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After a bit the investigative instinct, that inveterate curiosity which would not be stilled, came to the fore: she found she was speculating all the time about Miss Izzy’s death. A robber—maybe? A robber who had also tried to kill Tina Archer? Or a robber who had merely been surprised by her presence in the house? What connection if any had all this with Miss Izzy’s will?
    The will again: but that was one thing Jemima did not have to speculate about for very long. For Claudette the manageress also just happened to be married to the brother of Hazel, Miss Izzy’s cook … In this way Jemima was apprised—along with the rest of Bow Island no doubt—that Miss Izzy had indeed signed a new will down in Bowtownon the morning of her death. That Eddy Thompson, the solicitor, had begged her not to do it, that Miss Izzy had done it, that Miss Izzy had still looked after Hazel all right as she had promised (and Henry who had worked for her even longer), and some jewellery would go to a cousin in England (“seeing as Miss Izzy’s mother’s jewels were in an English bank anyway since long back”), but for the rest … Well, there would be no National Bo’lander Museum now. That was for sure. Everything else, that fine old Archer Plantation House, Miss Izzy’s fortune—reputedly enormous but who knew for sure?—everything else would go to Tina Archer.
    If she recovered, of course. But the latest cautious bulletin from Claudette via the niece-who-was-a-nurse, confirmed by a few other loquacious people on the island, was that Tina Archer
was
recovering. Slowly. The police had already been able to interview her. In a few days time she would be able to leave the hospital. She was determined, quite determined, to attend Miss Izzy’s funeral, which would be held, naturally enough, in that little English-looking church with its incongruous tropical vegetation overlooking the sunny grave. For Miss Izzy had long ago made clear her own determination to be buried in the Archer Tomb, along with Governor Sir Valentine and “his only wife Isabella.”
    “As the last of the Archers. But she had to get permission since it’s a national monument. And of course the government couldn’t do enough for her. So they gave it. Then. Ironic, isn’t it?” The speaker making absolutely no attempt to conceal her own disgust was Coralie Harrison. “And now we learn that she wasn’t the last of the Archers. Not even officially. And we shall have the so-called Miss Tina Archer as chief mourner. And while the Bo’lander government desperately looks for ways to get round the will and grab thehouse for their precious museum, nobody quite has the bad taste to go ahead and say: no, no burial in the Archer Tomb for naughty old Miss Izzy. Since she hasn’t after all left the people of Bow Island a penny.”
    “It should be an interesting occasion,” Jemima interrupted. She was sitting with Coralie Harrison under the conical thatched roof of the hotel’s beach bar. This was where she first danced, then sat out with Joseph Archer on the night of the new moon—the night Miss Izzy had been killed. Now the sea sparkled under the sun as though there were crystals scattered on its surface; today there were no waves at all and the happy water-skiers crossed and re-crossed the wide bay with its palm-fringed shore. Enormous brown pelicans perched on some stakes which indicated where rocks lay. Every now and then one would take off like an unwieldy aeroplane and fly slowly and inquisitively over the heads of the swimmers. It was a tranquil, even an idyllic scene. But somewhere in the distant peninsula lay Archer Plantation House, not only shuttered but now, she imagined, also sealed up by the police.
    Coralie Harrison had sauntered up to the bar from the beach. She traversed the few yards with seeming casualness. All Bo’landers frequently exercised their right to promenade along the sands unchecked (as in most Caribbean islands, no one owned any