SEASIDE ESCAPE
The resort is perfect, the weather ideal – but her fellow guests are set to disturb Mrs B’s peace
Mrs Bambury hasn’t had a holiday in ages – one where you rush to the coast and find yourself breathing sea-brined air in a sun-kissed locale.
She could have done this before. They’re always telling her, “Take a break. Go to the seaside. We’ll be OK without you.” But the files, which loom large on her desk, loom even larger in her mind. What a weight lifted when she resolves one, tucks it away in a cabinet, her duty done – done, but not forgotten.
Now, though, she will try to forget.
Owl glasses poised on her nose, trusty suitcase beside her, she takes in the splendid vista of the seaside resort.
The white façade blazes bright against the azure sea and sky. The open-air lobby frames a perfect view of the sea, soft white caps beckoning her forth. Everything about this place – from its gleaming marble floors to the languid spin of its ceiling fans – calms the pulse and quiets the mind.
Mrs Bambury thinks of pebbles on the beach. Over time, every jagged edge is pounded smooth by the surf.
A limousine pulls up beside her. A silver-haired man rushes out and bumps her as he passes.
“Out of my way,” he says as he marches to the lobby.
A porter hurries her way.
“I’m terribly sorry, ma’am. Let me help you to your room.”
“Who was that rude man?” she asks.
“I’m afraid I can’t say. It’s resort policy to protect the anonymity of our guests … as much as possible.”
He takes her suitcase, and just like that, she’s following the young porter to her beach bungalow, the impudent man forgotten. Once they arrive, he tours her through the ample, sea-facing sitting room, the tropical-themed bedroom and the serene bathroom with a clawfoot tub.
“It will do beautifully,” Mrs B says, slipping a neatly folded bill into his accepting hand.
The door clicks and he’s gone.
Through the open window, she smells seaweed and spume – mysteries of the deep scenting the air.
In the bathroom, she changes quickly into her modest swimsuit, then pulls on her new beach cover-up. She laments her seventy-year-old self in the mirror – crêpe skin on her legs, age spots on her chest. She strings her owl glasses around her neck once more, adds her wide-brimmed hat, packs her beach bag with a towel and book, and heads out.
The beach is busy and bright. Guests recline on yellow lounge chairs in the shade of flamingo-pink umbrellas. She finds a free spot, sits with relief on a lounger under an ample umbrella. Children chase a beach ball. Gulls circle. The waves wash the stress away.
The sound of feet on sand. Beside her, a family settles under an umbrella – a young couple, husband one metre eight, threedays’ facial hair; wife, blonde, one metre five, butterfly tattoo on bikini line. Their beach-ball-chasing children run up to greet them, then scurry back to the shore.
A hotel waiter approaches.
“What can I get you?” he asks the dashing couple.
“Honey, a daiquiri?” the husband asks. “For God’s sake, it’s not even ten a.m. I’ll have a coffee. So will you.”
The waiter nods and leaves without asking Mrs B what she’d like. She’s used to this – youth and beauty are first served.
Once the waiter is out of sight, the husband slams into his lounger. He searches his pockets.
“Dammit. Left my phone in the room.” His wife shakes her head as her husband heads back to the resort. Once he’s gone, she turns to Mrs B.
“How can a man forget his phone ten times a day?”
Mrs B knows the answer, but she smiles politely and says nothing. It’s her gift – to see what’s hidden, to extract with surgical precision falsehoods from the truth. This woman’s husband is sneaking off to the bar to down a shot or two. Once he’s taken the edge off, he’ll return to the beach and bury himself in his phone, the outline of which Mrs B spotted in his pocket all along.
The angry wife pads to the shoreline to be with her children.
Once she’s gone, Mrs B sinks deeper into her lounger. Let the waves smooth the jagged edges. She removes her book from her beach bag – Evil Under the Sun, by Agatha Christie. Oh, the pleasure of a good detective novel featuring Hercule Poirot. Case open, case closed. Justice served in the end. If only life were that simple.
She immerses herself in the first chapter, but a noise interrupts, a sound so out of place it jangles the nerves. A woman walks the beach, sobbing, not even attempting to hide her sorrow. One point seven metres, dark shoulder-length tresses, gold bikini. She’s impossibly lovely, a Vargas pin-up girl come to life. The face that launched a thousand ships. Mrs B catches her eye.
“Are you quite all right?” she calls out.
The woman stops abruptly.
“I don’t think I am,” she replies.
Mrs B makes a decision she hopes she won’t regret.
“Why don’t you sit for a moment?”
The young woman pauses, then strides to the vacant recliner under Mrs B’s umbrella. She arranges her lithe, toned body on the lounger and with the tips of her manicured fingers wipes her tears.
