A Flirty Dozen Box Set

Love Found on Lindisfarne-3

“Maybe all its children were grown up,” I suggested carefully, wary of what might be going on in that curly little head of hers. “Come on, we need to hurry up a bit to make sure we catch the tide.”

“What time is it?” Ian asked. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t wearing a watch with his Viking outfit. “You know you’ll be all right for a good half hour after the tide tables say. They just like to play it safe.”

“Yes, well, they’re not the only ones,” I muttered.

He grinned. “Ah, what’s the worst that could happen? I won’t be complaining if you get stuck on the island for a bit longer.”

He made it sound so easy. As if doing things just because you wanted to didn’t have consequences.

We were halfway back along the path to the priory when Kelis stopped dead, clutching at her neck. “Oh no!”

I thought she’d been stung by a wasp or something. “What is it?”

Her face twisted in anguish. “Mum’s necklace. I was wearing it before and now it’s gone. We’ve got to go back.” She turned on her heel and ran back along the path.

I cursed under my breath. “Kelis! Wait. We haven’t got time.”

She turned to shout back at me. “It’s Mum’s necklace.”

“I know, but if you go back we’re going to miss the tide.”

“I don’t care!” She kept on running.

Ian and I exchanged looks, then ran after her. “At least slow down a bit,” I called out. “If you dropped it on the path, you won’t see it if you run.”

She spun and looked at me uncertainly, hopping from foot to trainer-clad foot. “You’re not going to try and make me leave it?”

I sighed. “No, it’s okay. But I’d better not hear one word from you moaning about being tired tomorrow. If we miss the tide now we’ll have to wait until…” I frowned as I tried to remember the tide tables.

“Be getting on for midnight, I reckon,” Ian said.

“Great. We haven’t even packed yet.” We’d either have to get up at the arse crack of dawn tomorrow or be late leaving the cottage, which wouldn’t win us any friends with the staff who had to get it ready for the next family. And it was a long, long drive back down to Cambridge, which wouldn’t be any easier for being sleep-deprived.

“Thought you’d tell her to leave it behind,” Ian said in a low voice as he fell into step beside me.”

“No…Well, it’s her mum’s necklace. God knows, she’s got little enough to remember her by.” Shandi had died owning barely enough to fill a couple of suitcases of shabby tat. “But look, you don’t have to come back with us.”

He shrugged. “Six eyes are better than four, right?”

“Yes, but…” I swallowed the polite words that would tell him not to bother. Keep him at a distance. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” He put a hand on my shoulder for a moment, and I caught my breath. “So tell me what we’re looking for.”

“It’s a silver locket—just a cheap thing, really, and it’s got a few dents in it. Shandi—that’s Kelis’s mum—always was careless with her stuff, and it’s had a few more knocks since Kelis got it, too.”

That wasn’t the only thing Shandi had been careless about, of course, and I wasn’t just talking about contraception. But Kelis had loved her. Idolised her.

Ian would probably have liked her, too.

“What’ll you do if we don’t find it?” he asked.

“God knows.” Consoling a distraught Kelis was not a prospect I was looking forward to in the slightest.

“Hey, at least she’ll know we did our best.” Again, Ian put his hand on my shoulder. I tried not to lean into the comforting touch, and failed.

The walk back along the path was a frustrating one, spent scanning the ground and going over the age-old questions of Where do you think you left it? and Where were you the last time you saw it?

To which, of course, Kelis just answered an increasingly agitated “I don’t know.”

“Okay, listen,” I said finally, as we drew level with the castle again. “We should probably go straight for the beach. Tide’s coming in, remember? We can search the rest of the path on the way back.”

At least that got us moving faster. The sheep stared at us, uncomprehending, as we hurried back through their field.

The tide was visibly higher when we got close enough to see the sea, but we hadn’t been right down at the waterline when we’d been here before. At least, not for most of the time. I started where the path came out on the beach, and walked slowly, scrutinising the pebbles at my feet until my vision started to dance. Kelis was going to be devastated at losing the locket. I should have made her leave it at home, or checked the clasp was sound, or…

“I got an idea,” Ian said suddenly. “Kelis, you spent most time round the dead seal, didn’t you?”

She nodded. My heart ached as I saw her face was already streaked with silent tears, and I scrambled over to hug her. She clung to me the way she had as a six-year-old, missing her mum.

“And you had that camera round your neck for a bit,” Ian carried on. “The strap could have caught on the clasp, or something, couldn’t it?”

He was right. God, yes, why hadn’t I thought of that? “Come on, then.” Taking one last lungful of untainted air, I headed for the dead seal.

Karma, I decided as I tried not to gag, was going to owe me big time after this. Kelis crunched nervously at my side, her fingers digging into my arm, as we looked for the locket together. Ian was a few feet away, his dreads hanging over his face as he scoured the ground.

