Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
We start with a page in italics and people dancing on a cliff in a storm. Or are they fighting? Is this fantasy or an old man’s dream? Forget it for now because, in plain font and simple prose, we back-track a year, to plunge into reality with guests squeezed into a helicopter on their way to a wedding at a resort on Tresco in the Isles of Scilly.
Choppers are democratic; Hannah, a barmaid and general drudge, is riding along with Beatrice, a banker’s wife, and her goddaughter, Charlotte. Charlotte is a cool sylph focussed on Beatrice’s son, Kit, himself a charming drone in his late twenties, supported by his parents and living with them intermittently while avoiding work.
Once the chopper lands Hannah holds back allowing the visitors to exit first. Etiquette rules on Tresco where the menials are all incomers employed by the resort and living in tied accommodation. Staff conform, or must be seen to conform. But the privileged have their own rules and when, at the wedding, Kit notices the barmaid for the first time and realises that he has found his soul-mate, and genial Hannah responds, feathers fly.
This is no harmless flirtation, no one-night stand which might have been ignored, this is serious and more so because the protagonists have overstepped the class barrier. Lost in love or lust, the pair behave like teen-agers with no regard for any rules, but others, mostly women, are at least concerned, at worst distraught while men harbour dark thoughts. Hannah has always been as liberal with her attentions as she was careless.
It’s an unlikely catalyst but it works. While Charlotte sulks and Beatrice takes refuge in alcohol others have been leading their own desperate lives: the earth mother, the child-bride, an ageing trophy wife. This novel has everything including a Greek chorus. There’s Old Betty who talks to the dead and knows where the bodies are buried, and Nurse Kelly: steady, solid and politically incorrect, who herself knows more secrets than is wise and inadvertently lets one out.
On Tresco the long drift towards revelations has been so gentle, so insidious that, lulled by the steamy summer and interminable parties: the drink, the sex, the soul-searching, the reader is suddenly shocked into awareness that, without a change in tempo or a shift in style, a terrible reckoning has begun.
A great ending. Everyone, even the psychopath, gets their desserts.
