For Death Comes Softly (4 page)

I watched Robin Davey eat his dinner and fortunately was not actually force-fed by Mrs Cotley, who was probably so thin because she was so busy feeding up everybody who came into her clutches that she never had time to eat anything herself, although she did express some concern about my not having eaten for at least an hour.

Soon after Robin returned to whatever it was he was doing at the farm, Jason Tucker and his father Frank arrived as promised.

Mrs Cotley led them into the drawing room to me as if I were some ancient dowager aunt granting an audience, which at once made me feel at a disadvantage even though the company was hardly overbearing. Frank Tucker was a small scraggy man. His sinewy arms protruded from rolled-up woollen shirt sleeves and his trousers flapped around exceptionally skinny legs. Strange that he had fathered so strapping a son. Both men looked red-faced and uneasy, although they couldn't have been more uneasy than me.

‘Miss, 'e's a good boy, my Jason, but 'e should have knowed better than to do what 'e did,' said Frank, in an accent much broader than his son's, but a voice just as soft and gentle. His blue eyes, bright as Robin Davey's, shone earnestly out of a sharp-featured brown leather face. ‘'E knows he mustn't take no one out in thigee boat. Don't ee boy?'

Jason nodded shamefacedly. ‘I thought I was better, miss, honest I did,' he said. ‘I hadn't had a turn, oh, not for two years nor more, 'ad I, father?'

His father eagerly nodded his agreement.

‘It's all right,' I heard myself say. ‘Just one of those things.'

Abri was a holiday island. As a guest there I had been put in extreme danger. The island came under the same rules and regulations as any mainland hotel, and I knew perfectly well that the responsible thing to do was to report the incident to the Health and Safety Executive in Exeter, and leave it to them to ensure that nobody else was ever put in similar danger.

I suppose I also already knew that I was not going to cause trouble for Robin Davey or his people, and by the time Frank and Jason Tucker left Highpoint they must have been pretty sure of that too.

I was fascinated by Robin Davey and wanted to know more about him, which fortunately wasn't a difficult thing to do. The entire existence of Abri quite obviously revolved around him and he was the number one topic of conversation. Mrs Cotley, predictably enough, was a particularly rich source of information. Cooking and cleaning for Robin Davey was apparently what gave her life its meaning.

‘Mr Davey has been very kind,' I remarked casually to her as later that afternoon I sat in the kitchen watching her prepare yet more food. The evening meal. Two full-scale dinners were served at Highpoint House it appeared, the one served at lunchtime was called dinner and the one served around 8 p.m. was simply the evening meal.

My remark was quite enough to set Mrs Cotley off on autopilot.

‘Oh, he always is kind, a fine, fine man,' she told me. ‘The way he's coped with tragedy has been a lesson to us all. Then all these years without a wife. Not right for a man like 'e, not right at all.'

So he was unmarried was he. I gave up trying to pretend to myself that Robin Davey's marital status held no interest for me. And Mrs Cotley's reference to tragedy finally jogged my memory into some kind of sluggish activity. I began to dimly recall certain details of Davey's early life that had attracted a great deal of public attention. With little or no prompting Mrs Cotley eagerly filled in the gaps.

There had been a time when Robin Davey, the uncrowned King of Abri as he was still sometimes called, had appeared to have everything, including a wife and a little son – the heir that even in the present day and age remains obligatory for the likes of him. But the baby boy had been just a toddler when he had been taken ill with a mystery virus which also claimed his mother, and each of them had died after a devastating illness lasting several months.

“Twas a terrible time, yer on Abri,' Mrs Cotley volunteered. ‘Us 'ad to watch this lovely young man see his family being taken away from him. And then, when us found out what ‘twas that killed 'em, well, that was a fright too, I can tell 'ee.'