We seemed to search for hours. I was going to dream of pebbles, I decided. An avalanche of potato-sized boulders would cascade down and bury me in my sleep. Probably while a blond, dreadlocked berserker taunted me with Kelis’s necklace on the tip of his battle axe, his plunder—and himself—forever tantalisingly out of reach…

There. A glint of silver, among the grey and white pebbles.

The locket. Heady relief flooded through me as I bent to pick it up. “I’ve found it!”

Kelis grabbed it from my hands and cuddled it to her chest before giving me a big hug, followed by an even bigger sniff.

Ian’s smile was broad, his eyes crinkled at the edges in genuine happiness for her. “Hey, well done.”

I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. “It was your idea to look here. Come on, let’s get back to civilisation.”

“Do you think the seal was looking after it for me?” Kelis asked as we turned to retrace our steps once again. Every now and then she’d come out with stuff like that—I mean, I knew she knew what “dead” meant.

“Well, the smell probably kept away anyone who might have picked it up,” I conceded, rotating my shoulders, stiff from hunching over.

The necklace safe and sound, Kelis was free to get excited about the whole stranded-on-an-island thing, coupled with the prospect of staying up past her bedtime even by holiday standards. She fairly skipped along the path back to the village, babbling questions all the way.

“Is it going to get all spooky here like in The Woman in Black?”

I’d had a few choice words to say to the parents of one of Kelis’s classmates who’d allowed her to watch that film, with all the mothers and children dying in it. “No. People live on this island, remember?”

“Dad, what happens if people don’t see the warnings, and they try and drive on the road, but the tide comes in while they’re on it? Do they sink in the sand and never get found again? Do lots of people die?”

I was going to kill Chelsea’s mum. “Nobody dies. They just get to feel very silly when the coastguard rescues them.” I hoped.

“So there aren’t any buried cars out there? Or people?”

“No,” I said firmly.

She was silent a moment, kicking pebbles along the path. “Dad?”

“Yes, treacle?”

“If you died when the tide came in, would you be a ghost on the island or on the mainland? Or would you just have to stay in the middle?”

Ye gods.

I was still trying to work out what to say when Ian jumped in. “Which do you think would be the best place to haunt?”

“We-ell…On the mainland might be more fun, because there’s more to do. But I like it here, too, they’ve got beaches and seals and Vikings and stuff. Or you could be a good ghost, guiding people back to land if they got lost at sea. Like Grace Darling.”

“Grace Darling wasn’t a ghost,” I reminded her.

“We went to her lighthouse,” Kelis told Ian. “On the Far-un Islands. We saw her bedroom and everything. It had round walls.”

He c****d his head, smiling. “Oh, yeah? Think you’d like to live in a lighthouse?”

Kelis’s eyes went wide. “Ye-es!”

“And look out for shipwrecks in storms?” Ian seemed as excited by the prospect as she was.

She nodded. “Is Grace Darling a ghost now?”

I’d hoped we were off that topic. “Sweetheart, not everyone turns into a ghost when they die. Just think how crowded the world would be with them by now if they did. I expect she’s in heaven.”

“With Mum?”

I hated it when she asked questions like that. “Yes. Look, we’re almost back now.” I checked my watch. “We’re going to have quite a bit of time to kill.”

“Have we missed the tide?”

Ian laughed. “Just a bit.”

Kelis clung to my arm and looked up at me with her big, brown eyes. “Are you cross with me?”

I gave her a swift cuddle, letting go of her before she could squirm out of my grasp with a cry of Da-ad. “No, of course not. And I’m glad we found your necklace.”

The village seemed mostly deserted when we finally got back there, and the shops were shut. Either the staff had gone back to the mainland or, more likely, assumed all their customers had. They’d probably popped back home to put their feet up with a cuppa.

I could see Kelis getting very, very bored once her energy flagged and she realised just how little there was to do on the island. We hadn’t brought her DS or any of her puzzle books, and we could hardly knock on some islander’s door and ask to watch their telly for a bit.

“Want to come back to the priory?” Ian asked. “You could meet some of the others.”

Kelis shrugged, her Bamburgh Beast t-shirt rising and falling with her bony shoulders. “All right.”

The English Heritage lady waved us on through the gate, either recognising us from earlier or taking our costumed escort as a sort of human ticket. Inside, the visitors were easily outnumbered by the Vikings. The re-enactors had mostly left their individual tents and were clustered around an open fire at one end of the priory grounds. There was a large pot suspended over the flames, beside which stood a grey-haired woman in an apron-style dress almost as broad as it was long, stirring the contents with what I assumed was the Viking equivalent of a ladle.

There were a couple of kids running around, both of them a fair bit younger than Kelis. The girl was wearing a soft blue apron dress that came down to just above her ankles, with an under-dress that looked like linen, and a matching cap with loose cords to tie it under her chin. They’d come undone, and trailed behind her as she ran. The boy had on a baggy, belted knee-length tunic and rough trousers, just like Balder and Ian, and was waving a wooden sword.