Page 23

RED JOE

B y dawn on Monday the weather had turned bad thanks to a cluster of storm cells moving in from the southwest. I hadn’t slept much during the night.

I’d dozed for a few hours, but spent most of the night sitting in the kitchen instead, talking on the radio to the police.

They’d tried to send a chopper just after midnight, but the weather was even worse near the mainland, and it had been forced to turn back.

Now there was a boat on the way, but the going was slow and rough, and it wouldn’t arrive until mid-morning.

The clock on the kitchen wall told me it was dawn now, but it was still dark outside. The sun was barely able to breach the low, black clouds that clung to the island. There was a softening of the gloom, that was all, but no true light.

I did my rounds of the lighthouse then headed into the village to rejoin the search parties, knowing that one of the men they were searching for was already dead, and desperately hoping that the other wouldn’t be found.

“Miserable weather for it,” Fisher Harry Finch said through his scarf as I joined him outside the church.

I grunted in agreement, looking around the crowd and wondering which of my neighbours was a killer. I saw Young Harry Barnes standing off to the side of the crowd, his shock of white hair encased in a fug of cigarette smoke, and made my way over to him.

“Nasty fucking day,” Young Harry said cheerily, and coughed and smacked himself on the chest. He spat on the ground. “Bloody chest infection. Looks like I might be getting that new prescription from the doctor next week after all.”

Bloody cigarettes, more like, but I hummed in agreement. “Listen, Young Harry, did you talk to John Coldwell on Saturday night about that diary of Eddie Hawthorne’s?”

“Oh, yes,” Young Harry said blithely. “It’s a fake, he says, but I told him that you had it locked up like it were the crown jewels!”

My heart sank. It must have been John Coldwell who’d stolen the diary then. He must have seen at some point where I kept the spare key for the medical chest and remembered it.

“John Coldwell’s gone a bit mad, I reckon,” Young Harry said. “Foaming at the mouth over this Henry Jessup nonsense, and now running off for God knows what reason.”

I hummed again.

“Everyone knows that Henry Jessup died on the island anyhow,” Young Harry continued. “His name’s in the church. It’s just a lot of foolishness over nothing.”

“You were in the search party over at Seal Beach last night, weren’t you?” I asked. “Did you see any signs of Eddie Hawthorne?”

“Didn’t see a bloody thing.” Young Harry squinted at the sky. “And it won’t be much better today, I reckon.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, hope igniting in my chest. “I think you might be right.”

Wherever Eddie was hidden, I hoped he stayed there.

Nipper Will Harper shouldered his way through the crowd towards me. “Bad weather for a search,” he said. “And we’re missing a day of work.”

“Worse weather to be out on a bloody boat,” I said.

Nipper Will grunted, and his eyebrows tugged together. “You right?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, so I nodded and pulled on my gloves—at least I’d remembered them this morning. Then I looked around at the crowd. These people were more than my neighbours, they were my family. And one of them had killed John Coldwell.

It was a chilling thought.

This time last week I’d have trusted any one of them with my life. Now, I felt as though the ground was shaky beneath my feet, and that everything I thought I’d known about my history, about my home, and about the people I shared it with, might be a lie.

The sooner the police arrived and sorted this whole mess out, the better.

I looked up towards the point, to the lighthouse. It rose out of the darkness in the distance, ghostly and pale as a bleached bone. The flags I’d fastened there last night weren’t visible in the gloom.

“Be careful today,” I said in an undertone to Will. “Watch your back.”

He raised his eyebrows. “What the hell is going on, Joe?”

I shook my head. “Just be careful.”

Mavis stomped over to me, a heavy walking stick in her grasp.

“Bloody awful weather,” she said. Still, she was wearing her gumboots and her bright yellow puffer jacket, so I had no doubt she was here to lend a hand to the search.

All the islanders were, apart from the young kids and those who needed to stay behind to watch them.

Even the fishing boats wouldn’t leave the jetty until the search was done. That was the Dauntless way.

“Bloody awful,” I agreed.

“You think it’ll clear up later?” she asked, peering into the sky.

“Should do. Weather report said it would.”

“Good.” She looked around the crowd. “Who are we waiting for?”

Short Clarry bustled through, waving and nodding.

“Ah.” Mavis huffed out a breath. “No show without Punch.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to reply to that, and was saved having to by a sudden yell, which cut through the cold air as sharply as the call of a gull.

“Dad! Dad !” The soles of Jemmy Finch’s shoes slapped against the ground. “Dad!”

Jemmy Finch, Fisher Harry Finch’s second eldest, was a scrawny kid of thirteen, all long limbs he hadn’t figured out how to grow into yet and hair like wet straw.

