Holy Island(7)

Alex nodded thoughtfully, re-assessing the man he’d initially considered remote. He turned to dispatch Pete. Ryan watched the younger man nod eagerly, breathing through his teeth still. He turned and half ran back down the incline to the gate.

“Pete’s a good kid,” Alex defended his deputy. “Nothing like this has happened on the island for a long, long time. Not in my lifetime.”

“People kill each other all over the world.”

“Sure, but Lindisfarne - it’s holy.” Alex shook his head sadly. “It’s like killing someone in church.”

While Alex headed off to stand with Pete, Ryan turned back to Lucy and silently apologised. It was easier to work CID when you took a step back, tried to keep things impersonal. If he started thinking about Lucy with the brown hair and pretty blue eyes who had been home for the Christmas holidays, then about all the Christmases she wouldn’t see, he wasn’t sure he would be able to face it.

He stood frowning, a tall, unapproachable man who stood as still as the stones around him. This was personal. He may have only been on the island for a couple of months, but people like Liz trusted him to do his job. He’d told her that he would take care of Lucy and that was what he was going to do. Whether they knew it or not, the islanders had given him a home and a sanctuary when he had needed it. He owed them.

Besides, he thought as he rubbed his chilled hands together, they needed protecting from one of their own. He was damn sure the medics would find Lucy Mathieson was killed last night after the tide had rolled out and cut them off from the mainland, which meant somebody already on the island had her blood on their hands.

He checked the time again. Fifteen minutes until the causeway opened.

“Alex!” He called the man back from where he was hopping from one cold foot to the other. “I need you to send a couple of people down to the beach to man the road across. Set up a road block - nobody leaves or comes over the causeway unless they live or have business concerns on the island.”

“Ryan, we can’t do that. There’s going to be a huge influx today, you know that.” Alex’s face looked pained. “Besides, we haven’t got the man power. I’ve got Pete on the visitors’ gate and I – ah- haven’t been able to get hold of Rob. He worked the night shift. Mark’s on his way.” He ran through his short list of coastguard volunteers.

“Why would today be so special?” Ryan shrugged. “Because it’s almost Christmas?”

Alex looked at him as if he had grown two heads. “Well, sure, Christmas is always busy on Lindisfarne, but it’s the 21st today.”

Ryan flipped through a mental calendar but came up blank.

“The winter solstice,” Alex supplied with a look on his face which seemed to say, “stupid outsider”.

Ryan wouldn’t know a solstice from a cough remedy.

“OK,” he said, face blank.

Alex shifted his feet and adopted an authoritative tone. “It’s the day of the year when all the neo-pagans gather round to celebrate shorter nights, longer days. Basically, everyone meets on the beach, they light a few fires, sing a few songs and eat barbeque.”

Ryan didn’t consider himself to be a religious man. He had seen too much of life and of what one person was capable of doing to another, to believe in a deity which could allow that to happen. Still, if people wanted to dance around a few pogo sticks and get drunk, there was no real harm in it. Unless one of them had decided to take symbolic sacrifice a step too far, he added, thinking of the girl lying on a cold slab behind him.

“What do the residents make of it?” he asked.

“The older population tends to be Christian but since most of them own the B & B’s and the gift shops, they just smile politely and turn a decent trade. The rest of us don’t really give a shit,” he shrugged eloquently.

Ryan considered this for a moment.

“What about the vicar?” his eyes fixed on the steeple of the island’s church, just visible rising above the rooftops in the village beyond. The church graveyard backed directly onto the Priory grounds.

“Mike?” Alex laughed. “He loves it. Every year, it’s an opportunity for him to spread the word, try to convert a few unbelievers.”

Ryan paused to file it all away. Interesting, but it didn’t change the fact that the last thing they needed was a hoard of tourists trampling all over the place.

“If there’s going to be a swarm of visitors, that’s precisely why they can’t access the island. Think!” he cut across the other man’s protest. “It had to be somebody who’s already here, Alex.”