flowered cotton dress, but she looked hot and angry. “Tina schemed for everything all her life and now she’s got it. That’s what I wanted to warn you about that morning in the churchyard — don’t trust Tina Archer, I wanted to say. Now it’s too late, she’s got it all. When she was married to Greg, I tried to like her, Jemima, honestly I did. Little Tina, so cute and so clever, but always trouble—”

“Joseph Archer feels rather the same way about her, I gather,”

Jemima said. Was it her imagination or did Coralie’s face soften slightly at the sound of Joseph’s name?

“Does he? I’m glad. He fancied her, too, once upon a time. She is quite pretty.” Their eyes met. “Well, not all that pretty, but if you like the type—” Jemima and Coralie both laughed. The fact was that Coralie Harrison was quite appealing, if you liked her type, but Tina Archer was ravishing by any standards.

“Greg absolutely loathes her now, of course,” Coralie continued firmly, “especially since he heard the news about the will. When we met you that morning up at the church he’d just been told. Hence, well, I’m sorry, but he was very rude, wasn’t he?”

“More hostile than rude.” But Jemima had begun to work out the timing. “You mean your brother knew about the will before Miss Izzy was killed?” she exclaimed.

“Oh, yes. Someone from Eddie Thompson’s office told Greg — Daisy Marlow, maybe, he takes her out. Of course, we all knew it was on the cards, except we hoped Joseph had argued Miss Izzy out of it. And he would have argued her out of it given time.

That museum is everything to Joseph.”

“Your brother and Miss Izzy — that wasn’t an easy relationship, I gather.”

Jemima thought she was using her gentlest and most persuasive interviewer’s voice, but Coralie countered with something like defi-ance: “You sound like the police!”

“Why, have they—?”

“Well, of course they have!” Coralie answered the question before Jemima had completed it. “Everyone knows that Greg absolutely hated Miss Izzy — blamed her for breaking up his marriage, for taking little Tina and giving her ideas!”

“Wasn’t it rather the other way around — Tina delving into the family records for the museum and then my program? You said she was a schemer.”

“Oh, I know she was a schemer! But did Greg? He did not. Not then. He was besotted with her at the time, so he had to blame the old lady. They had a frightful row — very publicly. He went round to the house one night, went in by the sea, shouted at her. Hazel and Henry heard, so then everyone knew. That was when Tina told him she was going to get a divorce and throw in her lot with Miss Izzy for the future. I’m afraid my brother is rather an extreme person — his temper is certainly extreme. He made threats—”

“But the police don’t think—” Jemima stopped. It was clear what she meant.

Coralie swung her legs off the bar stool. Jemima handed her the huge straw bag with the archer logo on it and she slung it over her shoulder in proper Bo’lander fashion.

“How pretty,” Jemima commented politely.

“I sell them at the hotel on the North Point. For a living.” The remark sounded pointed. “No,” Coralie went on rapidly before Jemima could say anything more on that subject, “of course the police don’t think, as you put it. Greg might have assaulted Tina — but Greg kill Miss Izzy when he knew perfectly well that by so doing he was handing his ex-wife a fortune? No way. Not even the Bo’lander police would believe that.”

That night Jemima Shore found Joseph Archer again on the beach under the stars. But the moon had waxed since their first encounter.

Now it was beginning to cast a silver pathway on the waters of the night. Nor was this meeting unplanned as that first one had been.

Joseph had sent her a message that he would be free and they had agreed to meet down by the bar.

“What do you say I’ll take you on a night drive round our island, Jemima?”

“No. Let’s be proper Bo’landers and walk along the sands.” Jemima wanted to be alone with him, not driving past the rows of lighted tourist hotels, listening to the eternal beat of the steel bands.

She felt reckless enough not to care how Joseph himself would interpret this change of plan.

They walked for some time along the edge of the sea, in silence except for the gentle lap of the waves. After a while, Jemima took off her sandals and splashed through the warm receding waters, and a little while after that Joseph took her hand and led her back onto the sand. The waves grew conspicuously rougher as they rounded the point of the first wide bay. They stood for a moment together, Joseph and Jemima, he with his arm companionably round her waist.

“Jemima, even without that new moon, I’m going to wish—” Then Joseph stiffened. He dropped the encircling arm, grabbed her shoulder, and swung her around. “Jesus, oh sweet Jesus, do you see that?”

The force of his gesture made Jemima wince. For a moment she was distracted by the flickering moonlit swathe on the dark surface of the water. There were multitudinous white — silver — horses out beyond the land where high waves were breaking over an outcrop of rocks. She thought Joseph was pointing out to sea. Then she saw the lights.

