the village and along the track to the fields, turning up the path to Sophia’s cottage and demanding that Astrid come out.
Sophia emerged, said Astrid was in bed; what did they want?
You know, they shouted. Come out.
There is no reason, no charge, no cause, said Sophia. Leave my property. Now.
Why weren’t you there, fighting the fire!
What fire? asked Sophia, concerned.
Ask the ancestors! someone shouted. Didn’t they warn you?
Ask Astrid! yelled another. Astrid knows!
The mayor arrived, and Officer Bardelli.
Arrest Astrid, the men said. Enough is enough! She will burn all our boats, she will kill us all! She is crazy, a man-hater.
She is not crazy, she has been hurt, said Sophia.
Hurt! raged the men. Hurt! Look how she hurts us! We’ll show her hurt!
It’s unnatural what the two of you do! blurted one.
Tell these men to get off my property, said Sophia quietly to Officer Dorado Bardelli. Officer Bardelli looked at the mayor.
We will have to take Astrid to the office for questioning, said the mayor. Just a few questions from the council. And an examination. By the doctor.
Jojo Schoones was the one who saw her run out of the back door and away up the mountain, and they were off, thirty-four men after one woman, mad they all were, mad with rage and history and blame and revenge.
Astrid knew the mountain well after years of trying to escape, she knew her way even in the dark; but the sun was already prising open the lid of cloud, the sun was shining on her red crown of hair, red like fire against the black laval rock, as she ran for what felt like her life.
They could have waited for her; they could have gone home to drink coffee and clean up, they could have waited until Astrid came down the mountain of her own accord, cold and tired and hungry. By then the tempest of tempers would have died down, by then they might have discovered that Danny Schoones had drunkenly fallen asleep in the boat shed with a burning cigarette falling from his fingers. The detail of that evening was gone – it was one of many nights in his life that he would never recall; but he was told, on finding himself in hospital being treated by Sister Veronica for burns to his face and hands, that he was a hero for being injured while fighting the fire. He was pleased to have been of service, sorry he hadn’t been in time to save the boats.
They didn’t wait, they were after her like hounds baying for blood. They say Astrid slipped and fell at Ike’s Gully, that Jojo Schoones and Nelson Peters tried to save her, poor mad girl, that the two men tried to prevent her from jumping, but they were too late.
Chapter Eight
“This is monstrous!” paced the mayor. “Right before the elections!”
Nelson stared at his boots, which were peeling a rim of drying mud onto the mayoral office carpet. Dorado closed the blinds and wished that Clarence would keep his voice down. She had never seen Clarence’s younger son like this – struck weak by a vision, run through with shock.
“I’ll get Mannie to come with me, and the doctor,” she said, feeling ill at the thought of collecting blood and bone, at the thought of the spirit of mad, wild Astrid forever gone. “You go home and get some rest, Nelson.”
“Stupid, stupid girl!” Clarence pulled hard at his lower lip, reining himself in. “Look, my boy, you did the right thing, coming to me before the rumours get going. What’s happened has happened. The autopsy will set things straight. I’ll have a word with Orion.”
Clarence tugged open the blinds with such force they jumped and jangled. “Only one grave left,” he worried, glaring at Elijah Mobara trundling past with his barrow.
“We’ll look into opening up ground for the new cemetery,” consoled Dorado. “I’ll add that to tomorrow’s agenda.”
“You better,” Clarence warned, “Or the dead’ll be buried at sea.”
Across the road, a tall woman in black appeared, striding towards the hospital, her greying hair swept back into a knot, several children pulled into her wake. He swung on Dorado. “It’s that Sophia,” he railed, “causing trouble again, obstructing the peace! If she hadn’t defied the doctor’s instruction, none of this would’ve happened! That girl needed professional help.”
“She should’ve gone to the mainland,” agreed Dorado, trying to placate.
“Sophia is an obstruction! A remnant of the old days. Remember that business with old Rozi Bagonata? This damn woman dealing in boiled herbs and charms had a nerve, brazenly telling the doctor it was Rozi’s time to die!”
Nelson expelled a sudden, disparaging chestful of air, relieved the focus was not on him, eager it should remain so. “The doctor put her right. Sophia hasn’t midwived a baby at home or anywhere else in years.”
Clarence’s brow smouldered round the problem. “With Astrid, she’s gone too far.”
“You heard, she was going with that girl,” Nelson stoked.
“Imagine!” Something flared in Clarence’s face that terrified Dorado. “That a middle-aged woman would seduce an unstable girl! There was a time she could’ve had pretty much any man on the island.”
“Perhaps that was her problem all the time,” offered Nelson. “You know. Lesbian.”
The conflagration leaping in Clarence’s features made a small explosion in the back of his throat. His hand moved underneath his cardigan and fiddled with his navel. There was a way of salvaging the situation. He took a deep breath. “Now there’s a death on her hands,” he noted quietly. “Dorado, you’ll be with me on this in the council meeting. She has to go.”
* * *
Orion looked at the young woman lying on the mortuary table, at her face stark beneath her matted red hair, slivers of glass-green eyes showing beneath the drape of her pale eyelids. Her jersey was tinged with blood from the laceration in her scalp and her right foot lay at an unnatural angle. He put his gloved palms on her iliac crests, pushed down with the weight of his body and felt the give. Pelvic fracture. She had fallen from a height onto rocks. Accidental death caused by bleeding into a pelvic fracture and/or head injury. No need to look further.
He pulled off the gloves. Nothing more required here except to get Nelson in to do the necessary. It bothered him, this crazy mixed-up island where the butcher doubled as undertaker. Wouldn’t be allowed in a civilised place. But Nelson was the mayor’s son and Jerome’s brother, and thereby related to two of the most influential men on the island; there was nothing to be done about it.
He filled in the death certificate. It made him angry. This girl should have been in one of the institutions on the mainland. She could have done well. With recent advances in psychiatric medication, bipolar disorder was not the problem it used to be. This was a tragedy. But what could one do? To commit her required parental consent, and the mother would have none of it. He wondered how she felt now, having chosen to put her psychotic daughter in the care of a charlatan. That choice should not have been there in the first place. That’s why, in civilised countries, there were peer-review councils, medical boards, licences to practise. Guardians of the basic standards were essential. People needed to be protected against fraudsters taking advantage of a primitive propensity for magical thinking. Rule and science prevented anarchy and quackery, they allowed people to sleep peacefully in their beds.
He looked again at the body. Death looked so extraordinary, so unnatural. One moment the body animated, responsive, electrical circuits firing and in order; next, this bag of flesh and bone. He could never get used to it. It was a failure, a giving up. He felt a sudden anger towards Angelique. She had given up on him, she had reneged on her responsibility to bring up their child, to be a partner to him into his old age.
He