“Thanks,” she says. “I… I just need a moment.”
Mrs Bambury knows not to press. She smiles and observes – dark circles under anxious eyes, shaking hands, and blue smudges by her collarbone, so subtle most would assume they’re shadows. But
DARK CIRCLES UNDER ANXIOUS EYES, AND BLUE SMUDGES SO SUBTLE MOST WOULD ASSUME THAT THEY’RE SHADOWS
they’re not. They are bruises.
Mrs B feels every eye on the beach watching them – or rather, watching her.
No one has paid Mrs
Bambury any mind in decades. An old woman with a grey helmet coiffure, owl glasses and wrinkles, Mrs B is invisible in plain sight, a fact she has come to view as a professional advantage.
“I’m Cindy,” the young beauty says.
“Not Helen?” Mrs Bambury replies.
Cindy’s face contorts in confusion.
“Never mind. I’m Mrs
Bambury.” When she shakes the young woman’s hand, fear travels electrically up her arm.
A handsome waiter appears.
“Something to drink?”
Spoken to one, not two.
“Vodka and soda, double. Want one?” Cindy asks Mrs B.
“My tastes at this hour tend more towards orange juice,” she replies.
“Put both on my husband’s tab,” Cindy tells the bartender.
“There’s no need to –” Cindy stops Mrs B with a hand. “Believe me, he deserves to pay.”
The waiter takes his leave.
Once he’s gone, Cindy sighs loudly and leans back in her lounger.
“Ever feel like you’re being watched?” “It’s been some time since I was the subject of such scrutiny.”
“I wish I could fly away,” Cindy says. “Like those gulls. I wish I were invisible.”
“Careful what you wish for,” Mrs Bambury replies.
“I just want to find some beautiful place and hide away for a while. Or forever.”
Mrs B has encountered this before – a woman on a precipice. Approach too fast and she’ll jump; too slow and she’ll flee.
“My dear girl,” she says. “What are you running from?”
“Evil Under the Sun.”
It takes a second for Mrs B to realise that Cindy is reading the title of her book, which rests face up on her lounger.
“What’s it about?” Cindy asks.
“It’s a mystery. Naturally, there’s a murder to solve.”
“Does anyone ever get away with it? Murder? In real life, I mean.”
“A good lot do. Or rather a bad lot do. It’s a fact that’s always galled me.”
“Me too,” Cindy replies.
Cindy sits up to face Mrs B.
“If you had no choice, what would you do: murder someone to fix your life, kill yourself to end it, or disappear to begin a new life?”
“My,” says Mrs B. “What a question.” Just then, the waiter reappears with two enormous drinks. He passes Cindy’s first, then Mrs B’s. He clears his throat.
“I’m wondering if you’d pass a message to your h-h-husband,” he says to Cindy. “My brother, see, he’s an entrepreneur, and he’d love to pitch your husband an idea or two.”
“Ask him yourself. He’s right there.” Cindy points behind her.
The waiter bows, then rushes away.
In the open-air lobby of the resort stands a silverhaired man. Mrs B recognises him instantly – the rude man who bumped into her when she arrived. Cindy shakes her head. “That’s all I am any more. A conduit to a billionaire. They think I have power. They have no idea.”
Pieces assemble in Mrs B’s mind, a puzzle coming together. She sees it clearly: the woman’s dilemma – a difficult problem to solve.
“Can I tell you a secret?” Cindy asks.
“Of course,” Mrs Bambury replies.
Cindy leans forward and whispers something in Mrs Bambury’s ear, something so nonsensical it makes Mrs Bambury wonder if stress is scrambling the young woman’s senses.
“I don’t understand.” “You will. Can I ask you a favour?”
“Yes.”
“Can I just rest a minute under your umbrella? And can I read your book?”
This is not what Mrs B was expecting. She passes Cindy her novel.
“Keep it,” she says.
Cindy puts her drink in the sand, takes the novel and clutches it to her chest. “Thank you,” she says.
She lies back in the lounger, opens the book and begins to read.
So peculiar, Mrs B thinks to herself. She contemplates the orange juice in her hand, lies back in her lounger, and takes a sip. Freshly squeezed with a bubbly fizz. Champagne. It’s not what Mrs B ordered, but it is delicious. She sips and sips, then tucks her empty glass under the lounger.
As Cindy quietly reads beside her, Mrs B’s limbs slacken. The breeze is so soothing. Her eyelids are impossibly heavy. She allows them to close.
Only when she hears yelling and pandemonium do her eyes spring open. The beachside view has vastly changed while she was asleep.
A crowd has gathered by the water’s
edge. A police officer stands behind a line in the sand, keeping the crowd at a bay. At sea, porters and waiters and security guards wade into the water. A police boat trolls the bay. People call, “Cindy! Cindy!”