I remembered more clearly then. The death of Robin Davey's wife and child had become big news because they had both been early victims of AIDS, contracted from an infected supply of blood administered to Mrs Davey during childbirth. That had been over sixteen years previously. It seems incredible now, but most people hadn't even known about the existence of AIDS then, and it had only been towards the end of mother and child's lives that the truth had been learned. I had no idea how Robin Davey had dealt with such tragedy nor how he had lived his life since then, although Mrs Cotley would surely do her best to tell me with very little encouragement.

With a history like that there was little reason to assume that he would take any real interest in me. Yet I still managed to convince myself that there could be a lot more in his generosity and attentiveness than concern for my health and anxiety about what action I might take. I suppose I could be forgiven for misunderstanding, if indeed I did misunderstand. Over the next few days Robin was wonderfully kind and considerate, and quite charming company.

He managed Abri himself, the farm of almost 2000 sheep, the tourist business, the fishing activities, and the husbandry of the island's wildlife and vegetation. I quickly realised that all of this was more than a full-time occupation. Yet three afternoons in a row Robin managed to free himself for a couple of hours in order to take me to see some new point of interest on the island and to explain the history which patently so fascinated him.

I was never a keen student of history, usually finding the present to be of considerably more interest, but I had to admit that the story of Abri, certainly as related by Robin Davey, was an extraordinary one. There were signs of settlements on the island dating back to the Bronze Age, he told me. After the Battle of Hastings in 1066, Abri fell into the hands of various Norman nobles, one of whom gave the island the name it still bore.

‘It's French for “Place of Refuge”, of course,' said Robin.

There was no ‘of course' about it for me as I had always been hopeless with languages, but I tried not to let my ignorance show. Not that Robin would have noticed any reaction of mine at that moment. He was in full flight.

‘The pronunciation has become well and truly anglicised, nobody much rolls their “R”s around here, but there's no name could suit this island better,' he continued.

He grinned at me, delighting in the story he was telling, and went on to explain how, in the latter half of the thirteenth century, almost at the end of his reign, King Henry III had gained possession. It was Henry who built the now ruined castle, high above the landing beach, which had become one of Abri's most famous landmarks.

‘Can you imagine what it must have been like to live here then,' Robin enthused, his blue eyes shining, as we stood on the remaining battlements one blustery afternoon looking out to sea. He turned back to the castle, or rather the remains of it, which somehow managed to remain formidable and forbidding. ‘I'd love to restore it,' he said wistfully. ‘But I just don't have the money.'

‘I thought you Daveys were supposed to be mega rich,' I teased.

He gave a wry chuckle. ‘This island has a way of draining cash,' he said. ‘The only people who have ever flourished here have been villains. The Vikings did well enough out of Abri, they used it as a base for plundering raids to the mainland. It's been a smuggler's den in its time and a haven for pirates. But my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Ernest John Davey, was one of the richest men in England when he bought Abri in 1810. Now all we Daveys have is an overdraft and this lump of old rock.'

He stamped his foot on a granite outcrop. His words were dismissive but I was already becoming aware of the strength of his feeling for Abri.

‘You really love this place, Robin, don't you?' I said quietly.

‘I love it more than life itself,' he replied, and there was the hint of a quaver in his voice. I looked at him in mild surprise. He had a quaint turn of phrase sometimes, out of another age. I had never heard anyone talk like that before. Aware probably of my curious glance, he suddenly grinned and took me by the arm.

‘C'mon, there's loads more to see,' he said lightly, and led me off along the west coast path heading north.

He took me to the Battery, built in the mid-nineteenth century to supplement the suspect Old Lighthouse during fog by firing a round of blank shot from two eighteen-pound guns every ten minutes.

The wind was blowing the right way and we were able to sit down with our backs to the cliffside and enjoy the sun. Robin pointed out a lone seal powering through the swell below.

‘I think I've had enough of seal-spotting,' I remarked.

He laughed easily. There was no tension between us any more, and I realised that I was probably enjoying his company more than was good for me.

Further along the west side he showed me a succession of huge chasms which dramatically crisscrossed the landscape.

