Just before the Vorde there’s a small cove in the hillside. I parked there and watched, keeping low.
The cop car had stopped on the cusp of the hill. The lights went out. I could see the three of them silhouetted in the windows, chatting for a while in the twilight. The doors opened, front and back, and they all got out. Shirley put her flashlight on first. She was watching the ground, her waxed Inverness Cape flapping in the frantic wind. She went into the radar bunker first. When she came out her shoulders were slumped. She walked slowly along the path to the Range Rover. The flashlight flicked up, catching the rope whipping under the wheels. She followed the ground markings to the tent pegs and the flat rectangle of grass. She brought her flashlight up to the ground beyond it, at the edge of the cliff. I knew she could read it all. I think I started blushing.
The vicious wind bullied her sideways, her cape snapped around her face, and, as she lifted her hands to push it down, she saw me.
“Get her!” she shouted.
I didn’t run. There’s nowhere to run on an island.
It seemed to take the police officers a long time to get to me, but I stood still, waiting, my hands out to the side. They walked us all back over to their car and we got in. They asked Shirley to explain, the way Margie and I had asked her about the Golden Lab and the septic tank. She looked at them and told them what had happened step by step. It was uncanny.
I arrived after midnight: she knew this because the visitors’ book had been signed. I crept around the headland so that the camping men wouldn’t see me, tied the rope to the door handle, and left the door open. I set the rope on the ground and covered it with leaves. Then I held the rope and waited in the dark, watching the warm lights flickering in the tent. Shirley pointed to the flattened thicket. “She waited there. Didn’t you, Alison?”
She’s so smart. It’s weird how clever she is. It must be exhausting.
“I did,” I said. I was looking at where the Range Rover was fading into the darkness, and I told them, the visitors were only here for one night. I knew they wouldn’t unpack completely, they were bound to come out for something they’d left in the car. I described how the wind changed direction, carrying the sound of the men singing towards me. How I’d crouched, rain lashing my cheeks, thinking about selfishness and anarchy and the island. I was cold, I told them, so cold that my teeth went numb when I smiled, thinking about what I would do.
I told them how I saw the light change as the tent door was unzipped. A man crept out and turned back to zip it up before making his way to the car.
After a minute, Shirley opened her door, and the rest of us followed her over to where it had happened.
“Look,” said Shirley, pointing her flashlight at the ground. “His footsteps come this way, and then there’s a flattened patch on the ground. She yanked the rope and the open door slammed into him, knocking him on his back.”
I was nodding now, yes, that’s right, Shirley, he was out cold. I dragged him, unconscious, all the way to the cliff edge and rolled him over. The policemen didn’t look as if they believed us so Shirley traced my steps for them with the beam of the flashlight. One cop’s hand tightened on my arm.
I rolled the man over and he went head first, over the edge into the jagged dark, onto the knife-edge cliffs. The hungry sea swallowed him.
Shirley told them what happened next: “Then she pulled the pegs out and rolled the tent over the cliff with the men inside.”
The cops looked at me, horrified, imagining themselves in the dark tent, blind and terrified, being shoved over the edge. The ground was damp and soft. It wasn’t difficult. When I lifted the edge of the ground sheet at first the men were annoyed, they thought it was their friend playing a joke. I felt their anger change to panic as they realized that I wasn’t their friend.
One of the cops looked as if he might cry. He stared at me and asked, “Why?”
I just shrugged. I think maybe I was sort of smiling but I didn’t find it funny, I was just smiling a bit. Remembering: They weren’t even from here and they were rude, and if you buy all the pancakes there will be anarchy.
He tried again, “Did you put the pancakes in the car so we would think it was Margie?”
I didn’t answer that either. I couldn’t answer that. You can’t explain that to incomers. The other cop tried to make sense of it. “Why did you try to make it look like Margie? She’s your friend, isn’t she?”
Shirley looked at me, her eyes open a little too wide. She seemed excited. “Did you think Margie could make it all right, Alison?” I just smiled, but my heart was hammering. And then she said: “You’ve done it before, haven’t you?”
Well, I was angry then. I shouted at her, “Shirley! That has to be witchcraft. How could you possibly know Margie took the blame?”