Mrs B turns to the lounger beside her. A full vodka and soda sits untouched in the sand. Her novel is splayed open on the lounger. But Cindy is gone.
A silver-haired man marches towards the police officer on the beach. They exchange a few words that Mrs B can’t hear, until the man raises his voice.
“What do you mean, she was seen swimming out to sea?” He grabs the officer by his uniform. “My wife can’t swim! Do you understand? She can’t swim! Cindy!” he calls out as the officer holds him back.
Mrs B stands, making her way towards the officer.
“Let me go!” the silver-haired man yells as he frees himself, stumbling headlong into Mrs B. “Out of my way!” he snarls, then heads to the resort lobby.
Mrs B’s shoulder smarts where he bumped her. She stands in front of the officer, reading his badge.
“Officer Connors, what’s going on?”
“Ma’am, just stay out of the way.”
She takes off her wide-brimmed hat. It takes fifteen seconds for recognition to dawn on him.
“Oh my God. I’m sorry. I … You looked just like any other…. Detective Bambury, what are you doing here?”
“Attempting a holiday,” she says. “A bad idea. And call me Mrs Bambury. You should know that much.”
“Yes, Det – yes, ma’am.” Like every officer in the land, Office Connors has heard of the legendary Mrs Bambury, the world-renowned detective who closes every case, who solves mysteries no one else can crack. And he, like everyone else, also knows she despises being called “detective” or “chief” or “the legend.” She prefers to be addressed the way she thinks of herself, as a simple missus.
Mrs B crosses the line in the sand and wades ankle-deep into the water. Does this officer really think she can’t hear him behind her on his walkie-talkie?
“I swear it’s her! Detective Bambury…. Yes, the legendary Bambury is on the scene. Over and out.”
Mrs Bambury breathes in the seabrined air. A few metres away, the family she saw earlier huddles in the sand. “Thank God!” the husband sobs as he hugs his wife and babes. “I looked out of the window, and I thought one of our kids had drowned. And I…”
His wife folds him into her chest. Just the lesson he needs,
Mrs Bambury thinks to herself, a reminder of what matters most.
Officer
Connors joins
Mrs B at the water’s edge.
“The superintendent wants me to ask you if we’re doing things right. The wife of the billionaire, she waded out, but she can’t swim. By now she’s… gone.”
“Of course she’s gone,” Mrs B says. “Any fool could tell that much. What are your next steps?”
Officer Connors stammers, intimidated by the tiny figure before him.
“If she can’t swim, she drowned. On purpose. Sad. But it’s too late.”
Mrs B looks out at the misty line between sky and sea. She ponders truth and lies, right and wrong, good and evil. Sometimes the truth is wrong and the lie is right. Sometimes a blind eye serves justice best. Everything blurs under the sun.
“Ma’am?” Officer Connors says. “Should we call off the search? Dredge the beach? Is that what you would do?”
Mrs Bambury considers.
“Dredge the beach,” she says.
It’s quick after that. Officer Connors calls off the searchers in the water. He radios the police boat to come to shore. A team is called in to dredge. Tourists are sent to their rooms, where they peek past the curtains, anticipating a glimpse of the beautiful corpse hauled from the deep.
But as Mrs B returns to her lounger, she knows what others do not: they won’t find her body.
When Cindy leaned forward earlier that morning and whispered in Mrs B’s ear, what she said was so strange. But now it makes perfect sense.
“No one knows I can swim.”
Somewhere in another bay, on another beach down the coast, a lithe, toned woman emerges from the water, a mermaid come to shore. She will charm her way into what she needs – a change of clothes, a cut and colour, some cash – and then she’ll disappear.
Cindy was right all along. She had three choices, but she never wanted to die, and murder would bring no justice, certainly not to her.
All she wanted was to escape her brutal husband – his power, his wealth, his hand. And the only escape was the sea. She is an exceptionally strong swimmer, a secret she kept to herself. Sometimes, beauty, intelligence and strength commingle in a single devastating package. Like Helen of Troy, Mrs B thinks. She picks up her novel splayed spine-up on the lounger beside hers. Underneath is a page torn from the book and folded into an origami gull with sleek wings. “Incredible,” Mrs B says as she slips the bird into her bag where no one will find it. She puts on her beach hat, takes her bag and book, and heads to her bungalow. It won’t matter that her novel is missing a page. She’ll sink into the bathtub and immerse herself in a scintillating mystery – Evil Under The Sun.
MRS B LOOKS OUT AT THE MISTY LINE BETWEEN SKY AND SEA. SOMETIMES A BLIND EYE SERVES JUSTICE BEST. EVERYTHING BLURS UNDER THE SUN