“Dad!” he yelled again, puffing and panting in the gloom of the dawn. “Under the jetty! John Coldwell is floating under the jetty!”

* * *

T he islanders crowded the edge of the harbour at the jetty. I was given room at the front of the crowd alongside Short Clarry as Fisher Harry Finch and Sea John Barnes waded into the black water underneath the jetty and rolled John Coldwell out like a seal.

They dragged him up onto the shoreline.

He was white and bloated. The sea wasn’t kind to the dead.

Fisher Harry Finch shone his torch over John’s head, making a hissing sound when he found his cracked skull. “Aye. There it is.”

I thought of the rack of postcards and brochures in the museum and wondered if John had even seen it coming before it connected with his head.

“Oh,” Short Clarry said, shaking his head. “Oh no.”

“I reckon that maybe he didn’t run off at all then,” Young Harry Barnes said. “Huh.”

“I knew it!” Mavis said. “I knew no good could come from a Hawthorne on Dauntless. Didn’t I say it, Red Joe? Didn’t I say to mark my words?” She crossed herself.

“I reckon,” Young Harry Barnes continued, puffing on a cigarette, “that the young Hawthorne bloke up and killed him!”

“Stop that,” I said. I spoke loudly, hoping my voice would carry to everyone. “That’s for the police to decide, not you, and not me, and not anyone on this island.”

I wondered if George Hawthorne had ever felt like this—staring down his crew in a last futile attempt to maintain order. Of course, I had the advantage over George Hawthorne, didn’t I? I had a police boat on the way.

“The police are coming,” I said. “Leave them to do their job.”

“Righto,” Short Clarry said. “Red Joe is right! Though, if it was the Hawthorne bloke who did this to poor John Coldwell, are any of us safe right now?”

A murmur of unease went through the crowd.

Thank you, Short Clarry, for trying to douse that fire with petrol.

I wished I could tell them that Eddie hadn’t done this, but the last thing the islanders needed right now was the awful truth: that one of our own had put John Coldwell’s body down in the old icehouse, a place Eddie couldn’t have known about, and come back later to dump the body in the harbour. That one of our own was a killer.

Dauntless had proven itself a powder keg in the past. I didn’t want to be the one who lit a match today.

“The police are coming,” I repeated loudly. “In the meantime, the search is off.”

“What?” Short Clarry asked, his brow creasing. “Red Joe, there’s another man missing!”

Yeah, and the last thing I wanted was for him to meet his end on Dauntless the way his great-great-great-whatever-grandfather had.

“The search is off,” I repeated. “Let the police look for Eddie Hawthorne when they get here.”

Short Clarry pulled his shoulders back. “I’m the mayor, Red Joe, have you forgotten? I’m in charge of searches!”

I stared back evenly. “And I’m Josiah Nesmith. Have you forgotten that?”

The crowd shifted and murmured restlessly. Mavis’s jaw dropped. Young Harry Barnes puffed on a cigarette, owl-eyed.

I heard Eddie’s voice in the back of his mind. “So you’re like royalty or something? Holy shit. You are. You’re like the true king of the island, aren’t you?”

Or something, I’d told him, playing it down.

But something wasn’t nothing. The blood of Josiah Nesmith ran in my veins, and that carried weight on Dauntless Island, even two hundred years later.

I held Short Clarry’s gaze.

“Righto,” Short Clarry said at last, straightening his scarf. “Righto, you heard the man. Search for the murderer is off! I need some men to carry John Coldwell into the church!”

He shot me a worried look as he bustled away.

Mavis hummed, the sleeve of her puffer jacket brushing against my coat as she sidled up to me. “Calling off the search for a killer, hmm?”

“For a missing person,” I said evenly.

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you know, Red Joe?”

I shrugged. “Usually about half as much as any other man.”

Her thin mouth tugged up at the corners. “Oh, doubt that very much, Red Joe. I doubt that very much.”

She stomped away.

I waited at the jetty while the islanders slowly dispersed.

* * *

“Y es,” I said to Hiccup as I trudged my way back up the hill toward the point. “I’m a fucking idiot, probably, and they all think I’m a traitor for protecting a Hawthorne, which I am — protecting him, I mean, not being a traitor—but only because I know he didn’t kill John Coldwell.”

Hiccup stopped to eat a bug.

“If you’ve got a better idea on how to handle it, I’m all ears,” I muttered.

Hiccup hacked up the bug, and then pawed at it excitedly.

I looked up at the lighthouse. A shaft of sunlight had pierced the clouds at last, and the flags I’d hung there last night fluttered in the light.