CLEARLY CONFUSED
CLEARLY CONFUSED
I start heading out of the village. Other than coffee, I feel like I didn’t get anything out of that visit. Why couldn’t Cora give me a straight answer? Is she hiding something? Maybe the sweet old lady running the corner shop is a killer. Or perhaps she is just a bit aloof in general? I don’t know what to make of any of it. Abby was so much better at reading people and asking the right questions.
Columbo stops outside the butcher’s, sniffs the air, and stares up at me.
“You’re quite right. We could do with a decent dinner after Midge’s cooking last night,” I tell him, and the dog wags his tail as though he understands. Also, I figure meeting a few more of the twenty-five residents will surely help me to figure out what is really going on here. One of them has to know something.
The shop stands out from the others with its traditional red-and-white Victorian awnings and old-fashioned signage. The door and window frames have all been painted a bright red color, and there are glazed tiles depicting sheep. Bill’s Butchers looks like something from an old film and also appears to be closed, so I’m surprised when I try the door and it opens. Another little bell tinkles to announce my arrival—bells are obviously popular on Amberly—and a small woman with jet-black hair and olive skin appears behind the counter. Almost as though she had been crouching down, hiding beneath it, hoping that I wouldn’t come inside. She does not look like a Bill.
“Hello,” I say, feeling unwelcome. But then she smiles, and her whole face lights up as though someone just switched her on. I see she is wearing a necklace spelling out the name Mary.
“Good morning,” Mary replies with a Spanish accent I did not expect. She speaks as though on autopilot, smiling so much it is a tad unnerving. She’s a neat and tidy–looking woman with minimal makeup and not a hair out of place. A little younger than me, I think. She’s wearing a bright white, slightly bloody apron. I take in the steel rails on the walls and huge wooden chopping blocks, the oversize scales, and rows of large, shiny, extremely sharp-looking knives. “Is there anything I can help you with?” she asks, still smiling. The way she stares at me with her big eyes and bright white teeth makes me feel so uncomfortable I have to look away. I cast an eye over all the meat on display instead. There’s a lot of it for a tiny island.
“There’s so much to choose from,” I say.
She nods enthusiastically. “We do our best. At the moment we’ve got leg of lamb, lamb chops, lamb shoulder, lamb rack, lamb burgers, lamb cutlets, minced lamb, lamb shanks, lamb loin, and some lovely lamb cheeks.”
“That’s... a lot of lamb.”
She nods again. Beaming. “It is.”
“You don’t sell any other types of meat?”
The smile vanishes from her face. “No. We sell lamb.”
My eyes are drawn to the very sharp-looking knives again.
“Well, in that case, I’ll take some lamb chops please,” I say.
The smile returns, and she starts adding the meat to the scales.
“Life on a small island like this isn’t always easy,” she says. “Meat is best fresh but the ferry only sails once, sometimes twice a week, so we slaughter our own in the abattoir out back.” She turns to look over her shoulder at a door behind the counter. I look too, and think I see someone standing there behind the frosted glass, but maybe it was just a trick of the light. “Everything you see here,” she says, looking back down at the meat counter, “would have been alive and well only a day or so ago. Walking around, breathing the sea air, feeling the sun on its back. Now they’re dead . Just like that, their life is over. Finished. Extinguished. Ended when it had barely begun. How is the writing coming along?” The unexpected question tacked on the end of her speech knocks the wind out of me a little. I didn’t realize she knew who I was too. “Small island. Everyone knows everything about everyone here,” she adds, as though reading my mind.
“I’m starting to realize that.”
“Nobody has any secrets on the Isle of Amberly. I hope you left yours behind.”
Her words somehow feel like a threat and a warning at the same time.
“Writers don’t have secrets, and if we do we hide them inside our books,” I tell her, but she just smiles. “You have a beautiful accent. Are you from Spain originally?”
“I always find that fascinating about the British. The way they don’t ask what they really want to ask but still expect to find out what it is they want to know,” she says.
“Sorry, you’ve lost me.”
“Again, no. You are lost because of you, not me. You asked if I was from Spain, but what you really wanted to know is why I am here, on Amberly.”
She’s clearly confused. I was actually just trying to make polite conversation.
“Why are you here?” I ask, indulging her.
“Why does anyone do anything? There are only ever two reasons: for money or for love. In my case, love. I was living in Barcelona when the love of my life walked into the café where I worked. That was five years ago. We’ve been together ever since, and being married to a butcher has plenty of advantages,” she says, smiling again.
I stare at the bill’s butchers sign on the tiled wall behind her. “Well, Bill is a lucky man.”
“Bill is dead,” she replies, still smiling.
“Oh, I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be. I was talking about Alex. We took over Bill’s Butchers when Bill had a heart attack. We were here on holiday—just visiting the island—but ended up running the business. It was a case of right time, right place.”
Not for Bill, I can’t help thinking.
The door behind the counter swings open. I catch a brief glimpse of the room it hides, filled with lots of shiny metal surfaces. There is what looks like an operating table in the middle, with a carcass on top. And a saw. The bloody limbs almost look... human—
“Gosh, sorry, didn’t know we had a visitor,” a skinny young woman says, quickly closing the door.
They kiss and I feel a little old and out of touch for assuming that Alex was a man.
Alex—the woman—has short blond hair, round rubber earrings that stretch holes in her lobes, and when she wipes her bloody hands on her otherwise crisp white apron, I see that she has tattoos on each of her fingers. A skull, a star, a sun, a moon, and a heart. She catches me staring and smiles in a way I find deeply unsettling.
“How delightful. A visitor . Out of season.” She speaks the way someone does when they have known nothing but wealth. It catches me off guard because her posh British accent doesn’t match her appearance; it’s out of sync, like when the sound doesn’t match the image on your TV and your brain can’t immediately process what is wrong. “I hope you’re not writing about us in your book.”
“You and Mary?”
“The island . This is a quiet place. A peaceful place. A private place. We don’t need authors or journalists coming here, writing about Amberly, attracting even more visitors and turning our home into some sort of Scottish island Disneyland. We like things the way they are.” She says it all with a friendly smile but her words still sound menacing.
“Did a journalist come here?” I ask, wondering if she was referring to Abby.
“We get a lot of visitors during the tourist season—too many—it’s impossible to remember them all,” Mary interrupts.
“And they’re all the same,” Alex adds.
Mary smiles apologetically, then wraps the meat in paper before placing it inside a red-and-white stripy bag. “I’ve added some lamb sausages for the dog, my treat,” she says, smiling at Columbo, who is sitting outside staring in through the window.
I thank her, pay, and then turn to leave. The little bell tinkles when I open the door.
“Thanks again,” I say. Neither of them replies, but when I look over my shoulder their big white smiles are still firmly in place.
The people on this island are strange. All of them. I don’t think I’m imagining it.
But maybe that’s what happens when you’re cut off from the real world for too long.