“The Archer house!” she cried. “I thought it was shut up!” It seemed that all the lights of the house were streaming out across the promontory on which it lay. Such was the illumination that you might have supposed some great ball was in progress, a thousand candles lit as in the days of Governor Archer. More somberly, Jemima realized that was how the plantation house must have looked on the night of Miss Izzy’s death. Tina Archer and others had borne witness to the old lady’s insistence on never leaving her house in darkness. The night her murderer had come in from the sea, this is how the house must have looked to him.

“Come on!” said Joseph. The moment of lightness — or loving, perhaps? — had utterly vanished. He sounded both grim and determined.

“To the police?”

“No, to the house. I need to know what’s happening there.”

As they half ran along the sands, Joseph said, “This house should have been ours.”

Ours: the people of Bow Island.

His restlessness on the subject of the museum struck Jemima anew since her conversation with Coralie Harrison. What would a man — or a woman, for that matter — do for an inheritance? And there was more than one kind of inheritance. Wasn’t a national heritage as important to some people as a personal inheritance to others? Joseph Archer was above all a patriotic Bo’lander. And he had not known of the change of will on the morning after Miss Izzy’s death. She herself had evidence of that. Might a man like Joseph Archer, a man who had already risen in his own world by sheer determination, decide to take the law into his own hands in order to secure the museum for his people while there was still time?

But to kill the old lady who had befriended him as a boy? Batter her to death? As he strode along, so tall in the moonlight, Joseph was suddenly a complete and thus menacing enigma to Jemima.

They had reached the promontory, had scrambled up the rocks, and had got as far as the first terrace when all the lights in the house went out. It was as though a switch had been thrown. Only the cold eerie glow of the moon over the sea behind them remained to illuminate the bushes, now wildly overgrown, and the sagging balus-trades.

But Joseph strode on, helping Jemima up the flights of stone steps, some of them deeply cracked and uneven. In the darkness, Jemima could just see that the windows of the drawing room were still open.

There had to be someone in there behind the ragged red-brocade curtains which had been stained by Miss Izzy’s blood.

Joseph, holding Jemima’s hand, pulled her through the center window.

There was a short cry like a suppressed scream and then a low sound, as if someone was laughing at them there in the dark. An instant later, all the lights were snapped on at once.

Tina was standing at the door, her hand at the switch. She wore a white bandage on her head like a turban — and she wasn’t laughing, she was sobbing.

“Oh, it’s you, Jo-seph and Je-mi-ma Shore.” For the first time, Jemima was aware of the sing-song Bo’lander note in Tina’s voice. “I was so fright-ened.”

“Are you all right, Tina?” asked Jemima hastily, to cover the fact that she had been quite severely frightened herself. The atmosphere of angry tension between the two other people in the room, so different in looks yet both of them, as it happened, called Archer, was almost palpable. She felt she was in honor bound to try to relieve it.

“Are you all alone?”

“The police said I could come.” Tina ignored the question. “They have finished with everything here. And besides—” her terrified sobs had vanished, there was something deliberately provocative about her as she moved toward them “why ever not?” To neither of them did she need to elaborate. The words “since it’s all mine”

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.

Another small casualty, much less important, was the romance which just might have developed between Joseph Archer and Jemima Shore. Now, in his steamingly hot office with its perpetually moving fan, they talked of quite other things than the new moon and new wishes.

“You must be happy you’ll get your museum,” said Jemima.

“But that’s not at all the way I wanted it to happen,” he replied.

Then Joseph added: “But you know, Jemima, there has been justice done. And in her heart of hearts Miss Izzy did really want us to have this National Museum. I’d have talked her round to good sense again if she had lived.”

“That’s why they acted when they did. They didn’t dare wait given Miss Izzy’s respect for you,” suggested Jemima. She stopped but her curiosity got the better of her. There was one thing she had to know before she left. “The Archer Tomb and all that. Tina being descended from Sir Valentine’s lawful second marriage. Is that true?”

“Yes, it’s true. Maybe. But it’s not important to most of us here.

You know something, Jemima? I, too, am descended from that well-known second marriage. Maybe. And a few others maybe. Lucie Anne had two children, don’t forget, and Bo’landers have large families. It was important to Tina Archer, not to me. That’s not what I want. That’s all past. Miss Izzy was the last of the Archers, so far as I’m concerned. Let her lie in her tomb.”

“What do you want for yourself? Or for Bow Island, if you prefer.”

Joseph smiled and there was a glimmer there of the handsome fisherman who had welcomed her to Bow Island, the cheerful dancing partner. “Come back to Bow Island one day, Jemima. Make another program about us, our history and all that, and I’ll tell you then.”

“I might just do that,” said Jemima Shore.