Surtsey stared at the thread of white linking the sea to the sky. It was a calm day, the steam lazy in the heat.
‘You OK?’ Hal said.
Surtsey turned and smiled. ‘I’m fine.’
Hal handed her the hash pipe and lighter and she inhaled. Just a little, her lungs were still delicate. She passed it to Iona who sucked on it in silence.
Surtsey had spent two nights in hospital. Concussion from a knock to the head, burns to her face and hands, the ankle and wrist cuts from being restrained, lots more cuts and bruises, plus severe smoke inhalation.
Once she was considered fit to leave there were two full days at the police station answering questions. The concussion hadn’t damaged her memory, so she gave as clear an account as she could of everything that happened on the island and before.
Yates and Flannery were highly sceptical. It was a bit too handy that the person responsible for the murders was dead at the bottom of the ocean, literally petrified, along with all the evidence. So they kept asking and Surtsey kept telling them. The fact that she told the whole truth for the first time, including finding Tom’s body, helped. She couldn’t get her story mixed up because it was true.
And the evidence began to back her up. The police didn’t have Surtsey’s phone, or Tom’s or Donna’s, but they got records for all three and the calls and messages bore out what Surtsey told them.
Once they began looking into Donna Jones more evidence appeared. She disappeared at the time of the eruption, just as Surtsey explained, and hadn’t turned up for work. The police got a warrant to search her house and found medical supplies taken from the hospice plus receipts for boat hire that matched the date of Tom’s murder. They also found notebooks full of Surtsey’s movements and Donna’s own ramblings. There was a heap to go through, but the initial impression was one of unhinged obsession.
Once they knew to look for Donna, they found more. She was spotted in CCTV footage taken from King’s Buildings, close to the Grant Institute at the right time for Brendan’s death. Surtsey told them about Tom’s boat at Fisherrow, how Donna was going to plant DNA evidence in it. They found the boat there right enough, and when they checked the harbour security footage there was Donna, taking her hire boat out on the evening of Tom’s death and returning with Tom’s boat in tow later on. They found hair samples from Surtsey in a small bag on Tom’s boat, she hadn’t planted it yet. They also found Surtsey’s hair on the quartz that killed Brendan, clumsily planted according to forensics.
And there was the drugged wine, plus Iona and Hal’s evidence. Two empty bottles showed traces of diazepam in large quantities. Iona and Hal couldn’t remember much, but they spoke of feeling unwell and being helped to bed by Donna. By the time they woke up Surtsey was in hospital and the Inch was on fire.
The police requested a post mortem of Louise. The embalmers hadn’t done her yet at the funeral home so she was cut open and tested, and there were large amounts of morphine in her system. It didn’t prove Donna had killed her or forced her to take them, that would always be unknown. Surtsey would never know if her mum wanted to die when she did.
She looked at the box in her lap. The funeral director called it an ashes casket, but that seemed too fancy for a simple wooden box.
Iona reached across Surtsey and handed the pipe back to Halima.
The three of them hadn’t really talked about what happened. What could they say? Iona and Hal had eventually received garbled phone messages from a concussed Surtsey to say she was at hospital and the police wanted to speak to her. Groggy themselves, they went to visit and she explained what Donna had done as best she could.
The police were still investigating and Surtsey wasn’t off the hook, but Donna was the focus of their enquiries. How that would work in terms of the law, Surtsey had no idea. She had no wish to keep in touch with the cops and was trying to forget the whole thing.
But of course they could never forget. Surtsey looked at Iona. They hadn’t spoken about their mum’s letter. Again, what else was there to say? Iona had just learned her dad was dead along with their mum. And that she had two half-sisters. The police had apparently informed Alice that Donna was their prime suspect now. Surtsey wondered if that made any difference in the face of her grief. And they told her about Louise’s letter too, that her girls had a half-sister. That her dead husband had been lying to her their whole marriage. Surtsey tried to picture a future where Iona would have a relationship with Alice’s girls, but she couldn’t conjure anything up.
She ran a finger along the edge of the box. They had the funeral three days ago, after all the post-mortem stuff, then picked up the ashes from the home this morning.
This had been the plan all along, Louise had told her. No details for the funeral, she didn’t care about any of that, but she wanted her ashes scattered in the sea, here in the Firth of Forth.
Surtsey looked over again at the steam, the only sign that anything was still happening under the surface of the water. The only indication there had ever been an island out