‘One of the island's mysteries,' he said. ‘Most of the locals believe they were caused by an earthquake three or four centuries ago, but there's no proof.'

I stepped forward as close as I dared to the edge of one and looked down the steep sides of a gaping crack which must have been over one hundred feet deep. With the toe of a walking boot I caught a couple of loose stones and they bounced and clattered their way down the rift into the very bedrock of Abri.

‘Your island is full of hidden dangers, it seems to me, Robin,' I said.

For a moment he looked startled and I laughed. One thing was certain about Robin Davey – his sense of humour had not been honed in a Bristol police station.

‘I'm joking,' I said.

His eyes crinkled. That crinkly look was beginning to become familiar to me already, and I was growing to like it more and more.

On the way back to Highpoint we passed an old tumbled-down granite building surrounded by a tangle of rusting iron debris and what appeared to be a broken stretch of railway line. I glanced at Robin enquiringly.

‘All that remains of Abri's celebrated gold-mining operation,' he told me.

‘Good God,' I responded. ‘I didn't know we were in the Klondike.'

Robin smiled. ‘There's always been gold in the west of England,' he said. ‘People often don't realise just how much. Within the last four or five years pirate diggers have illegally hacked six tons of rock off Hopes Nose in Torbay because there are veins of gold running right through the cliff. And did you know there's prospecting going on right now around Crediton?'

I couldn't help giggling at the picture that conjured up. ‘What, grizzled old timers in cowboy hats sifting for gold in the trout streams of Devon?'

Robin shook his head, ignoring my sarcastic approach.

‘Not exactly,' he said. ‘Three years ago now a company called Minmet sunk bore holes in the Crediton Trough, which is a thirty-mile rift valley, and discovered bedrock gold. There's still exploratory work going on to discover whether or not there is actually enough gold to warrant a full-scale commercial mining operation, but so far there has been every indication that there is.'

I studied the ruined old building more carefully. It looked as if there had been a big chimney at one end. Robin followed my gaze.

‘They used to smelt the gold on the spot, over charcoal raised to a tremendous heat in brick ovens, just like the Romans did, and they were great gold miners. That produced a kind of gold concentrate, very impure. The railway was used to transport the impure gold out and on to the mainland to be refined and all the necessary goods and equipment in – including the charcoal because there's never been more than scrubby woodland on Abri. Everything was winched up and down the cliffs. The easiest ways in those days.'

‘But surely there could never have been a really substantial gold-mining operation on Abri?' I asked. ‘Not an island this size in the middle of the Bristol Channel?'

‘No, although people will conquer anything to get at gold. And a substantial vein was discovered on Abri. We all know the expression, but great-great-great-great-grandfather Ernest John really did strike gold.'

‘So surely that should have made your family even richer?' I queried.

Robin shook his head. ‘Only temporarily,' he replied. ‘The vein ran out quite quickly, but Ernest John never believed it. And by the time he died in 1860 at the age of ninety, he had not only lost all that the gold mining had earned him, but also much of his original fortune as well.'

We were standing by the broken railway line now. Robin kicked at a piece of twisted iron.

‘The gold turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing in the end,' he said. ‘And that's quite a familiar story, isn't it?'

‘I think I've seen the film,' I told him.

Robin laughed. ‘More than likely,' he replied. ‘It must have been an amazing period in the island's history though. Strange to think that when it was all over the islanders just blocked up the shafts, let the grass grow over them, and went back to sheep farming. Now there's something that hasn't changed.'

We continued to walk back towards Highpoint. Then Robin told me he needed to call in at the farm to check on a sick ewe. I went along, happy just to be with him. I had no idea that this would turn out to be the last of these carefree afternoons we were to spend together. His tragic past somehow seemed to turn Robin Davey into an even more romantic figure than he may otherwise have been. My fantasy software was fully operational – marginally better than lusting after an eighteen-year-old boy who then nearly kills you, I suppose, but not a lot.